WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?

BY

WASHINGTON GLADDEN

CONTENTS. 

 I. A LOOK INTO THE HEBREW BIBLE II. WHAT DID MOSES WRITE? III. SOURCES OF THE PENTATEUCH IV. THE EARLIER HEBREW HISTORIES V. THE HEBREW PROPHECIES VI. THE LATER HEBREW HISTORIES VII. THE POETICAL BOOKSVIII. THE EARLIER NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS IX. THE ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS X. NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY AND PROPHECY XI. THE CANON XII. HOW THE BOOKS WERE WRITTENXIII. HOW MUCH IS THE BIBLE WORTH?

WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?

CHAPTER I. 

A LOOK INTO THE HEBREW BIBLE. 

The aim of this volume is to put into compact and popular form, for thebenefit of intelligent readers, the principal facts upon which scholarsare now generally agreed concerning the literary history of the Bible. The doctrines taught in the Bible will not be discussed; its claims to asupernatural origin will not be the principal matter of inquiry; thebook will concern itself chiefly with those purely natural and humanagencies which have been employed in writing, transcribing, editing, preserving, transmitting, translating, and publishing the Bible. 

The writer of this book has no difficulty in believing that the Biblecontains supernatural elements. He is ready to affirm that other thannatural forces have been employed in producing it. It is to thesesuperhuman elements in it that reference and appeal are most frequentlymade. But the Bible has a natural history also. It is a book amongbooks. It is a phenomenon among phenomena. Its origin and growth in thisworld can be studied as those of any other natural object can bestudied. The old apple-tree growing in my garden is the witness to me ofsome transcendent truths, the shrine of mysteries that I cannot unravel. What the life is that was hidden in the seed from which it sprang, andthat has shaped all its growth, coördinating the forces of nature, andproducing this individual form and this particular variety of fruit, --this I do not know. There are questions here that no man of science cananswer. Life in the seed of the apple as well as in the soul of man is amystery. But there are some things about the apple-tree that may beknown. I may know--if any one has been curious enough to keep therecord--when the seed was planted, when the shoot first appeared abovethe ground, how many branches it had when it was five years old, howhigh it was when it was ten years old, when this limb and that twig wereadded, when the first blossom appeared, when that branch was grafted andthose others were trimmed off. All this knowledge I may have gained; andin setting forth these facts, or such as these, concerning the naturalhistory of the tree, I do not assume that I am telling all about thelife that is in it. In like manner we may study the origin and growth ofthe Bible without attempting to decide the deeper questions concerningthe inspiration of its writers and the meaning of the truths theyreveal. 

That the Bible has a natural as well as a supernatural history iseverywhere assumed upon its pages. It was written as other books arewritten, and it was preserved and transmitted as other books arepreserved and transmitted. It did not come into being in any suchmarvelous way as that in which Joseph Smith's "Book of Mormon, " forexample, is said to have been produced. The story is, that an angelappeared to Smith and told him where he would find this book; that hewent to the spot designated, and found in a stone box a volume sixinches thick, composed of thin gold plates, eight inches by seven, heldtogether by three gold rings; that these plates were covered withwriting in the "Reformed Egyptian" tongue, and that with this book were"the Urim and the Thummim, " a pair of supernatural spectacles, by meansof which he was able to read _and translate_ this "ReformedEgyptian" language. This is the sort of story which has been believed, in this nineteenth century, by tens of thousands of Mormon votaries. Concerning the books of the Bible no such astonishing stories are told. Nevertheless some good people seem inclined to think that if suchstories are not told, they might well be; they imagine that the Biblemust have originated in a manner purely miraculous; and though they knowvery little about its origin, they conceive of it as a book that waswritten in heaven in the English tongue, divided there into chapters andverses, with head lines and reference marks, printed in small pica, bound in calf, and sent down to earth by angels in its present form. What I desire to show is, that the work of putting the Bible into itspresent form was not done in heaven, but on earth; that it was not doneby angels, but by men; that it was not done all at once, but a little ata time, the work of preparing and perfecting it extending over severalcenturies, and employing the labors of many men in different lands andlong-divided generations. And this history of the Bible as a book, andof the natural and human agencies employed in producing it, will prove, I trust, of much interest to those who care to study it. 

Mr. Huxley has written a delightful treatise on "A Piece of Chalk, " andanother on "The Crayfish;" a French writer has produced an entertainingvolume entitled "The Story of a Stick;" the books of the Bible, considered from a scientific or bibliographical point of view, shouldrepay our study not less richly than such simple, natural objects. 

A great amount of study has been expended of late on the Scriptures, andthe conclusions reached by this study are of immense importance. What iscalled the Higher Criticism has been busy scanning these old writings, and trying to find out all about them. What is the Higher Criticism? Itis the attempt to learn from the Scriptures themselves the truth abouttheir origin. It consists in a careful study of the language of thebooks, of the manners and customs referred to in them, of the historicalfacts mentioned by them; it compares part with part, and book with book, to discover agreements, if they exist, and discrepancies, that they maybe reconciled. This Higher Criticism has subjected these old writings tosuch an analysis and inspection as no other writings have everundergone. Some of this work has undoubtedly been destructive. It hasstarted out with the assumption that these books are in no respectdifferent from other sacred books; that they are no more a revelationfrom God than the Zendavesta or the Nibelungen Lied is a revelation fromGod; and it has bent its energies to discrediting, in every way, theveracity and the authority of our Scriptures. But much of this criticismhas been thoroughly candid and reverent, even conservative in its temperand purpose. It has not been unwilling to look at the facts; but it hasheld toward the Bible a devout and sympathetic attitude; it believes itto contain, as no other book in the world contains, the message of Godto men; and it has only sought to learn from the Bible itself how thatmessage has been conveyed. It is this conservative criticism whoseleadership will be followed in these studies. No conclusions respectingthe history of these writings will be stated which are not accepted byconservative scholars. Nevertheless it must be remembered that theresults of conservative scholarship have been very imperfectly reportedto the laity of the churches. Many facts about the Bible are now knownby intelligent ministers of which their congregations do not hear. Ananxious and not unnatural feeling has prevailed that the faith of thepeople in the Bible would be shaken if the facts were known. The beliefthat the truth is the safest thing in the world, and that the thingswhich cannot be shaken will remain after it is all told, has led to thepreparation of this volume. 

I have no doubt, however, that some of the statements which follow willfall upon some minds with a shock of surprise. The facts which will bebrought to light will conflict very sharply with some of the traditionaltheories about the Bible. Some of my readers may be inclined to fearthat the foundations of faith are giving way. Let me, at the outset, request all such to suspend their judgment and read the book throughbefore they come to such a conclusion. Doubtless it will be necessary tomake some readjustment of theories; to look at the Bible less as amiraculous and more as a spiritual product; to put less emphasis uponthe letter and more upon the spirit; but after all this is done it mayappear that the Bible is worth more to us than it ever was before, because we have learned how rightly to value it. 

The word "Bible" is not a biblical word. The Old Testament writings werein the hands of the men who wrote the books of the New Testament, butthey do not call these writings the Bible; they name them the Scriptures, the Holy Scriptures, the Sacred Writings, or else they refer to themunder the names that were given to specific parts of them, as the Law, the Prophets, or the Psalms. Our word Bible comes from a word whichbegan to be applied to the sacred writings as a whole about four hundredyears after Christ. It is a Greek plural noun, meaning the books, or thelittle books. These writings were called by this plural name for abouteight hundred years; it was not till the thirteenth century that theybegan to be familiarly spoken of as a single book. This fact, of itself, is instructive. For though a certain spiritual unity does pervade thesesacred writings, yet they are a collection of books, rather than onebook. The early Christians, who honored and prized them sufficiently, always spoke of them as "The Books, " rather than as "The Book, "--andtheir name was more accurate than ours. 

The names Old and New Testament are Bible words; that is to say we findthe names in our English Bibles, though they are not used to describethese books. Paul calls the old dispensation the old covenant; and thatphrase came into general use among the early Christians as contrastedwith the Christian dispensation which they called the new covenant;therefore Greek-speaking Christians used to talk about "the booksof the old covenant, " and "the books of the new covenant;" and by and bythey shortened the phrase and sometimes called the two collectionssimply "Old Covenant" and "New Covenant. " When the Latin-speakingChristians began to use the same terms, they translated the Greek word"covenant" by the word "testament" which means a will, and which doesnot fairly convey the sense of the Greek word. And so it was that thesetwo collections of sacred writings began to be called The Old Testamentand The New Testament. It is the former of these that we are first tostudy. 

When Jesus Christ was on the earth he often quoted in his discoursesfrom the Jewish Scriptures, and referred to them in his conversations. His apostles and the other New Testament writers also quote freely fromthe same Scriptures, and books of the early Christian Fathers are fullof references to them. What were these Jewish Scriptures?

At the time when our Lord was on the earth, the sacred writings of theJews were collected in two different forms. The Palestinian collection, so called, was written in the Hebrew language, and the Alexandriancollection, called the Septuagint, in the Greek. For many years a largecolony of devout and learned Jews had lived in Alexandria; and as theGreek language was spoken there, and had become their common speech, they translated their sacred writings into Greek. This translation sooncame into general use, because there were everywhere many Jews who knewGreek well enough but knew no Hebrew at all. When our Lord was on earth, the Hebrew was a dead language; it may have been the language of thetemple, as Latin is now the language of the Roman Catholic mass; but thecommon people did not understand it; the vernacular of the PalestinianJews was the Aramaic, a language similar to the Hebrew, sometimes calledthe later Hebrew, and having some such relation to it as the English hasto the German tongue. There is some dispute as to the time when the Jewslost the use of their own language and adopted the Aramaic; many of theJewish historians hold the view that the people who came back from thecaptivity to Jerusalem had learned to use the Aramaic as their commonspeech, and that the Hebrew Scriptures had to be interpreted when theywere read to them. Others think that this change in language took placea little later, and that it resulted in great measure from the closeintercourse of the Jews with the peoples round about them in Palestine, most of whom used the Aramaic. At any rate the change had taken placebefore the coming of Christ, so that no Hebrew was then spokenfamiliarly in Palestine. When "the Hebrew tongue" is mentioned in theNew Testament it is the Aramaic that is meant, and not the ancientHebrew. The Greek, on the other hand, was a living language; it wasspoken on the streets and in the markets everywhere, and many Jewsunderstood it almost as well as they did their Aramaic vernacular, justas many of the people of Constantinople and the Levant now speak Frenchmore fluently than their native tongues. The Greek version of theScriptures was, for this reason, more freely used by the Jews even inPalestine than the Hebrew original; it was from the Septuagint thatChrist and his apostles made most of their quotations. Out of threehundred and fifty citations in the New Testament from the Old Testamentwritings about three hundred appear to be directly from the Greekversion made at Alexandria. Between these two collections of sacredwritings, the one written in Hebrew, then a dead language, and the otherin Greek, --the one used by scholars only, and the other by the commonpeople, --there were some important differences, not only in thephraseology and in the arrangement of the books, but in the contentsthemselves. Of these I shall speak more fully in the following chapters. It is to the Hebrew collection, which is the original of these writings, and from which our English Old Testament was translated, that we shallnow give our attention. What were these Hebrew Scriptures of which allthe writers of the New Testament knew, and from which they sometimesdirectly quote?

The contents of this collection were substantially if not exactly thesame as those of our Old Testament, but they were arranged in verydifferent order. Indeed they were regarded as three distinct groups ofwritings, rather than as one book, and the three groups were ofdifferent degrees of sacredness and authority. Two of these divisionsare frequently referred to in the New Testament, as The Law and TheProphets; and the threefold division is doubtfully hinted at in Lukexxiv. 44, where our Lord speaks of the predictions concerning himselfwhich are found in the Law and the Prophets and in the Psalms. 

The first of these holy books of the Jews was, then, THE LAW containedin the first five books of our Bible, known among us as the Pentateuch, and called by the Jews sometimes simply "The Law, " and sometimes "TheLaw of Moses. " This was supposed to be the oldest portion of theirScriptures, and was by them regarded as much more sacred andauthoritative than any other portion. To Moses, they, said, God spakeface to face; to the other holy men much less distinctly. Consequentlytheir appeal is most often to the law of Moses. 

The group of writings known as "The Prophets" is subdivided into theEarlier and the Later Prophets. _The Earlier Prophets_ compriseJoshua, the Judges, the two books of Samuel, counted as one, and the twobooks of the Kings, counted also as one. _The Later Prophets_comprise Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets, thelast books in our Old Testament, --Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Thesetwelve _were counted as one book_; so that there were four volumesof the earlier and four of the later prophets. Why the Jews should havecalled Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and the Kings books of the Prophets isnot clear; perhaps because they were supposed to have been written byprophets; perhaps because prophets have a conspicuous place in theirhistories. This portion of the Hebrew Scriptures, containing the fourhistorical books named and the fifteen prophetical books (reckoned, however, as four), was regarded by the Jews as standing next insacredness and value to the book of the Law. 

The third group of their Scriptures was known among them as Kethubim, orWritings, simply. Sometimes, possibly, they called it The Psalms, because the book of the Psalms was the initial book of the collection. It consisted of the Psalms, the Proverbs, Job, the Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, andthe Chronicles. This group of writings was esteemed by the Jews as lesssacred and authoritative than either of the other two groups; theauthors were supposed to have had a smaller measure of inspiration. Respecting two or three of these books there was also some dispute amongthe rabbis, as to their right to be regarded as sacred Scripture. 

Such, then, were the Hebrew Scriptures in the days of our Lord, and suchwas the manner of their arrangement. 

They had, indeed, other books of a religious character, to whichreference is sometimes made in the books of the Bible. In Numbers xxi. 14, 15, we have a brief war song quoted from "The Book of the Wars ofJehovah, " a collection of which we have no other knowledge. In Joshua x. 13, the story of the sun standing still over Gibeon is said to have beenquoted from "The Book of Jasher, " and in 2 Samuel i. 18, the beautiful"Song of the Bow, " written by David on the death of Saul and Jonathan, is said to be contained in the "Book of Jasher. " It is evident that thismust have been a collection of lyrics celebrating some of the greatevents of Hebrew history. The title seems to mean "The Book of theJust. " The exploits of the worthies of Israel probably furnished itsprincipal theme. 

In 1 Chronicles xxix. 29, we read: "Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold they are written in the History of Samuel theSeer, and in the History of Nathan the Prophet, and in the History ofGad the Seer. " There is no reason to doubt that the first named of theseis the history contained in the books of Samuel in our Bible; but theother two books are lost. We have another reference to the "History ofNathan, " in 2 Chronicles ix. 29, --the concluding words of the sketch ofKing Solomon's life. "Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first andlast, are they not written in the History of Nathan the Prophet, and inthe Prophecy of Abijah the Shilonite, and in the Visions of Iddo theSeer concerning Jeroboam the son of Nebat?" Here are two more books ofwhich we have no other knowledge; their titles quoted upon the page ofthis chronicle are all that is left of them. A similar reference, in thelast words of the sketch of Solomon's son Rehoboam, gives us our onlyknowledge of the "Histories of Shemaiah the Prophet. "

In the Kings and in the Chronicles, reference is repeatedly made to the"Books of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, " and the "Books of theChronicles of the Kings of Judah, " under which titles volumes that arenow lost are brought to our notice. Undoubtedly much of the history inthe biblical books of Kings and Chronicles was derived from theseancient annals. They are the sources from which the writers of thesebooks drew their materials. 

We are also told in 2 Chronicles xxvi. 22, that Isaiah wrote a historyof the "Acts of Uzziah, " which is wholly lost. 

Other casual references are made to historical writings of varioussorts, composed by prophets and seers, and thus apparently accredited bythe biblical writers as authoritative utterances of divine truth. Whywere they suffered to perish? Has not Emerson certified us that

 "One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost"?

But this is a fond exaggeration. Mr. Emerson was certainly not himselfinspired when he uttered it. Many and many an accent of the Holy Ghosthas been lost by this heedless world. And it is not at all improbablethat some of these histories of Nathan and Gad and Shemaiah held vitaland precious truth, --truth that the world has needed. The very fact thatthey are hopelessly lost raises some curious questions about the methodof revelation. Is it to be supposed that the Providence which sufferswhole books to be lost by men would infallibly guarantee those thatremain against errors in the copies, and other imperfections? As amatter of fact, we know that He has not so protected any of them. 

Still I doubt not that Providence has kept for us the best of thisHebrew literature. To say that it is the best literature that the worldhas produced is to say very little. It is separated widely from allother sacred writings. Its constructive ideas are as far above those ofthe other books of religion as the heavens are above the earth. I pitythe man who has had the Bible in his hand from his infancy, and who haslearned in his maturer years something of the literature of the otherreligions, but who now needs to have this statement verified. True it isthat we find pure maxims, elevated thoughts, genuine faith, loftymorality, in many of the Bibles of the other races. True it is that insome of them visions are vouchsafed us of the highest truths ofreligion, of the very substance of the gospel of the Son of God. Butwhen we take the sacred books of the other religions in their entirety, and compare them with the sacred writings of the Hebrews, thesuperiority of these in their fundamental ideas, in the conceptions thatdominate them, in the grand uplifting visions and purposes that vitalizethem, can be felt by any man who has any discernment of spiritualrealities. It is in these great ideas that the value of these writingsconsists, and not in any petty infallibility of phrase, or inerrancy ofstatement. They are the record, as no other book in the world is arecord, of that increasing purpose of God which runs through the ages. I hope that it will appear as the result of our studies, that one maycontinue to reverence the Scriptures as containing a unique and specialrevelation from God to men, and yet clearly see and frankly acknowledgethe facts concerning their origin, and the human and fallible elementsin them, which are not concealed, but lie upon their very face. 

CHAPTER II. 

WHAT DID MOSES WRITE?

We are now to study the first five books of the Bible, known as thePentateuch. This word "Pentateuch" is not in the Bible; it is a Greekword signifying literally the Five-fold Work; from _penta_, five, and _teuchos_, which in the later Greek means roll or volume. 

The Jews in the time of our Lord always considered these five books asone connected work; they called the whole sometimes "Torah, " or "TheLaw, " sometimes "The Law of Moses, " sometimes "The Five-fifths of theLaw. " It was originally one book, and it is not easy to determine atwhat time its division into five parts took place. 

Later criticism is also inclined to add to the Pentateuch the Book ofJoshua, and to say that the first six books of the Bible were put intotheir present form by the same hand. "The Hexateuch, " or Six-fold Work, has taken the place in these later discussions of the Pentateuch, orFive-fold Work. Doubtless there is good reason for the newclassification, but it will be more convenient to begin with thetraditional division and speak first of the five books reckoned by thelater Jews as the "Torah, " or the Five-fifths of the Law. 

Who wrote these books? Our modern Hebrew Bibles give them the generaltitle, _"Quinque Libri Mosis_. " This means "The Five Books ofMoses. " But Moses could never have given them this title, for these areLatin words, and it is not possible that Moses should have used theLatin language because there was no Latin language in the world untilmany hundreds of years after the day of Moses. The Latin title was givento them, of course, by the editors who compiled them. The preface andthe explanatory notes in these Hebrew Bibles are also written in Latin. 

But over this Latin title in the Hebrew Bible is the Hebrew word"Torah. " This was the name by which these books were chiefly known amongthe Jews; it signifies simply "The Law. " This title gives us noinformation, then, concerning the authorship of these books. 

When we look at our English Bibles we find no separation, as in theHebrew Bible, of these five books from the rest of the Old Testamentwritings, but we find over each one of them a title by which it isascribed to Moses as its author, --"The First Book of Moses, commonlycalled Genesis;" "The Second Book of Moses, commonly called Exodus;" andso on. But when I look into my Hebrew Bible again no such title isthere. Nothing is said about Moses in the Hebrew title to Genesis. 

It is certain that if Moses wrote these books he did not call them"Genesis, " "Exodus, " "Leviticus, " "Numbers, " "Deuteronomy;" for thesewords, again, come from languages that he never heard. Four of them areGreek words, and one of them, Numbers, is a Latin word. These names weregiven to the several books at a very late day. What are their names inthe Hebrew Bible? Each of them is called by the first word, or some ofthe first words in the book. The Jews were apt to name their books, aswe name our hymns, by the initial word or words; thus they called thefirst of these five books, "Bereshith, " "In the Beginning;" the secondone "Veelleh Shemoth, " "Now these are the names;" the third one"Vayikra, " "And he called, " and so on. The titles in our English Bibleare much more significant and appropriate than these original Hebrewtitles; thus Genesis signifies origin, and Genesis is the Book ofOrigins; Exodus means departure, and the book describes the departure ofIsrael from Egypt; Leviticus points out the fact that the book is mainlyoccupied with the Levitical legislation; Numbers gives a history of thenumbering of the people, and Deuteronomy, which means the second law, contains what seems to be a recapitulation and reënactment of thelegislation of the preceding books. But these English titles, which arepartly translated and partly transferred to English from older Latin andGreek titles, tell us nothing trustworthy about the authorship of thebooks. 

How, then, you desire to know, did these books come to be known as thebooks of Moses?

"They were quoted, " answer some, "and thus accredited by our Lord andhis apostles. They are frequently mentioned in the New Testament asinspired and authoritative books; they are referred to as the writingsof Moses; we have the testimony of Jesus Christ and of his apostles totheir genuineness and authenticity. " Let us see how much truth thisanswer contains. It confronts us with a very important matter which mayas well be settled before we go on. 

It is true, to begin with, that Jesus and the Evangelists do quote fromthese books, and that they ascribe to Moses some of the passages whichthey quote. The soundest criticism cannot impugn the honesty or theintelligence of such quotations. There is good reason, as we shall see, for believing that a large part of this literature was written in thetime of Moses, and under the eye of Moses, if not by his hand. In acertain important sense, which will be clearer to us as we go on, thisliterature is all Mosaic. The reference to it by the Lord and hisapostles is therefore legitimate. 

But this reference does by no means warrant the sweeping conclusion thatthe five books of the law were all and entire from the pen of theLawgiver. Our Lord nowhere says that the first five books of the OldTestament were all written by Moses. Much less does he teach that thecontents of these books are all equally inspired and authoritative. Indeed he quotes from them several times for the express purpose ofrepudiating their doctrines and repealing their legislation. In the veryfore-front of his teaching stands a stern array of judgments in whichundoubted commandments of the Mosaic law are expressly condemned and setaside, some of them because they are inadequate and superficial, some ofthem because they are morally defective. "Ye have heard that it was saidto them of old time" thus and thus; "but I say unto you"--and thenfollow words that directly contradict the old legislation. After quotingtwo of the commandments of the Decalogue and giving them aninterpretation that wholly transforms them, he proceeds to cite severalold laws from these Mosaic books, in order to set his own word firmlyagainst them. One of these also is a law of the Decalogue itself. Therecan be little doubt that the third commandment is quoted and criticisedby our Lord, in this discourse. That commandment forbids, not chieflyprofanity, but perjury; by implication it permits judicial oaths. AndJesus expressly forbids judicial oaths. "Swear not at all. " I am awarethat this is not the usual interpretation of these words, but I believethat it is the only meaning that the words will bear. Not to insist uponthis, however, several other examples are given in the discourseconcerning which there can be no question. 

Jesus quotes the law of divorce from Deuteronomy xxiv. 1, 2. "When a mantaketh a wife and marrieth her, then it shall be, if she find no favourin his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing in her, that heshall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and sendher out of his house. And when she is departed out of his house she maygo and be another man's wife. " These are the words of a law which Mosesis represented as uttering by the authority of Jehovah. This law, asthus expressed, Jesus Christ unqualifiedly repeals. "I say unto you thatevery one that putteth away his wife, saving for the cause offornication, maketh her an adulteress, and whosoever shall marry herwhen she is put away committeth adultery. "

The law of revenge is treated in the same way. "Ye have heard that itwas said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. " Who said this? Wasit some rabbin of the olden time? It was Moses; nay, the old record saysthat this is the word of the Lord by Moses: "The Lord spake unto Moses, saying [among other things], If a man cause a blemish in his neighbor, as he hath done so shall it be done to him; breach for breach, eye foreye, tooth for tooth; as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall itbe rendered unto him. " (Lev. Xxiv. 19, 20. ) So in Exodus xxi. 24, "Thoushalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. " It issometimes said that these retaliations were simply permitted under theMosaic law, but this is a great error; they were enjoined: "Thine eyeshall not pity, " it is said in another place (Deut. Xix. 21); "lifeshall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot forfoot. " This law of retaliation is an integral part of the morallegislation of the Pentateuch. It is no part of the ceremonial law; itis an ethical rule. It is clearly ascribed to Moses; it is distinctlysaid to have been enacted by command of God. But Christ in the mostunhesitating manner condemns and countermands it. 

"Ye have heard, " he continues, "that it was said, Thou shalt love thyneighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you. " "But this, " it is objected, "isnot a quotation from the Old Testament. These words do not occur in thatold legislation. " At any rate Jesus introduces them with the very sameformula which he has all along been applying to the words which he hasquoted from the Mosaic law. It is evident that he means to give theimpression that they are part of that law. He is not careful in any ofthese cases to quote the exact words of the law, but he does give themeaning of it. He gives the exact meaning of it here. The Mosaic lawcommanded Jews to love their neighbors, members of their own tribe, butto hate the people of surrounding tribes: "An Ammonite or a Moabiteshall not enter into the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenthgeneration shall none belonging to them enter into the assembly of theLord for ever. .. . Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperityall thy days for ever. " (Deut. Xxiii. 3-6. )

"When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goestto possess it, and shalt cast out many nations before thee, . .. Thenthou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them. " (Deut. Vii. 1, 2. ) This is the spirit of muchof this ancient legislation; and these laws were, if the record is true, literally executed, in after times, by Joshua and Samuel, upon thepeople of Canaan. And these bloody commands, albeit they have a "Thussaid the Lord" behind every one of them, Jesus, in the great discoursewhich is the charter of his kingdom, distinctly repeals. 

Such is the method by which our Lord sometimes deals with the OldTestament. It is by no means true that he assumes this attitude towardall parts of it. Sometimes he quotes Lawgiver and Prophets inconfirmation of his own words; often he refers to these ancientScriptures as preparing the way for his kingdom and foreshadowing hisperson and his work. Nay, he even says of that law which we are nowstudying that not one jot or tittle shall in any wise pass from it tillall things be accomplished. What he means by that we shall be able byand by to discover. But these passages which I have cited make it clearthat Jesus Christ cannot be appealed to in support of the traditionalview of the nature of these old writings. 

The common argument by which Christ is made a witness to theauthenticity and infallible authority of the Old Testament runs asfollows:

Christ quotes Moses as the author of this legislation; therefore Mosesmust have written the whole Pentateuch. 

Moses was an inspired prophet; therefore all the teaching of thePentateuch must be infallible. 

The facts are, that Jesus nowhere testifies that Moses wrote the wholeof the Pentateuch; and that he nowhere guarantees the infallibilityeither of Moses or of the book. On the contrary, he sets aside asinadequate or morally defective certain laws which in this book areascribed to Moses. 

It is needful, thus, on the threshold of our argument, to have a clearunderstanding respecting the nature of the testimony borne by our Lordand his apostles to this ancient literature. It is upon this that theadvocates of the traditional view of the Old Testament wholly rely. "Christ was authority, " they say; "the New Testament writers wereinspired; you all admit this; now Christ and the New Testament writersconstantly quote the Scriptures of the Old Testament as inspired and asauthoritative. Therefore they must be the infallible word of God. " Tothis it is sufficient to reply, Christ and the apostles do quote the OldTestament Scriptures; they find a great treasure of inspired andinspiring truth in them, and so can we; they recognize the fact thatthey are organically related to that kingdom which Christ came to found, and that they record the earlier stages of that great course ofrevelation which culminates in Christ; but they nowhere pronounce any ofthese writings free from error; there is not a hint or suggestionanywhere in the New Testament that any of the writings of the OldTestament are infallible; and Christ himself, as we have seen, clearlywarns his disciples that they do not even furnish a safe rule of moralconduct. After this, the attempt to prove the inerrancy of the OldTestament by summoning as witnesses the writers of the New Testament mayas well be abandoned. 

But did not Jesus say, "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think yehave eternal life, and they are they that testify of me?" Well, if hehad said that, it would not prove that the Scriptures they searched wereerrorless. The injunction would have all the force to-day that it everhad. One may very profitably study documents which are far frominfallible. This was not, however, what our Lord said. If you will lookinto your Revised Version you will see that his words, addressed to theJews, are not a command but an assertion: "Ye search the Scriptures, forin them ye think ye have eternal life" (John v. 39); if you searchedthem carefully you would find some testimony there concerning me. It isnot an injunction to search the Scriptures; it is simply the statementof the fact that the Jews to whom he was speaking did search theScriptures, and searched them as many people in our own time do, to verylittle purpose. 

But does not Paul say, in his letter to Timothy, that "All Scripture isgiven by inspiration of God?" No, Paul does not say that. Look again atyour Revised Version (2 Tim. Iii. 16): "Every Scripture inspired of Godis also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, forinstruction, which is in righteousness. " Every writing inspired of Godis profitable reading. That is the whole statement. 

But Paul says in the verses preceding, that Timothy had known from achild the Sacred Writings which were able to make him wise untosalvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Was there not, then, in hishands, a volume or collection of books, known as the Sacred Writings, with a definite table of contents; and did not Paul refer to thiscollection, and imply that all these writings were inspired of God andprofitable for the uses specified?

No, this is not the precise state of the case. These Sacred Writings hadnot at this time been gathered into a volume by themselves, with a fixedtable of contents. What is called the Canon of the Old Testament had notyet been finally determined. [Footnote: See chapter xi] There were, indeed, as we saw in the last chapter, two collections of sacredwritings, one in Hebrew and the other in Greek. The Hebrew collectionwas not at this time definitely closed; there was still a dispute amongthe Palestinian Jews as to whether two or three of the books which itnow contains should go into it; that dispute was not concluded untilhalf a century after the death of our Lord. The other collection, as Ihave said, was in the Greek language, and it included, not only our OldTestament books, but the books now known as the Old Testament Apocrypha. This was the collection, remember, most used by our Lord and hisapostles. Which of these collections was in the hands of Timothy we donot certainly know. But the father of Timothy was a Greek, though hismother was a Jewess; and it is altogether probable that he had studiedfrom his childhood the Greek version of the Old Testament writings. Shall we understand Paul, then, as certifying the authenticity andinfallibility of this whole collection? Does he mean to say that the"Story of Susanna" and "Bel and the Dragon, " and all the rest of thesefables and tales, are profitable for teaching and instruction inrighteousness? This text, so interpreted, evidently proves too much. Doubtless Paul did mean to commend to Timothy the Old TestamentScriptures as containing precious and saving truth. But we must notforce his language into any wholesale indorsement of every letter andword, or even of every chapter and book of these old writings. 

So far, therefore, as our Lord himself and his apostles are concerned, we have no decisive judgment either as to the authorship of these oldwritings or as to their absolute freedom from error. They handled theseScriptures, quoted from them, found inspired teaching in them; but theScriptures which they chiefly handled, from which they generally quoted, in which they found their inspired teaching, contained, as we know, worthless matter. It is not to be assumed that they did not know thismatter to be worthless; and if they knew this, it is not to be assertedthat they intended to place upon the whole of it the stamp of theirapproval. 

We have wandered somewhat from the path of our discussion, but it wasnecessary in order to determine the significance of those references tothe Old Testament with which the New Testament abounds. The questionbefore us is, Why do we believe that Moses wrote the five books whichbear his name in our Bibles? We have seen that the New Testament writersgive us no decisive testimony on this point. On what testimony is thebelief founded?

Doubtless it rests wholly on the traditions of the Jews. Such was thetradition preserved among them in the time of our Lord. They believedthat Moses wrote every word of these books; that God dictated thesyllables to him and that he recorded them. But the traditions of theJews are not, in other matters, highly regarded by Christians. Our Lordhimself speaks more than once in stern censure of these traditions bywhich, as he charges, their moral sense was blunted and the law of Godwas made of none effect. Many of these old tales of theirs wereextremely childish. One tradition ascribes, as we have seen, to Mosesthe authorship of the whole Pentateuch; another declares that when, during an invasion of the Chaldeans, all the books of the Scripture weredestroyed by fire, Ezra wrote them all out from memory, in an incrediblyshort space of time; another tradition relates how the same Ezra one dayheard a divine voice bidding him retire into the field with five swiftamanuenses, --"how he then received a full cup, full as it were of water, but the color of it was like fire, . .. And when he had drank of it, hisheart uttered understanding and wisdom grew in his breast, for hisspirit strengthened his memory, . .. And his mouth was opened and shut nomore and for forty days and nights he dictated without stopping till twohundred and four books were written down. " [Footnote: 2 Esdras xiv. See, also, Stanley's _Jewish Church_, iii, 151. ] These fables had widecurrency among the Jews; they were believed by Irenæus, Tertullian, Augustine, and others of the great fathers of the Christian Church; butthey are not credited in these days. It is evident that Jewish traditionis not always to be trusted. We shall need some better reason than thisfor believing that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch. 

I do not know where else we can go for information except to the booksthemselves. A careful examination of them may throw some light upon thequestion of their origin. A great multitude of scholars have been beforeus in their examination; what is their verdict?

First we have the verdict of the traditionalists, --those, I mean, whoaccept the Jewish tradition, and believe with the rabbins that Moseswrote the whole of the first five books of the Bible. Some who hold thistheory are ready to admit that there may be a few verses here and thereinterpolated into the record by later scribes; but they maintain thatthe books in their substance and entirety came in their present formfrom the hands of Moses. This is the theory which has been generallyreceived by the Christian church. It is held to-day by very few eminentChristian scholars. 

Over against this traditional theory is the theory of the radical anddestructive critics that Moses wrote nothing at all; that perhaps theten commandments were given by him, but hardly anything more; that thesebooks were not even written in the time of Moses, but hundreds of yearsafter his death. Moses is supposed to have lived about 1400 B. C. ; thesewritings, say the destructive critics, were first produced in part about730 B. C. , but were mainly written after the Exile (about 444 B. C. ), almost a thousand years after the death of Moses. "Strict and impartialinvestigation has shown, " says Dr. Knappert, "that . .. Nothing in thewhole Law really comes from Moses himself except the ten commandments. And even these were not delivered by him in the same form as we findthem now. " [Footnote: _The Religion of Israel_, p. 9. ] This is, tomy mind, an astounding statement. It illustrates the lengths to whichdestructive criticism can go. And I dare say that we shall find in ourstudy of these books reason for believing that such views as these areas far astray on the one side as those of the traditionalists are on theother. 

Let us test these two theories by interrogating the books themselves. 

First, then, we find upon the face of the record several reasons forbelieving that the books cannot have come, in their present form, fromthe hand of Moses. 

Moses died in the wilderness, before the Israelites reached the PromisedLand, before the Canaanites were driven out, and the land was dividedamong the tribes. 

It is not likely that he wrote the account of his own death and burialwhich we find in the last chapter of Deuteronomy. There are those, it istrue, who assert that Moses was inspired to write this account of hisown funeral; but this is going a little farther than the rabbins; theydeclare that this chapter was added by Joshua. It is conceivable thatMoses might have left on record a prediction that he would die and beburied in this way; but the Spirit of the Lord could never inspire a manto put in the past tense a plain narrative of an event which is yet inthe future. The statement when written would be false, and God is notthe author of falsehood. 

It is not likely either that Moses wrote the words in Exodus xi. 3:"Moreover the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in thesight of all the people;" nor those in Numbers xii. 3: "Now the manMoses was very meek above all the men which were on the face of theearth. " It has been said, indeed, that Moses was directed by inspirationto say such things about himself; but I do not believe that egotism is asupernatural product; men take that in the natural way. 

Other passages show upon the face of them that they must have been addedto these books after the time of Moses. It is stated in Exodus xvi. 35, that the Israelites continued to eat manna until they came to theborders of the land of Canaan. But Moses was not living when theyentered that land. 

In Genesis xii. 6, in connection with the story of Abraham's entranceinto Palestine, the historical explanation is thrown in: "And theCanaanite was then in the land. " It would seem that this must have beenwritten at a day when the Canaanite was no longer in the land, --afterthe occupation of the land and the expulsion of the Canaanites. InNumbers xv. 32, an incident is related which is prefaced by the words, "While the children of Israel were in the wilderness. " Does not thislook back to a past time? Can we imagine that this was written by Moses?Again, in Deuteronomy iii. 11, we have a description of the bedstead ofOg, one of the giants captured and killed by the Israelites, just beforethe death of Moses; and this bedstead is referred to as if it were anantique curiosity; the village is mentioned in which it is kept. InGenesis xxxvi. We find a genealogy of the kings of Moab, running throughseveral generations, prefaced with the words: "These are the kings thatreigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over thechildren of Israel. " This is looking backward from a day when kings werereigning over the children of Israel. How could it have been writtenfive hundred years before there ever was a king in Israel? In Genesisxiv. 14, we read of the city of Dan; but in Judges xviii. 29, we aretold that this city did not receive its name until hundreds of yearslater, long after the time of Moses. Similarly the account of the namingof the villages of Jair, which we find in Deuteronomy iii. 14, is quiteinconsistent with another account in Judges x. 3, 4. One of them must beerroneous, and it is probable that the passage in Deuteronomy is ananachronism. 

Most of these passages could be explained by the admission that thescribes in later years added sentences here and there by way ofinterpretation. But that admission would of course discredit theinfallibility of the books. Other difficulties, however, of a much moreserious kind, present themselves. 

In the first verse of the twentieth chapter of Numbers we read that thepeople came to Kadesh in the first month. The first month of what year?We look back, and the first note of time previous to this is the secondmonth of the second year of the wandering in the wilderness. Theirarrival at Kadesh described in the twentieth chapter would seem, then, to have been in the first month of the third year. In the twenty-secondverse of this chapter the camp moves on to Mount Hor, and Aaron diesthere. There is no note of any interval of time whatever; yet we aretold in the thirty-third chapter of this book that Aaron died in thefortieth year of the wandering. Here is a skip of thirty-eight years inthe history, without an indication of anything having happened meantime. On the supposition that this is a continuous history written by the manwho was a chief actor in it, such a gap is inexplicable. There is areasonable way of accounting for it, as we shall see, but it cannot beaccounted for on the theory that the book in its present form came fromthe hand of Moses. 

Some of the laws also bear internal evidence of having originated at alater day than that of Moses. The law forbidding the removal oflandmarks presupposes a long occupation of the land; and the lawregulating military enlistments is more naturally explained on thetheory that it was framed in the settled period of the Hebrew history, and not during the wanderings. This may, indeed, have been anticipatorylegislation, but the explanation is not probable. 

Various repetitions of laws occur which are inexplicable on thesupposition that these laws were all written by the hand of one person. Thus in Exodus xxxiv. 17-26, there is a collection of legal enactments, all of which can be found, in the same order and almost the same words, in the twenty-third chapter of the same book. Thus, to quote the summaryof Bleek, we find in both places, (_a_) that all the males shallappear before Jehovah three times in every year; (_b_) that noleavened bread shall be used at the killing of the Paschal Lamb, andthat the fat shall be preserved until the next morning; (_c_) thatthe first of the fruits of the field shall be brought into the house ofthe Lord; (_d_) that the young kid shall not be seethed in itsmother's milk. [Footnote: _Introduction to the Old Testament_, i. 240. ]

We cannot imagine that one man, with a fairly good memory, much less aninfallibly inspired man, should have written these laws twice over, inthe same words, within so small a space, in the same legal document. InLeviticus we have a similar instance. If any one will take that book andcarefully compare the eighteenth with the twentieth chapter, he will seesome reason for doubting that both chapters could have been inserted byone hand in this collection of statutes. "It is not probable, " as Bleekhas said, "that Moses would have written the two chapters one after theother, and would so shortly after have repeated the same precepts whichhe had before given, only not so well arranged the second time. "[Footnote: _Introduction to the Old Testament_, i. 240. ]

There are also quite a number of inconsistencies and contradictions inthe legislation, all of which may be easily explained, but not on thetheory that the laws all came from the pen of one infallibly inspiredlawgiver. We find also several historical repetitions and historicaldiscrepancies, all of which make against the theory that Moses is theauthor of all this Pentateuchal literature. A single author, if he werea man of fair intelligence, good common sense, and reasonably firmmemory, could not have written it. And unless tautology, anachronisms, and contradictions are a proof of inspiration, much less could it havebeen written by a single inspired writer. The traditional theory cannottherefore he true. We have appealed to the books themselves, and theybear swift witness against it. 

Now let us look at the other theory of the destructive critics which notonly denies that Moses wrote any portion of the Pentateuch, but allegesthat it was written in Palestine, none of it less than six or sevenhundred years after he was dead and buried. 

In the first place the book expressly declares that Moses wrote certainportions of it. He is mentioned several times as having written certainhistorical records and certain words of the law. In Exodus xxiv. , we aretold that Moses not only rehearsed to the people the Covenant which theLord had made with them, but that he wrote all the words of the Covenantin a book, and that he took the book of the Covenant and read it in theaudience of all the people. After the idolatry of the people Moses wasagain commanded to write these words, "and" it is added, "he wrote uponthe tables the words of the Covenant, the ten commandments. " In Exodusxvii. 14, we are told that Moses wrote the narrative of the defeat ofAmalek in a book; and again in Numbers xxxiii. 21, we read that Mosesrecorded the various marches and halts of the Israelites in thewilderness. We have also in the Book of Deuteronomy (xxxi. 24-26) astatement that Moses wrote "the words of the law" in a book, and put itin the ark of the covenant for preservation. Precisely how much of thelaw this statement is meant to cover is not clear. Some have interpretedit to cover the whole Pentateuch, but that interpretation, as we haveseen, is inadmissible. We may concede that it does refer to a body orcode of laws, --probably that body or code on which the legislation ofDeuteronomy is based. 

These are all the statements made in the writings themselves concerningtheir origin. They prove, if they are credible, that portions of thesebooks were written by Moses; they do not prove that the whole of themcame from his hand. 

I see no reason whatever to doubt that this is the essential fact. Thetheory of the destructive critics that this literature and thislegislation was all produced in Palestine, about the eighth centurybefore Christ, and palmed off upon the Jews as a pious fraud, does notbear investigation. In large portions of these laws we are constantlymeeting with legal provisions and historical allusions that take usdirectly back to the time of the wandering in the wilderness, and cannotbe explained on any other theory. "When, " says Bleek, "we meet with lawswhich refer in their whole tenor to a state of things utterly unknown inthe period subsequent to Moses, and to circumstances existing in theMosaic age, and in that only, it is in the highest degree likely thatthese laws not only in their essential purport proceeded from Moses, butalso that they were written down by Moses or at least in the Mosaic age. Of these laws which appear to carry with them such clear and exacttraces of the Mosaic age, there are many occurring, especially inLeviticus, and also in Numbers and Exodus, which laws relate tosituations and surrounding circumstances only existing whilst thepeople, as was the case in Moses' time, wandered in the wilderness andwere dwellers in the close confinement of camps and tents. " [Footnote:Vol. I. P. 212. ] It is not necessary to draw out this evidence atlength; I will only refer to a few out of scores of instances. The firstseven chapters of Leviticus, containing laws regulating the burntofferings and meat offerings, constantly assume that the people are inthe camp and in the wilderness. The refuse of the beasts offered insacrifice was to be carried out of the camp to the public ash heap, andburned. The law of the Great Day of Atonement (Lev. Xvi. ) is also fullof allusions to the fact that the people were in camp; the scapegoat wasto be driven into the wilderness, and the man who drove it out was towash his clothes and bathe, and afterward come into the camp; thebullock and the goat, slain for the sacrifice, were to be carried forthwithout the camp; he who bears them forth must also wash himself beforehe returns to the camp. Large parts of the legislation concerningleprosy are full of the same incidental references to the fact that thepeople were dwelling in camp. 

There are also laws requiring that all the animals killed for foodshould be slaughtered before the door of the Tabernacle. There was areason for this law; it was intended to guard against a debasingsuperstition; but how would it have been possible to obey it when thepeople were scattered all over the land of Palestine? It was adaptedonly to the time when they were dwelling in a camp in the wilderness. 

Besides, it must not be overlooked that in all this legislation "thepriests are not at all referred to in general, but by name, as Aaron andhis sons, or the sons of Aaron the priests. "

All the legislation respecting the construction of the tabernacle, thedisposition of it in the camp, the transportation of it from place toplace in the wilderness, the order of the march, the summoning of thepeople when camp was to be broken, with all its minute andcircumstantial directions, would be destitute of meaning if it had beenwritten while the people were living in Palestine, scattered all overthe land, dwelling in their own houses, and engaged in agriculturalpursuits. 

The simple, unforced, natural interpretation of these laws takes usback, I say, to the time of Moses, to the years of the wandering in thewilderness. The incidental references to the conditions of thewilderness life are far more convincing than any explicit statementwould have been. Can any one conceive that a writer of laws, living inPalestine hundreds of years afterwards, could have fabricated theseallusions to the camp life and the tent life of the people? Such anovelist did not exist among them; and I question whether ProfessorKuenen and Professor Wellhausen, with all their wealth of imagination, could have done any such thing. Many of these laws were certainlywritten in the time of Moses; and I do not believe that any man wasliving in the time of Moses who was more competent to write such lawsthan was Moses himself. The conclusion of Bleek seems therefore to mealtogether reasonable: "Although the Pentateuch in its present state andextent may not have been composed by Moses, and also many of the singlelaws therein may be the product of a later age, still the legislationcontained in it is genuinely Mosaic in its entire spirit and character. "[Footnote: Vol. I. P. 221. ] We are brought, therefore, in our study, tothese inevitable conclusions:

1. The Pentateuch could never have been written by any one man, inspiredor otherwise. 

2. It is a composite work, in which many hands have been engaged. Theproduction of it extends over many centuries. 

3. It contains writings which are as old as the time of Moses, and somethat are much older. It is impossible to tell how much of it came fromthe hand of Moses, but there are considerable portions of it which, although they may have been somewhat modified by later editors, aresubstantially as he left them. 

I have said that the Pentateuch is a composite work. In the next chapterwe shall find some curious facts concerning its component parts, and theway in which they have been put together. And although it did not comeinto being in the way in which we have been taught by the traditions ofthe rabbins, yet we shall see that it contains some wonderful evidenceof the superintending care of God, --of that continuous and growingmanifestation of his truth and his love to the people of Israel, whichis what we mean by revelation. 

Revelation, we shall be able to understand, is not the dictation by Godof words to men that they may be written down in books; it is rather thedisclosure of the truth and love of God to men in the processes ofhistory, in the development of the moral order of the world. It is theLight that lighteth every man, shining in the paths that lead torighteousness and life. There is a moral leadership of God in history;revelation is the record of that leadership. It is by no means confinedto words; its most impressive disclosures are in the field of action. "Thus _did_ the Lord, " as Dr. Bruce has said, is a more perfectformula of revelation than "Thus said the Lord. " It is in that greathistorical movement of which the Bible is the record that we find therevelation of God to men. 

CHAPTER III. 

SOURCES OF THE PENTATEUCH. 

In the last chapter we found evidence that the Pentateuch as it standscould not have been the work of Moses, though it contains much materialwhich must have originated in the time of Moses, and is more likely tohave been dictated by him than by any one else; that large portions ofthe Mosaic law were of Mosaic authorship; that the entire system ofLevitical legislation grew up from this Mosaic germ, though much of itappeared in later generations; and that, therefore, the habit of theJews of calling it all the law of Moses is easily understood. We thusdiscovered in this study that the Pentateuch is a composite book. 

The Christian Church in all the ages has been inclined to pin its faithto what the rabbins said about the origin of this book, and this is notaltogether surprising; but in these days when testimony is sifted bycriticism we find that the traditions of the rabbins are not at alltrustworthy; and when we go to the Book itself, and ask it to tell uswhat it can of the secret of its origin, we find that it has a verydifferent story to tell from that with which the rabbins have beguiledus. A careful study of the Book makes it perfectly certain that it isnot the production of any one man, but a growth that has been going onfor many centuries; that it embodies the work of many hands, puttogether in an artless way by various editors and compilers. Theframework is Mosaic, but the details of the work were added by reverentdisciples of Moses, the last of whom must have lived and written manyhundred years after Moses' day. 

Some of the evidences of composite structure which lie upon the veryface of the narrative will now come under our notice. It is plain thatthe whole of this literature could not have been written by any one manwithout some kind of assistance. All the books, except the first, areindeed a record of events which occurred mainly during the lifetime ofMoses, and of most of which he might have had personal knowledge. Butthe story of Genesis goes back to a remote antiquity. The last eventrelated in that book occurred four hundred years before Moses was born;it was as distant from him as the discovery of America by Columbus isfrom us; and other portions of the narrative, such as the story of theFlood and the Creation, stretch back into the shadows of the age whichprecedes history. Neither Moses nor any one living in his day could havegiven us these reports from his own knowledge. Whoever wrote this musthave obtained his materials in one of three ways. 

1. They might have been given to him by direct revelation from God. 

2. He might have gathered them up from oral tradition, from stories, folk-lore, transmitted from mouth to mouth, and so preserved fromgeneration to generation. 

3. He might have found them in written documents existing at the time ofhis writing. 

The first of these conjectures embodies the rabbinical theory. The laterform of that theory declared, however, that God did not even dictatewhile Moses wrote, but simply handed the law, all written andpunctuated, out of heaven to Moses; the only question with these rabbinswas whether he handed it down all at once, or one volume at a time. Itis certain that this is not the correct theory. The repetitions, thediscrepancies, the anachronisms, and the errors which the writingcertainly contains prove that it could not have been dictated, word forword, by the Omniscient One. Those who maintain such a theory as thisshould beware how they ascribe to God the imperfections of men. It seemsto me that the advocacy of the verbal theory of inspiration comesperilously near to the sin against the Holy Ghost. 

The second conjecture, that the writer of these books might havegathered up oral traditions of the earlier generations and incorporatedthem into his writings, is more plausible; yet a careful examination ofthe writings themselves does not confirm this theory. The form of thisliterature shows that it must have had another origin. 

The only remaining conjecture, that the books are compilations ofwritten documents, has been established beyond controversy by the mostpatient study of the writings themselves. In the Book of Genesis theevidence of the combination of two documents is so obvious that he whoruns may read. These two documents are distinguished from each other, partly by the style of writing, and partly by the different names whichthey apply to the Supreme Being. One of these old writers called theDeity Elohim, the other called him Yahveh, or Jehovah. These documentsare known, therefore, as the Elohistic and the Jehovistic narratives. Sometimes it is a little difficult to tell where the line runs whichseparates these narratives, but usually it is distinct. Readers ofGenesis find many passages in which the name given to the Deity is"God, " and others in which it is "LORD, " in small capitals. The first ofthese names represents the Hebrew Elohim, the second the Hebrew Yahvehor Jehovah. In one important section, beginning with the fourth verse ofthe second chapter, and continuing through the chapter, the two namesare combined, and we have the Supreme Being spoken of as "The LORD God, "Jehovah-Elohim. It is evident to every observing reader that we have inthe beginning of Genesis two distinct accounts of the Creation, the oneoccupying the first chapter and three verses of the second, the otheroccupying the remainder of the second chapter with the whole of thethird. The difference between these accounts is quite marked. The styleof the writing, particularly in the Hebrew, is strongly contrasted; andthe details of the story are not entirely harmonious. In the firstnarrative the order of creation is, first the earth and its vegetation, then the lower animals, then man, male and female, made in God's image. In the second narrative the order is, first the earth and itsvegetation, then man, then the lower orders of animals, then woman. Inthe first story plant life springs into existence at the direct commandof God; in the second it results from a mist which rose from the earthand watered the whole face of the ground. These striking differenceswould be hard to explain if we had not before our faces the clearevidence of two old documents joined together. 

I spoke in the last chapter of certain historical discrepancies whichare not explicable on the supposition that this is the work of a singlewriter. Such are the two accounts of the origin of the name ofBeersheba, the one in the twenty-first and the other in the twenty-sixthchapter of Genesis. The first account says that it was named by Abraham, and gives the reason why he called the place by this name. The secondaccount says that it received its name from Isaac, about ninety yearslater, and gives a wholly different explanation of the reason why hecalled it by this name. When we find that in the first of these storiesGod is called Elohim, [Footnote: In the last verse of this narrative theword Jehovah is used, but this is probably an interpolation. ] and in thesecond Jehovah, we can readily explain this discrepancy. The compilertook one of these narratives from one of these old documents, and theother from the other, and was not careful to reconcile the two. 

A similar duplication of the narrative is found in chapters xx. Andxxvi. , with respect to the incident of Abimelech; in the first of thesenarratives a serious complication is described as arising betweenAbimelech King of Gerar on the one hand and Abraham and Sarah on theother; in the second Abimelech is represented as interfering, inprecisely the same way and with the same results, in the domesticfelicity of Isaac and Rebekah. The harmonizers have done their work, ofcourse, upon these two passages; they have said that there were twoAbimelechs, and that Isaac repeated the blunder of his father; but it isa little singular, if this were so, that no reference is made in thelatter narrative to the former. It is altogether probable that we havethe same story ascribed to different actors; and when we find that theone narrative is Elohistic and the other Jehovistic, the problem issolved. 

More curious than any other of these combinations is the account of theFlood, in which the compiler has taken the narratives of these two oldwriters and pieced them together like patchwork. Refer to your Biblesand note this piece of literary joiner-work. At the fifth verse of thesixth chapter of Genesis this story begins; from this verse to the endof the eighth verse the Jehovistic document is used. The name of theDeity is Jehovah, translated LORD. From the ninth verse to the end ofthe chapter the Elohistic document is used. The word applied to God isElohim, translated God. With the seventh chapter begins again thequotation from the other document, "And the LORD [Jehovah] said untoNoah. " This extends only to the sixth verse; then the Elohisticnarrative begins again, and continues to the nineteenth verse of theeighth chapter, including it; then the Jehovistic narrative beginsagain, and continues through the chapter; then the Elohist takes up thetale for the first seventeen verses of the ninth chapter; then theJehovist goes on to the twenty-seventh verse, and the Elohist closes thechapter. It is true that we have in the midst of some of these Elohisticpassages a verse or two of the other document inserted by the compiler;but the outlines of the different documents are marked as I have toldyou. If you take this story and dissect out of it the portions which Ihave ascribed to the Elohist and put them together, you will have aclear, complete, consecutive story of the Flood; the portions of theJehovistic narrative inserted rather tend to confusion. "Theconsideration of the context here, " says Bleek, "quite apart from thechanges in the naming of God, shows that the Jehovistic passages of thenarrative did not originally belong to it. It cannot fail to be observedthat the connection is often interrupted by the Jehovistic passages, andthat by cutting them out a more valuable and clearer continuity of thenarrative is almost always obtained. For instance, in the existingnarrative certain repetitions keep on occurring; one of these, especially, is connected with a difference in the matters of factrelated, introducing no slight difficulty and obscurity. " [Footnote:Vol. I. P. 273. ]

Hear the Jehovist: "And Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was greatin the earth" (ch. Vi. 5). Now hear the Elohist (vi. 11): "And the earthwas corrupt before Elohim, and the earth was filled with violence. " TheJehovist says (vi. 7): "And Jehovah said, I will destroy man whom I havecreated from the face of the ground. " The Elohist says (vi. 13): "Theearth is filled with violence through them, and behold I will destroythem with the earth. " In the ninth verse of the sixth chapter we read:"Noah was a righteous man and perfect in his generations; Noah walkedwith Elohim. " In the first verse of the seventh chapter, we read, "AndJehovah said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; forthee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. " Theserepetitions show how the same story is twice told. But thecontradictions are more significant. Here the one narrative representsElohim as saying (vi. 19): "And of every living thing of all flesh, twoof every kind shalt thou bring into the ark to keep them alive withthee; they shall be male and female. Of the fowl after their kind and ofthe cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth afterits kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee to keep them alive. "But the other narrative represents Jehovah as saying, "Of every cleanbeast thou shalt take to thee seven and seven, the male and the female;and of the beasts that are not clean, two, the male and the female; ofthe fowl also of the air seven and seven, male and female, to keep seedalive upon the face of all the earth. " The one story says that of everykind of living creature one pair should be taken into the ark; the othersays that of _clean_ beasts, seven pairs of each species should bereceived, and of unclean beasts only one pair. The harmonists havewrestled with this passage also; some of them say that perhaps the firstpassage only meant that they should _walk in_ two and two; otherssay that a good many years had elapsed between the giving of the twocommands (of which there is not a particle of evidence), and we are leftto infer that in the mean time the Almighty either forgot his firstorders, or else changed his mind. It is a pitiful instance of an attemptto evade a difficulty that cannot be evaded. One of the veryconservative commentators, Dr. Perowne, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary, "concludes to face it: "May we not suppose, " he timidly asks, "that wehave here traces of a separate document, interwoven by a later writer, with the former history? The passage has not, indeed, been incorporatedintact, but there is a coloring about it which seems to indicate thatMoses, or whoever put the book of Genesis into its present shape, hadhere consulted a different narrative. The distinct use of the divinenames in the same phrase (vi. 22; vii. 5), in the former Elohim, in thelatter Jehovah, suggests that this may have been the case. " [Footnote:Art. "Noah, " iii. 2179, American Edition. ]

"May we not suppose, " the good doctor asks, that we have traces of twodocuments here? Certainly, your reverence. It is just as safe to supposeit, as it is to suppose, when you see a nose on a man's face, that it isa nose. There is no more doubt about it than there is about any otherpalpable fact. The truth is, that the composite character of Genesis isno longer, in scholarly circles, an open question. The most cautious, the most conservative of scholars concede the point. Even PresidentBartlett, of Dartmouth College, a Hebraist of some eminence, and assturdy a defender of old-fashioned orthodoxy as this country holds, madethis admission more than twenty years ago: "We may accept the traces ofearlier narratives as having been employed and authenticated by him[Moses]; and we may admit the marks of later date as indications of asurface revision of authorized persons not later than Ezra andNehemiah. " And Dr. Perowne, the conservative scholar already quoted, inthe article on the "Pentateuch" in "Smith's Bible Dictionary, " sums upas follows:--

 "1. The Book of Genesis rests chiefly on documents much earlier than the time of Moses, though it was probably brought to very nearly its present shape either by Moses himself, or by one of the elders who acted under him. 

 "2. The books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers are to a great extent Mosaic. Besides those portions which are expressly declared to have been written by him, other portions, and especially the legal sections, were, if not actually written, in all probability dictated by him. 

 "3. Deuteronomy, excepting the concluding part, is entirely the work of Moses, as it professes to be. 

 . . . . . . . . . . 

 "5. The first _composition_ of the Pentateuch as a whole could not have taken place till after the Israelites entered Canaan. 

 "6. The whole work did not finally assume its present shape till its revision was undertaken by Ezra after the return from the Babylonish captivity. "

The volume from which I have quoted these words bears the date of 1870. Twenty years of very busy work have been expended upon the Pentateuchsince Dr. Perowne wrote these words; if he were to write to-day he wouldbe much less confident that Moses wrote the whole of Deuteronomy, and hewould probably modify his statements in other respects; but he wouldretract none of these admissions respecting the composite character ofthese five books. 

The same fact of a combination of different documents can easily beshown in all the three middle books of the Pentateuch, as well as inGenesis. This is the fact which explains those repetitions of laws, andthose singular breaks in the history, to which I called your attentionin the last chapter. There is, as I believe, a large element of purelyMosaic legislation in these books; many of these laws were writteneither by the hand of Moses or under his eye; and the rest are soconformed to the spirit which he impressed upon the Hebrew jurisprudencethat they may be fairly called Mosaic; but many of them, on the otherhand, were written long after his day, and the whole Pentateuch did notreach its present form until after the exile, in the days of Ezra andNehemiah. 

The upholders of the traditional theory--that Moses wrote thePentateuch, just as Blackstone wrote his Commentaries--are wont to makemuch account of the disagreements of those critics who have undertakento analyze it into its component parts. "These critics, " they say, "areall at loggerheads; they do not agree with one another; none of themeven agrees with himself very long; most of them have several timesrevised their theories, and there seems to be neither certainty norcoherency in their speculations. " But this is not quite true. Withrespect to some subordinate questions they are not agreed, and probablynever will be; but with respect to the fact that these books arecomposite in their origin they are perfectly agreed, and they are alsoremarkably unanimous in their judgments as to where the lines ofcleavage run between these component parts. The consensus of criticalopinion now is that there are at least four great documents which havebeen combined in the Pentateuch; and the critics agree in the mainfeatures of the analysis, though they do not all call these separatedparts by the same names, nor do they all think alike concerning therelative antiquity of these portions. Some think that one of thesedocuments is the oldest, and some give that distinction to another; nordo they agree as to how old the oldest is, some bringing the earliestcomposition down to a recent period; but on the main question that theliterature is composite they are at one. The closeness of theiragreement is shown by Professor Ladd in a series of tables [Footnote:_The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture_, Part II. Chap. Vii. ] in whichhe displays to the eye the results of the analysis of four independentinvestigators, Knobel, Schrader, Dillmann, and Wellhausen. He goesthrough the whole of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, --theHexateuch, as it is now called, --and picks out of every chapter thoseverses assigned by these several authorities to that ancient writingwhich we have been calling the Elohistic narrative, and arranges them inparallel columns. You can see at a glance when they agree in thisanalysis, and when they disagree. I think that you would be astonishedto find that the agreements are so many and the disagreements so few. Somuch unity of judgment would be impossible if the lines of cleavagebetween these old documents were not marked with considerabledistinctness. "The only satisfactory explanation, " says Professor Ladd, "of the possibility of accomplishing such a work of analysis is the factthat the analysis is substantially correct. " [Footnote: _What is theBible?_ p. 311. ]

Professor C. A. Briggs, of the Union (Presbyterian) Theological Seminaryin New York, bore this testimony three years ago in the "PresbyterianReview:" "The critical analysis of the Hexateuch is the result of morethan a century of profound study of the documents by the greatestcritics of the age. There has been a steady advance until the presentposition of agreement has been reached, in which Jew and Christian, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Rationalistic and Evangelical scholars, Reformed and Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopal, Unitarian, Methodist, and Baptist all concur. The analysis or the Hexateuch into severaldistinct original documents is a purely literary question in which noarticle of faith is involved. Whoever in these times, in the discussionof the literary phenomena of the Hexateuch, appeals to the ignorance andprejudices of the multitude as if there were any peril to faith in theseprocesses of the Higher Criticism, risks his reputation for scholarshipby so doing. There are no Hebrew professors on the continent of Europe, so far as I know, who would deny the literary analysis of the Pentateuchinto the four great documents. The professors of Hebrew in theUniversities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, and tutors in a largenumber of theological colleges, hold to the same opinion. A veryconsiderable number of the Hebrew professors of America are in accordwith them. There are, indeed, a few professional scholars who hold tothe traditional opinion, but these are in a hopeless minority. I doubtwhether there is any question of scholarship whatever in which there isgreater agreement among scholars than in this question of the literaryanalysis of the Hexateuch. "

I have but one more witness to introduce, and it shall be thedistinguished German professor Delitzsch, who has long been regarded asthe bulwark of evangelical orthodoxy in Germany. "His name, " saysProfessor Ladd, "has for many years been connected with the conceptionof a devout Christian scholarship used in the defense of the faithagainst attacks upon the supernatural character of the Old Testamentreligion and of the writings which record its development. " In a prefaceto his commentary on Isaiah published since his recent death, he speakswith great humility of the work that he has done, adding, "Of one thingonly do I think I may be confident, --that the spirit by which it isanimated comes from the good Spirit that guides along the everlastingway. " The opinion of such a scholar ought to have weight with allserious-minded Christians. When I give you his latest word on thisquestion, you will recognize that you have all that the ripest and mostdevout scholarship can claim. Let me quote, then, Professor Ladd'sabstract of his verdict:--

"In the opinion of Professor Delitzsch only the basis of the severalcodes. .. Incorporated in the Pentateuch is Mosaic; the form in whichthese codes. .. Are presented in the Pentateuch is of an origin muchlater than the time of Moses. The Decalogue and the laws forming theBook of the Covenant are the most ancient portions; they preserve theMosaic type in its relatively oldest and purest form. Of this typeDeuteronomy _is a development_. The statement that Moses 'wrote'the Deuteronomic law (Deut. Xxxi. 9, 24) _does not refer to thepresent Book of Deuteronomy, but to the code of laws which underliesit_. 

"The Priest's Code, which embodies the more distinctively ritualisticand ceremonial legislation, is the result of a long and progressivedevelopment. Certain of its principles originated with Moses, but itsform, which is utterly unlike that of the other parts of the Pentateuch, was received at the hands of the priests of the nation. Probably someparticular priest, at a much later date, indeed, than the time of Moses, but prior to the composition of Deuteronomy, was especially influentialin shaping it. But the last stages of its development may belong to theperiod after the Exile. 

"The historical traditions which are incorporated into the Hexateuchwere committed to writing at different times and by different hands. Thenarratives of them are superimposed, as it were, stratum upon stratum, in the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua. For the Book of Joshua isconnected intimately with the Pentateuch, and when analyzed shows thesame composite structure. The differences which the several codesexhibit are due to modifications which they received in the course ofhistory as they were variously collected, revised, and passed fromgeneration to generation. .. . The Pentateuch, like all the otherhistorical books of the Bible, is composed of documentary sources, differing alike in character and age, which critical analysis may stillbe able, with greater or less certainty, to distinguish and separatefrom one another. " [Footnote: _What is the Bible?_ pp. 489-491. ]

That such is the fact with respect to the structure of these ancientwritings is now beyond question. And our theory of inspiration must beadjusted to this fact. Evidently neither the theory of verbalinspiration, nor the theory of plenary inspiration can be made to fitthe facts which a careful study of the writings themselves bring beforeus. These writings are not inspired in the sense which we have commonlygiven to that word. The verbal theory of inspiration was only tenablewhile they were supposed to be the work of a single author. To such acomposite literature no such theory will apply. "To make this claim, "says Professor Ladd, "and yet accept the best ascertained results ofcriticism, would compel us to take such positions as the following: Theoriginal authors of each one of the writings which enter into thecomposite structure were infallibly inspired; every one who made anychanges in any one of these fundamental writings was infalliblyinspired; every compiler who put together two or more of these writingswas infallibly inspired, both as to his selections and transmissions[omissions?], and as to any connecting or explanatory words which hemight himself write; every redactor was infallibly inspired to correctand supplement and omit that which was the product of previousinfallible inspirations. Or perhaps it might seem more convenient toattach the claim of a plenary inspiration to the last redactor of all;but then we should probably have selected of all others the one leastable to bear the weight of such a claim. Think of making the claim for aplenary inspiration of the Pentateuch in its present form on the groundof the infallibility of that one of the Scribes who gave it its lasttouches some time subsequent to the date of Ezra!" [Footnote: _TheDoctrine of Sacred Scripture_, i. 499]

And yet this does not signify that these books are valueless. When itwas discovered that the Homeric writings were not all the work of Homer, the value of the Homeric writings was not affected. As pictures of thelife of that remote antiquity they had not lost their significance. Thevalue of these Mosaic books is of a very different sort from that of theHomeric writings, but the discoveries of the Higher Criticism affectthem no more seriously. Even their historical character is by no meansoverthrown. You can find in Herodotus and in Livy discrepancies andcontradictions, but this does not lead you to regard their writings asworthless. There are no infallible histories, but that is no reason whyyou should not study history, or why you should read all history withthe inclination to reject every statement which is not forced on youracceptance by evidence which you cannot gainsay. 

These books of Moses are the treasury, indeed, of no little valuablehistory. They are not infallible, but they contain a great deal of truthwhich we find nowhere else, and which is yet wonderfully corroborated byall that we do know. Ewald declares that in the fourteenth chapter ofGenesis Abraham is brought before us "in the clear light of history. "From monuments and other sources the substantial accuracy of thisnarrative is confirmed; and the account of the visit of Abraham to Egyptconforms, in all its minute incidents, to the life of Egypt at thattime. The name Pharaoh is the right name for the kings reigning then;the behavior of the servants of Pharaoh is perfectly in keeping with thepopular ideas and practices as the monuments reveal them. The story ofJoseph has been confirmed, as to its essential accuracy, as to theverisimilitude of its pictures of Egyptian life, by every recentdiscovery. Georg Ebers declares that "this narrative contains nothingwhich does not accurately correspond to a court of Pharaoh in the besttimes of the Kingdom. " Many features of this narrative which a rashskepticism has assailed have been verified by later discoveries. 

We are told in the Exodus that the Israelites were impressed by Pharaohinto building for him two store-cities ("treasure cities, " the oldversion calls them), named Pithom and Rameses, and that in this work theywere made to "serve with rigor;" that their lives were embittered "withhard service in mortar and brick and all manner of hard service in thefield;" that they were sometimes forced to make brick without straw. Thewhereabouts of these store-cities, and the precise meaning of the termapplied to them, has been a matter of much conjecture, and the story hassometimes been set aside as a myth. To Pithom there is no clearhistorical reference in any other book except Exodus. Only four or fiveyears ago a Genovese explorer unearthed, near the route of the SuezCanal, this very city; found several ruined monuments with the name ofthe city plainly inscribed on them, "Pi Tum, " and excavating stillfurther uncovered a ruin of which the following is Mr. Rawlinson'sdescription: "The town is altogether a square, inclosed by a brick walltwenty-two feet thick, and measuring six hundred and fifty feet alongeach side. Nearly the whole of the space is occupied by solidly built, square chambers, divided one from another by brick walls, from eight toten feet thick, which are unpierced by window or door or opening of anykind. About ten feet from the bottom the walls show a row of recessesfor beams, in some of which decayed wood still remains, indicating thatthe buildings were two-storied, having a lower room which could only beentered by a trap-door, used probably as a store-house, or magazine, andan upper one in which the keeper of the store may have had his abode. Therefore this discovery is simply that of a 'store-city, ' built partlyby Rameses II. ; but it further appears from several short inscriptions, that the name of the city was Pa Tum, or Pithom; and thus there is noreasonable doubt that one of the two cities built by the Israelites hasbeen laid bare, and answers completely to the description given of it. "[Footnote: Quoted by Robinson in _The Pharaohs of the Bondage_, p. 97. ]

The walls of Egypt were not all laid with mortar, but the record speaksof mortar in this case, and here it is: the several courses of thesebuildings were usually "laid with mortar in regular tiers. " Morestriking still is the fact that in some of these buildings, while thelower tiers are composed of bricks having straw in them, the upper tiersconsist of a poorer quality of bricks without straw. Photographs may beseen in this country of some of these brick granaries of this old store-city of Pithom, with the line of division plainly showing between thetwo kinds of bricks; and thus we have before our eyes a most strikingconfirmation of the truth of this story of the bondage of the Israelitesin Egypt. Quite a number of such testimonies to the substantialhistorical verity of these Old Testament records have been discovered inrecent years as old mounds have been opened in Egypt and in Chaldea, andthe monuments of buried centuries have told their story to the wonderingworld. The books are not infallible, but he who sets them all aside as acollection of myths or fables exposes his ignorance in a lamentable way. 

But what is far more to the purpose, the ideas running all through theold literature, the constructive truths of science, of ethics, ofreligion, are pure and lofty and full of saving power. Even science, Isay, owes much to Genesis. The story of the Creation in the firstchapter of Genesis must not indeed be taken for veritable history; butit is a solemn hymn in which some great truths of the world's origin aresublimely set forth. It gives us the distinct idea of the unity ofCreation, --sweeping away, at one mighty stroke, the whole system ofnaturalistic polytheism, which makes science impossible, when itdeclares that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. "In the same words it sets forth the truth by whose light science alonewalks safely, that the source of all things is a spiritual cause. TheGod from whose power all things proceed is not a fortuitous concourse ofatoms, but a spiritual intelligence. From this living God came forthmatter with its forces, life with its organisms, mind with its freedom. And although it may not be possible to force the words of this ancienthymn into scientific statements of the order of creation, it is mostclear that it implies a continuous process, a law of development, in thegenerations of the heaven and the earth. This is not a scientifictreatise of creation, but the alphabet of science is here, as Dr. NewmanSmyth has said; and it is correct. The guiding lights of scientificstudy are in these great principles. 

Similarly the ethical elements and tendencies of these old writings aresound and strong. I have shown you how defective many of the Mosaic lawsare when judged by Christian standards; but all this legislationcontains formative ideas and principles by which it tends to purifyitself. Human sacrifices were common among the surrounding nations; thestory of Abraham and Isaac banishes that horror forever from Hebrewhistory. Slavery was universal, but the law of the Jubilee Year made anend of domestic slavery in Israel. The family was foundationless; thewife's rights rested wholly on the caprice of her husband; but that lawof divorce which I quoted to you, and which our Lord repealed, set somebounds to this caprice, for the husband was compelled to go throughcertain formalities before he could turn his wife out of doors. The lawof blood vengeance, though in terms it authorized murder, yet in effectpowerfully restrained the violence of that rude age, and gave a chancefor the development of that idea of the sacredness of life which to usis a moral commonplace, but which had scarcely dawned upon the minds ofthose old Hebrews. Thus the history shows a people moving steadilyforward under moral leadership, out of barbarism into highercivilization, and we can trace the very process by which the moralmaxims which to us are almost axioms have been cleared of the cruditiesof passion and animalism, and stamped upon the consciousness of men. Isnot God in all this history?

Those first principles which I have called the guiding lights of scienceare also the elements of pure religion. Science and religion spell outdifferent messages to men, but they start with the same alphabet. Andthe religious purity of that hymn of the Creation is not less wonderfulthan its scientific verity. Compare it with the other traditionalstories of the origin of things; compare it with the mythologies ofEgypt, of Chaldea, of Greece and Rome, and see how far above them itstands in spiritual dignity, in moral beauty. "We could more easily, indeed, " says Dr. Newman Smyth, "compute how much a pure spring wellingup at the source of a brook that widens into a river, has done formeadow and grass and flowers and overhanging trees, for thousands ofyears, than estimate the influence of this purest of all ancienttraditions of the Creation, as it has entered into the lives and revivedthe consciences of men; as it has purified countries of idolatries andswept away superstition; and has flowed on and on with the increasingtruth of history, and kept fresh and fruitful, from generation togeneration, faith in the One God and the common parentage of men. "[Footnote: _Old Faiths in New Light_, p. 73. ]

Above all, we find in all this literature the planting and the firstgermination of that great hope which turned the thought of this peoplefrom the earliest generations toward the future, and made them trust andpray and wait, in darkest times, for better days to come. "Speak untothe children of Israel that they go forward!" This is the voice that isalways sounding from the heights above them, whether they halt by theshore of the sea, or bivouac in the wilderness. They do not always obeythe voice, but it never fails to rouse and summon them. No people of allhistory has lived in the future as Israel did. "By faith" they worshipedand trusted and wrought and fought, the worthies of this old religion;towards lands that they had not seen they set their faces; concerningthings to come they were always prophesying; and it is this great hopethat forms the germ of the Messianic expectation by which they reachforth to the glories of the latter day. This attitude of Israel, in allthe generations, is the one striking feature of this history. Nosoulless sphinx facing a trackless desert with blind eyes--no impassiveBuddha ensphered in placid silence--is the genius of this people, butsome strong angel poised on mighty pinion above the highest peak ofPisgah, and scanning with swift glances the beauty of the promised land. Now any people of which this is true must be, in a large sense of theword, an inspired people; and their literature, with all the signs ofimperfection which must appear in it, on account of the medium throughwhich it comes, will give proof of the divine ideas and forces that areworking themselves out in their history. 

It is in this large way of looking at the Hebrew literature that wediscover its real preciousness. And when we get this large conception, then petty questions about the absolute accuracy of texts and dates nolonger trouble us. "He who has once gained this broader view of theBible, " says Dr. Newman Smyth, "as the development of a course ofhistory itself guided and inspired by Jehovah, will not be disconcertedby the confused noises of the critic. His faith in the Word of God liesdeeper than any difficulties or flaws upon the surface of the Bible. Hewill not be disturbed by seeing any theory of its mechanical formation, or school-book infallibility broken to fragments under the repeatedblows of modern investigation; the water of life will flow from the rockwhich the scholar strikes with his rod. He can wait, without fear, for acandid and thorough study of these sacred writings to determine, ifpossible, what parts are genuine, and what narratives, if any, areunhistorical. His belief in the Word of God, from generation togeneration, does not depend upon the minor incidents of the Biblicalstories; it would not be destroyed or weakened, even though humantraditions could be shown to have overgrown some parts of this sacredhistory, as the ivy, creeping up the wall of the church, does not loosenits ancient stones. " [Footnote: _Old Faiths in New Light_, p. 59. ]

CHAPTER IV. 

THE EARLIER HEBREW HISTORIES. 

We found reasons, in previous chapters, for believing that considerableportions of the Levitical legislation came from the hands of Moses, although the narratives of the Pentateuch and many of its laws were putinto their present form long after the time of Moses. The compositecharacter of all this old literature has been demonstrated. The factthat its materials were collected from several sources, by a processextending through many centuries, and that the work of redaction was notcompleted until the people returned from the exile about five centuriesbefore Christ, and almost a thousand years after the death of Moses, arefacts now as well established as any other results of scholarlyresearch. 

Nevertheless, we have maintained that the Israelites possessed, whenthey entered Canaan, a considerable body of legislation framed under theeye of Moses and bearing his name. Throughout the Book of Joshua thislegislation is frequently referred to. If the Book of Joshua was, as wehave assumed, originally connected with the first five books, constituting what is now called the Hexateuch, if these six books wereput into their present form by the same writers, we should expect thatthe Mosaic legislation would be clearly traced through all these books. 

But when we go forward in this history we come at once upon a remarkablefact. The Book of Judges, the Book of Ruth, and the two books of Samuelcover a period of Jewish history estimated in our common chronology atmore than four hundred years, and in these four books there is nomention whatever of that Mosaic legislation which constituted, as wehave supposed, the germ of the Pentateuch. The name of Moses ismentioned only six times in these four books; twice in the earlychapters of the Judges in connection with the settlement of the kindredof his wife in Canaan; once in a reference to an order given by Mosesthat Hebron should be given to Caleb; twice in a single passage in ISamuel xii. , where Moses and Aaron are referred to as leaders of thepeople out of Egyptian bondage, and once in Judges iii. 4, where it issaid that certain of the native races were left in Canaan, "to proveIsrael by them, whether they would hearken to the commandments of theLord which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. " This lastis the only place in all these books where there is the faintestallusion to any legislation left to the Israelites by Moses; and thisreference does not make it clear whether the "commandments" referred towere written or oral. The word "law" is not found in these four books. There is nothing in any of these books to indicate that the children ofIsrael possessed any written laws. There are, indeed, in Ruth and in theJudges frequent accounts of observances that are enjoined in thePentateuch; and in Samuel we read of the tabernacle and the ark and theoffering of sacrifices; the history tells us that some of the thingscommanded in the Mosaic law were observed during this period; but whenwe look in these books for any reference or appeal to the sacredwritings of Moses, or to any other sacred writings, or to any laws orstatutes or written ordinances for the government of the people, we lookin vain. Samuel the Prophet anointed Saul and afterward David as Kingsof Israel; but if, on these solemn occasions, he said anything about thewritings of Moses or the law of Moses, the fact is not mentioned. Therecords afford us no ground for affirming that either Samuel or Saul wasaware of the existence of such sacred writings. 

This is a notable fact. That the written law of Moses should, for fourcenturies of Hebrew history, have disappeared so completely from noticethat the historian did not find it necessary to make any allusion to it, is a circumstance that needs explanation. 

It is true, as I have said, that during this period certain observancesrequired by the law were kept more or less regularly. But it is alsotrue that many of the most specific and solemn requirements of the lawwere neglected or violated during all these years by the holiest men. The Mosaic law utterly forbids the offering of sacrifices at any otherplace than the central sanctuary, the tabernacle or the temple; but thenarrative of these early historical books shows all the saints andheroes of the earlier history building altars, and offering sacrificesfreely in many places, with no apparent consciousness of transgression, --nay, with the strongest assurance of the divine approval. "Samuel, "says Professor Robertson Smith, "sacrifices on many high places, Saulbuilds altars, David and his son Solomon permit the worship at the highplaces to continue, and the historian recognizes this as legitimatebecause the temple was not yet built (I Kings iii. 2-4). In NorthernIsrael this state of things was never changed. The high places were anestablished feature in the Kingdom of Ephraim, and Elijah himselfdeclares that the destruction of the altars of Jehovah--all illegitimateaccording to the Pentateuch--is a breach of Jehovah's covenant. "[Footnote: _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, pp. 220, 221. ]

According to the Levitical law it was positively unlawful for any personbut the high priest ever to go into the innermost sanctuary, the holy ofholies, where the ark of God was kept; and the high priest could go intothat awful place but once a year. But we find the boy Samuel actuallysleeping "in the temple of the Lord where the ark of the Lord was. " Theold version conceals this fact by a mistranslation. These are only a fewof many violations of the Pentateuchal legislation which we findrecorded in these books. 

From the silence of these earlier histories concerning the law of Moses, and from these many transgressions, by the holiest men, of the positiverequirements of the Pentateuchal legislation, the conclusion has beendrawn by recent critics that the Pentateuchal legislation could not havebeen in existence during this period of history; that it must have beenproduced at a later day. It must be admitted that they make out a strongcase. For reasons presented in the second chapter, I am unable to accepttheir theory. It is probable, however, that the code of laws inexistence at this time was a limited and simple code--no such elaborateritual as that which we now find in the Pentateuch; and that thoseparticular requirements with respect to which the earlier Judges andSamuel and David appear to behave themselves so disorderly, had not thenbeen enacted. 

Moreover, it seems to be necessary to admit that there was a surprisingamount of popular ignorance respecting even those portions of the lawwhich were then in existence. This is the astonishing phenomenon. Attempts are made to illustrate it by the ignorance of the Bible whichprevailed among our own ancestors before the invention of printing; butno parallel can be found, as I believe, in the mediæval history ofEurope. It is true that many of the common people were altogetherunfamiliar with the Bible in mediæval times; but we cannot conceive ofsuch a thing as that the priests, the learned men, and the leaders ofthe church at that time, should have been unaware of the existence ofsuch a book. 

On his death-bed David is said to have admonished Solomon (I Kings ii. 3), that he should keep the statutes and commandments of the Lord, "according to that which is written in the law of Moses. " This is thefirst reference to the Mosaic law which we find in connection with thehistory of David; the first mention of a written law since the death ofJoshua, four centuries before. After this there are three other casualallusions to the law of Moses in the first book of Kings, and four inthe second book. The books of Chronicles, which follow the Kings, contain frequent allusions to the law; but these books, as we shall seeby and by, were written long afterward; and the tradition which theyembody cannot be so safe a guide as that of the earlier histories. It isin Chronicles that we learn of the attempt which was made by one of thegood kings of Judah, Jehoshaphat, to have certain princes, priests, andLevites appointed to teach the law; they went about the land, it issaid, teaching the people, "and had the book of the law of Jehovah withthem. " I think that this is the first intimation, after the death ofMoses, that the law delivered by him had been publicly taught or evenread in connection with the ordinances of worship. The earlier narrativeof Jehoshaphat's reign, which we find in the Book of the Kings, makes noallusion to this circumstance. 

Nearly three hundred years after Jehoshaphat, and nearly five hundredyears after David, the young King Josiah was reigning in Jerusalem. Thetemple had fallen into ruin, and the good king determined to have itrepaired. Hilkiah, the high priest, who was rummaging among the rubbishof the dilapidated sanctuary, found there the Book of the Law of theLord. The surprise which he manifests at this discovery, the trepidationof Shaphan the scribe, who hastens to tell the king about it, and theconsternation of the king when he listens for the first time in his lifeto the reading of the book, and discovers how grievously itscommandments have been disobeyed, form one of the most striking scenesof the old history. "How are we to explain, " asks Dr. Perowne, "thissurprise and alarm in the mind of Josiah, betraying, as it does, suchutter ignorance of the Book of the Law and the severity of itsthreatenings, --except on the supposition that as a written document ithad well-nigh perished?" [Footnote: Smith's _Bible Dictionary_, art. "Pentateuch. "] Undoubtedly "the Book of the Law" thus discoveredwas that body of legislation which lies at the heart of the Deuteronomiccode; and this was never again lost sight of by the Jewish people. Itwas less than fifty years after this that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed thecity and the temple and carried the people away into captivity. And itwas not until their return from the Captivity, seventy years later, thatthese sacred writings began to assume that place of eminence in thereligious system of the Jews which they have held in later times. Theman by whom the Jews were taught to cherish and study these writings wasEzra, one of the returning exiles. This Ezra, the record says, "was aready scribe in the law of Moses which the Lord God of Israel hadgiven, " and "he had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, andto do it and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments. " He it was, nodoubt, who gave to these laws their last revision, and who put thePentateuch substantially into the shape in which we have it now. Doubtless much was added at this time; ritual rules which had beenhanded down orally were written out and made part of the code; thePentateuch, after the Exile, was a more elaborate law book than thatwhich Hilkiah found in the old temple. Under the presidency of Ezra inJerusalem, and in the days which followed, the Book of the Law wasexalted; it was the standard of authority; it was read in the temple andexplained in the synagogues; its writings were woven into all thethought and life of the people of Israel; there never has been a timesince that day when the history of the reign of any king could have beenwritten without mentioning the law of Moses; there never has been adecade when any adequate account of the life of the Jewish people couldhave been given which would not bring this book constantly into view. 

This Book of the Law, as finally completed by Ezra and his co-laborers, was the foundation of the Hebrew Scriptures; it possessed a sacrednessin the eyes of the Jews far higher than that pertaining to any otherpart of their writings. Next to this in age and importance was the greatdivision of their Scriptures known by them as _"The Prophets. "_

After the Book of the Law was given to the people with great solemnity, in the days of Ezra, and the public reading and explanation of it becamea principal part of the worship of the Jews, it began to be noisedabroad that there were certain other sacred writings worthy to be knownand treasured. The only information we have concerning the beginning ofthis second collection is found in one of the apocryphal books, thesecond of Maccabees (ii. 14), in which we are told that Neemias(Nehemiah), in "founding a library, gathered together the acts of thekings, and [the writings of] the prophets, and of David, and theepistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts. " These last nameddocuments are not now in existence. They appear to have been the lettersand commissions of Babylonian and Persian kings respecting the return ofthe people to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple. The otherwritings mentioned are, however, all known to us, and are included inour collection. It is not certain that Nehemiah began this collection;it may have been initiated before his day, and the "founding" of thelibrary may have been only the work of providing for the preservationand arrangement of books already in his possession. This secondcollection of sacred writings, called The Prophets, was divided, as Ihave before stated, into the Earlier and the Later Prophets; the formersubdivision containing the books of Joshua, [Footnote: Joshua, althoughoriginally a portion of the pentateuchal literature, was, about the timeof the Exile, separated from the first five books, and put into thislater collection. ] Judges, Samuel, and Kings; the latter, the bookswhich we now regard and class as the prophecies. Ruth was at firstconsidered as a part of the Judges, and was included among the "EarlierProphets, " and Lamentations was appended to Jeremiah, and included amongthe "Later Prophets. " These two books were afterward removed from thiscollection, for liturgical reasons, and placed in the third group ofwritings, of which we shall speak farther on. 

It is probable that the prophetic writings proper were first collected;but it will be more convenient to speak first of the books known to theJews as the "Earlier Prophets, " and to us as the Old TestamentHistories, --Judges, Ruth, Samuel, and the Kings. 

These books take up the history of Israel at the death of Joshua, andcontinue it to the time of the Captivity, a period of more than eightcenturies. Some of the critics are inclined to connect them all togetheras successive volumes of one great history; but there is not muchfoundation for this judgment, and it is better to treat them separately. 

The Book of Judges contains the annals of the Israelites after the deathof Joshua, and covers a period of three or four centuries. It was aperiod of disorder and turbulence, --the "Dark Ages" of Jewish history;when every man, as the record often says, "did that which was right inhis own eyes. " There is frequent mention of the keeping of variousobservances enjoined in the laws of Moses; but there is no expressmention of these laws in the book. The story is chiefly occupied withthe northern tribes; no mention is made of Judah after the thirdchapter; and it is largely a recital of the various wars of deliveranceand defense waged by these northern Hebrews against the surroundingpeoples, under certain leaders who arose, in a providential way, to takecommand of them. 

The questions, Who wrote it? and When was it written? are not easilyanswered. It would appear that portions of it must have been writtenafter the time of Saul, for the phrase, frequently repeated, "there wasthen no king in the land, " looks back from a period when there_was_ a king in the land. And it would appear that the firstchapter must have been written before the middle of the reign of KingDavid; for it tells us that the Jebusites had not yet been driven out ofJerusalem; that they still held that stronghold; while in 2 Samuel v. 6, 7, we are told of the expulsion of the Jebusites by David, who made theplace his capital from that time. The tradition that Samuel wrote thebook rests on no adequate foundation. 

The evidence that this book also was compiled, by some later writer, from various written documents, is abundant and convincing. There aretwo distinct introductions, one of which comprises the first chapter andfive verses of the second, and the other of which occupies the remainderof the second chapter. The first of these begins thus: "And it came topass after the death of Joshua that the children of Israel asked of theLord, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites, to fightagainst them?" The second of these introductions begins by telling howJoshua sent the people away, after his farewell address, and goes on(ii. 8) to say, "And Joshua the son of Nun the servant of the Lord died, being an hundred and ten years old. " After recounting a number of eventswhich happened, as it tells us, after the death of Joshua, the narrativegoes on to give us as naively as possible an account of Joshua's death. If this were a consecutive narrative from the hand of one writer, inspired or otherwise, such an arrangement would be inexplicable; but ifwe have here a combination of two or more independent documents, theexplanation is not difficult. It is a little puzzling, too, to find thecircumstances of the death of Joshua repeated here, in almost the samewords as those which we find in the Book of Joshua (xxiv. 29-31). Itwould seem either that the writer of Joshua must have copied fromJudges, or the writer of Judges from Joshua, or else that both copiedfrom some older document this account of Joshua's death. 

Another still more striking illustration of the manner in which theseold books are constructed is found in the account given in the firstchapter of the capture of Debir, by Caleb (i. 11-15). Here it isexpressly said that this capture took place after the death of Joshua, as a consequence of the leadership assigned by Jehovah to the tribe ofJudah in this war against the Canaanites. But the same narrative, in thesame words, is found in the Book of Joshua (xv. 15-19), and here we aretold no less explicitly that the incident happened during the lifetimeof Joshua. There is no doubt that the incident happened; it is a simpleand natural story, and carries the marks of credibility upon its face;but if it happened after the death of Joshua it did not happen beforehis death; one of these narrators borrowed the story from the other, orelse both borrowed it from a common source; and one of them, certainly, put it in the wrong place, --one of them must have been mistaken as tothe time when it occurred. Such a mistake is of no consequence at all toone who holds a rational theory of inspiration; he expects to find inthese old documents just such errors and misplacements; they do not inthe least affect the true value of the book; but it must be obvious toany one that instances of this nature cannot be reconciled with thetheory of an infallible book, which has been generally regarded as theonly true theory. 

The book is of the utmost value as showing us the state of morals andmanners in that far-off time, and letting us see with what crudematerial the great ideas committed to Israel--the unity and spiritualityand righteousness of God--were compelled to work themselves out. 

The Book of Ruth, which was formerly, in the Jewish collections, regarded as a part of the Book of Judges, is a beautiful pastoral idylof the same period. Its scene is laid in Judea, and it serves to show usthat in the midst of all those turbulent ages there were quiet homes andgentle lives. No sweeter story can be found in any literature; maternaltenderness, filial affection, genuine chivalry, find in the book theirtypical representatives. The first sentence of the book gives us theapproximate date of the incidents recorded: it was "in the days when thejudges judged. " The concluding verses give us the genealogy of KingDavid, showing that Ruth was his great-grandmother; it must, therefore, have been written as late as the reign of David, --probably much later;for it describes, as if they belonged to a remote antiquity, certainusages of the Jews which must needs have shaped themselves after theoccupation of Canaan. Yet it could scarcely have been written so late asthe Captivity, for the marriage of Ruth, who is a Moabitess, to Boaz, ismentioned as if it were a matter of course, with no hint of censure. Inthe latter days of Israel such an alliance of a Jew with a foreignerwould have been regarded as highly reprehensible. Indeed theDeuteronomic law most stringently forbids all social relations with thatparticular tribe to which Ruth belonged. "An Ammonite or a Moabite shallnot enter into the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generationshall none belonging to them enter into the assembly of the Lord forever. .. . Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thydays for ever. " (Deut. Xxiii. 3, 6. ) But Ruth, the Moabitess, becomesthe wife of one of the chief men of Bethlehem, with the applause of allthe Bethlehemites, and the highest approval of the author of thisnarrative; nay, she becomes, in the fourth generation, the ancestress ofthe greatest of all the kings of Israel. This certainly shows that thepeople of Bethlehem did not know of the Deuteronomic law, for they werea God-fearing and a law-abiding people; and it also makes it probablethat the incident occurred, and that the book which describes theincident was written, before this part of the Deuteronomic code was inexistence. It is therefore valuable, not only as throwing light on thelife of the people at that early period, but also as illustrating thegrowth of the pentateuchal literature. 

The two Books of Samuel and the two Books of Kings appear in theSeptuagint and in the Latin Vulgate as one work in four volumes, --theyare called the Four Books of Kings. In the recent Hebrew Bibles they aredivided, however, as in our Bible, and bear the same names. Theyconstitute, it is true, a continuous history; but the supposition thatthey were all written at one time and by one author is scarcelycredible. The standpoint of the writer of the Kings is considerablyshifted from that occupied by the writer of Samuel; we find ourselves ina new circle of ideas when we pass from the one book to the other. 

The Books of Samuel are generally ascribed to Samuel as their author. This is a fair sample of that lazy traditionalism which Christianopinion has been constrained to follow. There is not the slightestreason for believing that the Books of Samuel were written by Samuel anymore than that the Odyssey was written by Ulysses, or the Æneid byÆneas, or Bruce's Address by Bruce, or Paracelsus by Paracelsus, or St. Simeon Stylites by Simeon himself. Even in Bible books we do not holdthat the Book of Esther was written by Esther, or the Book of Ruth byRuth, or the Book of Job by Job, or the Books of Timothy by Timothy. Thefact that Samuel's name is given to the book proves nothing as to itsauthorship. It may have been called Samuel because it begins with thestory of Samuel. The Hebrews were apt to name their books by some wordor fact at the beginning of them, as we have seen in their naming of thebooks of the Pentateuch. 

It is true that certain facts are mentioned in this book of which Samuelwould have better knowledge than any one else; and he is said to havemade a record of certain events, (I Sam. X. 25. ) But his death isrelated in the first verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of First Samuel;and it is certain, therefore, that considerably more than half of thedocument ascribed to him must have been written by some one else. 

As to the name of the writer we are wholly ignorant, and it is not easyto determine the date at which he wrote. If we regarded this as acontinuous history from the hand of one writer, we should be compelledto ascribe it to a date somewhat later than the separation of the twokingdoms; for in I Sam. Xxvii. 6, we read of the present made by theking of Gath to David of the city of Ziklag, at the time when David washiding from Saul; "wherefore, " it is added, "Ziklag pertaineth unto thekings of Judah even unto this day. " Now there were no "kings of Judah"until after the ten tribes seceded; Rehoboam was the first of the kingsof Judah, therefore this must have been written after the time ofRehoboam. Doubtless this sentence was written after that time; and inall probability the books of Samuel did not receive their present formuntil some time after the secession of the ten tribes. The materialsfrom which the writer composed the book are hinted at here and there; itis almost certain that here, as in the other books, old documents arecombined by the author, and not always with the best editorial care. Several old songs are quoted: the "Song of Hannah, " David's exquisitelament over Saul and Jonathan, which is known as "The Bow;" David's"Song of Deliverance, " after he had escaped from Saul, which we find inthe Psalter as the Eighteenth Psalm, and "The Last Words of David. " Thebooks contain a vivid narrative of the times of Eli and Samuel and Saul, and of the splendid reign of King David. No portion of the Old Testamenthas been more diligently studied, and the moral teaching of the books isclear and luminous. The ethical thoroughness of these writings whencompared with almost any literature of equal antiquity is alwaysremarkable. Take, as an example, the treatment which David receives atthe hands of the writer. He is a great hero, the one grand figure ofHebrew history; but there is nothing of the demigod in this picture ofhim; his faults and crimes are exposed and denounced, and he gains ourrespect only by his hearty contrition and amendment. Verily the God ofIsrael whom this book reveals is a God who loveth righteousness andhateth iniquity. 

The Books of the Kings were originally one book, and ought to haveremained one. The manuscript was torn in two by some scribe or copyistlong ago, in the middle of the story of the reign of King Ahaziah; thefirst word of Second Kings goes on without so much as taking breath, from the last word of First Kings. There is no excuse for this bisectionof the narrative; it must be due to some accident, or to the arbitraryand unintelligent act of some person who paid no attention to themeaning of the document. As the Books of Samuel carry the history fromthe birth of Samuel down to the end of David's reign, so the Books ofthe Kings take up the story in the last days of David and carry it on tothe time of the Exile, a period of four hundred and fifty years. Thename of the author is concealed from us; there is a tradition, notaltogether improbable, that it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah. Ifyou will compare the last chapter of Second Kings with the last chapterof Jeremiah, you will discover that they are almost verbally the same. Here, again, if Jeremiah was not the author, either writer may havecopied the passage from the other, or both may have taken it from someolder book. But this passage gives us a note of time. It tells us thatEvil-Merodach, king of Babylon, in the first year of his reign, releasedthe captive king of Judah, Jehoiachin, from his long confinement, andgave him a seat at his own table. The book must have been written, then, after the beginning of the reign of Evil-Merodach; and there is plentyof history to show that his reign began 561 B. C. And inasmuch as thebook gives no hint of the return of the Jews from their captivity, whichbegan in 538 B. C. , we may fairly conclude that the book was written sometime between those dates. Let us suppose that Jeremiah wrote it; evenhe, as prophet of the Lord, certainly used the materials of historywhich had accumulated in the archives of the two nations. 

It is evident that, after the establishment of the kingdom, considerableattention was paid to the preservation of the records of importantnational events. The kings kept chroniclers who not only preserved andedited old documents, but who wrote the annals of their own times. In IKings xi. 41, at the conclusion of the narrative of Solomon's reign, weread, "Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and hiswisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?" Forhis history of Jeroboam the writer refers in the same way to "The Bookof the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, " and for his history ofRehoboam to "The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. " The sameis true of the reigns of other kings. These were not, of course, ourBooks of Chronicles, for these were not written for two hundred yearsafter the Book of Kings was finished. It is thus evident, as one modernwriter has said, "that the author laboriously employed the materialswithin his reach, very much as a modern historian might do, and furtherthat he was as much puzzled by chronological difficulties as a modernhistorian frequently is. " [Footnote: Horton's _Inspiration and theBible_, p. 182. ] Prophet or not, he took the materials at his hands, and put them together in this history. 

The splendid but corrupt reign of the son of David; the secession of theten tribes under Jeroboam; the hostile relations of the two kingdoms ofIsrael and Judah for two hundred and fifty years, by which both wereweakened, and through unholy alliances corrupted, and the result ofwhich was the final destruction of both, are described in this book in aspirited and evidently veracious manner. The two great prophets, Elijahand Elisha, are grand figures in this narrative; much of the storyrevolves around them. As witnesses for the righteous Jehovah they standforth, warning, rebuking, counseling kings and people; the moralleadership by which Israel is chastened and corrected and led in the wayof righteousness expresses itself largely through their ministry. Thewords of Lord Arthur Hervey, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary, " none toostrongly convey the historian's sense of the value of this part of theOld Testament:--

"Considering the conciseness of the narrative and the simplicity of thestyle, the amount of the knowledge which these books convey of thecharacters, conduct, and manners of kings and people during so long aperiod is truly wonderful. The insight which they give us into theaspect of Judah and Jerusalem, both natural and artificial, with thereligious, military, and civil institutions of the people, their artsand manufactures, the state of education and learning among them, theirresources, commerce, exploits, alliances, the causes of their decadence, and finally of their ruin, is most clear, interesting, and instructive. In a few brief sentences we acquire more accurate knowledge of theaffairs of Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, and other neighboringnations than had been preserved to us in all the other remains ofantiquity up to the recent discoveries in hieroglyphical and cuneiformmonuments. " [Footnote: Vol. Iii. P. 1561, American Edition. ]

The substantial historical veracity of these books has been confirmed inmany ways by these very monuments to which Lord Hervey refers. And yetthis substantial historical accuracy is found, as in other histories ofthe olden time, in the midst of many minor errors and discrepancies. Itwould seem as if Providence had taken the utmost pains to show us thatthe essential truth and the moral and religious value of this historycould not be identified with any theory of verbal or even plenaryinspiration. 

Take, for example, some of the chronological items of this record. Mr. Horton's clear statement will bring a few of them before us:--

"The author seems to have been content, in dealing with an Israeliteking, to give the date reckoned by the year of the reigning king inJudah just as he found it stated in the Israelite chronicles, and thento do the same in dealing with the dates of the reigning kings ofIsrael; but he did not consider whether the two chronicles harmonized. We may take some illustrations from the latter part of the work. Hosheabegan to reign in Israel (2 Kings xv. 30) in the twentieth year ofJotham the king of Judah. So far writes our author, following therecords of the Northern Kingdom. For his next paragraph he turns to hisrecords of the Southern Kingdom, and naively tells us that Jotham neverreached a twentieth year, but only reigned sixteen years (xv. 33); buteven this is not the end of the difficulty; in chapter xvii. He goesback to the Northern Kingdom and tells us that Hoshea began to reign, not in Jotham's reign at all, but in the reign of Ahaz, Jotham'ssuccessor; and if now he had said, 'in the fourth year of Ahaz, ' wemight see our way through the perplexity, for the fourth year of Ahazwould, at any rate, be twenty years from the beginning of Jotham'sreign, though Jotham himself had died after reigning sixteen years; buthe says, not in the fourth, but 'in the twelfth year of Ahaz king ofJudah. ' We may give it up, and exclaim with the Speaker's commentator, 'The chronological confusion of the history, as it stands, is striking, 'and then perhaps we may exclaim at the Speaker's commentator, that heand the like of him have given us so little account of theseunmistakable phenomena, and the cause of them, in the history. 

"One other illustration may suffice. King Ahaz, according to oneauthority, lived twenty years and then came to the throne and reignedfor sixteen years. (2 Kings xvi. 2. ) At his death, therefore, Ahaz wasthirty-six years of age. In that year he was succeeded by his sonHezekiah, who was twenty-five years of age. This would mean that KingAhaz was married at the age of ten, which, making all allowance for theearlier puberty of Eastern boys, does not seem probable; and theexplanation is much more likely to be found in the chronologicalinaccuracies of our author, to which, if we have been observantlyreading his book through, we shall by this time have become quiteaccustomed. " [Footnote: Inspiration and the Bible, pp. 189-191. ]

Observe that we are not going to any hostile or foreign sources forthese evidences of inaccuracy; we are simply letting the book tell itsown story. Such phenomena as these appear throughout this history. Theylie upon the very face of the narrative. Probably few of the readers ofthese pages have noted them. For myself, I must confess that I read theBible through, from cover to cover, several times before I was thirtyyears old, but I had never observed these inaccuracies. Thecommentators, for the most part, --the orthodox commentators, --carefullykeep these facts out of sight. Sometimes they attempt, indeed, toexplain or reconcile them, but such explanations generally increase theincredibility of the narrative. The latest verdict of ultra-conservatismis that these dates and chronological notes are interpolated by somelater hand; but this, too, is quite out of the question. The only trueaccount of the matter is, that the author took these records from theChronicles of the Kings of Judah and the Chronicles of the Kings ofIsrael, and pieced them together without noticing or caring whether theyagreed. His mind was not fixed upon scientific accuracy of dates. He wasthinking only of the great ethical and spiritual problems workingthemselves out in this history, --of the question whether or not thesekings "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, " and of theeffects of their right doing and their evil doing upon the lives of thepeople. What difference, indeed, does it make to you and me whetherJotham reigned sixteen years or twenty years? It seems to me that theseinaccuracies are suffered to lie upon the face of the narrative that ourthoughts may be turned away from these details of the record to thegreat principles of morality and religion whose development it revealsto us. 

These errors which appear upon the surface are obvious enough to anycareful reader. But other facts, most important and suggestive, arebrought to light when we compare these narratives of Samuel and Kings aswe find them in the Hebrew text with the same narrative in the Greektext, the Septuagint. The Old Testament, as we have seen, was translatedinto the Greek language, for the benefit of those Jews who spoke onlyGreek, early in the third century before Christ. Undoubtedly it was apretty faithful translation at the time when it was made. But a carefulcomparison of the two texts as they exist at the present time shows thatconsiderable additions have been made to both of them; and that somechanges and misplacements have occurred in both of them. Sometimes it isevident that the Hebrew is the more correct, because the story is moreorderly and consistent; and sometimes it is equally evident that theGreek version, which, as you remember, was commonly used by our Lord andhis apostles, is the better. This comparison gives us a vivid andconvincing illustration of the freedom with which the text was handledby scribes and copyists; how bits of narrative--most commonly legendsand popular tales concerning the heroes of the nation--were thrust intothe text, sometimes quite breaking its continuity; they make it plainthat that preternatural supervision of it, for the prevention of error, which we have frequently heard about, is itself a myth. It is in thesebooks of Samuel and the Kings that these variations of the Septuagintfrom the Hebrew text are most frequent and most instructive. 

In the story of David's introduction to Saul, for example, our version, following the Hebrew, tells us (I Sam. Xvi. 14-23), that when David wasfirst made known to Saul he was "a mighty man of valor, and a man ofwar, and prudent in speech, and a comely person. " He comes into Saul'shousehold; Saul loves him greatly, and makes him his armor-bearer. Inthe next chapter David is represented as a mere lad, and it appears thatSaul had never seen or heard of him. Indeed, he asks his general, Abner, who this stripling is. The contradiction in these narratives is palpableand irreconcilable. When we turn now to the Septuagint, we find that itomits from the seventeenth chapter verses 12-31 inclusive; also from the55th verse to the end of the chapter and the first five verses of thenext chapter. Taking out these passages, the main difficulties of thenarrative are at once removed. It appears probable that these passageswere not in the narrative when it was translated into Greek, but thatthey embodied a current and a very beautiful tradition about David whichsome later Hebrew transcriber ventured to incorporate into the text. 

In the Books of the Kings the variations between these two versions arealso extremely suggestive. You can see distinctly, as if it were donebefore your eyes, how supplementary matter has been inserted into theone text or the other, since the Greek translation was made. In thesixth chapter of First Kings, the Septuagint omits verses 11-14, whichis an exhortation to Solomon, injected into the specificationsrespecting the temple building. Omit these verses, and the descriptiongoes on smoothly. Similarly in the ninth chapter of the same book theSeptuagint omits verses 15-25. This passage breaks the connection; thenarrative of Solomon's dealings with Hiram is consecutively told in theGreek version; in the Hebrew it is interrupted by this extraneousmatter. You can readily see which is the original form of the writing. 

Now what does all this signify? Of course it signifies most distinctlythat this history must not be judged by the canons of modern historicalcriticism. Mr. Horton quotes some strenuous advocate of the traditionaltheory of the Bible as maintaining that "when God writes history he willbe at least as accurate as Bishop Stubbs or Mr. Gardiner; and if we areto admit errors in his historical work, then why not in his plan ofsalvation and doctrine of atonement?" It is this kind of reasoning thatdrives intelligent men into infidelity. For the errors are here; theyspeak for themselves; nothing but a mole-eyed dogmatism can evade them;and if we link the great doctrines of the Bible with this dogma of thehistorical inerrancy of the Scriptures, they will all go down together. 

But what, after all, do these errors amount to? What is the meaning andpurport of this history? What are these writers trying to do? "Itseems, " says Mr. Horton, "as if their purpose was not so much to tell uswhat happened as to emphasize for us the lesson of what happened. It is_applied_ history, rather than history pure and simple; and on thisground we can understand the tendency to irritation which criticalhistorians sometimes betray in approaching it. .. . The prophetichistorian would never dream, like a modern historian, of writinginterminable monographs about a disputed name or a doubtful date; hemight even take a story which rested on very doubtful authority, findingin it more that would suit his purpose than the bare and accuratestatement of the fact which could be authenticated. The standpoint ofthe prophetic historian and of the scientific historian are whollydifferent; they cannot be judged by the same canons of criticism. . .. Tothe prophetic eye the significance of all events seems to be in theirrelation to the will of God. The prophet may not always discern what thewill of God is; he may interpret events in a quite inadequate manner. But his predominant thought makes itself felt; and consequently thestudy of these histories leaves us in a widely different frame of mindfrom that which Thucydides or Mr. Freeman would produce. We do not feelto know, perhaps, so accurately about the wars between Israel and Judahas we know about the wars between Athens and Sparta; we do not feel toknow, perhaps, so much about the monarchy of Israel as we know about theAnglo-Norman monarchy; but, on the other hand, we seem to be more awareof God, we seem to recognize his hand controlling the wavering affairsof states, we seem to comprehend that obedience to his will is of moreimportance than any political consideration, and that in the long courseof history disobedience to his will means national distress and nationalruin. The study of scientific histories has its advantages; but it isnot quite certain that these advantages are greater than those which thestudy of prophetic history yields. Perhaps, after all, the one fact ofhistory is God's work in it; in which case the scientific histories, with all their learning, with all their toil, will look rather small bythe side of these imperfect compositions which at least saw vividly andrecognized faithfully _the one fact_. "

CHAPTER V. 

THE HEBREW PROPHECIES. 

In the last chapter the opinion was expressed that the first bookscollected by Nehemiah, when he made up his "library, " a century afterthe Exile, were the writings of the prophets. We studied the historicalbooks first, because they stand first in the Hebrew Bible, and are therenamed the "Earlier Prophets;" but the probabilities are that theprophetical writings proper, called by the Jews the "Later Prophets, "were first gathered. 

When was this collection made? If it was made by Nehemiah (and there isnothing to discredit the statement of the author of 2 Maccabees that hewas the collector), then it was not compiled until one hundred yearsafter the Exile, or only about four hundred and twenty years beforeChrist. Most of the prophets had written before or during the Exile. Joel, Hosea, and Amos had flourished three or four hundred years beforethis collection was made; Isaiah, the greatest of them all, had been inhis grave almost three centuries; Micah, nearly as long; Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah had been silent from one to two hundred years;Jeremiah, who was alive when the seventy years' captivity began, andEzekiel, who prophesied and perished among the captives on the banks ofthe Euphrates, were more remote from Nehemiah than Samuel Johnson andJonathan Edwards are from us; even Haggai and Zechariah, who came backwith the returning exiles and helped to build the second temple, hadpassed away from fifty to one hundred years before the time of Nehemiah. Malachi alone, --"The Messenger, "--and the last of the prophets, may havebeen alive when the compilation of the prophetic writings was made. 

It may be safely conjectured that the Jews, although they had neverpossessed any collection of the books of the prophets, had knownsomething of their contents. Several of the prophets had foretold thedesolation and the captivity, and there had been abundant time duringthe Exile to recall the words they had spoken and to wish that theirfathers had heeded them. These remembered words of the prophets, passingfrom lip to lip, would thus have acquired peculiar sacredness. It seemsclear, also, that copies of these books must have been kept, --perhaps inthe schools of the prophets; for the later prophets quote, verbally, from the earlier ones. It may, therefore, have been in response to apopular wish that this collection of their writings was undertaken. Words so momentous as these ought to be sacredly treasured. Furthermore, there were reasons to apprehend that the holy flame of prophecy wasdying out. Malachi may have been speaking still, but there was not muchpromise that he would have a successor, and the expectation of propheticvoices was growing dim among the people. 

The Levitical ritual, now so elaborate and cumbersome, had supplantedthe prophetic oracle. The ritualist is never a prophet; and out of sucha formal cult no words of inspiration are apt to flow. With all thegreater carefulness, therefore, would the people treasure the messagesthat had come to them from the past. Accordingly these propheticwritings, which had existed in a fragmentary and scattered form, weregathered into a collection by themselves. 

It must be admitted that when we try to tell how these writings had beenpreserved and transmitted through all these centuries, we have butlittle solid ground of fact to go upon. The Scriptures themselves areentirely silent with respect to the manner of their preservation; thetraditions of the Jews are wholly worthless. We must not imagine thatthese books of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea were written and publishedas our books are written and published; there was no book trade thenthrough which literature could be marketed, and no subscription agencieshawking books from door to door. You must not imagine that every familyin Judea had a copy of Isaiah's Works, --nor even that a copy could befound in every village; it is possible that there were not, when thepeople were carried into captivity, more than a few dozen copies ofthese prophecies in existence, and these were in the hands of some ofthe prophets or literary dignitaries of the nation, or in the archivesof some of the prophetical schools. The notion that these works weredistributed among the people for study and devotional reading is not tobe entertained. No such general use of the prophetical writings was everconceived of by the Jews before the Captivity. 

Indeed, many of these prophecies, as we call them, were not, primarily, literature at all. They were sermons or addresses, delivered orally tothe individuals concerned, or to assemblies of the people. You can seethe evidence, in many cases, that they must have been thus delivered. 

We speak of the "prophecy" of Isaiah, or the "prophecy" of Jeremiah; butthe books bearing their names are made up of a number of "prophecies, "uttered on various occasions. The division between these separateprophecies is generally indicated by the language; in all ParagraphBibles it is marked by blank lines. In each of these earlier propheticalbooks we thus have, in all probability, a succession of deliverances, extending through long periods of time and prepared for variousoccasions. 

After the oracle was spoken to those for whom it was designed, it waswritten down by the prophet or by his friends and disciples, and thuspreserved. This supposition seems, at any rate, more plausible than anyother that I have found. Manifestly many of these prophecies wereoriginally sermons or public addresses; it is natural to suppose thatthey were first delivered, and then, for substance, reduced to writing, that a record might be made of the utterance. 

It is sometimes alleged that these prophecies, as soon as they wereproduced, were at once added to a collection of sacred Scriptures whichwas preserved in the sanctuary. There was a "Book" or "Scripture, " it issaid, "which from the time of Moses was kept open, and in which thewritings of the prophets may have been recorded as they were produced. "[Footnote: Alexander on Isaiah, i. 7. ]

The learned divine who ventures this conjecture admits that it would beas hard to prove it as to disprove it. My own opinion is that it wouldbe much harder. If there had been any such official receptacle of sacredwritings, the prophets were not generally in a position to secure theadmission of their documents into it. They were often in opencontroversy with the people who kept the sanctuary; the political andthe religious authorities of the nation were the objects of theirseverest denunciations; it is not likely that the priests would makehaste to transcribe and preserve in the sanctuary the sermons andlectures of the men who were scourging them with censure. This national_bibliotheca sacra_ in which the writings of the prophets weredeposited as soon as they were composed is the product of pure fiction. It was not thus that the prophetical utterances were preserved; ratheris it to be supposed that the pupils and friends of the prophetfaithfully kept his manuscripts after he was gone; that occasionalcopies were made of them by those who wished to study them, and thatthus they were handed down from generation to generation. 

When Nehemiah made his collection he found these manuscripts, in whosehands we know not, and brought them together in one place. We maypresume that the writings of each prophet were copied upon a separateroll, and that the rolls were kept together in some receptacle in thetemple. Most of these prophets had now been dead some hundreds of years;the truth of their messages was no longer disputed even by the priestsand the scribes; their heresy was now the soundest orthodoxy; thecustodians of orthodoxy would of course now make a place for theirwritings in the national archives. The priests have always been ready tobuild sepulchres for the prophets after they were dead, and to pay themplenty of _post mortem_ reverence. 

The books of the prophets stand in the later Hebrew Bibles in the sameorder as that in which they are placed in our own; they occupy adifferent place in the whole collection: they are in the middle of theHebrew Bible, and they are at the end of ours; but their relation to oneanother is the same in both Bibles. This order is not chronological; inpart, at least, it seems to represent what was supposed to be therelative importance of the books. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel areplaced first, perhaps because they are longest, although several of theminor prophets are of earlier date than they. "Daniel" is not among theprophets in the Hebrew Bible; the book which bears this name is one ofthe books of the third collection, --the Hagiographa, --of which we shallspeak at another time. 

"When we follow further the same collection, " says Professor Murray, "wefind Hosea immediately following Ezekiel [although Hosea lived more thantwo centuries before Ezekiel] and in turn followed by Joel and Amos, mainly on the principle of comparative bulk. Haggai, Zechariah, andMalachi were placed at the end for reasons purely chronological, afterthe rest of the collection had been made up. We cannot see any clear orconsistent reason for the position of Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, which stand together in the middle of thecollection. "

An examination of the chronological notes on the margin of our EnglishBibles (which are not always correct though they are approximately so)will show that these prophetical books are not arranged in the order oftime. It would be a great improvement to have them so arranged. Pupilsin the Sunday-schools who attempted a few years ago to follow the"International" lessons through these prophecies, _seriatim_, foundthemselves skipping back and forward over the centuries in a history-defying dance which was quite bewildering to all but the clearest heads. We could understand these prophecies much better if they were arrangedin the order of their dates. And as no one supposes that the presentarrangement, made by Jewish scribes, is in any wise inspired, thereseems to be no good reason why the late revisers might not have alteredit, and set these books in a historical and intelligible order. 

Who were these prophets and what was their function? To give anyadequate answer to this inquiry would require a treatise; it is only inthe most cursory manner that we can deal with it in this place. 

The prophet is the man who speaks for God. He is the interpreter of thedivine will. By some means he has come to understand God's purpose, andhis function is to declare it. Thus in Exodus iv. 16, Jehovah says toMoses, "Aaron thy brother . .. Shall be thy spokesman unto the people, and it shall come to pass that he shall be to thee a mouth and thoushalt be to him as God. " And again (vii. I), "See, I have made thee agod to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet. " Thesepassages indicate the Biblical meaning of the word. The prophet is thespokesman or interpreter of some superior authority. In Classic Greek, also, Apollo is called the prophet of Jupiter, and the Pythia is theprophetess of Apollo. Almost universally, in the Old Testament, the wordis used to signify an expounder or interpreter of the divine will. 

"The English words 'prophet, prophecy, prophesying, '" says Dean Stanley, "originally kept tolerably close to the Biblical use of the word. Thecelebrated dispute about 'prophesyings' in the sense of 'preachings' inthe reign of Elizabeth, and the treatise of Jeremy Taylor on 'TheLiberty of Prophesying, ' _i. E. _, the liberty of preaching, showthat even down to the seventeenth century the word was still used as inthe Bible, for preaching or speaking according to the will of God. Inthe seventeenth century, however, the limitation of the word to thesense of prediction had gradually begun to appear. This secondarymeaning of the word had by the time of Dr. Johnson so entirelysuperseded the original Scriptural signification that he gives no otherspecial definition of it than 'to predict, to foretell, toprognosticate, ' 'a predicter, a foreteller, ' 'foreseeing or foretellingfuture events;' and in this sense it has been used almost down to ourown day, when the revival of Biblical criticism has resuscitated, insome measure, the Biblical use of the word. " [Footnote: _History ofthe Jewish Church_, i. 459, 460. ] The predictive function of theprophet is not, then, the only, nor the prominent feature of his work. By far the larger portion of the prophetic utterances were concernedwith the present, and made no reference to the future. 

The prophet exercised his office in many ways. Moses was a prophet, thefirst and greatest of the prophets; but we have from him fewpredictions; he interpreted the will of God in the enactment of laws. Samuel was a great prophet; but Samuel was not employed in foretellingfuture events; he sought to know the will of God, that he mightadminister the affairs of the Jewish commonwealth in accordance with it. Elijah and Elisha were great prophets, but they were notprognosticators; they were preachers of righteousness to kings andpeople, and they delivered their message in a way to make the ears ofthose who heard them to tingle. And this, for all the prophets whosucceeded them, was the one great business. The ethical function ofthese men of God came more and more distinctly into view. 

When Paul admonished Timothy (2 Tim. Iv. 2) to "preach the word; beinstant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and teaching, " he was calling on him to be a follower of theprophets. When kings became profligate and faithless, when priests grewformal and greedy, when the rich waxed extortionate and tyrannical, these men of God arose to denounce the transgressors and threaten themwith the divine vengeance. They might arise in any quarter, from anyclass. They were confined to no tribe, to no locality, to no calling. Neither sex monopolized this gift. Miriam, Deborah, Huldah were shiningnames upon their roll of honor. To no ecclesiasticism or officialism didthey owe their authority; no man's hands had been laid upon them inordination; they were Jehovah's messengers; from him alone they receivedtheir messages, to him alone they held themselves responsible. 

No such preachers of politics ever existed as these Hebrew prophets;with all the affairs of state they constantly intermeddled; bad laws andunholy policies found in them sharp and unsparing critics; theentangling alliances of Israel with the surrounding nations weredenounced by them in season and out of season. The people of their owntime often stigmatized them as unpatriotic; because they would notapprove popular iniquities, or refrain their lips from rebuking even"favorite sons, " or the idols of the populace, they often foundthemselves under the ban of public opinion; they lived lonely lives; nota few of them died violent deaths. "Which of the prophets did not yourfathers persecute?" demanded Stephen, "and they killed them which showedbefore of the coming of the Righteous One; of whom ye have now becomebetrayers and murderers. " [Footnote: Acts vii. 52. ]

The relation of the prophets to the political life of the Jewish peopleis brought out in a striking way by John Stuart Mill in his book on"Representative Government. " In that chapter in which he discusses thecriterion of a good government, he shows how the Egyptian hierarchy andthe Chinese paternal despotism destroyed those countries by stereotypingtheir institutions. Then he goes on:--

"In contrast with these nations let us consider the example of anopposite character, afforded by another and a comparativelyinsignificant Oriental people, the Jews. They, too, had an absolutemonarchy and a hierarchy, and their organized institutions were asobviously of sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos. These did forthem what was done for other Oriental races by their institutions, subdued them to industry and order, and gave them a national life. Butneither their kings nor their priests ever obtained, as in those othercountries, the exclusive moulding of their character. Their religion, which enabled persons of genius and a high religious tone to be regardedand to regard themselves as inspired from heaven, gave existence to aninestimably precious unorganized institution, --the Order (if it may beso termed) of Prophets. Under the protection, generally though notalways effectual, of their sacred character, the Prophets were a powerin the nation, often more than a match for kings and priests, and keptup in that little corner of the earth the antagonism of influences whichis the only real security for continued progress. Religion, consequently, was not then what it has been in so many other places, aconsecration of all that was once established, and a barrier againstfurther improvement. The remark of a distinguished Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the Prophets were in church and state the equivalent of the modernliberty of the press, gives a just but not an adequate conception of thepart fulfilled in national and universal history by this great elementof Jewish life; by means of which, the canon of inspiration never beingcomplete, the persons most eminent in genius and moral feeling could notonly denounce and reprobate, with the direct authority of the Almighty, whatever appeared to them deserving of such treatment, but could giveforth better and higher interpretations of the national religion, whichthenceforth became part of the religion. Accordingly, whoever can divesthimself of the habit of reading the Bible as if it was one book, whichuntil lately was equally inveterate in Christians and unbelievers, seeswith admiration the vast interval between the morality and religion ofthe Pentateuch, or even of the historical books (the unmistakable workof Hebrew Conservatives of the Sacerdotal order), and the morality andreligion of the Prophecies. Conditions more favorable to progress couldnot easily exist; accordingly, the Jews, instead of being stationarylike other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressivepeople of antiquity, and, joint with them, have been the starting-pointand main propelling agency of modern civilization. " [Footnote:_Considerations on Representative Government, _ pp. 51-53, AmericanEdition. ]

Not only in the sphere of politics, but in that of religion also, werethey constantly appearing as critics and censors. The tendency ofreligion to become merely ritual, to divorce itself from righteousness, is inveterate. Against this tendency the prophets were the constantwitnesses. The religious "machine" is always in the same danger ofbecoming corrupt and mischievous as is the political "machine;" the manwith the sledge-hammer who will smash it and fling it into the junk-pilehas a work to do in every generation. This was the work of the Hebrewprophets. "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice, " cries Hosea, speakingfor Jehovah. "I hate, I despise your feast days, " says Amos, "and I willnot smell in your solemn assemblies, . .. But let judgment run down aswaters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. " "Your new moons and yourappointed feasts my soul hateth, " proclaims Isaiah; "they are a troubleunto me; I am weary to bear them. Wash ye, make you clean; cease to doevil; learn to do well. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, toloose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burden, and to let theoppressed go free?"

This is, then, the chief function of the Hebrew prophet; he is theexpounder of the righteous will of God, not mainly with respect tofuture events, but with respect to present transgressions and presentobligations of kings and priests and people. And yet it would be anerror to overlook or disparage his dealings with the future. As ateacher of righteousness he saw that present disobedience would bringfuture retribution, and he pointed it out with the utmost fidelity. Anyman who carefully studies the laws of God can make some predictions withgreat confidence. He knows that certain courses of conduct will befollowed by certain consequences. Some of the predictions of the Hebrewprophets were of this nature. Yet predictions of this nature were alwaysconditional. The condition was not always expressed, but it was alwaysunderstood. The threatening of destruction to the disobedient waswithdrawn when the disobedient turned from their evil ways. Thepredictions of the prophets were not always fulfilled for this goodreason. The rule is explicitly laid down by the Prophet Jeremiah: "Atwhat instant I shall speak concerning a nation. .. To destroy it; if thatnation. .. Turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thoughtto do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning anation. .. To build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that itobey not my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said Iwould benefit them. " [Footnote: Jeremiah xviii. 7-9. ]

And there is something more than this. Instances are here recorded ofspecific predictions of future events, which came to pass as they werepredicted, --predictions which cannot be explained on naturalisticprinciples. "Of this sort, " says Bleek, "are the prophecies of Isaiah asto the closely impending destruction of the kingdoms of Israel andSyria, which he predicted with great confidence at a time when the twokingdoms appeared particularly strong by their treaty with eachother, . .. Besides the repeated predictions as to the destruction of themighty hosts of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, which besieged Jerusalem, and the deliverance of the state from the greatest distress. Among thesepredictions, those in Isaiah xxix. 1-8, appear to me particularlynoteworthy, where he foretells that a long time hence Jerusalem shouldbe besieged by a foreign host and pressed very hard, but that thelatter, just as they believed they were getting possession of the city, should be scattered and annihilated; for this prediction, from its wholecharacter, appears to have been uttered before any danger showed itselffrom this quarter. " [Footnote: _Introduction to the Old Testament_, ii. 27. ]

Beyond and above all this is the gradual rise in Israel of that greatMessianic hope, of which the prophets were the inspired and inspiringwitnesses. We find, at a very early day, an expectation of a futurerevelation of the glory of God, dawning upon the consciousness of thenation, and expressing itself by the words of its most devout spirits. Even in prosperous days there was a dim outreaching after somethingbetter; in times of disaster and overthrow this hope was kindled to apassionate longing. Of this Messianic hope, its nature and itsfulfillment, no words of mine can tell so eloquently as these words ofDean Stanley:--

"It was the distinguishing mark of the Jewish people that their goldenage was not in the past, but in the future; that their greatest hero (asthey deemed him to be) was not their Founder, but their Founder's latestDescendant. Their traditions, their fancies, their glories, gatheredround the head, not of a chief or warrior or sage that had been, but ofa King, a Deliverer, a Prophet who was to come. Of this singularexpectation the Prophets were, if not the chief authors, at least thechief exponents. Sometimes he is named, sometimes he is unnamed;sometimes he is almost identified with some actual Prince of the presentor the coming generation, sometimes he recedes into the distant ages. But again and again, at least in the late prophetic writings, the vistais closed by this person, his character, his reign. And almosteverywhere the Prophetic spirit in the delineation of his coming remainstrue to itself. He is to be a King, a Conqueror, yet not by the commonweapons of earthly warfare, but by those only weapons which theProphetic order recognized; by justice, mercy, truth, and goodness; bysuffering, by endurance, by identification of himself with the joys, thesufferings of his nation; by opening a wider sympathy to the whole humanrace than had ever been offered before. That this expectation, howeverexplained, existed in a greater or less degree amongst the Prophets isnot doubted by any theologians of any school whatever. It is no matterof controversy. It is a simply and universally recognized fact that, filled with these Prophetic images, the whole Jewish nation--nay, atlast, the whole Eastern world--did look forward with longing expectationto the coming of this future Conqueror. Was this unparalleledexpectation realized? And here again I speak only of facts which areacknowledged by Germans and Frenchmen no less than by Englishmen, bycritics and by skeptics even more than by theologians and ecclesiastics. There did arise out of this nation a Character as unparalleled as theexpectation which had preceded him. Jesus of Nazareth was, on the mostsuperficial no less than on the deepest view of his coming, the greatestname, the most extraordinary power that has ever crossed the stage ofHistory. And this greatness consisted not in outward power, butprecisely in those qualities in which from first to last the Propheticorder had laid the utmost stress, --justice and love, goodness andtruth. " [Footnote: _History of the Jewish Church_, i. 519, 520. ]

This is the great fact from which the student of the Old Testament mustnever remove his attention. That this wonderful hope and expectation didsuffuse all the utterances of the prophets is not to be gainsaid by anycandid man. That the expectation assumed, as the ages passed, a more andmore definite and personal form is equally certain. Isaiah was perhapsthe first to give distinct shape to this prophetic hope. Ewald thussummarizes the Messianic idea in the writings of Isaiah:--

"There must come some one who should perfectly satisfy all the demandsof the true religion, so as to become the centre from which all itstruth and force should operate. His soul must possess a marvelous andsurpassing nobleness and divine power, because it is his functionperfectly to realize in life the ancient religion, the requirements ofwhich no one has yet satisfied, and that, too, with that spiritualglorification which the great prophets had announced. Unless there firstcomes some one who shall transfigure this religion into its purest form, it will never be perfected, and its kingdom will never come. But he willand must come, for otherwise the religion which demands him would befalse; he is the first true King of the community of the true God, andas nothing can be conceived of as supplanting him, he will reign foreverin irresistible power; he is the divine-human King, whose coming hadbeen due ever since the true community had set up a human monarchy inits midst, but who had never come. He is to be looked for, to be longedfor, to be prayed for; and how blessed it is simply to expect himdevoutly, and to trace out every feature of his likeness. To sketch thenobleness of his soul is to pursue in detail the possibility ofperfecting all religion; and to believe in the necessity of his comingis to believe in the perfecting of all divine agency on earth. "[Footnote: _The History of Israel_, iv. 203, 204. ]

It is precisely here that we get at the heart of the Old Testament; thiswonderful fore-looking toward the Messianic manifestations of God uponthe earth, which kindled the hearts of the people and found clearestutterance by the lips of its most inspired men, which binds thisliterature all together, histories, songs, precepts, allegories. This itis which reveals the true inspiration of these old writings, and whichmakes them, to every Christian heart, precious beyond all price. 

Such being the character of these prophetic books, let us glance for amoment at a few of them, merely for the purpose of locating the prophecyin the history, and of discerning, when it is possible, the providentialcauses which called it forth. 

It is difficult to tell which of these fifteen prophets, whoseutterances are treasured in this collection, first appeared upon thescene. The probability seems to be that the earliest of them was Joel. Opinions differ widely; I cannot discuss them nor even cite them; butthe old theory that Joel lived and preached about eight hundred andseventy-five years before Christ does not seem to me to be invalidatedby modern criticism. He was a native of the Southern Kingdom; and at thetime we have named, the King of Judea was Joash, whose dramaticelevation to the throne in his seventh year, by Jehoiada the priest, isnarrated in the Book of Kings. It was a time of disturbance and disasterin Judah and Jerusalem; the boy-king was but a nominal ruler; the regentwas Jehoiada; and incursions of the surrounding tribes, who carried awaythe people and sold them as slaves, kept the land in a constant state ofalarm. Worse than this was the visitation of locusts, continuing, as itwould seem, for several years, by which the country was stripped anddevastated. This visitation furnishes the theme of the short discoursewhich is here reported. The description of the march of the locusts overthe land is full of poetic beauty; and the people are admonished toaccept this as a divine chastisement for their sins, and to do the worksmeet for repentance. Then comes the promise of the divine forgiveness, and of that great gift of the Spirit, whose fulfillment Peter claimed onthe day of Pentecost: "In the midst of the deepest woes which thenafflicted the kingdom, " says Ewald, "his great soul grasped all the morepowerfully the eternal hope of the true community, and impressed it allthe more indelibly upon his people, alike by the fiery glow of his clearinsight and the entrancing beauty of his passionate utterance. "[Footnote: _The History of Israel_, iv. 139. ]

The next prophet in the order of time is undoubtedly Amos. He tells usthat he lived in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, about seventy yearsafter Joel. He was a herdsman of Tekoa, a small city of Judah, twelvemiles south of Jerusalem. In these days the Northern Kingdom was farmore prosperous and powerful than the Southern; under Jeroboam II. Israel had become rich and luxurious; and the prophet was summoned, ashe declares, by the call of Jehovah himself to leave his herds upon theJudean hills, and betake himself to the Northern Kingdom, there to bearwitness against the pride and oppression of its people. This messengerand interpreter of Jehovah to his people is a poor man, a laboring man;but he knows whose commission he bears, and he is not afraid. Stern andterrible are the woes that fall from his lips: the words vibrate yetwith the energy of his righteous wrath. 

"Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence tocome near; that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upontheir couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out ofthe midst of the stall; that sing idle songs to the sound of the viol;that devise for themselves instruments of music, like David; that drinkwine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; but theyare not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. "

Such luxury always goes hand in hand with contempt of the lowly andoppression of the poor; it is so to-day; it was so in that far-off time;and this prophet pours upon it the vials of the wrath of God:--

"Forasmuch therefore as ye trample upon the poor, and take exactionsfrom him of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall notdwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall notdrink the wine thereof. For I know how manifold are your transgressionsand how mighty are your sins; ye that afflict the just, that take abribe, and that turn aside the needy in the gate from their right. "

It is no wonder that Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, writhed under thescourge of the herdsman prophet, and wanted to be rid of him: "O thouseer, " he cried, "go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and thereeat bread, and prophesy there: but prophesy not again any more inBethel. " But the prophet stood his ground and delivered his message, andit still resounds as the very voice of God through every land where thegreed of gold makes men unjust, and the love of pleasure banishescompassion from human hearts. 

The nearest successor of Amos, in this collection, seems to have beenHosea, who tells us in the opening of his prophecy that the word of theLord came unto him in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, king ofIsrael. There is some doubt about the genuineness of thissuperscription; but it was about this time, undoubtedly, that Hoseaflourished. To which kingdom he belonged it is not known; probably, however, to Israel, with whose affairs his teaching is chieflyconcerned. He must have followed close upon the herdsman of Tekoa;possibly they were contemporaries. His prophecy, too, is a blast fromthe trumpet of the Lord our Righteousness. Such an indictment of apeople has not often been heard. 

"Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath acontroversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. There is nought butswearing and breaking faith, and killing, and stealing, and committingadultery; they break out, and blood toucheth blood. "

Especially severe is the prophet in his denunciation of the priesthood. 

"They feed on the sin of my people, and set their heart on theiriniquity. And it shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punishthem for their ways, and will reward them their doings. "

These prophecies of Hosea are instinct with a severe morality; theethical thoroughness with which he chastises the national sins isunflinching; but it is not all threatening; now and again we hear theword of tenderness, the promise of the divine forgiveness:--

"I will heal their backsliding. I will love them freely; for mine angeris turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel; he shallblossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. "

Micah follows Hosea, at an interval of perhaps fifty years. He lived ina little village of Judah, west of Jerusalem, and exercised his ministryin both kingdoms, testifying impartially against the wickedness ofJerusalem and Samaria, though the weight of his censure seems to restupon the Judean capital. His strain is an echo of the outcry of Amos andHosea; it is the same intense indignation against the violence andrapacity of the rich, against corrupt judges, false prophets, rascallytraders, treacherous friends. For all these sins condign punishment isthreatened; and yet, after these retributive woes are past, there ispromise of a better day. The great Messianic hope here begins to findclear utterance; the former prophets have seen in their visions only therestoration of the people of Israel; to Micah there comes theanticipation of an individual Leader and Deliverer. 

"But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, which art little to be among thethousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth that is to be rulerin Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting. .. . And heshall stand and shall feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in themajesty of the name of the Lord his God; and they shall abide; for nowshall he be great unto the ends of the earth. "

Thus slowly broadens the dawn of the Messianic hope. 

The first part of the fourth chapter of Micah, which is a prediction ofthe glory that shall come to Zion in the latter day, is verballyidentical with the first part of the second chapter of Isaiah. One ofthe prophets must have quoted from the other or else, as Dr. Geikiesuggests, both copied from some older prophet. 

After Micah comes the greatest of the prophets, Isaiah. He appeared uponthe scene in his native city of Jerusalem about the middle of the eighthcentury before Christ. His work was mainly done during the reigns ofAhaz, "the Grasper, " one of the vilest and most ungodly of the Judeanmonarchs, and of Hezekiah, the good king, about a century and a halfbefore the destruction of Jerusalem. 

About this time Judea was constantly exposed to the rapacity of thegreat Assyrian power before whose armies she finally fell; sometimes herrulers entered into coalitions with the surrounding nations to resistthe Assyrian; sometimes they submitted and paid heavy tribute. Egypt, onthe south, was also a mighty empire at this time, constantly at war withAssyria; and the kings of Judah sometimes sought alliances with one ofthese great powers, as a means of protection against the other. Theyproved to be the upper and nether millstones between which the Jewishnationality was ground to powder. It was in the midst of these alarmingsigns of national destruction that Isaiah arose. Of the propheticdiscourses which he delivered in Jerusalem we have about thirty; hiswords are the words of a patriot, a statesman, a servant and messengerof Jehovah. He warned the kings against these entangling alliances withforeign powers; he admonished them to stand fast in their allegiance toJehovah, and obey his laws; yet he saw that they would not heed hisword, and that swift and sure destruction was coming upon the nation. And his expectation was not like that of the other prophets, that thenation as a whole would be saved out of these judgments; to him it wasmade plain that only a remnant would survive; but that from that remnantshould spring a noble race, with a purer faith, in whom all the nationsof the earth should be blessed. Of the Messianic hope as it findsexpression in these words of Isaiah I have already spoken. 

This Book of Isaiah contains thirty-one prophetic discourses, some ofthem mere fragments. There is reason for doubt as to whether they wereall spoken by Isaiah; when they were gathered up, two hundred yearslater, some utterances of other prophets may have been mingled withthem. Indeed it is now regarded as well-nigh certain that the lasttwenty-seven chapters are the work of a later prophet, --of one who wroteduring the Captivity. Professor Delitzsch, in the last edition of hiscommentary on Isaiah, finally concedes that this is probable. The Bookof Isaiah, he is reported as saying, "may have been an anthology ofprophetic discourses by different authors; that is, it may have beencomposed partly and directly by Isaiah, and partly by other laterprophets whose utterances constitute a really homogeneous andsimultaneous continuation of Isaian prophecy. These later prophets soclosely resemble Isaiah in prophetic vision that posterity might, onthat account, well identify them with him, --his name being the correctcommon denominator for this collection of prophecies. "

These words of the most distinguished and devout of the Old Testamentcritics throw a flood of light on the structure not only of Isaiah, butof other Old Testament writings; they show how unlike our own were theprimitive ideas of authorship; and how the Pentateuch, for example, drawn from many sources and revised by many editors, could be called thelaw of Moses; how _his_ name may have been the "common denominator"of all that collection of laws. 

I have shown, perhaps, in these hasty notices, something of the natureand purpose of five of these prophetic books. Of the rest I must speakbut a single word, for the time fails me to tell of Zephaniah, who inthe time of good King Josiah, denounced the idolatry of the people, theinjustice of its princes and judges, and the corruption of its prophetsand priests, threatened the rebellious with extermination, and promisedto the remnant an enduring peace; of Jeremiah, who about the same timefirst lifted up his voice, and continued speaking until after thedestruction of Jerusalem, --from whose writings we may derive a morecomplete and intelligible account of the period preceding the Exile thanfrom any other source; of Nahum, who, just before the fall of Jerusalem, uttered his oracle against Nineveh; of Obadiah, who, after the fall ofthe holy city, launched his thunderbolts against the perfidious Edomitesbecause of their rejoicing over the fate of Jerusalem; of Ezekiel, theprophet of the Exile, who wrote among the captives by the rivers ofBabylon; of Haggai and Zechariah, who came back with the returningexiles, and whose courageous voices cheered the laborers who wrought torestore the city and the temple; of Malachi, whose pungent reproofs ofthe people for their lack of consecration followed the erection of thesecond temple, and closed the collection of the Hebrew prophets. 

The limits of this small volume forbid us to enter upon severalinteresting critical inquiries respecting the component parts of Isaiahand Zechariah, and especially the matter of the variations of theSeptuagint from the Hebrew text in the Book of Jeremiah. In this lastnamed book we find the same phenomena that we encountered in our studyof Samuel and The Kings: the Greek version differs considerably from theHebrew; a comparison of the two illustrates, as nothing else can do, theprocesses through which the text of these old documents has passed, andthe freedom with which they have been handled by scribes and copyists. The Hebrew text, from which our English version was made, is generallybetter than the Greek; but there are several cases in which the Greek ismanifestly more accurate. 

There is one book, reckoned among these minor prophets, of which I havenot spoken, and to which I ought to make some reference. That is thebook of Jonah. 

It is found among the minor prophets, but it is not in any senseprophetical; it is neither a sermon nor a prediction; it is a narrative. Probably it was placed by the Jews among these prophetical books becauseJonah was a prophet. But this book was not written by Jonah; there isnot a word in the book which warrants the belief that he was its author. It is a story about Jonah, told by somebody else long after Jonah's day. Jonah, the son of Amittai, was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom in thedays of Jeroboam II. , far back in the ninth century. The only referenceto him contained in the Old Testament is found in 2 Kings xiv. 25. Butthis book was almost certainly written long after the destruction ofNineveh, which took place two hundred years later. One reason for thisbelief is in the fact that the writer of the book feels it necessary toexplain what kind of a city Nineveh was. He stops in the midst of hisstory to say: "Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days'journey. " That explanation would have been superfluous anywhere inIsrael in the days of Jeroboam II. , and the past tense indicates that itwas written by one who was looking back to a city no longer inexistence. "Nineveh was. " The character of the Hebrew also favors thetheory of a later date for the book. We have, therefore, a tale that wastold about Jonah probably three or four hundred years after his day. 

Is it a true tale, or is it a work of didactic fiction? I believe thatit is the latter. It is a very suggestive apologue, full of moral beautyand spiritual power, designed to convey several important lessons to theminds of the Jewish people. I cannot regard it as the actual experienceof a veritable prophet of God, because I can hardly imagine that such aprophet could have supposed, as the Jonah of this tale is said to havesupposed, that by getting out of the bounds of the Kingdom of Israel, hewould get out of the sight of Jehovah. This is precisely what this Jonahof the story undertook to do. When he was bidden to go to Nineveh andcry against it, "he rose up to flee unto Tarshish _from the presenceof the Lord;_ and he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going toTarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go withthem unto Tarshish _from the presence of the Lord"_ (ch. I. 3). Isthis actual history? Is this the belief of a genuine prophet of theLord? What sort of a prophet is he who holds ideas as crude as thisconcerning the Being with whom he is in constant communication and fromwhom he receives his messages? If Jonah did entertain this belief, thenit is not likely that he can teach us anything about God which it isimportant that we should know. 

Thus, without touching the miraculous features of the story, we havesound reasons for believing that this cannot be the actual experience ofany veritable prophet of God; that it is not history, but fiction. Whynot? Can any one who has read the parable of the Prodigal Son or theGood Samaritan doubt that fiction may be used in Sacred Scripture forthe highest purpose?

But it is argued that the references to this story which are found inthe words of Christ authenticate the story. Our Lord, in Matt. Xii, 39-42, refers to this book. He speaks of the repentance of the Ninevitesunder the preaching of Jonah as a rebuke to the Jews who had heard theword of life from him and had not repented; and he uses these words: "Anevil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and there shall no signbe given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet: for as Jonah was threedays and three nights in the belly of the whale; so shall the Son of manbe three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. "

This confirms, say the orthodox commentators, the historical accuracy ofthe story of Jonah. "If, " says Canon Liddon, "he would put his finger ona fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted reality, wouldwarrant belief in his own resurrection, he points to Jonah's being threedays and three nights in the belly of the whale. " This use of theincident by our Lord clearly authenticates the incident as an actualhistorical fact. So say the conservative theologians. And so say alsothe men who labor to destroy the authority of Christ. Mr. Huxleyperfectly agrees with Canon Liddon. He praises the Canon's penetrationand consistency; he agrees that there can be no other possibleinterpretation of Christ's words. The ultra-conservative and the anti-Christian critics are at one in insisting that Christ stands committedto the literal truth of the narrative in Jonah. The inference of theultra-conservative is that the narrative is historically true; theinference of the anti-Christian critic is that Jesus is unworthy ourconfidence as a religious teacher; that one who fully indorsed such apreposterous tale cannot be divine. It is instructive to observe theultra-conservative critics thus playing steadily into the hands of theanti-Christian critics, furnishing them with ammunition with which toassail the very citadel of the Christian faith. It is a kind of businessin which, I am sorry to say, they have been diligently engaged for agood while. 

Now I, for my part, utterly deny the proposition which these alliedforces of skepticism and traditionalism are enlisted in supporting. Ideny that Jesus Christ can be fairly quoted as authenticating thisnarrative. I maintain that he used it allegorically for purposes ofillustration, without intending to express any opinion as to thehistorical verity of the narrative. It was used in a literary way, andnot in a dogmatic way. Our Lord speaks always after the manner of men, --speaks the common speech of the people, takes up the phrases and eventhe fables that he finds upon their lips, and uses them for his ownpurposes. He does not stop to criticise all their stories, or to setthem right in all their scientific errors; that would have been utterlyaside from his main purpose, and would certainly have confused them andled them astray. He speaks always of the rising and the setting of thesun, using the phrases that were current at that time, and never hintingat the error underneath them. He knew what these people meant by thesephrases. If he knew that these phrases conveyed an erroneous meaning, why did he not correct them? So, too, he quotes from the story of theCreation in Genesis, and never intimates that the six days therementioned are not literal days of twenty-four hours each. He knew thatthose to whom he was speaking entertained this belief, and put thisinterpretation upon these words. Why does he not set it aside?

These questions may admit of more than one answer; but, taking the veryhighest view of Christ's person, it is certainly enough to say that anysuch discussion of scientific questions would have been, as even we cansee, palpably unwise. There was no preparation in the human mind at thatday for the reception and verification of such a scientific revelation. It could not have been received. It would not have been preserved. Itwould only have confused and puzzled the minds of his hearers, and wouldhave shut their minds at once against that moral and spiritual truthwhich he came to impart. And what we have said about scientificquestions applies with equal force to questions of Old Testamentcriticism. To have entered upon the discussion of these questions withthe Jews would have thwarted his highest purpose. In the largest senseof the word these Scriptures were true. Their substantial historicalaccuracy he wished to confirm. Their great converging lines of lightunited in him. He constantly claimed their fulfillment in his person andhis kingdom. Why, then, should he enter upon a kind of discussion whichwould have tended to confuse and obscure the main truths which he cameto teach? If, then, he refers to these Scriptures, he uses them for hisown ethical and spiritual purposes, --not to indorse their scientificerrors; not to confirm the methods of interpretation in use among theJews. 

But Mr. Huxley insists, and all the ultra-conservative commentators joinhim in insisting, that Christ could not, if he had been an honest man, have spoken thus of Jonah if the story of Jonah had not beenhistorically accurate. This is the way he puts it: "If Jonah's threedays' residence in the whale is not an 'admitted fact, ' how could it'warrant belief' in the 'coming resurrection'?" [Footnote: _TheNineteenth Century_, July, 1890. ] Mr. Huxley is using Canon Liddon'sphrases here; but he is using them to confute those for whom, as heknows very well, Canon Liddon does not speak. Those who say that thestory of Jonah is an "admitted reality" may, perhaps, be able to seethat it "warrants belief" in the "coming resurrection. " To my own mind, even this is by no means clear. I do not see how the one event, even ifit were an "admitted reality, " could "warrant belief" in the other. Nopast event can warrant belief in any future event, unless the two eventsare substantially identical. The growth of an acorn into an oak in thelast century "warrants the belief" that an acorn will grow into an oakin the present century; but it does not "warrant the belief" that a cityplanted on an eligible site will grow to be a great metropolis. The oneevent might illustrate the other, but no conclusions of logic can becarried from the one to the other. It is precisely so with these twoevents. There is a certain analogy between the experience of Jonah, astold in the book, and that of our Lord; but it is ridiculous to say thatthe one event, if an "admitted reality, " "warrants belief" in theother, --whether it is said by Mr. Huxley or Canon Liddon. Our Lord'swords convey no such meaning. In truth, if we are here dealing withscientific comparisons, the one event, if taken as an "admittedreality, " _warrants disbelief_ in the other. What are our Lord'sprecise words? "_As_ Jonah was three days and three nights in thewhale's belly, _so_ shall the Son of man be three days and threenights in the heart of the earth. " We are told by Mr. Huxley and hisorthodox allies that we must take this as a literal historical parallel, or not at all; that if we treat it in any other way, we accuse our Lordof dishonesty. What, then, was the condition of Jonah during these threedays and nights? Was he dead or alive? He was certainly alive, if thetale is history--very thoroughly alive in all his faculties. He waspraying part of the time, and part of the time he was writing poetry. Wehave a long and beautiful poem which he is said to have composed duringthat enforced retirement from active life. It would appear that hisrelease took place immediately after the poem was finished. If, now, these events are bound together with the links of logic, if the oneevent is the historic counterpart of the other, the Son of man, duringthe three days of his sojourn in the heart of the earth, was not dead atall! He was only hidden for a little space from the sight of men. He wasalive all the while, _and there was no resurrection!_ It is to thisthat you come when you begin to apply to these parables and allegoriesof the Bible the methods of scientific exposition. This may besatisfactory enough to Mr. Huxley. I should like to know how it suitshis orthodox allies. 

The fact is, that you are not dealing here with equivalents, but withanalogies; not with laws of evidence, but with figures of rhetoric: andit is absurd to say that one member of an analogy "warrants belief" inthe existence of the other. There is no such logical nexus. The leavenin the meal does not "warrant belief" in the spread of Christianity, butit serves to illustrate it. The story of the Prodigal Son does not"warrant belief" in the fatherly love of God, but it helps us tounderstand something of that love, and it helps us precisely as much asif it had been a veritable history, instead of being, as it is, a purework of fiction. 

"What sort of value, " asks Mr. Huxley, "as an illustration of God'smethods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that neverhappened?" Such an admonition, he says, is "morally about on a levelwith telling a naughty child that a bogy is coming to fetch it away. "Let us apply this maxim to some of Mr. Huxley's homilies:--

"Surely, " he says in one of his "Lay Sermons, " "our innocent pleasuresare not so abundant in this life that we can afford to despise this orany other source of them. We should fear being banished for our neglect_to that limbo where the great Florentine tells us are those whoduring this life wept when they might be joyful_. " [Footnote: _LaySermons and Addresses_, p. 92. ] This limbo of Dante's is not, I daresay, an "admitted reality" in Mr. Huxley's physical geography. "Whatsort of value, " therefore, has his reference to it? Is he merely raisingthe cry of bogy? He certainly does intend what he says as a dissuasivefrom a certain course of erroneous conduct. I venture to insist that hehas a real meaning, and that, although the limbo is a myth, thecondition which he intends to illustrate by his allusion to it is areality. 

Once more: "I do not suppose that the dead soul of Peter Bell, of whomthe great poet of nature says, --

 'A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more, '

would have been a whit roused from its apathy by the information thatthe primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla anda central placentation. " [Footnote: _Ibid_. P. 91. ]

Does Mr. Huxley believe that Peter Bell was a historical person? If hewas not, how, in the name of biological theology, could his dead soulhave been roused by any information whatever? Yet these sentences of hishave a real and valuable meaning. It is evident that Mr. Huxley doesunderstand the uses of allegory and fable for purposes of illustration;that he can employ characters and situations which are not historical, but purely imaginary, to illustrate the realities which he is trying topresent, --speaking of them all the while just as if they were historicalpersons or places, and trusting his readers to interpret him aright. Such a use of language is common in all literature. To affirm that ourLord could not resort to it without dishonesty is to deny to him theordinary instruments of speech. 

"We may conclude, then, " with Professor Ladd, "that the reference toJonah does not cover the question whether the prophet's alleged sojournin the sea monster is an historical verity; and that it is no lessuncritical than invidious to make the holding of any particular theoryof the Book of Jonah a test of allegiance to the teachings of theMaster. " [Footnote: _The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture_, i. 67. ]

It is evident enough, as Professor Cheyne has said, that the symbolicmeaning of the book was the most important part of it in the NewTestament times. But other and more obvious meanings are conveyed by thenarrative. Indeed, there is scarcely another book in the Old Testamentwhose meaning is so clear, whose message is so divine. Apologue thoughit is, it is full of the very truth of God. There is not one of theminor prophecies that has more of the real gospel in it. To the peoplewho first received it, how full of admonition and reproof it must havebeen! That great city Nineveh--a city which was, in its day, as Dr. Geikie says, "as intensely abhorred by the Jews as Carthage was by Rome, or France under the elder Napoleon was by Germany"--was a city dear toGod! He had sent his own prophet to warn it of its danger; and hisprophet, instead of being stoned or torn asunder, as the prophets of Godhad often been by their own people, had been heard and his messageheeded. The Ninevites had turned to God, and God had forgiven them! Godwas no less ready to forgive and save Nineveh than Jerusalem. What awonderful disclosure of the love of the universal Father! What a tellingblow, even in those old days, at the "middle wall of partition" by whichthe Jew fenced out the Gentile from his sympathy!

And then the gentle rebuke of Jonah's petulant narrowness! How true isthe touch that describes Jonah as angry because God had forgiven theNinevites! His credit as a prophet was gone. I suppose that he wasafraid also, like many theologians of more modern times, that ifthreatened penalty were remitted solely on the ground of the repentanceof the sinners, the foundations of the divine government would beundermined. How marvelously does the infinite pity and clemency of Godshine out through all this story, as contrasted with the pettyconsistency and the grudging compassion of man; and how clearly do wehear in this beautiful narrative the very message of the gospel: "Letthe wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: andlet him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to ourGod, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not yourthoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. "

May I say, in closing, that the treatment which the Book of Jonah hasreceived, alike from skeptics and from defenders of the faith, illustrates, in a striking way, the kind of controversy which is raisedby the attempt to maintain the infallibility of the Bible. The_crux_ of all the critics, orthodox and heterodox, is the storyabout the fish. The orthodox have assumed that the narrative without themiracle was meaningless, and the heterodox have taken them at theirword. In their dispute over the question whether Jonah did reallycompose that psalm in the belly of the fish, with his head festoonedwith seaweed, they have almost wholly overlooked the great lessons offidelity to duty, of the universal divine fatherhood, and the universalhuman brotherhood, which the story so beautifully enforces. How easy itis for saints as well as scoffers, in their dealing with the messages ofGod to men, to tithe the mint, anise, and cummin of the literal sense, and neglect the weightier matters of judgment, mercy, and truth whichthey are intended to convey!

CHAPTER VI. 

THE LATER HEBREW HISTORIES. 

After the Book of the Law had been revised by Ezra, and the Book of theProphets had been compiled by Nehemiah, there still remained a body ofsacred writings, not Mosaic in their origin and not from the hands ofany recognized prophet, but still of value in the eyes of the Jews. Wecannot tell the time at which the work of collecting these Scriptureswas begun; possibly it was going on while the Books of the Prophets werebeing compiled. This third collection was called from the first by theJews, "Ketubim, " meaning simply writings; the Greeks afterward called itby a name which has been anglicized, and which has become the commondesignation of these writings among us, "The Hagiographa, " or the HolyWritings. The adjective holy was not a part of the Jewish title; itwould have overstated, somewhat, their first estimate of this part oftheir Bible. For while the degree of sacredness attached to these booksgradually increased, they were always held as quite inferior to theother two groups of Scriptures. For convenience the list of books inthis collection may be here repeated:--

 The Psalms. The Proverbs. Job. The Song of Solomon. Ruth. Lamentations. Ecclesiastes. Esther. Daniel. Ezra. Nehemiah. 1 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles. 

The arrangement is topical; first, three poetical books, The Psalms, TheProverbs, and Job; then five so-called Megilloth, or Rolls, read in thelater synagogues on certain great feast days, --The Song of Songs at thePassover, Ruth at Pentecost, Lamentations on the anniversary of theburning of the temple, Ecclesiastes at the Feast of Tabernacles, andEsther at the Feast of Purim; lastly, the historical and quasi-historicalbooks, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Chronicles. 

Of Ruth I have already spoken in its proper historical connection, taking it with the Book of Judges. 

In treating of the remaining books I shall not follow the order of theHebrew Bible, which I have given above, but shall rather reverse it, treating first of the historical books, Ezra, Nehemiah, and theChronicles, also of Esther and Daniel; then, in a subsequent chapter, ofthe poetical books, the Lamentations, the books attributed to Solomon, --Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Solomon's Song, --and finally of Job and thePsalms. 

The histories which, under the title of the "Earlier Prophets, " arecontained in the middle group of the Hebrew Scriptures, have beenstudied in a former chapter. In this later group of writings we findcertain other historical works which cover the same ground. In the wordsof Mr. Horton:--

"Taking historical excerpts from the first six books of the Bible, andthen going on in a continuous narrative from the beginning of Judges tothe end of the Second Book of Kings, we have a story--true, a story withmany gaps in it, still a connected story--from the earliest times to thecaptivity of Judah. Then, starting from the First Book of Chronicles andreading on to the end of Nehemiah, we have, in a very compressed form, though enlarged in some parts, a complete record from Adam to the returnfrom the Captivity; at the end of this long sweep of narrative comes theBook of Esther, which is a brief appendix containing a historicalepisode of the Captivity. Taking these two distinct histories, we havetwo lines of narrative, an older and a later, which run together up tothe Captivity; the older, though covering a shorter time, is much thelarger and fuller; the later, very thin in most parts, becomes very fullin its account of the Temple-worship and Temple-kingship at Jerusalem, and then continues the story alone up to the end of the Captivity, andthe reëstablishment of the Temple-worship after the return. " [Footnote:_Inspiration and the Bible_, pp. 159, 160. ]

The older history, contained in Samuel and Kings, breaks off abruptly inthe time of the Captivity; we know that it must have been written duringthe Exile, and could not have been written earlier than about 550 B. C. The later history, in Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, begins with Adam, and goes on, by one or two genealogical tables, for almost two centuriesafter the Captivity. In 1 Chronicles iii. 19, the genealogy ofZerubbabel, who came back with the captives, is carried on for at leastsix generations. Counting thirty years for a generation, the tableextends the time of the writing of this record to at least one hundredand eighty years after the return of the exiles. This occurred in 538B. C. , and the book must therefore have been written as late as 350 B. C. , or very nearly two centuries after the earlier history was finished. 

There are conclusive reasons for believing that the four books now underconsideration, the two books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, wereoriginally but one book. In the Hebrew Canon the Chronicles is now butone book; and in the old Hebrew collections Ezra and Nehemiah were butone book. It was in the Septuagint that they were first separated. Thuswe have the four certainly reduced to two. And it is not difficult, onan inspection of the documents, to reduce the two to one. If you willopen your Bible at the last verses of Second Chronicles, beginning withthe twenty-second verse of the last chapter, and, fixing your eyes onthis passage, will ask some one to read to you the first three verses ofthe Book of Ezra, you will see how these two books were formerly one;and how the manuscript was torn in two in the wrong place; so that theBook of Chronicles actually ends in the middle of a sentence. The periodat the end of this book ought to be expunged. 

The explanatfon of this curious phenomenon is not difficult. The lastgroup of sacred writings, what the Jews call the Ketubim, was kept openfor additions to a very late day. After this history was written(Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah) the question arose whether it should beadmitted into the canon. The first answer to this question evidentlywas: "We do not need the first part of the history, --the Book ofChronicles, --for we have the substance of it already in the Books ofSamuel and Kings and in the earlier writings; but we do need the lastpart of it, 'Ezra-Nehemiah, ' for this carries the history on beyond theCaptivity, and gives the account of the return of the exiles and therebuilding of the city and the temple. " So they tore the book in two, and put the last part of it into the growing collection of "Ketubim, " or"Writings. " The careless division of the manuscript, not at thebeginning of a paragraph, but in the middle of a sentence, made itnecessary, of course, for the scribe to copy at the beginning of theEzra-roll the words belonging to it which had been torn off; but theywere not erased from the first part, and have been left there, as theold historians say, "unto this day. "

By and by there were requests that this first part--the Chronicles--beadmitted to the Ketubim. The priests and the Levites of the temple wouldbe sure to urge this request, for the Chronicles is the one book of theOld Testament in which their order is glorified; and at length therequest was granted; the Chronicles were added to the collection, and asthey went in last they follow Ezra-Nehemiah, although they belong, chronologically, before it. They stand to-day at the end of the HebrewBible, and thus testify, by their position, respecting the lateness ofthe date at which they were admitted to the canon. Thus the Hebrew Bibleends with an incomplete sentence. 

What this later history may have been called before it was torn in twowe have no means of knowing; but the Jews called the last part of it(which stands first in their collection) by the name of Ezra, and thefirst part of it (which is last in their canon) they named, "Events ofthe Times, " or "Annals. " In the Septuagint this book of the Chronicleswas called "Paraleipomena, " "Leavings, " "Things Left Over, ""Supplements. " Jerome first gave it the name of "Chronicles, " by whichwe know it. 

The name of the author of this book is unknown. The strong probabilitiesare that he was a Levite, connected with the temple service inJerusalem. The Levites had charge of the public religious services ofthe temple, especially of its music; and the fullness with which thiswriter expatiates upon all this part of the ritual shows that it wasvery dear to his heart. [Footnote: See 1 Chron. Vi. 31-48; xv. 16-24;xvi 4-42; xxv. 2 Chron. V. 12, 13; vii. 6; viii. 14; xx. 19-21; xxiii. 13; xxix. 25-30; xxxi 2; zxxiv. 12; xxxv. 15. ] Everything relating tothe Levitical priesthood and its services is dwelt upon in this bookwith emphasis and elaboration; as the histories of Samuel and the Kingsare written from the prophetical standpoint, this is most evidentlywritten from the priestly point of view. 

In these books of the Chronicles the author constantly points out thesources of his information. He tells us that he quotes from the "Book ofthe Kings of Judah and Israel, " from the "Acts of the Kings of Israel, "and from "The Story of the Book of the Kings. " The identity of thesebooks is a disputed question. It is supposed by some critics that herefers to the Books of Kings in our Bible; others maintain that he drawsfrom another and much larger book of a similar name which has been lost. The latter theory is generally maintained by the more conservativecritics; and it is easier to vindicate the author's trustworthiness onthis supposition; yet even so there are serious difficulties in thecase; for it is hard to believe that he could have written these annalswithout having had before him the earlier record, and between the twoare many discrepancies. The main facts of the history are substantiallythe same in the two narratives; but in minor matters the disagreementsand contradictions are numerous. It is part of the purpose of this studyto look difficulties of this kind fairly in the face; it is treason tothe spirit of all truth to refuse to do so. Let us examine, then, a fewof these discrepancies between the earlier and later history. 

In 2 Samuel viii. 4, we are told that in David's victory over Hadadezerking of Zobah, he took from the latter "a thousand and seven hundredhorsemen. " In 1 Chronicles xviii. 4, he is said to have taken "athousand chariots and seven thousand horsemen. " In 2 Samuel xxiv. 9, David's census is said to have returned 800, 000 warriors for Israel, and500, 000 for Judah. In 1 Chronicles xxi. 5, the number is stated as1, 100, 000 for Israel, and 470, 000 for Judah. In 2 Samuel xxiv. 24, Davidis said to have paid Araunah for his threshing-floor fifty shekels ofsilver, estimated at about thirty dollars of our money; in 1 Chroniclesxxi. 25, he is said to have given him "six hundred shekels of gold byweight, " amounting to a little more than thirty-four hundred dollars. In2 Chronicles xiv. I, we read that Asa reigned in the stead of his fatherAbijah, and that in his days the land was quiet ten years. Again in the10th and the 19th verses of the following chapter we learn that from thefifteenth to the thirty-fifth year of Asa there was no war in the land. In 1 Kings xv. 32, we are explicitly told that "there was war betweenAsa and Baasha king of Israel all their days. " In 1 Chronicles xx. Thestory of the taking of Rabbah seems to be abridged from 2 Samuel xi. , xii. ; but the abridgment is curiously done, so that the part taken byDavid in the siege and capture of the city is not brought out; and thewhole narrative of David's relation to Uriah and Bathsheba, with therebuke of Nathan and the death of David's child, is not alluded to. Therelation of the two narratives at this point is significant; it deservescareful study. One more curious difference is found in the two accountsof the numbering of Israel. In 2 Samuel xxiv. 1, we read, "And the angerof the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah. " In 1 Chronicles xxi. , we read, "And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel. "The numbering in both narratives is assumed to be a grievous sin; andthe penalty of this sin, which was David's, was visited upon the peoplein the form of a pestilence, which slew seventy thousand of them. Iobserve that the commentators try to reconcile these statements bysaying that God _permitted_ Satan to tempt David. I wonder if thatexplanation affords to any mind a shade of relief. But the older recordutterly forbids such a gloss. "The anger of the Lord against Israel"prompted the Lord to "move David against them, " and the Lord said, "Go, number Judah and Israel!" It was not a permission; it was a directinstigation. Then because David did what the Lord moved him to do, "theLord sent a pestilence upon Israel, " which destroyed seventy thousandmen. We are not concerned to reconcile these two accounts, for neitherof them can be true. Let us not suppose that we can be required, by anytheory of inspiration, to blaspheme God by accusing him of any suchmonstrous iniquity. Let no man open his mouth in this day to declarethat the Judge of all the earth instigated David to do a presumptuousdeed, and then slew seventy thousand of David's subjects for the sin oftheir ruler. Such a view of God might have been held without censurethree thousand years ago; it cannot be held without sin by men who havethe New Testament in their hands. This narrative belongs to that classof crude and defective teachings which Jesus, in the Sermon on theMount, points out and sets aside. We may, nay we must apply to themorality of this transaction the principle of judgment which Jesus givesus in that discourse, and say: "Ye have heard that it hath been said bythem of old time that God sometimes instigates a ruler to do wrong, andthen punishes his people for the wrong done by the ruler which hehimself has instigated; but I say unto you that 'God cannot be temptedwith evil, neither tempteth he any man;' moreover the ruler shall notbear the sin of the subject, nor the subject the sin of the ruler; forevery man shall give account of himself unto God. " It is by the higherstandard that Christ has given us in the New Testament that we mustjudge all these narratives of the Old Testament, and when we find inthese old writings statements which represent God as perfidious andunjust, we are not to try to "harmonize" them with other statements; weare simply to set them aside as the views of a dark age. 

Such blurred and distorted ideas about God and his truth we do certainlyfind here and there in these old writings; the treasure which they havepreserved for us is in earthen vessels; the human element, which is anecessary part of a written revelation, all the while displays itself. It is human to err; and the men who wrote the Bible were human. We mayhave a theory that God must have guarded them from every form of error, but the Bible itself has no such theory; and we must try to make ourtheories of inspiration fit the facts of the Bible as we find them lyingupon its pages. 

The second portion of this history, the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, presentsfewer of these difficulties than the Book of Chronicles. It is afragmentary, but to all appearance a veracious record of the eventswhich took place after the first return of the exiles to Jerusalem. Thefirst caravan returned in the first year of King Cyrus; and the historyextends to the last part of the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus, --covering a period of more than a hundred years. The documents on whichit is based were largely official; and there is no doubt thatconsiderable portions of the first book came from the pen of Ezrahimself, and that the second book was made up in part from writings leftby Nehemiah. The language of the second book is Hebrew; that of thefirst is partly Hebrew and partly Chaldee or Aramaic. We read in thefourth chapter of Ezra that a certain letter was written to KingArtaxerxes, and it is said that "the writing of the letter was writtenin the Syrian character. " The margin of the revised version says"Aramaic. " We find this letter in our Hebrew Bibles in the Aramaiclanguage. And the writer, after copying the letter in Aramaic, goesright on with the history in Aramaic; from the twelfth verse of thefourth chapter to the eighteenth verse of the sixth chapter the languageis all Aramaic; then the historian drops back into Hebrew again, andgoes on to the twelfth verse of the seventh chapter, when he returns toAramaic to record the letter of Artaxerxes, which extends to the twenty-seventh verse. The rest of the book is Hebrew. With the exception ofsome short sections of the Book of Daniel, this is the only portion ofour Old Testament that was not written originally in the Hebrew tongue. 

The contents of these two books may be briefly summarized. The firstbook tells us how the Persian king Cyrus, in the first year of hisreign, issued a proclamation to the Jews dwelling in his kingdom, permitting and encouraging them to return to their own country and torebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The conquest of the Babylonians by thePersians had placed the captive Jews in vastly improved circumstances. Between the faith of the Persians and that of the Jews there was closeaffinity. The Persians were monotheists; and "Cyrus, " as Rawlinson says, "evidently identified Jehovah with Ormazd, and, accepting as a divinecommand the prophecy of Isaiah, undertook to rebuild their temple for apeople who, like his own, allowed no image of God to defile thesanctuary. .. . The foundation was then laid for that friendly intimacybetween the two peoples of which we have abundant evidence in the booksof Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. " The words of the decree of Cyrus, withwhich the Book of Ezra opens, show how he regarded the God of the Jews:"Whosoever there is among you of all his people, his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the houseof the Lord, the God of Israel, (he is God, ) which is in Jerusalem. " Theparenthetical clause is a clear confession of the faith of Cyrus thatJehovah was only another name for Ormazd; that there is but one God. 

In consequence of this decree, a caravan of nearly fifty thousandpersons, led by Zerubbabel, carrying with them liberal free-willofferings of those who remained in Babylon for the building of thetemple, went back to Jerusalem, and in the second year began theerection of the second temple. With this pious design certain Samaritansinterfered, finally procuring an injunction from the successor of Cyrusby which the building of the temple was interrupted for several years. On the accession of Darius, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stirred upthe people to resume the work, and at length succeeded in getting fromthe great king complete authority to proceed with it. In the sixth yearof his reign the second temple was completed, and dedicated with greatrejoicing. This closes the first section of the Book of Ezra. The restof the book is occupied with the story of Ezra himself, who is said tohave been "a ready scribe in the law of Moses, " and who, "in the seventhyear of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, " led a second caravan of exiles hometo Jerusalem, with great store of silver and gold and wheat and wine andoil for the resumption of the ritual worship of the Lord's house. Thestory of this return of the exiles is minutely told; and the remainderof this book is devoted to a recital of the matter of the mixedmarriages between the Jewish men and the women of the surroundingtribes, which caused Ezra great distress, and which he succeeded inannulling, so that these "strange women, " as they are called, were allput away. To our eyes this seems a piece of doubtful morality, but wemust consider the changed standards of our time, and remember that thesemen might have done with the purest conscientiousness some things whichwe could not do at all. 

The Book of Nehemiah is in part a recital by Nehemiah himself of thecircumstances of his coming to Jerusalem, which seems to have takenplace about thirteen years after the coming of Ezra. He was thecupbearer of Artaxerxes the king; he had heard of the distress andpoverty of his people at Jerusalem, and in the fervid patriotism of hisnature he begged the privilege of going up to Jerusalem to rebuild itswalls. Permission was gained, and the first part of the book contains astirring account of the experiences of Nehemiah in building the walls ofJerusalem. After this work was finished, Nehemiah undertook a census ofthe restored city, but he found, as he says, "the book of the genealogyof them that came up at the first, "--the list of families which appearsin Ezra, --and this he copies. It may be instructive to take these twolists--the one in Ezra ii. And the one in Nehemiah vii. --and comparethem. After this we have an account of a great congregation whichassembled "in the broad place that was before the water gate, " when Ezrathe scribe stood upon "a pulpit of wood" from early morning untilmidday, and read to the assembled multitude from the book of the law. "And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people (for he wasabove all the people); and when he opened it all the people stood up, and Ezra blessed Jehovah the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with the lifting up of their hands; and they bowed theirheads, and worshiped Jehovah, with their faces to the ground. " Otherscribes stood by, apparently to take turns in the reading; and it issaid that "they read in the book, in the law of the Lord distinctly [or, 'with an interpretation, ' Marg. ], and they gave the sense, so that theyunderstood the reading. " From this it has been inferred that the peoplehad already become, in their sojourn in the East, more familiar withAramaic than with their own tongue, and that they were unable tounderstand the Hebrew without some words of interpretation. It isdoubtful, however, whether all this meaning can be read into thispassage. At any rate, we have here, undoubtedly, the history of theinauguration of the reading of the law as one of the regular acts ofpublic worship. And this must have been about 440 B. C. 

The narrative of the first complete and formal observance of the Feastof Tabernacles since the days of Joshua; the narrative of the solemnleague and covenant by which the people bound themselves to keep thelaw; the narrative of the dedication of the wall of the city, and theaccount of various reforms which Nehemiah prosecuted, with certain listsof priests and Levites, fill up the remainder of the book. 

Taking it all in all it is a very valuable record; no historical book ofthe Old Testament gives greater evidence of veracity; none excels it inhuman interest. The pathetic tale of the return of this people fromtheir long exile, of the rebuilding of their city and their temple, andof the heroic and self-denying labors of Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, thegovernors, and Haggai and Zechariah, the prophets, and Ezra the scribe, with all their coadjutors, is full of significance to all those whotrace in the history of the people of Israel, more clearly than anywhereelse, the increasing purpose of God which runs through all the ages. 

That portions of the first book were written by Ezra, and of the secondbook by Nehemiah, is not doubted; but both books were revised somewhatby later hands; additions were undoubtedly made after the death ofNehemiah; for one, at least, of the genealogies shows us a certainJaddua as high priest, and tells us that he was the great grandson ofthe man who was high priest when Nehemiah came to Jerusalem. It is notprobable that Nehemiah lived to see this Jaddua in the high priest'soffice. It is probable that the last revision of the Bible was made sometime after 400 B. C. 

I have now to speak, in the conclusion of this chapter, of two otherbooks of this last group, concerning which there has always been muchmisconception, the Book of Esther and the Book of Daniel. Esther standsin our Bibles immediately after Ezra-Nehemiah, while Daniel is includedamong the prophets. But in the Hebrew Bibles both books are found in thegroup which was last collected and least valued. 

I have styled these historical books; are they truly historical? Thatthey are founded upon fact I do not doubt; but it is, perhaps, safer toregard them both rather as historical fictions than as veritablehistories. The reason for this judgment may appear as we go on with thestudy. 

The Book of Esther may be briefly summarized. The scene is laid inShushan the palace, better known as Susa, one of the royal residences ofthe kings of Persia. The story opens with a great feast, lasting onehundred and eighty days, given by the King Ahasuerus to all the nabobsof the realm. It is assumed that this king was Xerxes the Great, but theidentification is by no means conclusive. At the close of thismonumental debauch, the king, in his drunken pride, calls in his queenVashti to show her beauty to the inebriated courtiers. She refuses, andthe refusal ought to be remembered to her honor; but this book does notso regard it. The sympathy of the book is with the bibulous monarch, andnot with his chaste and modest spouse. The king is very wroth, and aftertaking much learned advice from his counselors, puts away his queen forthis act of insubordination, and proceeds to look for another. Hischoice falls upon a Jewish maiden, a daughter of the Exile, who has beenbrought up by her cousin Mordecai. Esther, at Mordecai's command, atfirst conceals her Jewish descent from the king. An opportunity sooncomes for Mordecai to reveal to Esther a plot against the king's life;and the circumstance is recorded in the chronicles of the realm. 

Soon after this a certain Haman is made Grand Vizier of the kingdom, andMordecai the Jew refuses to do obeisance to him; in consequence of whichHaman secures from the king an edict ordering the assassination of allthe Jews in the kingdom. His wrath against Mordecai being still furtherinflamed, he erects a gallows fifty cubits high, with the purpose ofhanging thereon the testy Israelite. The intervention of Esther puts anend to these malicious schemes. At the risk of her life she presentsherself before the king, and gains his favor; then, while Haman'spurpose halts, the king is reminded, when the annals of his kingdom areread to him on a wakeful night, of the frustration of the plot againsthis person by Mordecai, and learning that no recompense has been made tohim, suddenly determines to elevate and honor him; and the consequenceis, that Haman himself, his purposes being disclosed by the queen, ishanged on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai, and Mordecai iselevated to Hainan's place. The decree of an Eastern king cannot beannulled, and the massacre of the Jews still remains a legalrequirement; yet Esther and Mordecai are permitted to send royal ordersto all parts of the realm authorizing the Jews upon the day of theappointed massacre to stand for their lives, and to kill as many as theycan of their enemies. Thus encouraged, and supported also by the king'sofficials in every province, who are now the creatures of Mordecai, theJews turn upon their enemies, and slay in one day seventy-five thousandof them, --five hundred in the palace of Shushan, --among whom are the tensons of Haman. On the evening of this bloody day, the king says toEsther the queen: "The Jews have slain five hundred men in Shushan thepalace, and the ten sons of Haman; what then have they done in the restof the king's provinces? [From this sample of their ferocity you canjudge how much blood must have been shed throughout the kingdom. ] Nowwhat is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee; or what is thyrequest further? and it shall be done. " It might be supposed that thisfair Jewish princess would be satisfied with this banquet of blood, butshe is not; she wants more. "Then said Esther, if it please the king, let it be granted to the Jews which are in Shushan to do to-morrow also, according unto this day's decree, and let Haman's ten sons be hangedupon the gallows. " The request is granted; the next day three hundredmore Persians are butchered in Shushan the palace; and the dead bodiesof the ten sons of Haman, weltering in their gore, are lifted up andhanged upon the gallows, and all to please Queen Esther! If a single Jewloses his life in this outbreak, the writer forgets to mention it. It isidle to say that this is represented as a defensive act on the part ofthe Jews; the impression is given that the Persians, by the menacingaction of their own officials under Mordecai's authority, werecompletely cowed, and were simply slaughtered in their tracks by theinfuriated Jews. 

As a memorial of this feast of blood, the Jewish festival of Purim wasinstituted, which is kept to this day; and the Book of Esther is read atthis feast, in dramatic fashion, with passionate responses by thecongregation. 

Is this history? There is every reason to hope that it is not. That somedeliverance of the Jews from their enemies in Persia may be commemoratedby the feast of Purim is possible; that precisely such a fiendishoutbreak of fanatical cruelty as this ever occurred, we may safely andcharitably doubt. The fact that the story was told, and that it gainedgreat popularity among the Jews, and by some of those in later ages cameto be regarded as one of the most sacred books of their canon is, however, a revelation to us of the extent to which the most baleful andhorrible passions may be cherished in the name of religion. It isprecisely for this purpose, perhaps, that the book has been preserved inour canon. If any one wishes to see the perfect antithesis of theprecepts and the spirit of the gospel of Christ, let him read the Bookof Esther. Frederick Bleek is entirely justified in his statement that"a spirit of revenge and persecution prevails in the book, and that noother book of the Old Testament is so far removed as this is from thespirit of the gospel. " [Footnote: Introduction to the Old Testament, i. 450. ] For it is not merely true that these atrocities are here recited;they are clearly indorsed. There is not a word said in deprecation ofthe beastliness of the king or the vindictiveness of the hero and theheroine. It is clear, as Bleek says, "that the author finds a peculiarsatisfaction in the characters and mode of acting of his Jewishcompatriots, Esther and Mordecai; and that the disposition shown by themappears to him as the right one, and one worthy of their nation. ""Esther the beautiful queen, " whose praises have been sung by many ofour poets, possesses, indeed, some admirable qualities; her courage isillustrious; her patriotism is beautiful; but her bloodthirstiness isterrible. 

As to the time when this book was written, or who wrote it, I am notcurious. Probably it was written long after the Exile, but by some onewho was somewhat familiar with the manners of Oriental courts. The nameof God is not once mentioned in the book; and it seems like blasphemy tointimate that the Spirit of God could have had anything to do with itscomposition. It is absolutely sickening to read the commentaries, whichassume that it was dictated by the Holy Ghost, and which labor tojustify and palliate its frightful narrative. One learns, with a senseof relief, that the Jews themselves long disputed its admission to theircanon; that the school of Schammai would not accept it, and that severalof the wisest and best of the early fathers of the Christian church, Athanasius and Melito of Sardis among the rest, denied it a place insacred Scripture. Dr. Martin Luther is orthodox enough for me, and he, more than once, expressed the hearty wish that the book had perished. That, indeed, we need not desire; let it remain as a dark background onwhich the Christian morality may stand forth resplendent; as a strikingexample of the kind of ideas which Christians ought not to entertain, and of the kind of feelings which they ought not to cherish. 

The Book of Daniel brings us into a very different atmosphere. Esther isabsolutely barren of religious ideas or suggestions; Daniel is full ofthe spirit of faith and prayer. Whether the character of Daniel, as herepresented, is a sketch from life or a work of the imagination, it is anoble personality. The self-control, the fidelity to conscience, theheroic purposes which are here attributed to him, make up a picturewhich has always attracted the admiration of generous hearts. 

"As in the story of the Three Children, " says Dean Stanley, "so in thatof the Den of Lions, the element which has lived on with immortal vigoris that which tells how, 'when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanksto God, as he did aforetime. ' How often have these words confirmed thesolitary protest, not only in the Flavian amphitheatre, but in theordinary yet not more easy task of maintaining the right of conscienceagainst arbitrary power or invidious insult! How many an independentpatriot or unpopular reformer has been nerved by them to resist theunreasonable commands of king or priest! How many a little boy at schoolhas been strengthened by them for the effort, when he has knelt down byhis bedside for the first time to say his prayers in the presence ofindifferent or scoffing companions. .. . Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednegoin the court of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the court of Darius, are thelikenesses of 'the small transfigured band whom the world cannot tame, 'who, by faith in the Unseen, have in every age 'stopped the mouths oflions, and quenched the violence of fire. ' This was the example to thoseon whom, in all ages, in spirit if not in letter, 'the fire had nopower, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coatschanged, nor the smell of fire passed upon them;' but it was 'as it werea moist, whistling wind, and the form of the fourth, who walked withthem in the midst of the fire, was like a Son of God. '" [Footnote:_History of the Jewish Church_, pp. 41, 42. ]

Was Daniel a historical person? The question has been much disputed, butI think that we may safely answer it in the affirmative. It is true thatin all these writings of the later period of Israel Daniel is mentionedbut twice, both times in the Book of Ezekiel (xiv. 14; xxviii. 3). Thefirst of these allusions is a declaration that a few righteous mencannot save a wicked city, when the decree of destruction against it hasbeen issued; "though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saiththe Lord God. " The other is in a prophecy against the King of Tyre, inwhich he is represented as saying to himself that he is wiser thanDaniel; that there is no secret that can be hidden from him. Whetherthese casual uses of the name of Daniel for purposes of illustration canbe regarded as establishing his historical character may be questioned. And it is a singular fact that we have not in Ezra, or Nehemiah, orHaggai, or Zechariah, or Malachi, any reference to the existence ofDaniel. Nevertheless, it is hardly to be supposed that such a characterwas wholly fictitious; we may well suppose that he existed, and that thenarratives of his great fidelity and piety are at any rate founded uponfact. 

The first six chapters of the book are not ascribed to Daniel as theirauthor; he is spoken of in the third person, and sometimes in a way thata good man would not be likely to speak about himself. The remainder ofthe book claims to be written by him. The question is whether this claimis to be taken as an assertion of historical fact, or as a device ofliterary workmanship. Ecclesiastes was undoubtedly written long afterthe Exile, yet it purports to have been composed by King Solomon. Theauthor puts his words into the mouth of Solomon, to gain attention forthem. It is not fair to call this a fraud; it was a perfectly legitimateliterary device. It is entirely possible that this may be the case withthe author of this book. Daniel was a person whose name was well-knownamong his contemporaries, and the author makes him his mouthpiece. Theremay have been a special reason why the author should have desired tosend out these narratives and visions under the name of a hero ofantiquity, a reason which we shall presently discover. 

The Book of Daniel is not what is commonly called a prophecy; it israther an apocalypse. It belongs to a class of literature which sprangup in the last days of the Jewish nationality, after the old prophetshad disappeared; it is designed to comfort the people with hopes offuture restoration of the national power; its method is that of visionand symbolic representation. Daniel is the only book of this kind in theOld Testament; the New Testament canon closes, as you know, with asimilar book. I shall not undertake to interpret to you these visions ofthe Book of Daniel; they are confessedly obscure and mysterious. Butthere is one portion of the book, the eleventh chapter, which isadmitted to be a minute and realistic description of the coalitions andthe conflicts between the Græco-Syrian and the Græco-Egyptian kings, events which took place about the middle of the second century beforeChrist. These personages are not named, but they are vividly described, and the intrigues and vicissitudes of that portion of Jewish history inwhich they are the chief actors are fully told. Moreover the recital isput in the future tense; "There shall stand up yet three kings inPersia; and the fourth shall be richer than they all; and when he iswaxed strong through his riches, he shall stir up all against the realmof Greece. " If, now, the Book of Daniel was written in the early days ofthe Exile, this was a very circumstantial prediction of what happened inthe second century, --a prediction uttered three hundred years before theevent. And respecting these predictions, if such they are, we must saythis, that we have no others like them. The other prophets neverundertake to tell the particulars of what is coming to pass; they giveout, in terms very large and general, the nature of the events which areto come. No such carefully elaborated programme as this is found in anyother predictive utterance. 

But there are those--and they include the vast majority of the leadingChristian scholars of the present day--who say that these words were notwritten in the early days of the Exile; that they must have been writtenabout the middle of the second century; that they were therefore anaccount of what was going on, by an onlooker, couched in these phrasesof vision and prophecy. The people of Israel were passing through aterrible ordeal; they needed to be heartened and nerved for resistanceand endurance. Their heroic leader, Judas Maccabeus, was urging them onto prodigies of valor in their conflict with the vile Antiochus; such aringing manifesto as this, put forth in the progress of the conflict, might have a powerful influence in reinforcing their patriotism andconfirming their faith. It might also have appeared at some stage of theconflict when it would have been imprudent and perhaps impossible tosecure currency for the book if the reference to existing rulers hadbeen explicit; such a device as the author adopted may have beenperfectly understood by the readers; although slightly veiled in theform of its deliverance, it was, perhaps, for this very reason, all thebetter fitted for its purpose. 

It might, then, have been written when the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæwere wasting the fields of Palestine with their conflicts. But was itwritten then? How do we know that it was not a circumstantial predictionmade three hundred years before? We do not know, with absolutecertainty, when it was written; but there are strong reasons forbelieving that the later date is the true date. 

1. The book is not in the Hebrew collection of the Prophets. Thatcollection was made at least a hundred years after the time at whichDaniel is here said to have lived; if so great a prophecy had beenexisting then, it is strange that it should not have been gathered withthe other prophets into Nehemiah's collection. It is found, instead, among the Ketubim, --the later and supplementary writings of the HebrewBible. 

2. It is strange also, as I have intimated, that no mention of Daniel orof his book is found in the histories of the Exile and the return, or inany of the prophecies uttered in Israel after the return. That thereshould be no allusion in any of these books to so distinguished apersonage can hardly be explained. 

3. Jesus, the son of Sirach, one of the writers of the Apocrypha, wholived about 200 B. C. , gives a full catalogue of all the great worthiesof Israel; he has a list of the prophets; he names all the otherprophets; he does not name Daniel. 

4. The nature of this prediction, if it be a prediction, isunaccountable. Daniel is said to have lived in the Babylonian period, and looked forward from that day. His people were in exile, but there isnot a vision of his that has any reference to their return from thecaptivity, to the rebuilding of the temple, or to any of the events oftheir history belonging to the two centuries following. It is strangethat if, standing at that point of time, he was inspired to predict thefuture of the Jewish people, he should not have had some messagerespecting those great events in their history which were to happenwithin the next century. Instead of this, his visions, so far as his ownpeople are concerned, overleap three centuries and land in the days ofAntiochus Epiphanes. Here they begin at once to be very specific; theytell all the particulars of this period, but beyond this period theygive no particulars at all; the vision of the Messianic triumph whichfollows is vague and general like the rest of the prophecies. Thesecircumstances strongly support the theory of the later date. 

5. Words appear in this writing which almost certainly fix it at a laterdate than the Babylonian period. There are certainly nine undoubtedPersian words in this book; there are no Persian words in Ezekiel, wholived at the time when Daniel is placed at the Babylonian court, nor inHaggai, Zechariah, or Malachi. There are several Greek words, names ofmusical instruments, and it is almost certain that no Greek words werein use in Babylonia at that early day. This philological argument mayseem very dubious and far-fetched, but it is really one of the mostconclusive tests of the date of a document. There is no witness socompetent as the written word. Let me give you a homely illustration. Suppose you find in some late history of the United States a quotedletter said to have been written by President Zachary Taylor, who diedin 1850, respecting a certain political contest. The letter containsthe following paragraph:--

"On receiving this intelligence, I called up the Secretary of State bytelephone, and asked him how he explained the defeat. He told me that, in his opinion, boodle was at the bottom of it. I determined to make aninvestigation, and after wiring to the member of Congress in thatdistrict, I ordered my servant to engage me a section in a Pullman car, and started the same night for the scene of the contest. "

Now of course you know that this paragraph could not have been writtenby President Taylor, nor during the period of his administration. Thetelephone was not then in existence; there were no Pullman cars; thewords "boodle" and "wire, " in the sense here used, had never been heard. In precisely the same way the trained philologist can often determinewith great certainty the date of a writing. He knows the biography ofwords or word-forms; and he may know that some of the words or the word-forms contained in a certain writing were not yet in the language at thedate when it is said to have been written. It is by evidence of thisnature that the critics fix the date of the Book of Daniel at a periodlong after the close of the Babylonian empire. 

This verdict reduces, somewhat, the element of the marvelous containedin the book; it does not in any wise reduce the moral and spiritualvalue of it. The age of the Maccabees, when this book appeared, was oneof the great ages of Jewish history. Judas Maccabeus is one of the firstof the Israelitish heroes; and the struggle, in which he was the leader, against the dissolute Syrian Greeks brought out some of the strongestqualities of the Hebrew character. The genuine humility, the fervidconsecration, the dauntless faith of the Jews of this generation put toshame the conduct of their countrymen in many ages more celebrated. Andit cannot be doubted that this book was both the effect and the cause ofthis lofty national purpose. "Rarely, " says Ewald, "does it happen thata book appears as this did, in the very crisis of the times, and in aform most suited to such an age, artificially reserved, close andsevere, and yet shedding so clear a light through obscurity, and somarvelously captivating. It was natural that it should soon achieve asuccess entirely corresponding to its inner truth and glory. And so, forthe last time in the literature of the Old Testament, we have in thisbook an example of a work which, having sprung from the deepestnecessities of the noblest impulses of the age, can render to that agethe purest service; and which, by the development of events immediatelyafter, receives with such power the stamp of Divine witness that itsubsequently attains imperishable sanctity. " [Footnote: Quoted byStanley, _History of the Jewish Church_, iii. P. 336. ]

CHAPTER VII. 

THE POETICAL BOOKS. 

The poetical books of the Old Testament now invite our attention, --"TheLamentations, " "Proverbs, " "Ecclesiastes, " "The Song of Solomon, " "Job, "and "The Psalms. " Ecclesiastes is not in poetical form, but it is aprose poem; the movement of the language is often lyrical, and thethought is all expressed in poetic phrases. The other books are allpoetical in form as well as in fact. 

LAMENTATIONS, called in the Hebrew Bible by the quaint title "Ah How, "the first two words of the book, and in the Greek Bible "Threnoi, "signifying mourning, is placed in the middle of the latest group of theHebrew writings. In the English Bible it follows the prophecy ofJeremiah. It is called in our version "The Lamentations of Jeremiah. "This title preserves the ancient tradition, and there is no reason todoubt that the tradition embodies the truth. "In favor of this opinion, "says Bleek, "we may note the agreement of the songs with Jeremiah'sprophecies in their whole character and spirit, in their purport, and inthe tone of disposition shown in them, as well as in the language. .. . Asregards the occasion and substance of these songs, the two first and thetwo last relate to the misery which had been sent on the Jewish people, and particularly on Jerusalem; the middle one, however, chiefly refersto the personal sufferings of the author. " [Footnote: Vol. Ii. P. 102. ]

These five parts are not the five chapters of a book; they are fivedistinct poems, each complete in itself, though they are all connectedin meaning. You notice the regularity of the structure, which is evenexhibited to some extent in the Old Version. The first and second, thefourth and fifth, have each twenty-two verses or stanzas; the third onehas sixty-six stanzas. All but the last are acrostical poems. There aretwenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet; each of these letters, inregular order, begins a verse in four of these songs; in the thirdlamentation there are three verses for each letter. 

The time at which these elegies were written was undoubtedly the year ofthe capture of Jerusalem by the army of Nebuchadnezzar, 586 B. C. TheChaldean army had been investing the city for more than a year; thewalls were finally broken down, and the Chaldeans rushed in; as theygained entrance on one side, the wretched King Zedekiah escaped on theother with a few followers and fled down the Jericho road; he waspursued and overtaken, his sons and princes were slain before his face, then his own eyes were put out, and he was led away in chains toBabylon, where he afterward died in captivity. After a few months' workof this sort, a portion of the Chaldeans under Nebuzar-adan returned tothe dismantled and pillaged city and utterly destroyed both the city andthe temple. It is supposed that Jeremiah, who was allowed to remain inthe city during this bloody interval, wrote these elegies in the midstof the desolation and fear then impending. "Never, " says Dean Milman, "was ruined city lamented in language so exquisitely pathetic. Jerusalemis, as it were, personified and bewailed with the passionate sorrow ofprivate and domestic attachment; while the more general pictures of thefamine, common misery of every rank and age and sex, all the desolation, the carnage, the violation, the dragging away into captivity, theremembrance of former glories, of the gorgeous ceremonies, and of theglad festivals, the awful sense of the Divine wrath, heightening thepresent calamities, are successively drawn with all the life and realityof an eye-witness. " [Footnote: _History of the Jews_, i. 446. ] Theethical and spiritual qualities of the book are pure and high; thewriter does not fail to enforce the truth that it is because "Jerusalemhath grievously sinned" that "she is become an unclean thing. " And inthe midst of all this calamity there is no rebellion against God; it isonly the cry of a desolate but trusting soul to a just and faithfulRuler. 

THE PROVERBS, in the Hebrew Bible, is called "Mishle, " or sometimes"Mishle Shelomoh. " The first word signifies Parables or Proverbs orSayings; the second word is the supposed name of the author, Solomon. Bythe later Jews it is sometimes called "Sepher Chokmah, "--the Book ofWisdom, --the same title as that which is borne by one of the apocryphalbooks. 

Here, doubtless, we have again, in the name of the author, whatDelitzsch calls a common denominator. On this subject the words ofWilliam Aldis Wright, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary, " express aconservative judgment:--

"The superscriptions which are affixed to several portions of the Bookof Proverbs in i. 1, x. 1, xxv. 1, attribute the authorship of thoseportions to Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel. With theexception of the last two chapters, which are distinctly assigned toother authors, it is probable that the statement of the superscriptionsis in the main correct, and that the majority of the proverbs containedin the book were uttered or collected by Solomon. It was natural andquite in accordance with the practice of other nations that the Hebrewsshould connect Solomon's name with a collection of maxims and preceptswhich form a part of their literature to which he is known to havecontributed most largely (1 Kings, iv. 32). In the same way the Greeksattributed most of their sayings to Pythagoras; the Arabs to Lokman, AbuObeid, Al Mofaddel, Meidani, and Samakhshari; the Persians to FeridAttar; and the northern people to Odin. 

"But there can be no question that the Hebrews were much more justifiedin assigning the Proverbs to Solomon than the nations which have justbeen enumerated were in attributing the collections of national maximsto the traditional authors above mentioned. " [Footnote: Art. "Book ofProverbs. "]

This is, undoubtedly, as much as can be truly said respecting theSolomonian authorship of these sayings. Professor Davidson, writing at alater day, is more guarded. 

"In the book which now exists we find gathered together the mostprecious fruits of the wisdom of Israel during many hundreds of years, and undoubtedly the later centuries were richer, or at all eventsfuller, in their contributions than the earlier. The tradition, however, which connects Solomon with the direction of mind known as 'The Wisdom'cannot be reasonably set aside. .. . Making allowances for theexaggerations of later times, we should leave history and traditionaltogether unexplained if we disallowed the claim of Solomon to haveexercised a creative influence upon the wisdom in Israel. " [Footnote:Art. "Proverbs, " _Encyc. Brit. _]

The book is divided into several sections:

1. A general introduction, explaining the character and aim of the book, which occupies the first six verses. 

2. A connected discourse upon wisdom, not in the form of maxims, butrather in the manner of a connected essay, fills the first ninechapters. 

3. The next thirteen chapters (x. -xxii. 16) contain three hundred andseventy-four miscellaneous proverbs, each consisting of two phrases, thesecond of which is generally antithetical to the first, as "A wise sonmaketh a glad father, but a foolish son is a heaviness to his mother. "There is only one exception (xix. 7), where the couplet is a triplet. Probably one phrase has been lost. The heading of this section is "TheProverbs of Solomon;" the section ends with the twenty-second chapter. 

4. From xxii. 17 to xxiv. 22 is a more connected discussion, though inthe proverbial form, of the principles of conduct. This is introduced bya brief exhortation to listen to "the words of the wise. "

5. At xxiv. 23, begins another short section which extends through thechapter, under this title: "These also are sayings of the wise. "

6. The next five chapters (xxv. -xxix. ) have for their caption thissentence: "These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men ofHezekiah, king of Judah, copied out. "

7. Chapter xxx. Is said to contain "The words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, the oracle. " The author is wholly unknown. 

8. Chapter xxxi. 1-9, contains "The words of King Lemuel, the prophecythat his mother taught him. " He too stands here upon the sacred page butthe shadow of a name. 

9. The book closes with an acrostical poem---twenty-two verses beginningwith the Hebrew letters in the order of the alphabet--upon "The VirtuousWoman. " The word "virtue" here is used in the Roman sense; it signifiesrather the vigorous woman, the capable woman. 

Of these sections it seems probable that the one here numbered 6 is theoldest, and that it contains the largest proportion of Solomoniansayings. Professor Davidson thinks that it cannot have taken its presentform earlier than the eighth century. 

The character of the teaching of the book is not uniform, but on thewhole it is best described as prudential rather than prophetic. Itembodies what we are in the habit of calling "good common sense. " Thereis an occasional maxim whose application to our own time may be doubted, and now and then one whose morality has been superseded by the higherstandards of the New Testament; but, after making all due deductions, weshall doubtless agree that it is a precious legacy of practical counsel, and shall consent to these words of Professor Conant:--

"The gnomic poetry of the most enlightened of other nations will notbear comparison with it in the depth and certainty of its foundationprinciples, or in the comprehensiveness and moral grandeur of itsconceptions of human duty and responsibility. " [Footnote: Smith's_Bible Dictionary_, iii. 2616. ]

Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher, bears in the Hebrew collection the name, "Koheleth, " which means the assembler of the people, and therefore, probably, the man who addresses the assembly. Ecclesiastes is the Greekname of the book in the Septuagint; we have simply copied the Greek wordin English letters. 

The first verse is, "The words of Koheleth (the Preacher), the son ofDavid, King in Jerusalem. " The only son of David who was ever king inJerusalem was Solomon; was Solomon the author of this book? This is theapparent claim; the question is whether we have not here, as in the caseof Daniel, a book put forth pseudonymously; whether the author does notpersonate Solomon, and speak his message through Solomon's lips. Thatthis is the fact modern scholars almost unanimously maintain. Theirreasons for their opinion may be briefly stated:

1. In the conclusion of the book the author speaks in his own person, laying aside the thin disguise which he has been wearing. In severalother passages the literary veil becomes transparent. Thus (i. 12), "IKoheleth was king over Israel in Jerusalem. " This sounds like the voiceof one looking backward and trying to put himself in Solomon's place. Again, in this and the following chapter, he says of himself: "I havegotten me great wisdom above all that were before me in Jerusalem;" "Iwas great, and increased more than all that were before me inJerusalem, " etc. , --"all of which, " says Bleek, "does not appear verynatural as coming from the son of David, who first captured Jerusalem. "Nobody had been before him in Jerusalem except his father David. 

2. The state of society as described in the book, and particularly thereference to rulers, agree better with the theory that it was writtenduring the Persian period, after the Captivity, when the satraps of thePersian king were ruling with vacillating arbitrariness and fitfulviolence. 

3. The religious condition of the people as here depicted, and thereligious ideas of the book represent the period following theCaptivity, and do not represent the golden age of Israel. 

4. More important and indeed perfectly decisive is the fact that thebook is full of Chaldaisms, and that the Hebrew is the later Hebrew, ofthe days of Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Esther. It could not have beenwritten by Solomon, any more than the "Idylls of the King" could havebeen written by Edmund Spenser. There are those, of course, who maintainthat the book was written by Solomon; just as there are those who stillmaintain that the sun revolves around the earth. The reason for thisopinion is found in the first sentence of the book itself. The bookannounces its own author, it is said; and to question the truth of thisclaim is to deny the veracity of Scripture. On this question we maycall, from the array of conservative writers who have given us Smith's"Bible Dictionary, " such a witness as Professor Plumptre:--

"The hypothesis that every such statement in a canonical book must bereceived as literally true is, in fact, an assumption that inspiredwriters were debarred from forms of composition which were open, withoutblame, to others. In the literature of every other nation the form ofpersonated authorship, when there is no _animus decipiendi_, hasbeen recognized as a legitimate channel for the expression of opinions, or the quasi-dramatic representation of character. Why should we ventureon the assertion that if adopted by the writers of the Old Testament itwould make them guilty of falsehood?. .. There is nothing that needstartle us in the thought that an inspired writer might use a libertywhich has been granted without hesitation to the teachers of mankind inevery age and country. " [Footnote: Art. "Ecclesiastes, " vol. I. P. 645. ]

That such is the character of the book and that it appeared some timeduring the Persian age are well-ascertained results of scholarship. 

The doctrine of the book is not so easily summarized. It is a hard bookto interpret. Dr. Ginsberg gives a striking _résumé_ of thedifferent theories of its teaching which have been promulgated. There isno room here to enter upon the great question. Let it suffice to saythat we seem to have in these words the soliloquy of a soul strugglingwith the problem of evil, sometimes borne down by a dismal skepticism, sometimes asserting his faith in the enduring righteousness. Thewriter's problem is the one to which Mr. Mallock has given anepigrammatic statement: "Is life worth living?" He greatly doubts, yethe strongly hopes. Much of the time it appears to him that the bestthing a man can do is to enjoy the present good and let the world wag. But the outcome of all this struggle is the conviction that there is alife beyond this life and a tribunal at which all wrongs will berighted, and that to fear God and keep his commandments is the wholeduty of man. There are thus many passages in the book which express abitter skepticism; to winnow the wheat from the chaff and to find outwhat we ought to think about life is a serious undertaking. It is onlythe wise and skillful interpreter who can steer his bark along thesetortuous channels of reflection, and not run aground. Yet, properlyinterpreted, the book is sound for substance of doctrine, and theexperience which it delineates, though sad and depressing, is full ofinstruction for us. Dean Stanley's words about it are as true as theyare eloquent; they will throw some light on the path which lies justbefore us:--

"As the Book of Job is couched in the form of a dramatic argumentbetween the patriarch and his friends, as the Song of Songs is adramatic dialogue between the Lover and the Loved One, so the Book ofEcclesiastes is a drama of a still more tragic kind. It is aninterchange of voices, higher and lower, mournful and joyful, within asingle human soul. It is like the struggle between the two principles inthe Epistle to the Romans. It is like the question and answer of 'TheTwo Voices' of our modern poet. .. . Every speculation and thought of thehuman heart is heard and expressed and recognized in turn. Theconflicts, which in other parts of the Bible are confined to a singleverse or a single chapter, are here expanded into a whole book. " Andafter quoting a few of the darker and more cynical utterances, thisclear-sighted teacher goes on: "Their cry is indeed full of doubt anddespair and perplexity; it is such as we often hear from the melancholy, skeptical, inquiring spirits of our own age; such as we often refuse tohear and regard as unworthy even a good man's thought or care, but theadmission of such a cry into the Book of Ecclesiastes shows that it isnot beneath the notice of the Bible, not beneath the notice of God. "[Footnote: _History of the Jewish Church_, ii. 283, 284. ]

"THE SONG OF SONGS" is another of the books ascribed to Solomon. It mayhave been written in Solomon's time; that it was composed by Solomonhimself is not probable. 

It has generally been regarded as an allegorical poem; the Jewsinterpreted it as setting forth the love of Jehovah for Israel; theChristian interpreters have made it the representation of the love ofChrist for his Church. These are the two principal theories, but itmight be instructive to let Archdeacon Farrar recite to us a short listof the explanations which have been given of the book in the course ofthe ages:--

"It represents, say the commentators, the love of God for thecongregation of Israel; it relates the history of the Jews from theExodus to the Messiah; it is a consolation to afflicted Israel; it is anoccult history; it represents the union of the divine soul with theearthly body, or of the material with the active intellect; it is theconversation of Solomon and Wisdom; it describes the love of Christ tohis Church; it is historico-prophetic; it is Solomon's thanksgiving fora happy reign; it is a love-song unworthy of any place in the canon; ittreats of man's reconciliation to God; it is a prophecy of the Churchfrom the Crucifixion till after the Reformation; it is an anticipationof the Apocalypse; it is the seven days' epithalamium on the marriage ofSolomon with the daughter of Pharaoh; it is a magazine for direction andconsolation under every condition; it treats in hieroglyphics of thesepulchre of the Saviour, his death, and the Old Testament saints; itrefers to Hezekiah and the Ten Tribes; it is written in glorification ofthe Virgin Mary. Such were the impossible and diverging interpretationsof what many regarded as the very Word of God. A few only, till thebeginning of this century, saw the truth, --which is so obvious to allwho go to the Bible with the humble desire to know what it says, and notto interpret it into their own baseless fancies, --that it is theexquisite celebration of a pure love in humble life; of a love which nosplendor can dazzle and no flattery seduce. "

These last sentences of Canon Farrar give the probable clew to theinterpretation of the book. It is a dramatic poem, celebrating the storyof a beautiful peasant girl, a native of the northern village of Shunem, who was carried away by Solomon's officers and confined in his harem atJerusalem. But in the midst of all this splendor her heart is true tothe peasant lover whom she has left behind, nor can any blandishments ofthe king disturb her constancy; her honor remains unstained, and she iscarried home at length, heart-whole and happy, by the swain who has cometo Jerusalem for her rescue. This is the beautiful story. The phrases inwhich it is told are, indeed, too explicit for Occidental ears; thecolor and the heat of the tropics is in the poetry, but it is perfectlypure; it celebrates the triumph of maiden modesty and innocence. "Thesong breathes at the same time, " says Ewald, "such deep modesty andchaste innocence of heart, such determined defiance of the over-refinement and degeneracy of the court-life, such stinging scorn of thegrowing corruption of life in great cities and palaces, that no cleareror stronger testimony can be found of the healthy vigor which, in thiscentury, still characterized the nation at large, than the combinationof art and simplicity in the Canticles. " [Footnote: _History ofIsrael_, iv. 43. ]

The Book of Job has been the subject of a great amount of criticalstudy. The earliest Jewish tradition is that it was written by Moses;this tradition is preserved in the Talmud, which afterward states thatit was composed by an Israelite who returned to Palestine from theBabylonian Captivity. It is almost certain that the first of thesetraditions is baseless. The theory that it was written after theCaptivity is held by many scholars, but it is beset with seriousdifficulties. 

The book contains no allusion whatever to the Levitical law, nor to anyof the religious rites and ceremonies of the Jews. The inference hastherefore been drawn that it must have been written before the giving ofthe law, probably in the period between Abraham and Moses. It seemsinconceivable that a devout Hebrew should have treated all the greatquestions discussed in this book without any reference to the religiousinstitutions of his own people. It is equally difficult to understandhow the divine interposition for the punishment of the wicked and therewarding of the righteous could have been so fully considered without aglance at the lessons of the Exodus, if the Exodus had taken placebefore the book was written. But these arguments for an early origin arequite neutralized by the doctrine of the book. The view of divineprovidence set forth in it is very unlike that contained in thePentateuch. It is not necessary to say that there is any contradictionbetween these two views; but the subject is approached from a verydifferent direction, and the whole tone of the book indicates a state ofreligious thought quite different from that which existed among theHebrews before the Exodus. "If we are to believe that Moses wrote it, "says a late critic, "then we must believe that he held these views as anesoteric philosophy, and omitted from the religion which he gave to hispeople the truths which had been revealed to him in the desert. The bookitself must have been suppressed until long after his day. The ignorantIsraelites could not have been trained under the discipline of the Lawif they had had at the same time the fiery, cynical, half-skeptical, andenigmatical commentary which the Book of Job furnishes. There is nothingabnormal or contrary to the conception of an inspired revelation in thedevelopment of truth by wider views and deeper analysis throughsuccessive sacred writers. But it is repulsive to conceive an inspiredteacher as first gaining the wider view, and then deliberately hidingit, to utter the truth in cruder and more partial forms. " [Footnote:Raymond's _The Book of Job_, p. 18. ] The fact that neither theperson nor the Book of Job is mentioned in the historical books of theJews, and that the first reference to him is in the Book of Ezekiel, would indicate that the date of the book must have been much later thanthe time of Moses. This argument could not be pressed, however, for wehave noted already the silence of the earlier historical booksconcerning the Mosaic law. 

The dilemma of the critics may be summed up as follows:--

1. The absence of allusion to the history of the Exodus and to theMosaic system shows that it must have been written before the Exodus. 2. The absence of all reference to the book in the Hebrew history, and moreespecially the doctrinal character of the book, shows that it could nothave been written before the age of Solomon. The latter conclusion isheld much more firmly than the former; and the silence respecting thehistory and the Law is explained on the theory that the book is ahistorical drama, the scene of which is laid in the period before Moses, and the historic unities of which have been perfectly observed by thewriter. _The people of this drama_ lived before the Exodus and thegiving of the Law, and their conversations do not, therefore, refer toany of the events which have happened since. The locality of the dramais the "Land of Uz, " and the geographers agree that the descriptions ofthe book apply to the region known in the classical geographies as"Arabia Deserta, " southeast of Palestine. It is admitted that thescenery and costume of the book are not Jewish; and they agree moreperfectly with what is known of that country than with any other. ThatJob was a real personage, and that the drama is founded upon historicaltradition cannot be doubted. It is probable that it was written afterthe time of Josiah. 

I need not rehearse the story. Job is overtaken by great losses andsufferings; in the midst of his calamities three friends draw near tocondole with him, and also to administer to him a little wholesomereproof and admonition. Their theory is that suffering such as he isenduring is a sign of the divine displeasure; that Job must have been agreat sinner, or he could not be such a sufferer. This argument Jobindignantly repels. He does not claim to be perfect, but he knows thathe has been an upright man, and he knows that bad men round about himare prospering, while he is scourged and overwhelmed with trouble; hesees this happening all over the earth, --the good afflicted, the evilexalted; and he knows, therefore, that the doctrine of his miserablecomforters cannot be true. Sin does bring suffering, that he admits; butthat all suffering is the result of sin he denies. He cannot understandit; his heart is bitter when he reflects upon it; and the insistence ofhis visitors awakes in him a fierce indignation, and leads him to chargeGod with injustice and cruelty. They are shocked and scandalized at hisalmost blasphemous outcries against God; but he maintains hisrighteousness, and drives his critics and censors from the field. Finally Jehovah himself is represented as answering Job out of thewhirlwind, in one of the most sublime passages in all literature, --silencing the arguments of his friends, sweeping away all the reasoningswhich have preceded, explaining nothing, but only affirming his owninfinite power and wisdom. Before this august manifestation Job bowswith submission; the mystery of evil is not explained; he is onlyconvinced that it cannot be explained, and is content to be silent andwait. The teaching of the book is well summarized in these words of Dr. Raymond:--

"The current notion that calamity is always the punishment of crime andprosperity always the reward of piety is not true. Neither is it truethat the distress of a righteous man is an indication of God's anger. There are other purposes in the Divine mind of which we know nothing. For instance, a good man may be afflicted, by permission of God, andthrough the agency of Satan, to prove the genuine character of hisgoodness. But whether this or some other reason, involved in theadministration of the universe, underlies the dispensation of temporalblessings and afflictions, one thing is certain: the plans of God arenot, will not be, cannot be revealed; and the resignation of faith, notof fatalism, is the only wisdom of man. " [Footnote: _The Book ofJob_, p. 49. ]

I have reserved for the last the most precious of all the Hebrewwritings, the _Book of Psalms_. The Hebrews called it "Tehillim, " praise-book or hymn-book, and the title exactly describes it; in the form inwhich we have it, it was a hymn-book prepared for the service of thelater temple. 

If the question "Who wrote the Psalms?" were to be propounded in anymeeting of Sunday-school teachers, nine tenths of them wouldunhesitatingly answer, "David. " If the same question were put to anassembly of modern Biblical scholars some would answer that David wrotevery few and perhaps not any of the psalms; that they were writtenduring the Maccabean dynasty, only one or two hundred years beforeChrist. Both these views are extreme. We may believe that David didwrite several of the psalms, but it is more than probable that the greatmajority of them are from other writers. 

Seventy-three psalms of the book seem to be ascribed to David in theirtitles. "A Psalm of David, " "Maschil of David, " "Michtam of David, " orsomething similar is written over seventy-three different psalms. Concerning these titles there has been much discussion. It has beenmaintained that they are found in the ancient Hebrew text as constituentparts of the Psalms, and are therefore entitled to full credit. But thistheory does not seem to be held by the majority of modern scholars. "Thevariations of the inscriptions, " says a late conservative writer, "inthe Septuagint and the other versions sufficiently prove that they werenot regarded as fixed portions of the canon, and that they were open toconjectural emendations. " [Footnote: _Speaker's Commentary_, iv. 151. ] Dr. Moll, the learned author of the monograph on the Psalms inLange's "Commentary, " says in his introduction: "The assumption that allthe inscriptions originated with the authors of the Psalms, and aretherefore inseparable from the text, cannot be consistently maintained. It can at most be held only of a few. .. . There is now a disposition toadmit that some of them may have originated with the authorsthemselves. "

The probability is that most of these inscriptions were added by editorsand transcribers of the Psalms. You open your hymn-book, and find overone hymn the name of Watts, and over another the name of Wesley, andover another the name of Montgomery. Who inserted these names? Not theauthors, of course, but the editor or compiler of the collection. Compilers in these days are careful and accurate, but they do makemistakes, and you find the same hymn ascribed to different authors indifferent books, while hymns that are anonymous in one book are creditedin another, rightly or wrongly, to the name of some author. The men whocollected the hymn-book of the Jews made similar mistakes, and the oldcopies do not agree in all their titles. 

But while the inscriptions over the psalms do not, generally, belong tothe psalms themselves, and are not in all cases accurate, most of themwere, no doubt, suffixed to the psalms at a very early day. "On thewhole, " says Dr. Moll, "an opinion favorable to the antiquity and valueof these superscriptions has again been wrought out, which ascribes themfor the most part to tradition, and indeed a very ancient one. "

Even if the titles were rightly translated, then, they would not give usconclusive proof of the authorship of the Psalms. But some of the bestscholars assert that they are not rightly translated. The late ProfessorMurray of Johns Hopkins University, whose little book on the Psalms isvouched for as one of the most admirable productions of Biblicalscholarship which has yet appeared in this country, says that "wheneverwe have an inscription in our version stating that the psalm is 'ofDavid' it is almost invariably a mistranslation of the original. " Itshould be written "to David, " and it signifies that the compilersascribed the psalm to a more ancient collection to which the name ofDavid had been appended, not because he wrote all the poems in it, butbecause he originated the collection and wrote many of its songs. Thisolder collection was called "The Psalms of David" something as a popularhymn-book of these times is called Robinson's "Laudes Domini, " becauseDr. Robinson compiled the book, and wrote some of the hymns. This oldDavidic collection is not in existence, but many of the psalms in ourbook were taken from it, and the titles in our version are attempts tocredit to this old book such of them as were thus borrowed. 

This method of crediting is not altogether unknown in this critical age. In the various eclectic commentaries on the Sunday-school lessons Ioften find sentences and paragraphs credited to "William Smith" whichwere taken from Dr. Smith's "Bible Dictionary, " the articles from whichthey are taken being signed in all cases by the initials of the men whowrote them. I find, also, quotations from the "Speaker's Commentary, " ofwhich Canon Cook is the editor, ascribed to "F. C. Cook, " or to "Cook, "though the table of contents in the volume from which the quotation wastaken bears in capital letters the name of the writer of the commentaryon this particular book. In like manner "Lange" gets the credit of allthat is written in his famous "Bibelwerk, " though he wrote very littleof it himself. The power to distinguish between editorship andauthorship was not, probably, possessed by ancient compilers in anygreater degree than by modern ones; and the inscriptions over the psalmsmust be estimated with this fact in view. 

I have spoken of the present collection of the Psalms as one book, butit is in reality five books. It is so divided in the Revised Version. The concluding verse of the Forty-first Psalm is as follows: "Blessed bethe Lord God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and amen. "This doxology marks the close of the first hymn-book prepared by theJews for the worship of the second temple. It was probably formed soonafter the first return from the Exile. All the Psalms except the first, the tenth, and the thirty-third are credited to the old Davidic PsalmBook. The title of the thirty-third has probably been omitted by somecopyist; the ninth and tenth in some old Hebrew copies are written asone psalm, and there is an acrostical arrangement which shows that theyreally belong together. The psalm may have been divided for liturgicalpurposes, or by accident in copying. The title of the ninth, therefore, covers the tenth. The first and second are, then, the only psalms thatare not ascribed to the old book of which this book was simply anabridgment. 

At the end of the Seventy-second Psalm is the doxology which marks theclose of the second of these hymn-books. After a while the psalms of thefirst book grew stale and familiar, and a new book was wanted. "GospelHymns No. 1, " of the Moody and Sankey psalmody, had to be followed aftera year or two by "Gospel Hymns No. 2, " and then by "No. 3" and "No. 4"and "No. 5, " and finally they were all bound up together. I may bepardoned for associating things sacred with things not very sacred, andpoetry with something that is not always poetry, but the illustration, familiar to all, shows exactly how these five hymn-books of the Jewsfirst came to be, and how they were at length combined in one. 

The last verse of the Seventy-second Psalm has puzzled many readers:"The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended. " After this you findin our collection several psalms ascribed to David, some of which heundoubtedly wrote. The probable explanation is that the Seventy-secondPsalm was the last psalm of the old Davidic hymn-book; the compiler madeit the last one of this second book, and carelessly copied into thispsalm the inscription with which the old book ended. 

The second of these hymn-books begins, therefore, with Psalm xlii. , andends with Psalm lxxii. , a collection of thirty-one songs of praise. 

Number three of the temple-service contains eighteen psalms, and endswith Psalm lxxxix; this book, as well as the one that precedes it, isascribed by a probable tradition to Nehemiah as its compiler. 

The last verse of Psalm cvi. Indicates the close of the fourth book. Itcontains but seventeen psalms, and is the shortest book of the five. Thefifth book includes the remaining forty-four psalms, among them the"Songs of David, " or Pilgrim Songs, sung by the people on their journeysto Jerusalem to keep the solemn feasts. It is probable that this fifthbook was compiled by the authorities in charge of the temple worship, and that they at the same time collected the other four books and putthem all together, completing in this way the greater book of sacredlyrics which has been so precious to many generations not only of Jews, but also of Christians. 

Various unsuccessful attempts have been made to classify these booksaccording to their subject-matter. It is plain that the first two arecomposed chiefly of the oldest psalms and of those adapted to thegeneral purposes of worship; the third book reflects the grief of thenation in the Captivity; the fourth, the joy of the returning exiles;the fifth contains a more miscellaneous collection. The Jewish scholarsrecognize and sometimes attempt to explain this arrangement of thePsalms into five books. The Hebrew Midrash on Psalm i. I. , says: "Mosesgave the five books of the law to the Israelites, and as a counterpartof them, David gave the Psalms consisting of five books. " This is, ofcourse, erroneous; the present collection of Psalms was made long afterthe time of David; but it is not unlikely that some notion of asymmetrical arrangement of the Psalms, to correspond to the five-folddivision of the Law, influenced the compilers of this Praise Book. 

Of the contents of this book, of the peculiar structure of Hebrewpoetry, and of the historic references in many of the psalms, much mightbe said, but this investigation would lead us somewhat aside from ourpresent purpose. 

It may, however, be well to add a word or two respecting some of theinscriptions and notations borne by the Psalms in our translation. Manyof them are composed of Hebrew words, transliterated into English, --spelled out with English letters. King James' translators did not knowwhat they meant, so they reproduced them in this way. There has beenmuch discussion as to the meaning of several of them, and the scholarsare by no means agreed; the interpretations which follow are mainlythose given by Professor Murray:--

First is the famous "Selah, " which we used to hear pronounced with greatsolemnity when the Psalms were read. It is a musical term, meaning, perhaps, something like our "Da Capo" or, possibly, "Forte"--a mark ofexpression like those Italian words which you find over the staff onyour sheet music. 

"Michtam" and "Maschil" are also musical notes, indicating the time ofthe melody, --metronome-marks, so to speak; and "Gittith" and "Shiggaion"are marks that indicate the kind of melody to which the psalm is to besung. 

"Negiloth" means stringed instruments; it indicates the kind ofaccompaniment with which the psalm was to be sung. "Nehiloth" signifiespipes or flutes, perhaps wind instruments in general. 

The inscription "To the Chief Musician" means, probably, "For the Leaderof the Choir, " and indicates that the original copy of the psalm thusinserted in the book was one that had belonged to the chorister in theold temple. "Upon Shemimith" means "set for bass voices;" "UponAlamoth, " "set for female voices. " "Upon Muthlabben, " a curioustransliteration, means "arranged for training the soprano voices. "Professor Murray supposes that this particular psalm was used forrehearsal by the women singers. 

Some of these inscriptions designate the airs to which the psalms wereset, part of which seem to be sacred, and part secular. Such is "ShushanEduth, " over Psalm lx. , meaning "Fair as lilies is thy law, " apparentlythe name of a popular religious air. Another, probably secular, is overPsalm xxii. , "Aijeleth Shahar, " "The stag at dawn, " and another, overPsalm 1vi. , "Jonathelem Rechokim, " which is, being interpreted, "Osilent dove, what bringest thou us from out the distance?"

These inscriptions and many other features of this ancient Hebrew poetryhave furnished puzzles for the unlearned and problems for the scholars, but the meaning of the psalms themselves is for the most part clearenough. The humble disciple pauses with some bewilderment over"Neginoth" or "Michtam;" he classes them perhaps among the mysterieswhich the angels desire to look into; but when he reads a little fartheron, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want;" or "God is our refugeand strength, a very present help in trouble;" or "Create in me a cleanheart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me, " he knows full wellwhat these words mean. There is no life so lofty that these psalms donot lift up a standard before it; there is no life so lowly that it doesnot find in them words that utter its deepest humility and its faintesttrust. Wherever we are these psalms find us; they search the deep thingsof our hearts; they bring to us the great things of God. Of how manyheroic characters have these old temple songs been the inspiration!Jewish saints and patriots chanted them in the synagogue and on thebattle-field; apostles and evangelists sung them among perils of thewilderness, as they traversed the rugged paths of Syria and Galatia andMacedonia; martyrs in Rome softly hummed them when the lions near athand were crouching for their prey: in German forests, in Highlandglens, Lutherans and Covenanters breathed their lives out through theircadences; in every land penitent souls have found in them words to tellthe story of their sorrow, and victorious souls the voices of theirtriumph; mothers watching their babes by night have cheered the vigil bysinging them; mourners walking in lonely ways have been lighted by thegreat hopes that shine through them, and pilgrims going down into thevalley of the shadow of death have found in their firm assurances astrong staff to lean upon. Lyrics like these, into which so much of thedivine truth was breathed when they were written, and which a hundredgenerations of the children of men have saturated with tears andpraises, with battle shouts and sobs of pain, with all the highest anddeepest experiences of the human soul, will live as long as joy livesand long after sorrow ceases; will live beyond this life, and be sung bypure voices in that land from which the silent dove, coming from afar, brings us now and then upon her shining wings some glimpses of a glorythat eye hath never seen. 

NOTE. The reference on pages 200 and 201 to the Gospel Hymns is notstrictly accurate. "Number Five" has not been bound up with the othernumbers. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE EARLIER NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS. 

The books of the New Testament are now before us. Our task is notwithout its difficulties; questions will confront us which have neveryet been answered, and probably will never be; nevertheless, comparedwith the Old Testament writings, the books of the New Testament arewell-known documents; we are on firm ground of history when we talkabout them; of but few of the famous books of Greek and Latin authorscan we speak so confidently as to their date and their authorship as wecan concerning most of them. 

We have in the New Testament a collection of twenty-seven books, by ninedifferent authors. Of these books thirteen are ascribed to the ApostlePaul; five to John the son of Zebedee; two to Peter; two to Luke; oneeach to Matthew, Mark, James, and Jude, and the authorship of one isunknown. 

Of these books it must be first remarked that they were not only writtenseparately but that there is no trace in any of them of theconsciousness on the part of the author that he was contributing to acollection of sacred writings. Of the various epistles it is especiallyevident that they were written on special occasions, with a certainaudience immediately in view; the thought that they were to be preservedand gathered into a book, which was to be handed down through the comingcenturies as an inspired volume, does not appear to have entered themind of the writer. But this fact need not detract from their value;often the highest truth to which a man gives utterance is truth of whosevalue he is imperfectly aware. 

It must also be remembered that these books of the New Testament werenearly all written by apostles. The only clear exceptions are the Gospelof Mark, the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistleto the Hebrews; and the authors of these books, though not apostles, were undoubtedly in the closest relations with apostolic men, andreflected their thought. These apostolic men had received a specialtraining and a definite commission to bear witness of their Master, totell the story of his life and death, and to build up his kingdom in theworld. 

We must admit that they possessed unusual qualifications for this work. Those who had been for three years in constant and loving intercoursewith Jesus Christ ought to have been inspired men. And he promised them, before he parted from them, that the Spirit of truth should come to themand abide with them to lead them into all truth. 

Now although we may find it difficult to give a satisfactory definitionof inspiration; though we may be utterly unable to express, in anyformularies of our own, the influence of the Infinite Spirit upon humanminds, yet we can easily believe that these apostolic men wereexceptionally qualified to teach religious truth. No prophet of theolden time had any such preparation for his mission as that which wasvouchsafed to them. No school of the prophets, from the days of Samueldownward, could be compared to that sacred college of apostles, --thatgroup of divine peripatetics, who followed their master through Galileeand Perea, and sat down with him day by day, for three memorable years, on the mountain top and by the lake side, to listen to the words of lifefrom the lips of One who spake as never man spake. 

To say that this training made them infallible is to speak beyond therecord. There is no promise of infallibility, and the history makes itplain enough that no such gift was bestowed. The Spirit of all truth waspromised; but it was promised for their guidance in all their work, intheir preaching, their administration, their daily conduct of life. There is no hint anywhere that any special illumination or protectionwould be given to them when they took the pen into their hands to write;they were then inspired just as much as they were when they stood up tospeak, or sat down to plan their missionary campaigns, --just as much andno more. 

Now it is certain that the inspiration vouchsafed them did not make theminfallible in their ordinary teaching, or in their administration of thechurch. They made mistakes of a very serious nature. It is beyondquestion that the majority of the apostles took at the beginning anerroneous view of the relation of the Gentiles to the Christian church. They insisted that Gentiles must first become Jews before they couldbecome Christians; that the only way into the Christian church wasthrough the synagogue and the temple. It was a grievous and radicalerror; it struck at the foundations of Christian faith. And this errorwas entertained by these inspired apostles after the day of Pentecost;it influenced their teaching; it led them to proclaim a defectivegospel. This is not the assertion of a skeptic, it is the cleartestimony of the Apostle Paul. If you will read the second chapter ofhis Epistle to the Galatians you will learn from the mouth of anunimpeachable witness that the very leaders of the apostolic band, Peterand James and John, were greatly in error with respect to a mostimportant subject of the Christian teaching. In his account of thatfamous council at Antioch, Paul says that Peter and James and John werewholly in the wrong, and that Peter, for his part, had been actingdisingenuously:--

"But when Cephas came to Antioch, I resisted him to the face, because hestood condemned. For before that certain came from James, he did eatwith the Gentiles: but when they came, he drew back and separatedhimself, fearing them that were of the circumcision. And the rest of theJews [the Jewish Christians] dissembled likewise with him; insomuch thateven Barnabas was carried away with their dissimulation. But when I sawthat they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, Isaid unto Cephas before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest as do theGentiles, and not as do the Jews, how compellest thou the Gentiles tolive as do the Jews?"

Now it is evident that one or the other of these opposing parties in theapostolic college must have been in error, if not greatly at fault, withrespect to this most vital question of Christian faith and doctrine. When one apostle resists another to the face because he standscondemned, and tells him that he walks not uprightly, according to thetruth of the gospel, it must be that one or the other of them has, forthe time being, ceased to be infallible in his administration of thetruth of the gospel. And if these apostolic men, sitting in theircouncils, teaching in their congregations, can make such mistakes asthese, how can we be sure that they never make a mistake when they sitdown to write, that then their words are always the very word of God? Wecan have no such assurance. Indeed we are expressly told that theirwords are not, in some cases, the very word of God; for the Apostle Paulplainly tells us over and over, in his epistles to the Corinthians (1Cor. Vii. ; 2 Cor. Xi. ), that upon certain questions he is giving his ownopinion, --that he has no commandment of the Lord. With respect to onematter he says that he is speaking after his own judgment, but that he"thinks" he has the Spirit of the Lord; two or three times he distinctlydeclares that it is he, Paul, and not the Lord, that is speaking. 

All of these facts, and others of the same nature clearly brought beforeus by the New Testament itself, must be held firmly in our minds when wemake up our theory of what these writings are. That these books werewritten by inspired men is, indeed, indubitable; that these menpossessed a degree of inspiration far exceeding that vouchsafed to anyother religious teachers who have lived on the earth is to my mindplain; that this degree of inspiration enabled them to bear witnessclearly to the great facts of the gospel of Christ, and to present to uswith sufficient fullness and with substantial verity the doctrines ofthe kingdom of heaven I am very sure; but that they were absolutelyprotected against error, not one word in the record affirms, and theythemselves have taken the utmost pains to disabuse our minds of any suchimpression. That is a theory about them which men made up out of theirown heads hundreds of years after they were dead. We shall certainlyfind that they were not infallible; but we shall also find that, in allthe great matters which pertain to Christian faith and practice, whentheir final testimony is collected and digested, it is clear, harmonious, consistent, convincing; that they have been guided by theSpirit of the Lord to tell us the truth which we need to know respectingthe life that now is and that which is to come. 

Furthermore, it is a matter of rejoicing when we take up these books ofthe New Testament to find their substantial integrity unimpeached. Thereis no reason to suspect that any important changes have been made in anyof these books since they came from the hands of their writers. Whatevermay be said about the first three Gospels (and we shall come to thatquestion in our next chapter), the remaining books of the New Testamenthave come down to us, unaltered, from the men who first wrote them. There is none of that process of redaction, and accretion, andreconstruction whose traces we have found in many of the Old Testamentbooks. There may be, here and there, a word or two or a verse or twowhich has been interpolated by some officious copyist, but thesealterations are very slight. The books in our hands are the very samebooks which were in the hands of the contemporaries and successors ofthe apostles. 

I shall not attempt any elaborate discussion of these twenty-sevenbooks. I only propose to go rapidly over them, indicating, with theutmost brevity, the salient facts, so far as we know them, respectingtheir authorship, the date and the place at which they were written, andthe circumstances which attended the production of them. 

From the fact that the Gospels stand first in the New Testamentcollection it is generally assumed that they are the earliest of the NewTestament books, but this is an error. Several of the Epistles werecertainly written before any of the Gospels; and one of the Gospels, that of John, was written later than any of the Epistles, except thethree brief ones by the same author. 

The first of these New Testament books that saw the light was, as isgenerally supposed, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. It was inthe year 48 of our era that St. Paul set out on his first missionaryjourney from Antioch through Cyprus and Eastern Asia Minor, a journeywhich occupied about a year. Two years afterward, his second journeytook him through the eastern part of Asia Minor and across the Ægean Seato Europe, where he preached in Troas, Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, and Corinth. His stay in Thessalonica was interrupted, as you willremember, by the hostility of the Jews, and he remained but a short timein that place; long enough, however, to gather a vigorous church. Afterward, while he was in Corinth, he learned from one of his helpersthat the people of Thessalonica had misunderstood portions of histeaching, and were in painful doubt on certain important subjects. Toset them right on these matters he wrote his first epistle, which wasforwarded to them from Corinth, probably about the year 52. 

This explanation was also misunderstood by the Thessalonians, and itbecame necessary during the next year to write to them again. These twoletters are in all probability the first of the Christian writings thatwe possess. They contain instruction and counsel of which the Christiansof Thessalonica were just then in need. The question which had mostdisturbed them had relation to the second coming of Christ. Theyexpected him to return very soon; they were impatient of delay; theythought that those who died before his coming would miss the gloriousspectacle; and therefore they deplored the hard fate of some of theirnumber who had been snatched away by death before this sublime event. Inhis first epistle the apostle assures them that the dead in Christ wouldbe raised to participate in their rejoicing. "We who are alive when theLord returns, " he says, "will have no advantage over those who have beencalled to their reward before us; for they will be raised from theirgraves to take part with us in this great triumph. " It is manifest thatPaul, when he wrote this, expected that Christ would return to earthwhile he was alive. Alford and other conservative commentators say thathe here definitely expresses that expectation; others deny that thesewords can be so interpreted, but concede that he did entertain some suchexpectation. "It does not seem improper to admit, " says Bishop Ellicott, "that in their ignorance of the day of the Lord the apostles might haveimagined that he who was coming would come speedily. " [Footnote: _Com. In loc. _] "It is unmistakably clear from this, " says Olshausen, "thatPaul deemed it possible that he and his contemporaries might live to seethe coming again of Christ. " "The early church, and even the apostlesthemselves, " say Conybeare and Howson, "expected their Lord to comeagain in that very generation. St. Paul himself shared in thatexpectation, but being under the guidance of the Spirit of truth, he didnot deduce any erroneous conclusions from this mistaken premise. "[Footnote: _Life and Epistles of St. Paul_, i. 401. ] It is evident, then, that St. Paul and the rest of the apostles were mistaken on thispoint; this is one of the evidences which they themselves have takenpains to point out to us of the fact that though they were inspired menthey were not infallible. 

Paul's first letter to the Christians at Thessalonica was interpreted bythem, very naturally, as teaching that the return of the Lord wasimminent; and they began to neglect their daily duties and to behave inthe same foolish way that men have behaved in all the later ages, whenthey have got their heads full of this notion. His second letter waswritten chiefly to rebuke this fanaticism, and to bid them go right onwith their work making ready for the Lord's coming by a faithfuldischarge of the duties of the present hour. St. Paul might have beenmistaken in his theories about the return of his Master, but hispractical wisdom was not at fault; it was his spirit that survived inAbraham Davenport, the Connecticut legislator, who, in the "dark day" of1780 when his colleagues thought that the end of the world had come, refused to vote for the adjournment of the House, but insisted oncalling up the next bill; saying as Whittier has phrased it:--

 "'This well may be The Day of Judgment which the world awaits; But be it so or not, I only know My present duty, and my Lord's command To occupy till he come. So at the post Where he hath set me in his providence, I choose, for one, to meet him face to face, -- No faithless servant frightened from my task, But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls; And therefore, with all reverence, I would say, Let God do his work, we will see to ours. Bring in the candles. ' And they brought them in. "

These two letters are, then, the earliest of the New Testament writings. Like most of the other Epistles of Paul they begin with a salutation. The common salutation with which the Greeks began their letters was"Live well!" that of the Roman was "Health to you!" But Paul almostalways began with a Christian greeting, "Grace, mercy, and peace toyou. " In these letters he associates with himself in this greeting histwo companions, Timothy and Silas. 

The last words of his epistles are almost always personal messages toindividuals known to him in the several churches, --to men and women whohad "labored with him in the gospel, "--casual yet significant words, which "show a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. " Theletters were written by an amanuensis, --all save these concluding wordswhich Paul added in his own chirography. He seems to desire to put moreof himself into these personal messages than into the didactic anddoctrinal parts of his epistles. At the end of the second of the lettersto the Thessalonians we find these words: "The salutation of me Paulwith mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write;"better, perhaps, "This is my handwriting. " This signature and thisconcluding greeting are to be proof to them of the genuineness of theletter. It appears from other references in the same epistle (ch. Ii. 2)that some busybody had been writing a letter to the Thessalonians, whichpurported to be a message from Paul; he puts them on their guard againstthese supposititious documents. At the end of the letter to theGalatians you find in the old version: "Ye see how large a letter I havewritten unto you with my own hand;" but the right rendering is in thenew version: "See with how large letters [what a bold chirography] Ihave written unto you with my own hand. " "These last coarse charactersare my own handwriting. " It is almost universally assumed that Paul wasa sufferer from some affection of the eyes; the large letters are thusexplained. Mr. Conybeare, in a foot-note on this passage, speaks ofreceiving a letter from the venerable Neander a few months before hisdeath, which illustrates this point in a striking manner: "His letter, "says Mr. Conybeare, "is written in the fair and flowing hand of anamanuensis, but it ends with a few irregular lines in large and ruggedcharacters, written by himself and explaining the cause of his needingthe services of an amanuensis, namely the weakness of his eyes (probablythe very malady of St. Paul). It was impossible to read this autographwithout thinking of the present passage, and observing that he mighthave expressed himself in the very words of St. Paul: 'Behold the sizeof the characters in which I have written to you with my own hand. '"[Footnote: _Life and Epistles of St. Paul_, ii. 149. ]

There is another touching sentence at the end of Paul's letter to theColossians which was written from Rome when he was prisoner there: "Thesalutation of me Paul with mine own hand. Remember my bonds. Grace bewith you. Amen. " This seems to say: "There is a manacle, you remember, on my wrist. I cannot write very well. Grace be with you. " I will onlyadd that the subscriptions which follow the epistles in the old versionare no part of the epistles, and in several cases they are erroneous. They embody conjectures of later copyists, or traditions which arewithout foundation. These letters to the Thessalonians, for example, aresaid to have been written from Athens; but we know that they werewritten from Corinth. For Paul expressly says (iii. 6) that the letterwas written immediately after the return of Timothy from Thessalonica, and we are told, in Acts xviii. 5, that Silas and Timothy joined him atCorinth after he had left Athens and had gone to Corinth. Besides, heassociates Silas and Timothy with himself in his greetings, and theywere not with him at Athens. The evidence is therefore conclusive, thatthe subscription is incorrect. You will not find any of thesesubscriptions in the new version. Some of them are undoubtedly correct, but some of them are not; and in no case is the subscription an integralpart of the epistle. The excision of these traditional addenda was oneof the first results of what is called the "Higher Criticism, " andadmirably illustrates the uses of this kind of criticism, which, to someof our devout brethren, is such a frightful thing. Why should it beregarded as a dangerous, almost a diabolical proceeding, to let theBible tell its own story about its origin, instead of trusting torabbinical traditions and mediæval guesses and _a priori_ theoriesof seventeenth century theologians?

These two letters were, no doubt, read in the assemblies of theThessalonian Christians more than once, and were sacredly treasured bythem. They were the only Christian documents possessed by them; andthere was, at this time, no other church so rich as they were. TheGospels, as we have them now, were not then in the possession of anyChristian church. The story of the gospel had been repeated to them byPaul and Silas and Timothy, and had been diligently impressed upon theirmemories; but it was only an oral gospel that had been delivered tothem; the written record of Christ's life and sayings was not in theirhands. They remembered, therefore, the things which had been told themconcerning the life and death of Jesus Christ; they repeated them overone to another, and they explained and supplemented these rememberedwords by the two letters which they had received from the great apostle. 

The next year after Paul wrote these letters to the Thessalonians fromCorinth, he returned to Jerusalem and Antioch (Acts xviii. 18-23), andthe year following, probably 54, he set out on his third missionaryjourney, which took him through Galatia and Phrygia in Asia Minor toEphesus, where his home was for two or three years. While there, perhapsin the year 57, he wrote the first of his letters to the Christians inCorinth. Shortly after writing it he went on to Macedonia, whence thesecond of his letters to the Corinthians was written; presently hefollowed his letters to Corinth, and while there, probably in 58, hewrote his letter to the Galatians. Galatia was a province rather than acity; there may have been several churches, which had been establishedby Paul, in the province; and this may have been a circular letter, tobe handed about among them, copies of it to be made, perhaps, for theuse of each of the churches. It was in the spring of the next year, while he was still in Corinth, that he wrote his letter to the Romans, the longest, and from some points of view, the most important of hisepistles. He had never, at the time of this writing, been in Rome (ch. I. 13), but he had met Roman Christians in many of the cities of theEast where he had lived and taught; and, doubtless, since all roads ledto Rome, and the metropolis of the world was constantly drawing toitself men of every nation and province, many of Paul's converts in Asiaand Macedonia and Achaia had made their way to the Eternal City, and hadjoined themselves there to the Christian community. The long list ofpersonal greetings with which the epistle closes shows how large was hisacquaintance in the Roman church, and, doubtless, by his correspondence, he had become fully informed concerning the needs of these disciples. Hetells the Romans, in this letter, that he hopes to visit them by and by;he did not, however, at that time, expect to appear among them as aprisoner. This was the fate awaiting him. Shortly after writing thisepistle he returned from Corinth to Jerusalem, bearing a collectionwhich had been gathered in Europe for the poor Christians of the motherchurch; at Jerusalem he was arrested; in that city and in Cæsarea hewas for a long time imprisoned; finally, probably in the spring of 61, he was sent as a prisoner to Rome, because he had appealed to theimperial court; and here, for at least two years, he dwelt a prisoner, in lodgings of his own, chained by day and night to a Roman soldier. During this imprisonment, probably in 62, he wrote the letters to theColossians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, and Philemon. From the firstimprisonment he seems to have been released; and to have gone westwardas far as Spain, and eastward as far as Asia Minor, preaching thegospel. During this journey he is supposed to have written the firstletter to Timothy and the letter to Titus. At length he was re-arrested, and brought to Rome where, in the spring of 68, just before his death, he wrote the second letter to Timothy, the last of his thirteenepistles. 

Much of this account of the late years of Paul's life, following theclose of his first two years at Rome, where the narrative in the Acts ofthe Apostles abruptly leaves him, is traditional and conjectural; I donot give it to you as indubitable history; it furnishes the mostreasonable explanation that has been suggested of that productiveactivity of his which finds its chief expression in the letters thatbear his name. 

Of these letters it is impossible to give any adequate account in thisplace. Let it suffice to say that the principal theme of the twoepistles to the Thessalonians is the expected return of Christ to earth;that those to the Corinthians are largely occupied with questions ofChristian casuistry; that those to the Galatians and the Romans are thegreat doctrinal epistles unfolding the relation of Christianity toJudaism, and discussing the philosophy of the new creed; that theEpistle to the Philippians is a luminous exposition of Christianity as apersonal experience; that those to the Colossians and the Ephesians arethe defense of Christianity against the insidious errors of theGnostics, and a wonderful revelation of the immanent Christ; that theEpistle to Philemon is a letter of personal friendship, embodying agreat principle of practical religion; and that the letters to Timothyand Titus are the counsel of an aged apostle to younger men in theministry. 

"May we go farther, " with Archdeacon Farrar, "and attempt, in one or twowords, a description of each separate epistle, necessarily imperfectfrom the very brevity, and yet perhaps expressive of some one maincharacteristic. If so we might perhaps say that the First Epistle to theThessalonians is the epistle of consolation in the hope of Christ'sreturn; and the second of the immediate hindrances to that return, andour duties with regard to it. The First Epistle to the Corinthians isthe solution of practical problems in the light of eternal principles;the second, an impassioned defense of the apostle's impugned authority, his _Apologia pro vita sua_. The Epistle to the Galatians is theepistle of freedom from the bondage of the law; that to the Romans ofjustification by faith. The Epistle to the Philippians is the epistle ofChristian gratitude and of Christian joy in sorrow; that to theColossians the epistle of Christ the universal Lord; that to theEphesians, so rich and many-sided, is the epistle of the 'heavenlies, 'the epistle of grace, the epistle of ascension with the ascended Christ, the epistle of Christ in his one and universal church; that to Philemonthe Magna Charta of Emancipation. The First Epistle to Timothy and thatto Titus are the manuals of a Christian pastor; the Second Epistle toTimothy is the last message of a Christian ere his death. " [Footnote:_The Life and Work of St. Paul_, chap. Xlvi. ]

The genuineness of several of these books has been assailed by moderncriticism. The authorship of Paul has been disputed in the cases of nineout of the thirteen epistles. The Epistle to the Galatians, that to theRomans, and the two to the Corinthians are undisputed; all the rest havebeen spoken against. I have attended to these criticisms; but thereasons urged for denying the Pauline authorship of these epistles seemto me in many cases far-fetched and fanciful in the extreme. Respectingthe pastoral epistles, those to Timothy and Titus, it may be admittedthat there are some difficulties. It is not easy for us to understandhow there could have been developed in the churches at that early day somuch of an ecclesiasticism as these letters assume; and there is forcein the suggestion that the peculiar errors against which some of thesecounsels are directed belong to a later day rather than to the apostolicage. To this it may be replied that ecclesiasticism is a weed whichgrows rapidly when once it has taken root, and that the germs ofGnosticism were in the church from the earliest day. And although thevocabulary of these epistles differs in rather a striking way, as Dr. Harnack has pointed out, [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit. _, art. "PastoralEpistles. " ] from that of Paul's other epistles, I can easily imaginethat in familiar letters to his pupils he would drop into a differentstyle from that in which he wrote his more elaborate theologicaltreatises. One could find in the letters of Macaulay or Charles Kingsleymany words that he would not find in the history of the one or thesermons of the other. Putting all these objections together, I do notfind in them any adequate reason for denying that these epistles werewritten by St. Paul. Indeed, it seems to me incredible that the SecondEpistle of Timothy should have been written by any other hand than thatwhich wrote the undoubted letters to the Corinthians and the Romans. 

When we come to the other disputed epistles, those to the Thessalonians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, and the Colossians, I confess that thedoubts of their genuineness seem to me the outcome of a willfuldogmatism. What Archdeacon Farrar says of the cavils respecting theepistles to the Philippians applies to much of this theoretic criticism:"The Tübingen school, in its earlier stages, attacked it with themonotonous arguments of their credulous skepticism. With those critics, if an epistle touches on points which make it accord with the narrativeof the Acts it was forged to suit them; if it seems to disagree withthem the discrepancy shows that it is spurious. If the diction isPauline it stands forth as a proved imitation; if it is un-Pauline itcould not have proceeded from the apostle. " [Footnote: _Life and Workof St. Paul_, chap, xlvi] One grows weary with this reckless andcarping skepticism, much of which springs from a theory of a permanentschism in the early church, --a theory which was mainly evolved from theinner consciousness of some mystical German philosopher, and which hasbeen utterly exploded. 

We may, then, receive as genuine the thirteen epistles ascribed to St. Paul; and we have good reason for believing that we have them in theirintegrity, substantially as he wrote them. 

The title of one of these epistles, that to the Ephesians, is, however, undoubtedly erroneous. As Mr. Conybeare says, the least disputable factabout the letter is that it was not addressed to the Ephesians. For itis incredible that Paul should have described a church in whosefellowship he had lived and labored for two years as one of whosereligious life he knew only by report (ch. I. 15); and it is strangethat he should not have a single word of greeting to any of theseEphesian Christians. Several of the early Christian fathers testify thatthe words "at Ephesus" are omitted from the first verse of themanuscript known to them. The two oldest manuscripts now in existence, that of the Vatican and that known as the Sinaitic manuscript, both omitthese words. The destination of the epistle is not indicated. The placefilled by the words "at Ephesus" is left blank. Thus it reads: "Paul, anapostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, to the saints which are and the faithful in Christ Jesus. " Some of the old fathersexpatiate on this title, drawing distinctions between the saints which_are_ and the saints which _seem to be_, --an amusing example ofexegetical thoroughness. Undoubtedly the letter was designed as acircular letter to several churches in Western Asia, --Laodicea among thenumber; and a blank was left in each copy made, in which the name of thechurch to which it was delivered might be entered. Some knowing copyistat a later day wrote the words "at Ephesus" into one of these copies;and it is from this that the manuscript descended from which ourtranslation was made. 

That these letters of Paul were highly prized and carefully preserved bythe churches to which they were written we cannot doubt; and as fromtime to time messengers passed back and forth between the churches, copies were made of the letters for exchange. The church at Thessalonicawould send a copy of its letter to the church at Philippi and to thechurch at Corinth and to the church at Ephesus, and would receive inreturn copies of their letters; and thus the writings of Paul earlyobtained a considerable distribution. We have an illustration of theseexchanges in the closing words of the Epistle to the Colossians (iv. 16): "And when this epistle hath been read among you, cause that it beread also in the church of the Laodiceans; and that you also read theepistle from Laodicea. " It is probable that the last-named epistle wasthe one of which we have just been speaking, called in our version, theEpistle to the Ephesians. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews is ascribed in its title to "Paul theApostle. " But the title was added at a late date; the Greek Testamentscontain only the brief title "To the Hebrews, " leaving the question ofauthorship unsettled. Of all the other epistles ascribed to Paul hisname is the first word; this epistle does not announce its author. Inthe early church there was much controversy about it; the EasternChristians generally ascribed it to Paul, while the Western church, until the fourth century, refused to recognize his authorship. Onesentence in the epistle (ch. Ii. 3) is supposed to signify that thewriter was of the number of those who had received the gospel at secondhand, and this was an admission that Paul always refused to make; hesteadily contended that his knowledge of the gospel was as direct andimmediate and copious as that of any of the apostles. For these andother reasons it has been contended that the letter was written by someone not an apostle, but an associate and pupil of apostolic men; themost plausible conjecture ascribes it to Apollos. The date of it is noteasily fixed; it was probably written before the destruction ofJerusalem; such an elaborate discussion of the Jewish ritual wouldscarcely have been made after the temple was destroyed, without anyreference to the fact of its destruction. 

Following the letter to the Hebrews in our New Testament are sevenepistles ascribed to four different authors, James, Peter, John, andJude. These are commonly called the "Catholic Epistles, "--catholicmeaning general or universal, --since they are not addressed to any onecongregation, but to the whole church, to Christians in general. Two ofthem, however, the Second and Third of John, hardly deserve thedesignation, for they are addressed to individuals. 

The author of the Epistle of James is not easily identified. There arenumerous Jameses in the New Testament history; we do not readilydistinguish them. It was not James the son of Zebedee, for he was put todeath by Herod only six or seven years after the death of our Lord (Actsxii. 2). Probably this was the one named James the Lord's brother, whowas a near relative of Jesus, brother or cousin, and who was the leadingman--perhaps they called him bishop--of the church at Jerusalem. He may, also, be identical with that James the son of Alpheus, who was one ofthe apostles. The letter was issued at an early day, probably before theyear 60. It was addressed to the "twelve tribes which are of theDispersion, "--that was the name by which the Jews scattered through Asiaand Europe were generally known. To Christians who had been Jews, therefore, this letter was written; in this respect it is to be classedwith the letter to the Hebrews; but in the tenor of its teaching it iswholly unlike that letter; instead of putting emphasis on the ritual andsymbolical elements of religion, it leaves these wholly on one side, andmakes the ethical contents of the Christian teaching the matter ofsupreme concern. There is more of applied Christianity in this than inany other of the epistles; and both in style and in substance we arereminded by it of the teaching of our Lord more strongly than by anyother portion of the New Testament. 

The First Epistle of Peter is addressed to the same class of persons, --to "the elect who are sojourners of the Dispersion" in various provincesof Asia Minor. The only intimation of tha locality of the writing iscontained in one of the concluding verses: "She that is in Babylon, elect together with you, saluteth you. " What Babylon is this? Is it thefamous capital of the Euphrates? So some have supposed, for there is atradition that Peter journeyed to the distant East and founded Christianchurches among the Jews, who, in large numbers, were dwelling there. Others take it to be the mystical Babylon, --Rome upon her seven hills. This theory helps to support the contention, for which there is smallevidence, that Peter was the first bishop of Rome. The first conjecturehas a firmer basis. But who is "she" that sends her salutations to theseAsian saints? Was it the church or the wife of the apostle? Eitherinterpretation is difficult; I cannot choose between them. Of the originof this letter we know little; but there is nothing in it inconsistentwith the unbroken tradition which ascribes it to the impetuous leader ofthe apostolic band. Like the Epistle of James it is full of a strenuousmorality; while it does not disregard the essentials of Christiandoctrine it puts the emphasis on Christian conduct. 

The Second Epistle of Peter is the one book of the New Testamentconcerning whose genuineness there is most doubt. From the earliest daysthe canonicity of this book has been disputed. It is not mentioned byany early Christian writer before the third century; and Origen, who isthe first to allude to the book, testifies that its genuineness has beendoubted. The early versions do not contain it; Eusebius marks itdoubtful; Erasmus and Calvin, in later times, regarded it as a dubiousdocument. It seems almost incredible, with such witnesses against it, that the book should be genuine; but if it is not the work of St. Peterit is a fraudulent writing, for it openly announces him as its authorand refers to his first epistle. There is a remarkable similaritybetween this letter and the short Epistle of Jude; it would appear thatthis must be an imitation and enlargement of that, or that acondensation of this. There are some passages in this book with which wecould ill afford to part, --with which, indeed, we never shall part; forwhether they were written by Peter or by another they express clear andindubitable verities; and even though the author, like that Balaam whomhe quotes, may have been no true prophet, he was constrained, even asBalaam was, to utter some wholesome and stimulating truth. 

The three epistles of John are the last words of the disciple that Jesusloved. The evidence of their genuineness, particularly of the first ofthem, is abundant and convincing; Polycarp, who was John's pupil andfriend, quotes from this book, and there is an unbroken chain oftestimony from the early fathers respecting it. Of course those who havedetermined, for dogmatic reasons, to reject the Fourth Gospel, are boundto reject these epistles also; but that procedure is wholly unwarranted, as we shall see in the next chapter. These epistles were probablywritten from Ephesus during the last years of the first century. Thefirst is a meditation on the great fact of the incarnation and itsmystic relation to the life of men; it sounds the very depths of thatwonderful revelation which was made to the world in the person and workof Jesus Christ. The other two are personal letters, wherein thefragrance of a gracious friendship still lingers, and in which we seehow the spirit of Christ was beginning, even then, to transfigure withits benignant gentleness the courtesies of life. 

The Book of Jude, the last of the epistles, is one of whose author wehave little knowledge. He styles himself "the brother of James, " butthat, as we have seen, is a vague description. Of the close relationbetween this letter and Second Peter I have spoken. It is not in theearly Syriac version; Eusebius and Origen question it, and Chrysostomdoes not mention it; we may fairly doubt whether it came from the handof any apostolic witness. One feature of this short letter deservesmention; the writer quotes from one of the old apocryphal books, theBook of Enoch, treating it as Scripture. If a New Testament citationauthenticates an ancient writing, Enoch must be regarded as an inspiredbook. We must either reject Jude or accept Enoch, or abandon the rulethat makes a New Testament citation the proof of Old Testamentcanonicity. The abandonment of the rule is the simplest and the mostrational solution of the difficulty. 

I have now run rapidly over the history of twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, --all of the Epistles of the inspiredbook. The end of the first century found these books scattered throughEurope and Asia, each probably in possession of the church to which ithad been sent; those addressed to individuals probably in the hands oftheir children or children's children. Some exchanges, such as I havesuggested, had taken place; and some churches might have possessedseveral of these apostolic letters, but there was yet no collection ofthem. Of the beginning of this collection of the New Testament writingsI shall speak in the chapter upon the canon. 

I said at the beginning that these writers probably had no thought whenthey composed these letters that they were contributing to a volume thatwould outlast empires, and be a manual of study and a guide of conductin lands to the world then unknown, and in generations farther from themthan they were from Abraham. But each of them uttered in sincerity theword that to him seemed the word of the hour; and God who gives life tothe seed gave vitality to these true words, so that they are as full ofdivine energy to-day as ever they were. It is easy to cavil at asentence here and there, or to pick flaws in their logic; but thequestion always returns, What kind of fruit have they borne? "By theirfruits ye shall know them. " One of the most precious gifts of God to menis contained in these twenty-one brief letters. It is not in equalmeasure in all of them, but there is none among them that does notcontain some portion of it. The treasure is in earthen vessels; it wasso when the apostles were alive and speaking; it is so now; it alwayswas and always will be so; but the treasure is there, and he who withopen mind and reverent spirit seeks for it will find it there, and willknow that the excellency of the power is of God, and not of men. 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 

We have arrived in our study of the Sacred Scriptures at the thresholdof the most interesting and the most momentous topic which is presentedto the student of the Biblical literature, --the question of the originof the Gospels. These Gospels contain the record of the life and thedeath of Jesus Christ, that marvelous Personality in whom the histories, the prophecies, the liturgies of the Old Testament are fulfilled, andfrom whom the growing light and freedom and happiness of eighteenChristian centuries are seen to flow. Most certain it is that thehistory of the most enlightened lands of earth during these Christiancenturies could not be understood without constant reference to thepower which came into the world when Jesus Christ was born. Sometremendous social force made its appearance just then by which the wholelife of mankind has been affected ever since that day. The most powerfulinstitutions, the most benign influences which are at work in the worldto-day, can be followed back to that period as surely as any great rivercan be followed up to the springs from which it takes its rise. If wehad not these four Gospels we should be compelled to seek for anexplanation of the chief phenomena of modern history. "We trace, " saysMr. Horton, "this astonishing influence back to that life, and if weknew nothing at all about it, but had to construct it out of thecreative imagination, we should have to figure to ourselves facts, sayings, and impressions which would account for what has flowed fromit. Thus, if the place where this biography comes were actually a blank, we should be able to surmise something of what ought to be there, justas astronomers surmised the existence of a new planet, and knew in whatquarter of the heavens to look for it by observing and registering theinfluences which retarded or deflected the movements of the otherplanets. " [Footnote: _Inspiration and the Bible, _ p. 65. ]

That place is not a blank; it is filled with the fourfold record of theLife from which all these mighty influences have flowed. Must not thisrecord prove to be the most inspiring theme open to human investigation?Is it any wonder that more study has been expended upon this theme thanupon any other which has ever claimed the attention of men?

What do we know of the origin of this four-fold record? Origin it musthave had like every other book, an origin in time and space. That thereare divine elements in it the most of us believe; but the form in whichwe have it is a purely human form, and it would be worthless to us if itwere not in purely human form. The sentences of which it is composedwere constructed by human minds, and were written down by human hands onparchment or papyrus leaves. When, and where, and by whom? These are thequestions now before us. 

Let us go back to the last half of the second century and see whattraces of these books we can find. 

Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, in France, who died about 200, speaksdistinctly of these four Gospels, which, he declares, are equal inauthority to the Old Testament Scriptures, and which he ascribes to thefour authors whose names they now bear. With the fanciful reasoning thencommon among Christian writers, he finds a reason in the four quartersof the globe why there should have been four Gospels and no more. 

Clement of Alexandria was living at the samq time. He also quotesliberally in his writings from all these four books, of which he speaksas "the four Gospels that have been handed down to us. "

Tertullian, who was born in Carthage about 160, also quotes all theseGospels as authoritative Christian writings. 

It is clear, therefore, that in the West, the East, and the South, --inall quarters where Christianity was then established, --the four Gospelswere recognized and read in the churches in the latter half of thesecond century. Let us go back a little farther. 

Justin Martyr was born at Rome about the year 100, and was writing mostabundantly from his fortieth to his forty-fifth year. In one of thebooks which he has left us, in describing the customs of the Christians, he uses the following language: "On the day which is called Sunday thereis an assembly in the same place of all who live in cities or in countrydistricts, and the records of the apostles or the writings of theprophets are read as long as we have time. Then the reader concludes, and the president verbally instructs and exhorts us to the imitation ofthese excellent things. Then we all rise up together and offer ourprayers. " In another place he speaks of something commanded by "theapostles in the records which they made, and which are called Gospels. "Justin does not say how many of these Gospels the church in his daypossessed, but we find in his writings unmistakable quotations from atleast three of them. Dr. Edwin Abbott, of London, whom Mrs. Humphry Wardrefers to as master of all the German learning on this subject, saysthat it would be possible "to reconstruct from his (Justin's) quotationsa fairly connected narrative of the incarnation, birth, teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord;" that thisnarrative is all found in the three Synoptic Gospels, and that Justinquotes no words of Christ and refers to no incidents that are not foundin these Gospels. [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit. , _ vol. X. P. 817. ]

We may fully accept Dr. Abbott's testimony so far as the quotations ofJustin from the first three Gospels are concerned; but his arguments, which are intended to prove that there is no certain reference to thefourth Gospel in Justin's works, appear to me inconclusive. When Justinsays: "For indeed Christ also said, 'except ye be born again, ye shallnot enter into the kingdom of heaven, ' but that it is impossible forthose who were once born to enter into their mother's womb is plain toall, " he is quoting words that are found in the fourth Gospel, and notin any of the other three. The attempt to show that he found these andsimilar citations in the same sources from which the author of thefourth Gospel derived them is not successful. 

Several indirect lines of evidence tend to confirm the belief thatJustin possessed all four of our Gospels. This, then, carries us back tothe first half of the second century. Between 100 and 150 Papias ofHierapolis, Clement of Rome, and Polycarp of Smyrna were writing. Papias, who wrote about 130-140 A. D. , composed five books orcommentaries on what he calls "The Oracles of the Lord. " He gives ussome account of the origin of at least two of these Gospels. "Mark, " hesays, "was the interpreter of Peter;" "Matthew wrote his scriptures(_logia_) in Hebrew, and each man interpreted them as best hecould. " "Interpreted" here evidently means translated. Elsewhere herepeats a tradition of "the elder, " by which word he apparently meansthe Apostle John, whom he may have known, in these words: "Mark, havingbecome Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately all that heremembered, --not, however, in order, --both the words and the deeds ofChrist. For he never heard the Lord, nor attached himself to him, butlater on, as I said, attached himself to Peter, who used to adapt hislessons to the needs of the occasion, but not as though he was composinga connected treatise of the discourses of our Lord; so that Markcommitted no error in writing down some matters just as he rememberedthem. For one object was in his thoughts, to make no omissions and nofalse statements in what he heard. " [Footnote: Quoted by Abbott, asabove. ] This is a perfect description of the Gospel of Mark as we haveit in our hands to-day. And the testimony of Papias to its authorship, and to the spirit and purpose of the author, is significant andmemorable. Evidence of this nature would be regarded as decisive in anyother case of literary criticism. 

Polycarp, who was the friend and pupil of John the Apostle, was bornabout the year 69, and suffered martyrdom about 155. In his writings wefind no express mention of the Gospels, but we do find verbally accuratequotations from them. It is clear that he was acquainted with the books. Polycarp was the teacher of Irenæus of Lyons whom I first quoted, andhe was the pupil and friend of St. John and the other apostles; andIrenæus, who quotes all these Gospels so freely, bears this testimonyrespecting Polycarp, in a letter which he wrote to Florinus. 

"I saw you, when I was yet a boy, in Lower Asia with Polycarp. .. . Icould even point out now the place where the blessed Polycarp sat andspoke, and describe his going out and coming in, his manner of life, hispersonal appearance, the addresses he delivered to the multitude, how hespoke of his intercourse with John, and with the others who had seen theLord, and how he recalled their words, and everything that he had heardabout the Lord, about his miracles and his teaching. Polycarp told us, as one who had received it from those who had seen the Word of Life withtheir own eyes, and all this in complete harmony with the Scriptures. Tothis I then listened, through the mercy of God vouchsafed to me, withall eagerness, and wrote it not on paper, but in my heart, and still bythe grace of God I ever bring it into fresh remembrance. "

These living witnesses give us solid ground for our statement that theGospels--the first three of them at any rate--were in existence duringthe last years of the first century. Indeed, not to prolong this searchfor the origin of the books, it is now freely admitted, by many of themost radical critics, that the first three Gospels were written beforethe year 80, and that Mark must have been written before 70. 

It is interesting to contrast the course of New Testament criticism withthat engaged upon the Old Testament. In the study of the origin of thePentateuch the gravitation of opinion has been steadily downward, towarda later date, so that the great majority of scholars are now certainthat the books must have been put into their present form long after thetime of Moses. In the study of the origin of the Gospels the date hasbeen steadily pushed upward, to the very age of the apostles. Theearlier critics, Strauss and Baur, insisted that they must have appearedmuch later, far on in the second century; but the more recent and morescientific criticism has demolished or badly discredited their theories, and has carried the Gospels back to the last part of the first century. 

Are we entitled, then, to say that these Gospels were written byMatthew, Mark, Luke, and John? We should be cautious, no doubt, inmaking such a statement. The Gospels themselves are not so explicit onthis point as we could desire. Their titles do not warrant thisassertion. It is not "The Gospel of St. Matthew" or "The Gospel of St. Mark;" it is the "Gospel according to St. Matthew" or St. Mark. Theimport of the title would be fully satisfied with the explanation thatthis is the story as Matthew or Mark was wont to tell it, put into formby some person or friend of his, in his last days, or even after hisdeath. But the testimony of Papias, to which I have referred, is to myown mind good evidence that these Gospels were written by the men whobear their names. In the case of Luke, as we shall presently see, theevidence is much stronger. And after going over the evidence ascarefully as I am able, the theory that the four Gospels were written bythe men whose names they bear, all of whom were the contemporaries ofour Lord, and two of whom were his apostles, seems to me, on the whole, the best supported by the whole volume of evidence. The case is notabsolutely clear; perhaps it was left somewhat obscure for the verypurpose of stimulating study. At all events, the study which has beengiven to the subject has confirmed rather than weakened the belief thatthe Gospels are contemporary records of the life of Christ. Mr. Norton, a distinguished Unitarian scholar, sums up the evidence as follows: "Itconsists in the indisputable fact that throughout a community ofmillions of individuals, scattered over Europe, Asia, and Africa, theGospels were regarded with the highest reverence, as the works of thoseto whom they are ascribed, at so early a period that there could be nodifficulty in determining whether they were genuine or not, and whenevery intelligent Christian must have been deeply interested toascertain the truth. .. . This fact is itself a phenomenon admitting of noexplanation except that the four Gospels had all been handed down asgenuine from the apostolic age, and had everywhere accompanied ourreligion as it spread throughout the world. "

When we turn from the external or historical evidence for thegenuineness of the Gospels to study their internal structure and theirrelations to one another, we come upon some curious facts. TheseGospels, in the form in which we possess them, are written in the Greeklanguage. But the Greek language was not the vernacular of the Jews inPalestine when our Lord was on the earth; the language which was thenspoken by them, as I have before explained, was the Aramaic. It is truethat Palestine was, to some extent, a bilingual country, --like Wales, one writer suggests, where the English and the Welsh languages are nowfreely spoken, --that Aramaic and Greek were used indifferently. I canhardly imagine that a people as tenacious of their own institutions asthe Jews could have adopted Greek as generally as the Welsh have adoptedthe English tongue. Even in Wales, if a Welshman were speaking to acongregation of his countrymen on any important topic, he would belikely to speak the Welsh language. And much more probable does it seemto me that the discourses and the common conversation of Jesus must havebeen spoken in the vernacular. The discourses and sayings of our Lord, as reported for us in these Gospels, are not therefore given us in thewords that he used. We have a translation of his words from the Aramaicinto the Greek, made either by the writers of the Gospels, or by someone in their day. We have quoted the testimony of Papias, that theGospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew (by which heundoubtedly means Aramaic), and that each one interpreted it as best hecould; and if this be true, then that copy first made by Matthew didcontain many of our Lord's very words. But that Aramaic copy has neverbeen seen since that day; we have no manuscript of any New Testamentbook except in the Greek language. There are a few cases in which thewriters of the Gospels have preserved for us the very words used byChrist. Thus in the healing of the deaf man in the neighborhood ofDecapolis, of which Mark tells us (vii. 34), Jesus touched his ears, andsaid unto him, "Ephphatha, " that is, "Be opened. " The Evangelist givesus the Aramaic word which Jesus used, and translates it for his readersinto Greek. Likewise in the healing of the ruler's daughter (Mark v. 41)he took her by the hand, and said unto her, "Talitha cumi, which is, being interpreted, " the Evangelist explains, "Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise. " Doubtless most readers get the impression that our Lord usedhere some cabalistic words in a foreign tongue; the fact is that theseare the words of the common speech of the people; only the Evangelistseems to have thought them especially memorable, and he has given us notmerely, as he generally does, a translation into the Greek of our Lord'swords, but the Aramaic words themselves, with their meaning appended ina Greek phrase. The same is true of our Lord's words on the cross: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" These are Aramaic words, the very words thatJesus uttered. The Roman soldiers who stood near might not know what hemeant; but every Jew who distinctly heard him must have understood him, for he was speaking in no foreign tongue, but in the language of his ownpeople. 

When we speak, therefore, of the Greek as the original language of theGospels, we do not speak with entire accuracy. The Greek does not giveus our Lord's original words. These we have not, except in the cases Ihave named, and a few others less important. No man on earth knows orever will know what were the precise words that our Lord used in hisSermon on the Mount, in his conversation with the woman at the well, inhis last discourses with his disciples. We have every reason to believethat the substance of what he said is faithfully preserved for us; thefourfold record, so marvelously accordant in its report of histeachings, makes this perfectly clear. But his very words we have not, and this fact itself is the most convincing dis-proof of the dogma ofverbal inspiration. If our Lord had thought it important that we shouldhave his very words he would have seen to it that his very words werepreserved and recorded for us, instead of that Greek translation of hiswords, made by his followers, which we now possess. These evangelistscould have written Aramaic, doubtless did write Aramaic; and they wouldcertainly have kept our Lord's discourses and sayings in the Aramaicoriginal if they had been instructed to do so. The fact that they werenot instructed to do so, but were permitted to give his teachings to theworld in other words than those in which they were spoken, shows howlittle there was of modern literalism in Christ's conception of the workof revelation. 

The first three of these Gospels exhibit many striking similarities;they appear to give, from somewhat different standpoints, a condensedand complete synopsis of the events of our Lord's life; therefore theyare called the Synoptic Gospels. The fourth Gospel differs widely fromthem in matter and form. It will be more convenient, therefore, to speakfirst of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 

The singular fact respecting these Gospels is the combination in them oflikeness and difference. A considerable portion of each one of them isto be found, word for word, in one or both of the others; otherconsiderable portions of each are not found in either of the others;some passages are nearly alike, but slightly different in two or in allof them. Did these three authors write independently each of the other?If so, how does it happen that their phraseology is so often identical?Did they copy one from another? If so, why did they copy so little? Why, for example, did each one of them omit so much that the others hadwritten? And why are there so many slight differences in passages thatare nearly identical? If we accepted the theory of verbal inspiration, we might offer some sort of explanation of this phenomenon. We might saythat the Holy Ghost dictated these words, and that that is the end ofit; since no explanation can be offered of the reason why the Holy Ghostchose one form of expression rather than another. But the Gospelsthemselves contain abundant proof that the Holy Ghost did not dictatethe words employed by these writers. 

The two genealogies of our Lord, one in Matthew and the other in Luke, are widely different. From Abraham to David they substantially agree;from David to Christ, Matthew makes twenty-eight generations, and Lukethirty-eight; only two of the intermediate names in the one table arefound in the other; the one list makes Jacob the father of Joseph, andthe other declares that the name of Joseph's father was Heli. All sortsof explanations, some plausible and others preposterous, have beenoffered of this difficulty; the one explanation that cannot be allowedis that these words were dictated by Omniscience. In the story of thehealing of the blind near Jericho, Matthew and Mark expressly say thatthe healing took place as Christ was departing from the city; Luke thatit was before he entered it. Matthew says that there were two blind men;Mark and Luke that there was but one. About these details of thetransaction there is some mistake, --that is the only thing to be saidabout it. The various explanations offered are weak and inadmissible. But what difference does it make to anybody whether the healing tookplace before or after Jesus entered the city, or whether there was oneman healed or two? The moral and spiritual lessons of the story are justas distinct in the one case as in the other; and it is these moral andspiritual values only that inspiration is intended to secure. 

Similarly, Luke (iv. 38-39) expressly tells us that the healing ofPeter's wife's mother took place before the calling of Simon and Andrew;while Matthew and Mark tell us with equal explicitness that the callingtook place before the healing. No reconciliation is possible here;either Luke or Matthew and Mark must have misplaced these events. 

So in Matthew xxvii. 9, certain words are said to have been spoken byJeremiah the prophet. These words are not in Jeremiah; they are inZechariah xi. 13. It is simply a slip of the Evangelist's memory. 

So in the record of the inscription on the cross when Jesus wascrucified. Each of the four Evangelists copies it for us in a differentform. The meaning is the same in all the cases, but the copy was notexactly made by some of them, perhaps not by any of them. If the HolyGhost had dictated the words, they must, in a case like this, have beenexactly alike in all the Evangelists. The substance is given, but theinexactness of the copy shows that the words could not have beendictated by Omniscience. It is sometimes explained that this inscriptionwas in three languages, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and that we may havethe exact translations of the different inscriptions. This might accountfor three of them, but not for four. 

From these and many other similar facts, we know that the theory ofverbal inspiration is not true; but that these Evangelists were allowedto state each in his own language the facts known by him concerning ourLord, and that nothing like infallible accuracy was so much asattempted. The only inspiration that can be claimed for them is thatwhich brought the important facts to their remembrance, and guarded themagainst serious errors of history or doctrine. 

But now the question returns, if they wrote these Gospels in their ownlanguage and independently of one another, how happens it that they useso often the very same words and phrases and sentences? Take, forexample, the following verses from parallel narratives in Matthew and inMark, concerning the calling of the first apostles:--

MATTHEW iv. 18-22. 

And walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw two brethren, Simon who iscalled Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; forthey were fishers. And he saith unto them, Come ye after me, and I willmake you fishers of men. And they straightway left the nets, andfollowed him. And going on from thence he saw two other brethren, Jamesthe son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee theirfather, mending their nets; and he called them. And they straightwayleft the boat and their father, and followed him. 

MARK i. 16-20. 

And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew thebrother of Simon casting a net in the sea: for they were fishers. AndJesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to becomefishers of men. And straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little further, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and Johnhis brother, who also were in the boat mending the nets. And straightwayhe called them: and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with thehired servants, and went after him. 

There are slight verbal variations, but in general the words are thesame, and the corresponding sentences are in precisely the same order inboth narratives. Now, as Archbishop Thomson says, in Smith's "BibleDictionary, " "The verbal and material agreement of the first threeEvangelists is such as does not occur in any other authors who havewritten independently of each other. "

Besides many such passages which are substantially alike but verbally orsyntactically different, there are quite a number which are identical, word for word, and phrase for phrase. These verbal agreements occur mostfrequently, as is natural, in the reports of our Lord's discourses andsayings; but they also occur in the descriptive and narrative portionsof the gospel. This is the fact which is so difficult to reconcile withthe theory that the books were produced by independent writers. 

Suppose three competent and truthful reporters are employed by you towrite an exact and unvarnished report of some single transaction whichhas occurred, and which each of them has witnessed. Each is required todo his work without any conference with the others. When these reportsare brought to you, if they are very faithful and accurate forsubstance, you will not be surprised to find some circumstancesmentioned by each that are not mentioned by either of the others, and itwill be strange if there are not some important discrepancies. But if onreading them, you find that the reports, taken sentence by sentence, arealmost identical, --that there is only an occasional difference in a wordor in the order of a phrase, --then you at once say, "These reportersmust have been copying from some other reporter's note-book, or elsethey must have been comparing notes; they could not have written withsuch verbal agreement if they had written independently. " Suppose, forexample, that each of the three reports began in just these words: "Thefirst object that attracted my notice on entering the door was a chair. "Now it is extremely improbable that all these writers, writingindependent reports of a transaction, should begin in the same way bymentioning the first object that attracted the attention of each. Andeven if they should so begin, it is wholly beyond the range ofpossibilities that they should all select from all the multitude of thewords in the English language the very same words in which to make thisstatement; and should put these words in the very same order, out of themultitude of different orders into which they could grammatically beput. There is not one chance in a million that such a coincidence wouldoccur. But such coincidences occur very often in the first threeGospels. How can we account for it? We say that they wroteindependently, that their words were not dictated to them; how does ithappen that there is so much verbal agreement?

We may get some hint of the manner in which these biographies wereproduced if we turn to the beginning of Luke's Gospel:--

"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerningthose matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they deliveredthem unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministersof the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of allthings accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, mostexcellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know the certainty concerningthe things wherein thou wast instructed. " The marginal reading of thislast phrase is, "which thou wast taught by word of mouth. " This is themore exact meaning of the Greek. The passage contains these statements:--

1. Theophilus had been orally taught the Gospels. 

2. Many persons, not apostles, had undertaken to write out parts of thegospel story, as they had heard it from eyewitnesses and ministers ofthe word. 

3. Luke also, as one who had full and accurate information, haddetermined to reduce his knowledge to an orderly written narrative, forthe benefit of his friend Theophilus. 

It appears from this clear statement that written memoranda of thediscourses of our Lord and of the incidents of his life had been made bymany persons. Numbers of these had undertaken to combine their memorandawith their recollections in an orderly statement. This fact itself showshow powerful an impression had been made by our Lord's life and deathupon the people of Palestine. Everything relating to him was treasuredwith the utmost care; Luke, for his part, believing that he had gainedby careful investigation sufficient knowledge to warrant theundertaking, sets out to collect the facts and present them in aconsecutive and intelligible literary form. Yet Luke, in thisannouncement of his purpose, betrays no consciousness that he is usingany different powers from those employed by the many others of whom hespeaks. Rather does he most clearly rank himself with them, as one ofmany gleaners in this fruitful field. He does claim thoroughness andpainstaking accuracy; I believe that every honest man will concede hisclaim. 

This, then, was the way in which Luke went to work to write his Gospel. This is not guesswork; it is the explicit statement of the authorhimself. Have we not good reason for believing that the Gospels ofMatthew and Mark were composed in much the same way?

In addition to the written memoranda of Christ's life which were in thehands of the apostles, and of many others, there was another source fromwhich the Evangelists must have drawn. Luke alludes to it when he speaksof the fact that Theophilus had received much of his narrative "by wordof mouth. " There was, unquestionably, an oral gospel, covering thelarger part of the deeds and the words of Jesus, which had been widelycirculated in Palestine and in the whole missionary field. When it issaid (Acts viii. 1-4; xi. 19) that they which were scattered abroad bythe early persecutions went everywhere preaching the word, it must beunderstood that they went about simply telling the story of Jesus, hisbirth, his life, his deeds, his words, his death upon the cross. Sometimes, when preaching to Jews, they would show the correspondencebetween his life and the Old Testament prophecies, to prove that he wasthe Messiah; but the substance of their preaching was the telling overand over again of the story of Jesus. It was upon this oral gospel thatthe apostles and the first missionaries mainly relied. What they desiredto do was to make known as speedily and as rapidly as possible the wordsof his lips and the facts of his life. And it is highly probable thatbefore they set out on these missionary tours, they took great pains torehearse to one another the story which they were going forth to tell. "The apostles, " says Professor Westcott, "guided by the promised Spiritof truth, remained together in Jerusalem in close communion for a periodlong enough to shape a common narrative, and to fix it with requisitesurroundings. "

It was these concerted recollections and rehearsals that gave to so manypassages of the gospel its identity in form. Some of the sentences oftenand devoutly repeated were remembered by all, word for word; in some ofthem there were verbal differences and discrepancies, as they wererepeated by one and another. The verbal resemblances as well as theverbal differences are thus explained by this theory of an oral gospel, prepared at first for preaching by the apostles, and held only in theirmemory. 

The preservation of so many passages in words and sentences nearly orexactly similar is nothing miraculous. Even in our own time there are, as we are told, secret societies whose ritual has never been written, but has been handed down with nearly verbal accuracy, from generation togeneration. For the Hebrews, who were a people at this time greatlydisinclined to write, and thoroughly practiced in remembering andrepeating the sayings of their wise men, this task would not bedifficult. 

The apostles and the early evangelists, as Westcott suggests, werepreachers, not historians, not pamphleteers. They believed in livingwitnesses more than in transmitted documents. They did not write out therecord at first, partly because they were naturally disinclined towrite, and partly, no doubt, because they expected the immediate returnof our Lord to earth. Their gospel was therefore for many years a spokenand not a written word. As they went on repeating it, changes wouldoccur in the repetition of the words; to the remembrance of one andanother of them the Spirit of truth would bring facts and circumstancesthat they did not think of at first; words, phrases, gestures of ourLord would reappear in the memory of each, and thus the narrative becamevaried and shaded with the personal peculiarities of the severalwriters. 

Years passed, and the expected return of the Lord to earth did not takeplace. The churches were spreading over Asia and Europe, and theapostles were unable personally to instruct those who were preaching thegospel in other lands. Thus the need of a written record began to makeitself felt; and the apostles themselves wrote out the story which theyhad been telling, or it was written for them by their companions andfellow-helpers in the gospel. The oral gospel as it lived in theirmemories would form, no doubt, the substance of it, and the writtenmemoranda of the discourses and incidents, to which Luke refers, wouldbe drawn upon in completing the biography. The oral gospel thuscarefully prepared and transmitted by memory would be substantially thesame, yet many differences in arrangement of words and phrases wouldnaturally have crept in; the written memoranda would in many cases beverbally identical. And each Evangelist, gleaning from this wide field, would collect some facts and sayings omitted by the others. 

There are other explanations of the origin of the Synoptic Gospels, someof which are ingenious and plausible, but I shall not burden your mindswith them, since the theory which I have presented appears to me thesimplest, the most natural, and the most comprehensive of them all. 

The Fourth Gospel, it is evident, must have had a different origin. Beyond question it is a consecutive narrative, composed by a singlewriter, and not, like the Synoptics, a compilation of memoranda, oral orwritten. It appears to be, in part at least, a supplementary narrative, omitting much that is contained in the other Gospels, supplying someomissions, and correcting, possibly, certain unimportant errors. Mr. Horton illustrates the supplementary work of this Evangelist by severalinstances. "The communion of the Lord's Supper, " he says, "was souniversally known and observed when he wrote that he actually does notmention its institution, but he records a wonderful discourse concerningthe Bread of Life which is an indispensable commentary on the unnamedinstitution, and by filling in with great detail the circumstances ofthe last evening, he furnished a framework for the ordinance which isamong our most precious possessions. On the other hand, because thecommon tradition was very vague in its date he gave precision to theevent which they had recorded by fixing the time of its occurrence. .. . In Matt, iv. 12 and Mark i. 14, the temptation, immediately followingChrist's baptism, is immediately followed by the statement, 'When heheard that John was delivered up, he withdrew into Galilee; and leavingNazareth he came and dwelt in Capernaum. ' But this summary narrative hadexcluded one of the most interesting features of the early ministry ofJesus. Accordingly the Fourth Gospel enlarges the story and emphasizesthe marks of time. After the Baptism, according to this authority, Jesus'went down to Capernaum, he and his mother and his brethren and hisdisciples, and there they abode not many days' (ii. 12). Then he went upto the Passover at Jerusalem, where he had the interview with Nicodemus. After that he went into the country districts of Judea, where John wasbaptizing in Ænon, and then the writer adds, as if his eye were on thecondensed and misleading narrative of the common tradition, 'For Johnwas not yet cast into prison. ' The two great teachers, the Forerunner, and the Greater-than-he, were actually baptizing side by side, and itwas because Jesus saw his reputation overshadowing John's that hevoluntarily withdrew into Galilee, passing through Samaria. So thatwhile there had been two journeys to Galilee before John was imprisoned, and that early period of the life was full of unique and wonderfulinterest, all had been compressed and crushed into the brief statementof Matt. Iv. 12 and Mark i. 14. In this case we seem to see theEvangelist deliberately loosening and breaking up the current history inorder that he might insert into the cramped and lifeless framework someof the most valuable episodes of the Lord's life. If the fourthEvangelist had treated the triple narrative in the way that many of ushave treated it, regarding it as a sin against the Holy Spirit tosuggest that there was any incompleteness or any misleadingabbreviations in it, we should have lost the wonderful accounts of theconversation with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well. " [Footnote:_Inspiration and the Bible, _ pp. 95-99. ]

If such is the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the Synoptics, itfollows that it must have been the work of one who was thoroughlyfamiliar with the events recorded. That the narrative bears evidence ofhaving been written by an eyewitness is to my own mind clear. That thewriter intends to convey the impression that he is the beloved discipleis also manifest. Either it was written by John the Apostle, or else thewriter was a deliberate deceiver. There can be no such explanation ofhis personation of John as that which satisfies our minds in the case ofDaniel and Ecclesiastes; the book is either the work of John, or it is acunning and conscienceless fraud. And it seems to me that any one whowill read the book will find it impossible to believe that it is animposture. If any book of the ages bears in itself the witness to thetruth it is the Fourth Gospel. It shines by its own light. Any of uscould tell the difference between the sun in the heavens and a brassdisk suspended in the sky reflecting the sun's rays; and in much thesame way the fact is apparent that the book is not a counterfeit gospel. 

It is true that historical criticism has raised difficulties about it;the battle of the critics has been raging around it for half a century;but one after another of the positions taken by men like Strauss andBaur have been shown to be untenable; and it can truthfully be said, inthe words of Professor Ladd, "that the vigorous and determined attacksupon the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel have greatly increased insteadof impairing our confidence in the traditional view. " [Footnote: _Whatis the Bible?_ p. 327. ] And I am ready to go farther with the samebrave but reverent scholar, and say, "Having thus grounded in historicaland critical researches the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, we have nohesitation in affirming what position it must take in Sacred Scripture. It is the heart of Jesus Christ with which we here come in contact. Inspiration and reflection uniting upon the choicest and most undoubtedmaterial of history, and fusing all the material with the holycharacteristics of revelation, are nowhere else so apparent as in theGospel of the Apostle John. " [Footnote: _Doctrine of SacredScripture_, i. 573]

Such, then, is the fourfold biography of Jesus the Christ preserved forus in the New Testament. If this study has removed something of themystery with which the origin of these writings has been shrouded, ithas, I trust, at the same time, made them appear more real and morehuman; and it has shown the providential oversight by which theirartless record, many-sided, manifold, yet simple and clear as thedaylight, has been preserved for us. Of these four Gospels we arecertainly entitled to say as much as this, that whatever verbaldiscrepancies may be detected in them, and however difficult it may besatisfactorily to explain all the phenomena of their structure andrelations, in one thing they marvelously agree, and that is in thepicture which they give us of the life and character of Jesus Christ. Inthis each one of them is self-consistent, and they are all consistentwith one another. And this, if we will reflect upon it, is a marvelous, not to say a miraculous fact. That four such men as these Evangelistsincontestably were should have succeeded in giving us four portraituresof the Divine Man, without contradicting themselves, and withoutcontradicting one another, --four distinct views of this wonderfulPerson, which show us different sides of his character, and which we yetinstantly recognize as the same person, is a very great wonder. No suchtask was ever laid on any other human biographer as that whichconfronted these men; no character so difficult to comprehend anddescribe ever existed; for one man to preserve all the unities of art indescribing him would be notable; for four men to give us, independently, four narratives, from the simple pages of which the same lineamentsshine out, so that no one ever thinks of saying that the Jesus ofMatthew is a different person from the Jesus of Mark or Luke or John, --this, I say, is marvelous. 

And it is this character, majestic in its simplicity, glorious in itshumility, the Ideal of Humanity, the Mystery of Godliness, that theseGospels are meant to show us. If they only bring him clearly before us, make his personality real and familiar and vivid before our eyes, sothat we may know him and love him, that is all we want of them. Infallibility in details would be worthless if this were wanting; anysmall discrepancies are beneath notice if this is here. And this ishere. Read for yourselves. From the page of Matthew, illuminated withthe words of prophecy that tell of the Messiah's coming; from the vividand rapid record of Mark, in which the Wonder-worker displays his power;from the tender story of Luke, speaking the word of grace to those thatare lowest down and farthest off; from the mystical Gospel of thebeloved disciple opening to us the deep things that only love can see, the same divine form appears, the same divine face shines, the samedivine voice is speaking. Behold the man!

CHAPTER X. 

NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY AND PROPHECY. 

The Acts of the Apostles contains the history of the Christian churchfrom the time of the ascension of our Lord to the end of the second yearof Paul's first imprisonment at Rome. The period covered by the historyis therefore only about thirty years. The principal events recorded init are the great Pentecostal Revival, the Martyrdom of Stephen, thefirst persecution of the church and the dispersion of the disciples, theconversion and the missionary work of Paul, with the circumstances ofhis arrest at Jerusalem, his journey as a prisoner to Rome, and a briefaccount of his residence in that city. In the first part of the bookPeter, the leader of the apostolic band, is the central figure; the lastpart is occupied with the life and work of Paul. 

Who is the writer? Irenæus, about 182, names Luke as the author of thebook, and speaks as though the fact were undisputed. He calls him "afollower and disciple of apostles, " and declares that "he wasinseparable from Paul and was his fellow-helper in the gospel. " This isthe earliest distinct reference to the book in any ancient Christianwriting. After this, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, andEusebius bear the same testimony. But these are late witnesses. Theearliest of them testified a hundred years after the death of Luke. Thedirect testimony to the existence of this book in the first two cenuriesis not, therefore, altogether satisfactory. The indirect testimony is, however, clear and strong. 

That the Acts was written by the author of the Third Gospel is scarcelydoubted by any critical scholar. The fact of the identity of authorshipis stated with the utmost explicitness in the introduction of the Acts. "The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesusbegan both to do and to teach" (Luke i. I, 2). The author of the Acts ofthe Apostles certainly intends to say that he is the writer of the ThirdGospel. If he is not the author of the Third Gospel he is an artful andshameless deceiver. But the whole atmosphere of the book forbids thetheory that it is a cunning imposition. And the internal evidence thatthe two books were written by the same author is ample and convincing. The style and the method of the treatment of the two books areunmistakably identical. Every page bears witness to the fact that theauthor of the Third Gospel and the author of the Acts are one and thesame person. Now we know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Gospelof Luke was written certainly as early as the year 80 A. D. And there isas good reason, as we have seen already, for accepting the ancient anduniversal tradition of the church that Luke was its author. If Lukewrote the two books, the date of both of them is carried back to thelast part of the first century. But the concluding portion of the Actsof the Apostles seems to fix the date of that book much more precisely. The author, after narrating Paul's journey to Rome, his arrival there, and his first unsatisfactory interview with the Jewish leaders, closeshis book with this compendious statement:--

"And he abode two whole years in his own hired dwelling, and receivedall that went in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teachingall things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, noneforbidding him. "

This is the last word in the New Testament history respecting theApostle Paul. Now it is evident that this writer was Paul's friend andtraveling companion. It is true that he keeps himself out of sight inthe history. We only know when he joined Paul by the fact that thenarrative changes from the third person singular to the first personplural; he ceases to say "he, " and begins to say "we. " Thus we are madeaware that he joined Paul at Troas on his second missionary journey, andwent with him as far as Philippi; rejoined him at the same place on histhird missionary tour, and accompanied him to Jerusalem; was his fellow-voyager on that memorable journey to Rome, and there abode with him fortwo years. The Epistle to the Colossians and the Epistle to Philemonwere written during this imprisonment at Rome, and in both of theseEpistles Paul speaks of the fact that Luke is near him. In the secondletter to Timothy, which is supposed to have been written during thesecond imprisonment at Rome, and near the close of his life, he saysagain, "Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him unto me, for heis useful to me for ministering. " If the common opinion concerning thedate of this letter is correct, then Luke must have remained with Paulat Rome until the close of his life. But the narrative in Luke does notgive any account of the closing years of Paul's life. It breaks offabruptly at the end of his two years' residence in Rome. Why is this?Evidently because there is no more to tell at this time. The writercontinues the history up to the date of his writing and stops there. Ifhe had been writing after the death of Paul, he would certainly havetold us of the circumstances of his death. There is no rationalexplanation of this abrupt ending, except that the book was written atabout the time when the story closes. This was certainly about 63 A. D. And if the Book of Acts was written as early as this, the Gospel ofLuke, the "former treatise" by the same author, must have been writtenearlier than this. Thus the Book of Acts not only furnishes strongevidence of its own early date, but helps to establish the early date ofthe third Gospel. 

These conclusions, to my own mind, are irresistible. No theory whichconsists with the common honesty of the writer can bring these booksdown to a later date. And I cannot doubt the honesty of the writer. Hiswritings prove him to be a careful, painstaking, veracious historian. Inmany slight matters this accuracy appears. The political structure ofthe Roman Empire at this time was somewhat complicated. The provinceswere divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those heads ofprovinces who were directly responsible to the Emperor and the militaryauthorities were called proprætors; those who were under thejurisdiction of the Senate were called proconsuls. In mentioning theseofficers Luke never makes a mistake; he gets the precise title everytime. Once, indeed, the critics thought they had caught him in an error. Sergius Paulus, the Roman ruler of Cyprus, he calls proconsul. "Wrong!"said the critics, "Cyprus was an imperial province; the title of thisofficer must have been proprætor. " But when the critics studied a littlemore, they found out that Augustus put this province back under theSenate, so that Luke's title is exactly right. And to clinch the matter, old coins of this very date have been found in Cyprus, giving to thechief magistrate of the island the title of proconsul. Such evidences ofthe accuracy of the writer are not wanting. It is needless to insistthat he never makes a mistake; doubtless he does, in some small matters, and we have learned to take such a view of the inspiration of theScriptures that the discovery of some small error does not trouble us inthe least; but the admission that he is not infallible is perfectlyconsistent with the belief that he is an honest, competent, faithfulwitness. This is all that he claims for himself, this is all that weclaim for him, but this we do claim. We do not believe that he was aconscienceless impostor. We do not believe that the man who told thestory of Ananias and Sapphira was himself a monumental liar. We believethat he meant to tell the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing butthe truth. Therefore, we believe that he lived in the times of theapostles, and received from them, as he says that he did, the facts thathe recorded in his Gospel; that he was the traveling companion andmissionary helper of Paul, as he intimates that he was, and that he hasgiven us a true account of the life and work of that great apostle. 

The constant and undesigned coincidences between the Acts of theApostles and the Epistles of Paul--the many ways in which the personaland historical references of the latter support the statements of theformer--are also strong evidence of the genuineness of the Acts. Puttingall these indirect and incidental proofs together the historical verityof the Acts seems to me very firmly established. That there are criticaldifficulties may be admitted; some passages of this ancient writing arenot easily explained; there are discrepancies, for example, between thestory of the resurrection and ascension of Christ as told in Luke andthe same story as related in the Acts; possibly the writer obtainedfuller information in the interval between the publication of these twobooks by which he corrected the earlier narrative. In the differentaccounts of the conversion of Paul there are also disagreements which wecannot reconcile; nevertheless, in the words of Dr. Donaldson, "Eventhese very accounts contain evidence in them that they were written bythe same writer, and they do not destroy the force of the rest of theevidence. " [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit. _, i. 124. ]

The theory of Baur that this book was written in the last part of thesecond century by a disciple of St. Paul, and that it is mainly a workof fiction, intended to bring about a reconciliation between twobitterly hostile parties in the church, the Pauline and the Petrinesects, need not detain us long. Baur contends that the church in thefirst two centuries was split in twain, the followers of Peter insistingthat no man could become a Christian without first becoming a Jew, thefollowers of Paul maintaining that the Jewish ritual was abolished, andthat the Gentiles ought to have immediate access to the Christianfellowship. Their antagonism was so radical and far-reaching that at theend of the apostolic age the two parties had no dealings with eachother. "Then, " in the words of Professor Fisher, who is here summarizingthe theory of Baur, "followed attempts to reconcile the difference, andto bridge the gulf that separated Gentile from Jewish, Pauline fromPetrine Christianity. To this end various irenical and compromisingbooks were written in the name of the apostles and their helpers. Themost important monument of this pacifying effort is the Book of Acts, written in the earlier part of the second century by a Pauline Christianwho, by making Paul something of a Judaizer, and then representing Peteras agreeing with him in the recognition of the rights of the Gentiles, hoped, not in vain, to produce a mutual friendliness between therespective partisans of the rival apostles. The Acts is a fictionfounded on facts, and written for a specific doctrinal purpose. Thenarrative of the council or conference of the Apostles, for example(Acts xx. ), is pronounced a pure invention of the writer, and such arepresentation of the condition of things as is inconsistent with Paul'sown statements, and for this and other reasons plainly false. The sameground is taken in respect to the conversion of Cornelius, and thevision of Peter concerning it. " [Footnote: _The Supernatural Origin ofChristianity, _ pp. 211, 212. ]

For this theory there is, of course, some slight historical basis. It istrue, as we have seen, that Peter and Paul did have a sharp disagreementon this very question at Antioch. It is also true that both these greatapostles behaved quite inconsistently, Peter at Antioch, and Paulafterwards at Jerusalem, when he consented to the propositions of theJudaizers, and burdened himself with certain Jewish observances in avain attempt to conciliate some of the weaker brethren. That the storyof the Acts unflinchingly shows us the weaknesses and errors of thegreat apostles is good evidence of its veracity. But the notion that itis a work of fiction fabricated for such purposes as are outlined aboveis utterly incredible. Those Epistles of Paul which Baur admits to begenuine contain abundant disproof of his theory. There never was anysuch schism as he fancies. Paul spends a good part of his time in hislast missionary journey in collecting funds for the relief of those poor"saints, " for so he calls them, at Jerusalem; and every reference thathe makes to them is of the most affectionate character. Paul recognizesin the most emphatic way the authority of the other apostles, and thefellowship of labor and suffering by which he is united to them. Allthis and much more of the same import we find in those epistles whichBaur admits to be the genuine writings of Paul. In short, it may be saidthat after the thorough discussion to which his theory has beensubjected for the last twenty-five years, it has scarcely a sound legleft to stand on. It may be admitted to be one of the most brilliantworks of the historical imagination which the century has produced. Itis supported by vast learning, and it has thrown much light on certainmovements of the early church; but, taken as a whole it is unscientificand contradictory; it raises two difficulties, where it disposes of one, and it ignores more facts than it includes. 

We return from this excursion through the fields of destructivecriticism with a strong conviction that this narrative of the Acts ofthe Apostles was written by Luke the Evangelist, the companion andfellow-worker of Paul, and that it gives us a veracious history of theearliest years of the Christian church. 

The last of the New Testament books does not belong chronologically atthe end of the collection. There was a tradition, to which Irenæus givescurrency, that it was written during the reign of Domitian, about 97 or98 A. D. But this tradition is now almost universally discredited. Critics of all classes date the book as early as 75-79 A. D. , while thebest authorities put it nearly ten years earlier, in the autumn of 68 orthe spring of 69. As Archdeacon Farrar suggests, it would be vastlybetter if these books of the New Testament were arranged in truechronological order; they could be more easily understood. The fact thatthis weird production stands at the end of the collection has made uponmany minds a wrong impression as to its meaning, and has given it a kindof significance to which it is not entitled. 

The authorship of the book is quite generally ascribed to John the sonof Zebedee, brother of James, and one of the apostles of our Lord. Eventhe destructive critics agree to this; some among them say that there isless doubt about the date and the authorship of this book than aboutalmost any other New Testament writing. In making this concession theyintend, however, to discredit the Johannine authorship of the FourthGospel. The more certain we are that John wrote the Revelation, theyargue, the more certain are we that he did not write the Gospel whichbears his name; for the style of the two writings is so glaringlycontrasted that it is simply impossible that both could have come fromthe same writer. This does not seem nearly so clear to me as it does tosome of these learned and perspicacious critics. A great contrast thereis, indeed, between the style of the Revelation and that of the Gospel;but this contrast may be explained. It is said, in the first place, thatthe Greek of the Apocalypse is very bad Greek, full of ungrammaticalsentences, abounding in Hebraisms, while that of the Gospel is goodGreek, accurate and rhetorical in its structure. But this is by no meansan unaccountable phenomenon. The first book was written by the apostlevery soon, probably, after his removal to Ephesus. He had never, Isuppose, been accustomed to use the Greek familiarly in his own country;had never written in it at all, and it is not strange that he shouldexpress himself awkwardly when he first began to write Greek; that theAramaic idioms should constantly reproduce themselves in his Greeksentences. After he had been living for twenty-five years in thecultivated Greek city of Ephesus, using the Greek language continually, it is probable that he would write it more elegantly. 

But it is said that the rhetorical style of the one book differsradically from that of the other. Doubtless. The one book is anapocalypse, the other is a biography. John may not have been a practiced_litterateur, _ but he certainly had literary sense and feelingenough to know how to put a very different color and atmosphere into anapocalyptical writing from that which he would employ in a report of thelife and words of Jesus. Without any reflection, indeed, he wouldinstinctively use the apocalyptic imagery; his pages would flare andresound with the lurid symbolism peculiar to the apocalypses. Howdefinite a type of literature this was we shall presently see; nowriter, while using it, would clearly manifest his own personality. Andif through all this disguise we do discern symptoms of a temper morefervid and a spirit more Judaic than that which finds expression in theFourth Gospel, let us remember that the ripened wisdom of the old manspeaks in the latter, and the intense enthusiasm of conscious strengthin the former. This John, let us not forget, was not in his youth aparagon of mildness; it was he and his brother James who earned thesobriquet of Boanerges, "Sons of thunder;" it was they who wanted tocall down fire from heaven to consume an inhospitable Samaritan village. Moreover, we shall see as we go on that the times in which thisapocalypse was written were times in which the mildest, mannered menwould be apt to forget their decorum, and speak with unwonted intensity. A man with any blood in him, who undertook to write in the year 68 ofthe themes with which the soul of this apostle was then on fire, wouldbe likely to show, no matter in what vehicle of speech his thought mightbe conveyed, some sign of the tumult then raging within him. 

All these circumstances, taken together, enable me to explain thedifference between the literary form of the Revelation and that of theGospel. But when we come to look a little more deeply into the meaningof the two books, we shall find that beneath all this dissimilaritythere are some remarkable points of agreement. Quite a number of theleading ideas and conceptions of the one book reappear in the other; theidea of Christ as the _Word_ or _Logos_ of God, the representationof Christ as the Lamb, as the Good Shepherd, as the Light, are peculiar toJohn; we find them emphasized in the Gospel and in the Revelation. Theunity of the two books in fundamental conceptions has been admirablybrought out by Dr. Sears, in his volume entitled "The Heart of Christ. "And after weighing the evidence, I find neither historical norpsychological reasons sufficient to overthrow my belief that the FourthGospel, as well as the Revelation, was written by John the Apostle. 

The Greek name of the book means an uncovering or unveiling, and isfairly interpreted, therefore, by our word Revelation. It belongs to aclass of books which were produced in great numbers during the twocenturies preceding the birth of Christ and the two centuries following;and no one can understand it or interpret it who does not know somethingof this species of literature, of the forms of expression peculiar toit, and of the purposes which it was intended to serve. 

We have in the Old Testament one Apocalyptic book, that of Daniel, andthere are apocalyptical elements in two or three of the prophecies. Thefact that the Book of Daniel bears this character is a strong argumentfor the lateness of its origin; for it was in the last years of theJewish nationality that this kind of writing became popular. We have sixor seven books of this kind, which are written mainly from thestandpoint of the old dispensation, part of which appeared just beforeand part shortly after the beginning of our era; and there are nearly adozen volumes of Christian apocalypses, all of which employ similarforms of expression, and are directed towards similar ends. Doubtlessthese are only a few of the great number of apocalyptical books whichthose ages produced. Their characteristics are well set forth by Dr. Davidson:--

"This branch of later Jewish literature took its rise after the olderprophecy had ceased, when Israel suffered sorely from Syrian and Romanoppression. Its object was to encourage and comfort the people byholding forth the speedy restoration of the Davidic Kingdom of Messiah. Attaching itself to the national hope, it proclaimed the impending of aglorious future, in which Israel freed from her enemies should enjoy apeaceful and prosperous life under her long-wished-for deliverer. Theold prophets became the vehicle of these utterances. Revelations, sketching the history of Israel and of heathenism, are put into theirmouths. The prophecies take the form of symbolical images and marvelousvisions. .. . Working in this fashion upon the basis of well-knownwritings, imitating their style, and artificially reproducing theirsubstance, the authors naturally adopted the anonymous. The difficultywas increased by their having to paint as future, events actually near, and to fit the manifestation of a personal Messiah into the history ofthe times. Many apocalyptists employed obscure symbols and mysteriouspictures, veiling the meaning that it might not be readily seen. [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit. _, i. 174. ]

"Every time, " says Dr. Harnack, "the political situation culminated in acrisis for the people of God, the apocalypses appeared stirring up thebelievers; in spirit, form, plan, and execution they closely resembledeach other. .. . They all spoke in riddles; that is, by means of images, symbols, mystic numbers, forms of animals, etc. , they half concealedwhat they meant to reveal. The reasons for this procedure are not far toseek: (1. ) Clearness and distinctness would have been too profane; onlythe mysterious appears divine. (2. ) It was often dangerous to be toodistinct. " [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit. _, xx. 496. ]

That these writings appeared in troublous times, and that they dealtwith affairs of the present and of the immediate future, must always beborne in mind. Certain symbolical conceptions are common to them;earthquakes denote revolutions; stars falling from heaven typify thedownfall of kings and dynasties; a beast is often the emblem of atyrant; the turning of the sun into darkness and the moon into bloodsignify carnage and destruction upon the earth. We have these symbolismsin several of the Old Testament writings as well as in many of theapocalyptical books which are not in our canon; and the interpretationof such passages is not at all difficult when we understand the usage ofthe writers. 

Of these apocalyptic books one of the most remarkable is the Book ofEnoch, which appears to have been written a century or two beforeChrist. It purports to be a revelation made to and through the patriarchEnoch; it contains an account of the fall of the angels, and of aprogeny of giants that sprung from the union of these exiled celestialswith the daughters of men; it takes Enoch on a tour of observationthrough heaven and earth under the guidance of angels, who explain tohim many things supernal and mundane; it deals in astronomical andmeteorological mysteries of various sorts, and in a series of symbolicalvisions seeks to disclose the events of the future. It is a grotesqueproduction; one does not find much spiritual nutriment in it, but Judemakes a quotation from it, in his epistle, as if he considered it HolyScripture. 

"The Fourth Book of Esdras" is another Jewish book of the same kind, which may have been written about the hundredth year of our era. Itpurports to be the work of Ezra, whom it misplaces, chronologically, putting him in the thirtieth year of the Captivity. The problem of thewriter is the restoration of the nation, destroyed and scattered by theRoman power. He makes the ancient scribe and law-giver of Israel hismouthpiece, but he is dealing with the events of his own time. Nevertheless, his allusions are veiled and obscure; he speaks inriddles, yet he speaks to a people who understand his riddles, and knowhow to take his symbolic visions. This book is in our English Apocrypha, under the title 2 Esdras. 

"The Book of Jubilees, " which assumes to be a revelation made to Moseson Mount Sinai, "The Ascension of Moses, " "The Apocalypse of Moses, " andthe "Apocalypse of Baruch, " are other similar books of the Jewishliterature. 

Of apocalyptical Christian writings, I may mention "The SibyllineBooks, " "The Apocalypse of Paul, " "The Apocalypse of Peter, " "TheRevelation of Bartholomew, " and "The Ascension of Isaiah, " and there isalso another "Apocalypse of John, " a feeble imitation of the one withwhich our canon closes. These books appeared in the second, third, andfourth centuries of our era; they generally look forward to the secondcoming of Christ, and set forth in various figures and symbols theconflicts and persecutions which his saints must encounter, thedestruction of his foes, and the establishment of his kingdom. 

It will be seen, therefore, that the Revelation of St. John is notunique; and the inference will not be rash that much light may be thrownupon its dark sayings by a careful study of kindred books. 

It may be answered that the writer of this book is inspired, and thatnothing can be learned of the meaning of an inspired book by studyinguninspired books. I reply that no inspired book can be understood at allwithout a careful study of uninspired books. The Greek grammar and theGreek lexicon are uninspired books, and no man can understand a singleone of the books of the New Testament without carefully studying both ofthem, or else availing himself of the labor of some one else who hasdiligently studied them. An inspired writer uses language, --the samelanguage that uninspired writers use; the meaning of language is fixednot by inspiration, but by usage; you must study the grammar and thelexicon to learn about the usage. And the case is precisely similar whenan inspired writer uses a peculiar form of literature like theapocalyptical writings. He knows when he uses symbolisms of this classthat they will be interpreted according to the common usage; he expectsand desires that they shall be so understood; and, therefore, in orderto understand them, we must know what the usage is. 

When our Lord, speaking of the calamities which were about to fall uponthe Jewish people, said, "Immediately after the tribulation of thosedays, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavensshall be shaken, " he was speaking to people who were perfectly familiarwith language of this sort, because the same expressions occur over andover again in their prophets, and are there distinctly declared to meangreat political overturnings. He used the apocalyptic phraseology, andhe expected them to give it the apocalyptic signification. If we wish tounderstand the Scripture, we must understand the language of Scripture, and this means not only the grammatical forms, but also the symbolicusages of the language. 

We have seen that the apocalypses are apt to appear in times of greatcalamity, and we have accepted the verdict of later scholarship, thatthis Apocalypse of St. John appeared about 68 or 69 A. D. Was this a timeof trouble in that Eastern world? Verily it was; the most appalling hourperhaps in the world's history. The unspeakable Nero was either stillupon the throne of the Roman Empire, or had just reeled from thateminence to the doom of a craven suicide. The last years of his lifewere gorged with horror. The murder of his brother, the burning of Rome, probably by his connivance, if not by his command, in order that hemight sate his appetite for sensations upon this horrid spectacle;following this the fiendish scheme to charge this incendiarism upon theChristians, and slaughter them by tens of thousands in all the cities ofthe Empire, --these are only instances of a career which words are toofeeble to portray. Those who succeeded him in this supreme power werenot much less ferocious; the very name of pity seemed to have beenblotted from the Roman speech; the whole Empire reeked with cruelty andperfidy. While such men ruled at Rome it could not be supposed that theimperial representatives in the provinces would be temperate and just. Some of them, at any rate, had learned the lesson of the hour, and wereas perfidious, as truculent, as base as their master could have wished. Such a one was that Gessius Floras who was the procurator of Judea, andwho seemed to have exhausted the ingenuity of a malignant nature instirring up the Jews to insurrection. By every species of indignity andcruelty he finally stung the long-suffering people into a perfect fury, and the rebellion which broke out in Palestine in the year 66 was one ofthe most fearful eruptions of human nature that the world has ever seen. Florus had raised the demon; now the legions of Rome must be called into exorcise it. It was a terrible struggle. All the energies of Jewishfanaticisms were enlisted; the Zealots, the fiercest party among them, not content with slaughtering their Roman enemies, turned their handsagainst every man of their own nation who ventured to question thewisdom of their desperate resistance. In Jerusalem itself a reign ofterror raged which makes the French Revolution seem in comparison a calmand orderly procedure. 

At the beginning of the outbreak Nero had sent one of his trustedgenerals, Vespasian, and Vespasian's son Titus, to put down theinsurrection. Neither of these soldiers was a sentimentalist; bothbelieved as heartily as did Wentworth in later years that the word ofthe hour was Thorough. They started with their armies from Antioch inMarch, 67, resolved on sweeping Palestine with the besom of destruction. Cities and villages, one by one, were besieged, captured, destroyed;men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The Jewisharmy fought every inch of the ground like tigers; but they wereoverpowered and beaten in detail, and steadily forced southward. Blackened walls, pools of blood, and putrefying corpses were all thatthe Romans left in their rear; ruthlessly they drove the doomed peoplebefore them toward their stronghold of Jerusalem. In the autumn of thatyear Vespasian withdrew his army into winter-quarters, and left theZealots in Jerusalem to their orgy of brigandage and butchery. He couldwell afford to rest and let them do his deadly work. 

In the spring of the following year, the siege of Jerusalem began. TheChristians of the city had fled to Pella, east of the Jordan; theremnant of the Jews held their sacred heights with the courage ofdespair. 

It is at this very juncture that this book of the Revelation waswritten. John testifies that it was written on Patmos, a desolate isletof the Ægean Sea, west of Asia Minor, to which he had either beenbanished by some tool of Nero, or else had betaken himself for solitudeand reflection. To him, in this retreat, the awful tidings had come ofthe scourge that had fallen on the land of his fathers; added to this, the conflagration at Rome, the Neronian persecution, all the horrors ofthe past decade were fresh in his memory. May we not say that the timewas ripe for an apocalyptic message?

It is in these events, then, that we must find the explanation of muchof this symbolical language. Such is the law of the apocalypse, and thisapocalypse may be expected to conform to the law. St. John is instructedby the angel to write "the things which thou sawest, and the thingswhich are, and the things which shall come to pass hereafter, "--"thethings which must _shortly_ come to pass, " the first verse moreexplicitly states. It is the past which he has seen, the present, andthe immediate future with which his visions are concerned. It is not anyattempt to outline the whole course of human history; it is the picture, in mystic symbols, of the present crisis and of the deliverance which isto follow it. There is no room here for a commentary on the Apocalypse;I will only indicate, in a rapid glance, the outline of the book. 

The first three chapters are occupied with the epistles to the sevenchurches which are in Asia, administering reproof, exhortation, comfort, and counsel to the Christians in these churches, --faithful, stirring, persuasive appeals, whose meaning can be easily understood, and whosetruth is often sorely needed by the churches of our own time. 

Then begins the proper Apocalypse, with the first vision of the thronein heaven, and sitting thereon the Lamb that was slain, who is also theLion of the tribe of Judah. The book sealed with seven seals is given tohim to open, and the opening of each seal discloses a new vision. Thefirst seal opened shows a white horse bearing a rider who carries a bowand wears a crown, and who goes forth conquering and to conquer. This isthe emblem of the Messiah whose conquest of the world is represented asbeginning. But the Messiah once said, "I came not to bring peace, but asword, " and the consequences of his coming must often be strife andsorrow because of the malignity of men. And therefore the three sealswhich are opened next disclose a fiery horse, the symbol of War, a blackhorse, whose rider is Famine, a pale horse in whose saddle is Death. Theopening of the fifth seal shows the martyred multitude before the throneof God. The sixth discloses the desolation and the ruin taking placeupon the earth. Thus the mighty panorama passes constantly before oureyes; the confusion, the devastation, the woes, the scourges of mankindthrough which Messiah's Kingdom is advancing to its triumph. The seals, the trumpets, the vials bring before us representations of theretributions and calamities which are falling upon mankind. Sometimes weseem to be able to fix upon a historical event which the vision clearlysymbolizes; sometimes the meaning to us is vague; perhaps if we hadlived in that day the allusion would have been more intelligible. 

There is, however, one great central group of these visions round aboutwhich the others seem to be arrayed as scenic accessories, whoseinterpretation the writer has taken great pains to indicate. These arethe visions found in chapters xii. , xiii. , xvi. , and xvii. The woman, sun-clad, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars uponher head (chap, xii. ), is beyond all question the ancient Jewish church;the child which is born to the woman is the Christian church; the greatred dragon that seeks to devour the child is the Satanic power, thePrince of this world. The Dragon is here on the earth because he hasbeen expelled from heaven. The war of the Dragon against the womanindicates the persecutions of the church; the flight of the woman to thewilderness may symbolize the recent escape of the mother church fromJerusalem to Pella. 

The next vision shows a Beast, coming up out of the sea, with sevenheads and ten horns, and on his horns ten diadems, and on his headsnames of blasphemy. Here we have an instance of that confounding ofsymbols, the merging of one in another, which is very common in theapocalyptic writings. The beast is, primarily, Nero, or the RomanEmpire, as represented by--Nero. The ten horns are the ten chiefprovinces; the seven heads are seven emperors. "It is a symbol, " saysDr. Farrar, "interchangeably of the Roman Empire and of the Emperor. Infact, to a greater degree than at any period of history, the two wereone. Roman history had dwindled down into a personal drama. The RomanEmperor could say with literal truth, _'L'Etat c'est moi'_. And awild beast was a Jew's natural symbol either for a Pagan Kingdom or forits autocrat. " [Footnote: _The Early Days of Christianity_, p. 463. ] I can do no better than to repeat to you a small part of Dr. Farrar's further comment upon this vision. 

"This wild beast of Heathen Rome has ten horns, which represent the tenmain provinces of Imperial Rome. It has the power of the Dragon, thatis, it possesses the Satanic dominion of the 'Prince of the power of theair. '

"On each of its heads is the name of blasphemy. Every one of the sevenKings, however counted, had borne the (to Jewish ears) blasphemoussurname of Augustus (Sebastos, one to be adored); had receivedapotheosis, and been spoken of as _Divine_ after his death; hadbeen crowned with statues, adorned with divine attributes, had beensaluted with divine titles, and, in some instances, had been absolutelyworshiped, and that in his lifetime. .. . 

"The diadems are on the horns, because the Roman _Proconsuls_, asdelegates of the Emperor, enjoy no little share of the Cæsareanautocracy and splendor, but the name of blasphemy is only on the heads, because the Emperor alone receives divine honors and alone bears thedaring title of Augustus. " [Footnote: _Ibid_. , p. 464. ]

One of the heads of this Beast was wounded to death, but the deadlywound was healed. It was the universal belief among Pagans andChristians that the world had not yet seen the last of Nero. Either hissuicide was feigned and ineffectual, and he was in hiding, or else hewould come to life and resume his savage splendors and his gildedvillainies. To make it certain that the writer here refers to thisexpectation, we find, in chapter xvii. , another reference to the Beast, which seems at first a riddle, but which is easily interpreted. "Thefive are fallen, the one is, the other is not yet come"; "The Beast thatthou sawest was and is not, and is about to come out of the abyss. " "TheBeast that was and is not, even he is an eighth, and is of the seven. "The head and the Beast are here identified. The meaning is that fiveRoman Emperors are dead, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero;"one is, "--Galba is now reigning; "the other" (Otho) "is not yet come;"but he must come soon for Galba is an old man and cannot long survive, and "the Beast that was and is not, "--Nero, --who is "about to come outof the abyss, "--to return to life, --"even he is an eighth, and is ofthe seven. " He is one of the seven, for he was the fifth, and he will bethe eighth. It was the universal Christian belief that Nero, raised fromthe dead, would be the future Antichrist, and it is this belief whichthe vision reflects. To make the case still clearer the writer gives us, by the current Hebrew Kabbalistic method, the number of the Beast, thatis to say, the numerical value of his name. Each letter of the oldalphabets has a numerical value. Thus the writer of the Sibyllinespoints out the Greek name of Jesus--Ιησους, --by saying that its wholenumber is equivalent to eight units, eight tens, and eight hundreds. This is the exact numerical value of the six Greek letters composingthe Saviour's name, 10+8+200+70+400+200=888. Precisely so John heretells us what is the numerical value of the letters in the name ofthe Beast. If we tried the Latin or the Greek names of Nero the cluewould not be found; but John was writing mainly for Hebrews, and theHebrew letters of _Kesar Neron_, the name by which every Jew knewthis Emperor, amount to exactly 666. 

Many other of the features of this veiled description tally perfectlywith the character of this infamous ruler; and when the evidence is allbrought together it seems as though the apostle could scarcely have madehis meaning more obvious if he had written Nero's name in capitalletters. 

This is the central vision of the Apocalypse, as I have said; roundabout this the whole cyclorama revolves; and it has been the standingenigma of the interpreters in all the ages. The early church generallydivined its meaning; but in later years the high-soaring exegesis whichhas spread this Apocalypse all over the centuries and found in itprophetic symbols of almost all the events that have happened inmediæval and modern history, has identified the Beast with countlesscharacters, among them Genseric, King of the Vandals, Benedict, Trajan, Paul V. , Calvin, Luther, Mohammed, Napoleon. All this wild guessingarises from ignorance of the essential character and purpose of theapocalyptical writings. 

I can follow this enticing theme no further. Let it suffice to call theattention of all who desire to reach some sober conclusions upon themeaning of the book to Archdeacon Farrar's "Early Days of Christianity, "in which the whole subject is treated with the amplest learning and thesoundest literary judgment. 

The Book of Revelation has been, as I have intimated, the favoritetramping ground of all the hosts of theological visionaries; men whopossessed not the slightest knowledge of the history or the nature ofapocalyptic literature, and whose appetite for the mysterious and themonstrous was insatiable, have expatiated here with boundless license. To find in these visions descriptions of events now passing andcharacters now upon the stage is a sore temptation. To use these hardwords, the Beast, the Dragon, the False Prophet, as missiles wherewithto assail those who belong to a school or a party with which you are atvariance, is a chance that no properly constituted partisan couldwillingly fore-go. Thus we have seen this book dragged into thecontroversies and applied to the events of all the centuries, and thehistory of its interpretation is, as one of its interpreters confesses, the opprobrium of exegesis. But if one ceases to look among thesesymbols for a predictive outline of modern history, "a sort ofanticipated Gibbon, " and begins to read it in the light of theapocalyptic method, it may have rich and large meanings for him. He willnot be able, indeed, to explain it all; to some of these riddles theclue has been lost; but, in the words of Dr. Farrar, "he will find thatthe Apocalypse is what it professes to be, --an inspired outline ofcontemporary history, and of the events to which the sixth decade of thefirst century gave immediate rise. He will read in it the tremendousmanifesto of a Christian seer against the blood-stained triumph ofimperial heathenism; a pæan and a prophecy over the ashes of themartyrs; the thundering reverberations of a mighty spirit struck by thefierce plectrum of the Neronian persecution, and answering inimpassioned music which, like many of David's Psalms, dies away into thelanguage of rapturous hope. " [Footnote: _Early Days of Christianity_, p. 429. ]

For we must not forget that this is a song of triumph. This seer is nopessimist. The strife is hot, the carnage is fearful, they that rise upagainst our Lord and his Messiah are many and mighty, but there is nomisgiving as to the event. For all these woes there is solace, after allthese conflicts peace. Even in the midst of the raging wars andpersecutions, the door is opened now and again into the upper realm ofendless joy and unfading light. And he "whose name is called The Word ofGod, " upon whose garment and whose thigh the name is written, "King ofKings and Lord of Lords, " will prevail at last over all his foes. TheBeast and the Dragon, and the False Prophet and the Scarlet Woman (theharlot city upon her seven hills whose mystic name is Babylon) will allbe cast into the lake of fire; then to the purified earth the NewJerusalem shall come down out of heaven from God. This is the emblem andthe prophecy, not of the city beyond the stars, but of the purifiedsociety which shall yet exist upon the earth, --the fruition of his workwho came, not to judge the world, but to save the world. It is on theseplains, along these rivers, by these fair shores that the New Jerusalemis to stand; it is not heaven; it is a city that comes down out ofheaven from God. No statement could be more explicit. The gloriousvisions which fill the last chapters of this wonderful book are thepromise of that "All hail Hereafter, " for which every Christian patriot, every lover of mankind, is always looking and longing and fighting andwaiting. And he who, by the mouth of this seer, testifieth the wordsof the prophecy of this book saith, "Yea, I come quickly. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. "

CHAPTER XI. 

THE CANON. 

We have studied with what care we were able tee historical problem ofthe origin and authorship of the several books of the Old and NewTestament; we now come to a deeply interesting question, --the questionof the canon. 

This word, as used in this connection, means simply an authoritativelist or catalogue. The canon of the Bible is the determined and officialtable of contents. The settlement of the canon is the process ofdetermining what and how many books the Bible shall contain. In the OldTestament are thirty-nine books, in the New Testament twenty-seven; andit is a fixed principle with Protestants that these books and no othersconstitute the Sacred Scriptures, --that no more can be added and nonetaken away. 

The popular belief respecting this matter has been largely founded uponthe words with which the Book of Revelation concludes:--

"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy ofthis book, If any man shall add unto them, God shall add unto him theplagues which are written in this book: and if any man shall take awayfrom the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away hispart from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are writtenin this book. "

The common notion is that the "book" here referred to is the Bible; andthat these sentences, therefore, are the divine authorization of thepresent contents of the Bible, a solemn testimony from the Lord himselfto the integrity of the canon. But this is a misapprehension. The bookreferred to is the Revelation of St. John, --not the Bible, not even theNew Testament. When these words were written, says Dr. Barnes in his"Commentary, " "the books that now constitute what we call the Bible werenot collected into a single volume. That passage, therefore, should notbe adduced as referring to the whole of the Sacred Scriptures. " In fact, when these words of the Revelation were written, several of the books ofthe New Testament were not yet in existence; for this is by no means thelast of the New Testament writings, though it stands at the end of thecollection. The Gospel and the Epistles of John were added after this;and we may trust that no plagues were "added" to the beloved disciplefor writing them. 

Nevertheless, as I said, it is assumed that the contents of the Bibleare fixed; that the collection is and for a long time has been completeand perfect; that it admits neither of subtractions nor of additions;that nothing is in the book which ought not to be there, and that thereis nothing outside of its covers which ought to be within them; that thecanon is settled, inflexibly and infallibly and finally. 

The questions now to be considered are these: Who settled it? When wasit settled? On what grounds was it determined? Was any question everraised concerning the sacredness or authority of any of the books nowincluded in the canon? Did any other books, not now included in thecanon, ever claim a place in it? If so, why were these rejected andthose retained?

This is, as will be seen, a simple question of history. We can tracewith tolerable certainty the steps by which this collection of sacredwritings was made; we know pretty well who did it, and when and how itwas done. And there is nothing profane or irreverent in this inquiry, for the work of collecting these writings and fixing this canon has beendone mainly, if not wholly, by men who were not inspired and did notclaim to be. There is nothing mysterious or miraculous about theirdoings any more than there is about the acts of the framers of theWestminster Confession, or the American Constitution. They were dealingwith sacred matters, no doubt, when they were trying to determine whatbooks should be received and used as Scriptures, but they were dealingwith them in exactly the same way that we do, by using the best lightsthey had. 

As we have learned in previous chapters, the beginning of our canon wasmade by Ezra the scribe, who, in the fifth century before Christ, newlypublished and consecrated the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, as theHoly Book of the Jewish people. 

After Ezra came Nehemiah, to whom the beginning of the second collectionof Jewish Scriptures, called the Prophets, is ascribed in one of theapocryphal books. But this collection was not apparently finished andclosed by Nehemiah. The histories of Joshua and Judges, of Samuel andKings, and the principal books of the Prophets were undoubtedly gatheredby him; but it would seem that the collection was left open for futureprophecies. 

About the same time the third group of the Old Testament Scriptures, "The Hagiographa, " or "Writings, " began to be collected. No book of theBible contains any information concerning the making of these two latercollections, the Prophets and the Hagiographa; and we are obliged torely wholly upon Jewish tradition, and upon references which we find inJewish writers. Professor Westcott, who is one of the most conservativeof Biblical scholars, says that "the combined evidence of tradition andof the general course of Jewish history leads to the conclusion that thecanon in its present shape was formed gradually during a lengthenedinterval, beginning with Ezra and extending through a part, or even thewhole of the Persian period, " or from B. C. 458 to 332. Without adoptingthis conclusion, we may remark that this last date, 332, was nearly acentury after Nehemiah and Malachi, the last of the prophets; so that ifthe canon was closed at a date so late as this, it must have been closedby men who were certainly not known to have been inspired. If it wasforming, through all this period, then it must have been formed in partby men in behalf of whom no claim of inspiration has ever been set up. 

According to Jewish tradition the work of collecting, editing, andauthorizing the sacred writings was done by a certain "Great Synagogue, "founded by Ezra, presided over by Nehemiah, after him, and continuing inexistence down to about the year 200 B. C. This is wholly a tradition, and has been proved to be baseless. There never was such a synagogue;the Scriptures know nothing about it; the apocryphal writers, sonumerous and widely dispersed, have never heard of it; Philo andJosephus are ignorant concerning it. None of the Jewish authors of theperiod who freely discuss the Scriptures and their authority makesmention of this Great Synagogue. The story of its existence is firstheard from some Jewish rabbin hundreds of years after Christ. 

We have proof enough in the New Testament that the Jews had certainSacred Scriptures; the New Testament writers often quote them and referto them; but there is no conclusive proof that they had been gathered atthis time into a complete collection. Jesus tells the Jews that theysearch the Scriptures, but he does not say how many of these Scripturesthere were in his day; Paul reminds Timothy that from a child he hadknown the Holy Scriptures, but he gives no list of their titles. If wefound all the books of the Old Testament quoted or referred to by theNew Testament writers, then we should know that they possessed the samebooks that we have. Most of these books are thus referred to; but thereare seven Old Testament books whose names the New Testament neverquotes, and at least five to which it makes no reference whatever:Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah. To Judges, Chronicles, and Ezekiel it refers only in the same way that it refers toa number of the apocryphal books. Some of these omissions appear to besignificant. The New Testament gives us therefore no definiteinformation by which we can determine whether the Old Testament canonwas closed at the time of Christ, nor does it tell us of what books itwas composed. 

We have seen already that two different collections of Old Testamentwritings were in existence, one in Hebrew, and the other a translationinto the Greek, made by Jews in Alexandria, and called the Septuagint. The latter collection was the one most used by our Lord and theapostles; much the greater number of quotations from the Old Testamentfound in the Gospels and the Epistles are taken from the Septuagint. This Greek Bible contained quite a number of books which are not in theHebrew Bible: they were later in their origin than any of the OldTestament books; most of them were originally written in Greek; andwhile they were regarded by some of the more conservative of the Jews inEgypt as inferior to the Law and the Prophets, they were generallyranked with the books of the Hagiographa as sacred writings. This isevident from the fact that they were mingled indiscriminately with thesebooks of the older Scriptures. You know that I am speaking now of theapocryphal books which you find in some of your old Bibles, between theOld and New Testaments. These were the later books contained in theSeptuagint, and not in the Hebrew Bible. But they were not sorted out bythemselves in the Septuagint; they were interspersed through the otherbooks, as of equal value. Thus in the Vatican Bible, of which we shalllearn more by and by, Esdras First and Second succeed the Chronicles;Tobit and Judith are between Nehemiah and Esther; the Wisdom of Solomonand Sirach follow Solomon's Song; Baruch is next to Jeremiah; Daniel isfollowed by Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, and the collection closeswith the three books of Maccabees. 

All the old manuscripts of the Bible which we possess--those which areregarded as above all others sacred and authoritative--contain theseapocryphal writings thus intermingled with the books of our own canon. It is clear, therefore, that to the Alexandrian Jews these later bookswere Sacred Scriptures; and it is certain also that our Lord and hisapostles used the collection which contained these books. It is saidthat they do not refer to them, and it is true that they do not mentionthem by name; but they do use them occasionally. Let me read you a fewpassages which will illustrate their familiarity with the apocryphalbooks. 

James i. 19: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak. " Sirach v. 11; iv. 29: "Be swift to hear. " "Be not hasty in thy tongue. "

Hebrews i. 3: "Who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very imageof his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power. "Wisdom vii. 26: "For she (Wisdom) is the brightness of the everlastinglight, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of hisgoodness. "

Rom. Ix. 21: "Hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the samelump to make one part a vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?"Wisdom xv. 7: "For the potter, tempering soft earth, fashioneth everyvessel with much labor for our service; yea, of the same clay he makethboth the vessels that serve for clean uses, and likewise also such asserve to the contrary: but what is the use of either sort, the potterhimself is the judge. "

I Cor. Ii. 10, 11: "The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deepthings of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save thespirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God noneknoweth save the Spirit of God. " Judith viii. 14: "For ye cannot findthe depth of the heart of man, neither can ye perceive the things thathe thinketh: then how can ye search out God, that hath made all thesethings, and know his mind, or comprehend his purpose?"

Several similar indications of the familiarity of the New Testamentwriters with these apocryphal books might be pointed out. These are notexpress citations, but they are clear appropriations of the thought andthe language of the apocryphal writers. We have, then, the mostindubitable proof that the apocryphal books were in the hands of the NewTestament writers; and so far as New Testament use authenticates an OldTestament writing, several of the apocryphal books stand on much betterfooting than do five of our Old Testament books. 

It is true that the Hebrew or Palestinian canon differed from the Greekor Alexandrian canon; the books which were written in Greek had neverbeen translated into the Hebrew, and could not, of course, beincorporated into the Hebrew canon; and there was undoubtedly a strongfeeling among the stricter Jews against recognizing any of these laterbooks as Sacred Scriptures; nevertheless, the Greek Bible, with all itsadditions, had large currency among the Jews even in Palestine, and theassertion that our Lord and his apostles measured the Alexandrian Bibleby the Palestinian canon, and accepted all the books of the latter whiledeclining to recognize any of the additions of the former, is sheerassumption, for which there is not a particle of evidence, and againstwhich the facts already adduced bear convincingly. Paul, in his letterto Timothy, refers to the "Scriptures" as having been in the hands ofTimothy from his childhood; and we have every reason to believe that theScriptures to which he refers was this Greek collection containing theApocrypha. Whatever Paul says about the inspiration of the Scripturesmust be interpreted with this fact in mind. To find in these words ofPaul the guarantee of the inspiration and infallibility of the books ofthe collection which are translated from the Hebrew, and not those whichare written in Greek, is a freak of exegesis not more violent thanfantastic. We know that Paul read and used some of these apocryphalbooks, and there are several of the books in our Hebrew Bible that henever quotes or refers to in the remotest way. The attempt which isoften made to show that the New Testament writers have established, bytheir testimony, the Old Testament canon, as containing just those bookswhich are in our Old Testament, and no more, is a most unwarrantabledistortion of the facts. 

It is true that at the time of Christ the Palestinian Jews had not, fora century or so, added any new books to their collection, and were notinclined to add any more. Their canon was practically closed to thisextent, that no new books were likely to get in. But it was not yetsettled that some later books, which had been trying to maintain afooting in the canon, should not be put out. Esther, Ecclesiastes, andSolomon's Song were regarded by some of the Palestinian Jews as sacredbooks, but their right to this distinction was hotly disputed by others. This question was not settled at the time of our Lord. 

"The canon, " says Davidson, "was not considered to be closed in thefirst century before and the first after Christ. There were doubts aboutsome portions. The Book of Ezekiel gave offense, because some of itsstatements seemed to contradict the Law. Doubts about some of the otherswere of a more serious nature--about Ecclesiastes, the Canticles, Esther, and the Proverbs. The first was impugned because it hadcontradictory passages and a heretical tendency; the second because ofits worldly and sensual tone; Esther for its want of religiousness; andProverbs on account of inconsistencies. This skepticism went far toprocure the exclusion of the suspected works from the canon and theirrelegation to the class of the _genuzim_. But it did not prevail. Hananiah, son of Hezekiah, son of Garon, about 32 B. C. , is said to havereconciled the contradictions and allayed the doubts. But these tracesof resistance to the fixity of the canon were not the last. Theyreappeared about 65 A. D. , as we learn from the Talmud, when thecontroversy turned mainly upon the canonicity of Ecclesiastes, which theschool of Schammai, which had the majority, opposed; so that that bookwas probably excluded. The question emerged again at a later synod inJabneh or Jamnia, when R. Eleaser ben Asaria was chosen patriarch, andGamaliel the Second, deposed. Here it was decided, not unanimously, however, but by a majority of Hillelites, that Ecclesiastes and the Songof Songs 'pollute the hands, ' _i. E. _, belong properly to theHagiographa. This was about 90 A. D. Thus the question of the canonicityof certain books was discussed by two synods. " [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit_. , v. 3. ]

By such a plain tale do we put down the fiction, so widely disseminated, that the canon of the Old Testament was "fixed" long before the time ofChrist, and, presumably, by inspired men. It was not "fixed, " even inPalestine, until sixty years after our Lord's death; several of thebooks were in dispute during the whole apostolic period, and these arethe very books which are not referred to in the New Testament. Whetherthe men who finally "fixed" it were exceptionally qualified to judge ofthe ethical and spiritual values of the writings in question may bedoubted. They were the kind of men who slew our Lord and persecuted hisfollowers. When we are asked what are our historical reasons forbelieving that Esther and Ecclesiastes and Solomon's Song are sacredbooks and ought to be in the Old Testament canon, let us answer: It isnot because any prophet or inspired person adjudged them to be sacred, for no such person had anything to say about them; it is not because ourLord and his apostles indorsed them, for they do not even mention them;it is not because they held a place in a collection of Sacred Scripturesused by our Lord and his apostles, for their position in that collectionwas in dispute at that time; it is because the chief priests and scribeswho rejected Christ pronounced them sacred. The external authority forthese books reduces to exactly this. Those who insist that all parts ofthe Old Testament are of equal value and authority, and that aquestioning of the sacredness of one book casts doubts upon the wholecollection, ought to look these facts in the face and see on what aslender thread they suspend the Bible which they so highly value. Theselater books, says one, "have been delivered to us; they have their useand value, which is to be ascertained by a frank and reverent study ofthe texts themselves; but those who insist on placing them on the samefooting of undisputed authority with the Law, the Prophets, and thePsalms, to which our Lord bears direct testimony, and so make the wholedoctrine of the canon depend on its weakest part, sacrifice the truestrength of the evidence on which the Old Testament is received byChristians. " [Footnote: _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, p. 175. ]

Such, then, is the statement with respect to the Old Testament canon inthe apostolic age. The Palestinian canon, which was identical with ourOld Testament, was practically settled at the synod of Jamnia about 90A. D. , though doubts were still entertained by devout Jews concerningEsther. The Alexandrian collection, containing our apocryphal books, was, however, widely circulated; and as it was the Greek version whichhad been most used by the apostles, so it was the Greek version whichthe early Christian fathers universally studied and quoted. Very few ifany of these Christian fathers of the first two centuries understood theHebrew; they could not, therefore, use the Palestinian manuscripts; theGreek Bible was their only treasury of inspired truth, and the GreekBible contained the Apocrypha. Accordingly we find them quoting freelyas Sacred Scripture all the apocryphal books. Westcott gives us a table, in Smith's "Bible Dictionary, " of citations made from these apocryphalbooks by fifteen of the Greek fathers, beginning with Clement of Romeand ending with Chrysostom, and by eight Latin writers, beginning withTertullian and ending with Augustine. Every one of these apocryphalbooks is thus quoted with some such formula as "The Scripture saith, " or"It is written, " by one or more of these writers; the Book of Wisdom isquoted by all of them except Polycarp and Cyril; Baruch and theAdditions to Daniel are quoted by the great majority of them; Origenquotes them all, Clement of Alexandria all but one, Cyprian all but two. It will therefore be seen that these books must have had wide acceptanceas Sacred Scriptures during the first centuries of the Christian church. In the face of these facts, which may be found in sources asunassailable as Smith's "Bible Dictionary, " we have such statements asthe following, put forth by teachers of the people, and indorsed byeminent theological professors:--

"We may say of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament that, whilesome who were not Jews and who were unacquainted with Hebrew used themto some extent, yet they never gained wide acceptance, and soon droppedout altogether. "

"Certain apocryphal writings have since been bound up with theSeptuagint, but _there is no reason to think that they made any partof it in the days of our Saviour_"!

"These books were not received as canonical by the Christian fathers, but were expressly declared to be apocryphal"!

The last statements are copied from a volume on the Bible, prepared forpopular circulation by the president of a theological seminary!

It is true that some of the most inquisitive and critical of theChristian fathers entertained doubts about these apocryphal books;Melito of Sardis traveled to Palestine on purpose to inquire into thematter, and came back, of course, with the Palestinian canon to which, however, he did not adhere. Origen made a similar investigation, andseems to have been convinced that the later books ought to be regardedas uncanonical; nevertheless, he keeps on quoting them; Jerome was thefirst strenuously to challenge the canonicity of these later Greek booksand to maintain a tolerably consistent opposition to them. While, therefore, several of these early fathers were led by theirinvestigations in Palestine to believe that the narrower canon was themore correct one, their opinions had but little weight with the peopleat large; and even these fathers themselves freely and constantly quotedas Sacred Scripture the questionable writings. 

In 393 the African bishops held a council at Hippo, in which the canonwas discussed. The list agreed upon includes all the Old TestamentScriptures of our canon, and, in addition to them, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees. In 397another council at Carthage reaffirmed the list of its predecessor. Augustine was the leader of both councils. 

In spite of the protests of Jerome and of other scholars in all thecenturies, this list, for substance, was regarded as authoritative, until the Council of Trent, in 1546, when the long debate was finallysettled, so far as the Roman Catholic Church is concerned, by theadoption of the Augustinian canon, embracing the apocryphal books, thelist concluding with the following anathema. "If any one will notreceive as sacred and authoritative the whole books with all theirparts, let him be accursed. " This determines the matter for all goodCatholics. Since 1546, they have known exactly how many books theirBible contains. And if usage and tradition are and ought to beauthoritative, they have the strongest reasons for receiving as sacredthe books of their Bible; for it is beyond question that the books whichthey accept and which we reject have been received and used as SacredScriptures in all the ages of the church. Most of us who do not acceptusage and tradition as authoritative will continue, no doubt, to thinkour own thoughts about the matter. 

The Council of Trent marks the definite separation of the Roman CatholicChurch from the Protestant reformers. Up to this time there had beenamong the reformers some differences of opinion respecting the OldTestament books; when they were excluded from the Holy Church and werecompelled to fall back upon the authority of the Bible, the presentlimits of the canon at once became an important question. They did notsettle it all at once. Luther, in making his German version of theBible, translated Judith, Wisdom, Tobit, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2Maccabees, the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, with the Prayer ofManasseh. Each of these books he prefaces with comments of his own. First Maccabees he regards as almost equal to the other books of HolyScripture, and not unworthy to be reckoned among them. He had doubtedlong whether Wisdom should not be admitted to the canon, and he trulysays of Sirach that it is a right good book, the work of a wise man. Baruch and 2 Maccabees he finds fault with; but of none of theseapocryphal books does he speak so severely as of Esther, which he ismore than willing to cast out of the canon. The fact that Luthertranslated these apocryphal books is good evidence that he thought themof value to the church; nevertheless, he considered the books of theHebrew canon, with the exception of Esther, as occupying a higher planethan those of the Apocrypha. Gradually this opinion gained acceptanceamong the Protestants; the apocryphal books were separated from therest, and although by some of the Reformed churches, as by the Anglicanchurch, they were commended to be read "for example of life andinstruction of manners, " they ceased to be regarded as authoritativesources of Christian doctrine. Since the sixteenth century, there hasbeen little question among Protestants as to the extent of the canon. The books which now compose our Old Testament, and no others, have beenfound in the Bible of the Protestants for the past three hundred years. The apocryphal books have sometimes been printed between the Old and theNew Testaments, but they have not been used in the churches, [Footnote:The English Church uses some portions of them. ] nor have they beenregarded as part of the Sacred Scripture. 

The history of the New Testament canon is much less obscure, and may bemore briefly treated. The Bible of the early Christians was the OldTestament. They relied wholly upon this for religious instruction; theyhad no thought of any other Sacred Scripture. 

I have explained in a former chapter how the Epistles and the Gospelsoriginated; but when these writings first came into the hands of thedisciples there was not, it is probable, any conception in their mindsthat these were sacred writings, to be ranked along with the books ofthe Old Testament. They read them for instruction and suggestion; theydid not at first think of them as holy. But their conviction of thevalue and sacredness of these writings soon began to strengthen; we findthem quoting Gospels and Epistles with the same formula that they applyto the Old Testament books; and thus they began to feel the need ofmaking a collection of this apostolic literature for use in thechurches. It is not until the second half of the second century that anysuch collection comes into view. It consisted at first of two parts, TheGospel and The Apostle; the first part contained the four Gospels, andthe second the Acts, thirteen Epistles of Paul, one of Peter, one ofJohn, and the Revelation. It will be seen that this twofold Testamentomitted several of our books, --the Epistle to the Hebrews, two ofJohn's Epistles, one of Peter's, and the Epistles of James and Jude. 

About this time there was also in circulation certain writings which arenot now in our canon, but which were sometimes included by theauthorities of that time among the apostolic writings, and were quotedas Scripture by the early fathers. There was a book called "The Gospelaccording to the Egyptians, " and another entitled "The Preaching ofPeter, " and another called "The Acts of Paul, " and another called "TheShepherd of Hermas, " and an epistle attributed to Barnabas, and severalothers, all claiming to be sacred and apostolic writings. It became, therefore, a delicate and important question for these early Christiansto decide which of these writings were sacred, and which were not; andthey began to make lists of those which they regarded as canonical. Theearliest of these lists is a fragmentary anonymous canon, which was madeabout 170. It mentions all the books in our New Testament but four, --Hebrews, First and Second Peter, and James. 

Irenæus, who died about 200, had a canon which included all the books ofour New Testament except Hebrews, Jude, James, Second Peter, and ThirdJohn. First Peter, Second John, and "The Shepherd of Hermas" he put bythemselves in a second class of writings, which he thought excellent butnot inspired. 

Clement of Alexandria (180) puts into his list most of our canonicalbooks, but regards several of them as of inferior value, among themHebrews, Second John, and Jude. In the same list of inferior writings heincludes "The Shepherd of Hermas, " the "Epistle of Barnabas, " and the"Apocalypse of Peter. "

Tertullian (200) omits entirely James, Second Peter, and Third John, butincludes among useful though not inspired books, Hebrews, Jude, "TheShepherd of Hermas, " Second John, and Second Peter. 

These are the greatest authorities of the first two centuries. NoChristian teachers of that day were better informed or more trustworthythan these, and it will be seen that they were far from agreeing withone another or with our canon; that each one of them received as sacredsome books which we do not possess, and rejected some which we receive. 

Coming down into the third century, we find Origen (250), one of thegreat scholars, wrestling with the problem. He seems to have made threeclasses of the New Testament writings, the authentic, the non-authentic, and the doubtful. The authentic books are the Gospels, the Acts, thethirteen Epistles of Paul, and the Apocalypse; the non-authentic onesare "The Shepherd of Hermas, " "The Epistle of Barnabas, " and severalother books not in our canon; and the doubtful ones are James, Jude, Second and Third John, and Second Peter. It will be seen that Origenadmits none that are not in our collection, but that he is in doubtrespecting some that are in it. 

Facts like these are writ large over every page of the history of theearly church. And yet we have eminent theological professors assertingthat the canon of the New Testament was finally settled "during thefirst half of the second century, within fifty years after the death ofthe Apostle John. " A more baseless statement could not be fabricated. Itis from teachers of this class that we hear the most vehement outcriesagainst the "Higher Criticism. "

Eusebius, who died in 340, has a list agreeing substantially with thatof Origen. 

Cyril of Jerusalem (386) includes all of our books except theApocalypse, and no others. 

Athanasius (365) and Augustine (430) have lists identical with ours. This indicates a steady progress toward unanimity, and when the twogreat councils of Hippo and Carthage confirmed this judgment of the twogreat fathers last named, the question of the New Testament canon waspractically settled. [Footnote: It is noted, however, that the receptionof the doubtful books into the canon does not imply a recognition oftheir equality with the other books. The distinct admission of theirinferiority was made by all the ecclesiastical authorities of thatperiod. None of the early fathers believed that all these writings wereequally inspired and equally authoritative. ] Nevertheless, considerableindependent judgment on the subject still seems to have been tolerated, and writings which we do not now receive were long included in the NewTestament collection. The three oldest manuscripts of the Bible now inexistence are the Sinaitic, the Vatican, and the Alexandrian Bibles, dating from the fourth and the fifth centuries. Of these the Sinaiticand the Alexandrian Bibles both include some of these doubtful books inthe New Testament collection; the Sinai Bible has "The Epistle ofBarnabas" and "The Shepherd of Hermas;" the Alexandrian Bible theEpistle of Clement and one of Athanasius. These old Bibles are clearwitnesses to the fact that the contents of the New Testament were notclearly defined even so late as the fifth century. Indeed, there wasalways some freedom of opinion concerning this matter until theReformation era. Then, of course, the Council of Trent fixed the canonof the New Testament as well as of the Old for all good Catholics; andthe New Testament of the Catholics, unlike their Old Testament, isidentical with our own. 

The Protestants of that time were still in doubt about certain of theNew Testament books. Luther, as every one knows, was inclined to rejectthe Epistle of James; he called it "a right strawy epistle. " The letterto the Hebrews was a good book, but not apostolic; he put it in asubordinate class. Jude was a poor transcript of Second Peter, and heassigned that also to a lower place. "The Apocalypse, " says Davidson, "he considered neither apostolic nor prophetic, but put it almost on alevel with the Fourth Book of Esdras, which he spoke elsewhere oftossing into the Elbe. " Luther's principle of judgment in many of thesecases was quite too subjective; he carried the Protestant principle ofprivate judgment to an extreme; I only quote his opinions to show withwhat freedom the strong men of the Reformation handled these questionsof Biblical criticism. 

Zwingli rejected the Apocalypse. Œcolampadius placed James, Jude, Second Peter, Second and Third John and the Apocalypse along with theApocryphal books, on a lower level than the other New TestamentScriptures. 

The great majority of the Reformers, however, speedily fixed upon thatcanon which we now receive, and their decision has not been seriouslycalled in question since the sixteenth century. 

I have now answered most of the questions proposed at the beginning ofthis chapter. We have seen that while the great majority of the books inboth Testaments have been universally received, questions have beenraised at various times concerning the canonicity of several of thebooks in either Testament; that many good men, from the second centurybefore Christ until the sixteenth century after Christ, have disputedthe authority of some of these books. We have seen also that quite anumber of other books have at one time and another been regarded assacred and numbered among the Holy Scriptures; we have seen that thefinal judgment respecting these doubtful books is different in differentbranches of the church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek CatholicChurch admitting into their canons several books that the Reformedchurches exclude from theirs. 

We have seen that the decision which has been reached by the severalbranches of the church respecting this matter has been reached as theresult of discussion and argument; that the canonicity of the disputedbooks was freely canvassed by the church fathers in their writings, bythe church councils in their assemblies, by the Reformers in theirinquiries; that no supernatural methods have been employed to determinethe canonicity of these several books; but that the enlightened reasonof the church has been the arbiter of the whole matter. 

The grounds upon which the Jews acted in admitting or rejecting booksinto their Scriptures it might be difficult for us to determine. In somecases we know that they were fanciful and absurd. But the grounds onwhich the Christians proceeded in making up their canon we know prettywell. 

The first question respecting each one of the Christian writings seemsto have been: "Was it written by an apostle?" If this question could beanswered in the affirmative, the book was admitted. And in deciding thisquestion, the Christians of later times made appeal to the opinions ofthose of earlier times; authority and tradition had much to do indetermining it. "Was it the general opinion of the early church thatthis book was written by an apostle?" they asked. And if this seemed tobe the case, they were inclined to admit it. Besides, they comparedScripture with Scripture: certain books were unquestionably written byPaul or Luke or John; other books which were doubted were also ascribedto them; if they found the language of the disputed book correspondingto that of the undisputed book, in style and in forms of expression, they judged that it must have been written by the same man. Upon suchgrounds of external and internal evidence, it finally came to bebelieved that all of the New Testament books except four were written byapostles, and that these four, Mark, Luke, The Acts of the Apostles, andthe Epistle to the Hebrews, were written by men under the immediatedirection of apostles. 

But, it may be said, there have been great differences of opinion onthis matter through all the ages, down to the sixteenth century; how dowe know but that those good and holy men, like Ignatius and Clement andTertullian and Origen in the early church, and Luther and Zwingli andŒcolampadius in the Reformed church, were right in rejecting some booksthat we receive and in receiving some that we reject?

If you were a good Catholic, that question would not trouble you. Forthe fundamental article of your creed would then be, The Holy CatholicChurch, when she is represented by her bishops in a general council, cannever make a mistake. And the Holy Catholic Church in a general councilat Trent, in 1546, said that such and such books belonged to the Bible, and that no others do; and the council of the Vatican, in 1870, said thesame thing over again, making it doubly sure; so, that, as a goodCatholic, you would have no right to any doubts or questions about it. 

But, being a Protestant, you cannot help knowing that all generalcouncils have made grave and terrible mistakes; that no one of them everwas infallible; and so you could not rest satisfied with the decisionsof Trent and the Vatican, even if they gave you the same Bible that younow possess, which, of course, they do not. What certainty has theProtestant, then, that his canon is the correct one? He has no absolutecertainty. There is no such thing as absolute certainty with respect tohistorical religious truth. But this discussion has made one or twothings plain to the dullest apprehension. 

The first is that the books of this Bible are not all of equal rank andsacredness. If there is one truth which all the ages, with all theirvoices, join to declare, it is that the Bible is made up of manydifferent kinds of books, with very different degrees of sacredness andauthority. For one, I do not wish to part with any of them; I findinstruction in all of them, though in some of them, as in Esther andEcclesiastes, it is rather as records of savagery and of skepticism, from which every Christian ought to recoil, that I can see any value inthem. As powerful delineations of the kind of sentiments that theChristian ought not to cherish, and the kind of doubts that he cannotentertain without imperilling his soul, they may be useful. It is not, therefore, at all desirable that these ancient records should be tornasunder and portions of them flung away. That process of mutilation noneof us is wise enough to attempt. Let the Bible stand; there are gooduses for every part of it. But let us remember the lesson which thissurvey has brought home to us, that these books are not all alike, andthat the message of divine wisdom is spoken to us in some of them farmore clearly than in others, Richard Baxter is an authority in religion for whose opinion allconservative people ought to entertain respect. He cannot be suspectedof being a "New Departure" man; he was a stanch Presbyterian, and hepassed to the "Saints' Rest" nearly two hundred years ago. With a fewwords of his upon the question now before us, this chapter may fitlyclose:--

"And here I must tell you a great and needful truth, which Christians, fearing to confess, by overdoing, tempt men to infidelity. The Scriptureis like a man's body, where some parts are but for the preservation ofthe rest, and may be maimed without death. The sense is the soul of theScripture, and the letters but the body or vehicle. The doctrine of theCreed, Lord's Prayer and Decalogue, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, isthe vital part and Christianity itself. The Old Testament letter(written as we have it about Ezra's time) is that vehicle which is asimperfect as the revelation of those times was. But as, after Christ'sincarnation and ascension, the Spirit was more abundantly given, and therevelation more perfect and sealed, so the doctrine is more full, andthe vehicle or body, that is the words, are less imperfect and more sureto us; so that he which doubteth of the truth of some words in the OldTestament or of some circumstances in the New, hath no reason thereforeto doubt of the Christian religion of which these writings are but thevehicle or body, sufficient to ascertain us of the truth of the Historyand Doctrine. " [Footnote: _The Catechizing of Christian Families_, p. 36. ]

CHAPTER XII. 

HOW THE BOOKS WERE WRITTEN. 

The books of the Old Testament were originally written upon skins ofsome sort. The Talmud provided that the law might be inscribed on theskins of clean animals, tame or wild, or even of clean birds. Theseskins were usually cut into strips, the ends of which were neatly joinedtogether, making a continuous belt of parchment or vellum which wasrolled upon two sticks and fastened by a thread. They were commonlywritten on one side only, with an iron pen which was dipped in inkcomposed of lampblack dissolved in gall juice. 

The Hebrew is a language quite unlike our own in form and appearance. Not only do we read it from right to left, instead of from left toright, but the consonants only of the several words are written indistinct characters on the line; the vowels being little dots or dashesstanding under the consonants, or within their curves. These vowelpoints were not used in the original Hebrew; they are a modern invention, originating some centuries after Christ. It is true that it was thebelief of the Jews in former times that these vowel points were anoriginal part of the language; their scholars made this claim with greatconfidence, which shows how little reliance is to be placed on Jewishtradition. The evidence is abundant that the Hebrew was originallywritten without vowels, precisely as stenographers often write in thesedays. We know from the testimony of old students and interpreters of theHebrew that they constantly encountered this difficulty in reading thelanguage. Write a paragraph of our own language without vowels and lookat it. Or, better, ask some one else to treat for you in the same way aparagraph with which you are not familiar, and see if you can decipherit. Undoubtedly, you could with some difficulty make out the sense ofmost passages. It would puzzle you at first, but after you had had somepractice in supplying the vowels you would learn to read quite readily. Stenographers, as I have said, have a somewhat similar task. Nevertheless, you would sometimes be in uncertainty as to the words. Suppose you have the three consonants _brd_, how would you knowwhether the word was bard, or bird, or bread, or board, or brad, orbroad, or bride, or braid, or brood, or breed? It might be any one ofthem. You could usually tell what it was by a glance at the connection, but you could not tell infallibly, for there might be sentences in whichmore than one of these words would make sense, and it would beimpossible to determine which the writer meant to use. Now the oldHebrew as it came from the hands of the original writers was all in thisform; while, therefore, the meaning of the writer can generally begained with sufficient accuracy, you see at a glance that absolutecertainty is out of the question; that the Jewish scholars who suppliedthese vowel points a thousand years or more after the originalmanuscripts were written may sometimes have got the wrong word. 

Jerome gives numerous illustrations of this uncertainty. In Jer. Ix. 21, "Death is come up into our windows, " he says that we have for the firstword the three Hebrew consonants corresponding to our _dbr_; theword may be _dabar_, signifying death, or _deber_, signifyingpestilence; it is impossible to tell which it is. In Habakkuk iii. 5, wehave the same consonants, and there the word is written pestilence. Either word will made good sense in either place; and we are perfectlyhelpless in our choice between them. Again, in Isaiah xxvi. 14, we havea prediction concerning the wicked, "Therefore hast thou visited anddestroyed them and made all their memory to perish. " The Hebrew wordhere translated "memory" consists of three consonants represented by ourEnglish _zkr_; it may be the word _zeker_, which signifies memory, or the word _zakar_, which signifies a male person. And Jerome saysthat it is believed that Saul was deceived, perhaps willingly, by thedifference in these words (I Sam. Xv. ); having been commanded to cutoff every _zeker_--memorial or vestige--of Amaiek, he took the wordto be _zakar_, instead of zeker, and contented himself withdestroying the males of the army and keeping for himself the spoil. Jerome's conjecture in this case is sufficiently fanciful; neverthelesshe illustrates the impossibility of determining the exact meaning of manyHebrew sentences. This impossibility is abundantly demonstrated by theSeptuagint, for we find many undoubted errors in that translation fromthe Hebrew into the Greek, which have arisen from this lack of precisionin the Hebrew language. 

When, therefore, we know that the Bible was written in such a language--a language without vowels--and that it was not until six hundred yearsafter Christ that the vowel points were invented and the words werewritten out in full, the theory of the verbal inerrancy of the text aswe now have it becomes incredible. Unless the men who supplied the vowelpoints were gifted with supernatural knowledge they must have mademistakes in spelling out some of these words. I do not believe thatthese mistakes were serious, or that they affect in any important waythe meaning of the Scripture, but the assumption that in this stupendousgame of guess-work no wrong guesses were made is in the highest degreegratuitous. The substantial truthfulness of the record is not impeachedby this discovery, but the verbal inerrancy of the document can never bemaintained by any honest man who knows these facts. 

It is unsafe and mischievous to indulge in _a priori_ reasoningsabout inspiration; we have had too much of that; but the followingproposition is unassailable: If the Divine Wisdom had proposed todeliver to man an infallible book, he would not have had it recorded ina language whose written words consist only of consonants, leavingreaders a thousand years after to fill in the vowels by conjecture. Thevery fact that such a language was chosen is the conclusive andunanswerable evidence that God never designed to give us an infalliblebook. 

We are familiar with the fact that the Old Testament writings in generaluse among the early churches were those of the Septuagint. TheChristians from the second to the sixteenth centuries knew very littleHebrew. But during all these ages the Palestinian Jews and theirsuccessors in other lands were preserving their own Scriptures; it wasthey who added at a late day--probably as late as the sixth century--thevowel points, which were invented in Syria; and when, at length, underthe impulse of Biblical study which led to the Reformation, Christianscholars began to think of going back to the original Hebrew, they wereobliged to obtain from the Jews the copies which they studied. It issomewhat remarkable that the Jews, who were the exclusive custodians ofthe Hebrew writings up to the sixteenth century, had not been careful topreserve their old manuscripts. After the vowel points had beenintroduced into the text, they seem to have been willing that copies notwritten in this manner should pass out of existence. Accordingly we havefew Hebrew manuscripts that are even supposed to be more than six orseven hundred years old. There is one copy of the Pentateuch which mayhave been made as early as 580 A. D. , but this is extremely doubtful;aside from this I do not know that there are any Hebrew Bibles whichclaim to be older than the ninth century. Of these Hebrew manuscriptsnearly six hundred are now known to be in existence, but the greaterpart of these are only fragmentary copies of the Pentateuch or of singlebooks. There are two classes of these--synagogue rolls, prepared forreading in the way that I have described, and manuscripts in the bookform, some on parchment and some on paper. 

The variations in these manuscripts are few. Compared with the Greekmanuscripts of the New Testament, the accuracy of these Hebrew codicesis remarkable. It is evident that the care of the Scribes to guard theirScriptures against error has been scrupulous and vigilant. Doubtlessthis intense devotion to the very letter of the sacred books has beenexercised for many centuries. We know that in the earliest days thisprecision was not sought; for the Septuagint translation, made duringthe second and third centuries before Christ, gives us indubitableproof, when we compare it with the Hebrew text, that changes, some ofthem radical and sweeping, have been made in the text of the Hebrewbooks since that translation was finished. But it is evident that theScribes at an early day, certainly as early as the beginning of theChristian era, determined to have a uniform and an unchangeable text. For this purpose they chose some manuscript copy of the Scriptures, doubtless the one which seemed to them most accurate, and made that thestandard; all the copies made since that time have been religiouslyconformed to that. Consequently, all the Hebrew manuscripts now inexistence are remarkably uniform. The Old Testament contains more thanthree times as many pages as the New Testament; but while we have morethan one hundred and fifty thousand "various readings" in the Greekmanuscripts and versions of the New Testament, we have less than tenthousand such variations in those of the Old Testament. It must beremembered, however, that this uniformity has its source in some copychosen to be the standard hundreds of years after most of the OldTestament books were written; and it does not guarantee the closecorrespondence between this copy and the autographs of the originalwriters. [Footnote: For an interesting discussion of the preservationand transmission of the Hebrew text, the reader is referred to Mr. Robertson Smith's _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, Lectures ii. And iii. ]

Our chief interest centres, however, in the Greek manuscripts of theBible preserved and transmitted by Christians, and including bothTestaments. All the oldest and most precious documents that we possessbelong to this class. 

The original New Testament writings which came from the hands of theapostles and their amanuenses we do not possess. These were probablywritten, not on skins, but upon the papyrus paper commonly used at thatday, which was a frail and flimsy fabric, and under ordinarycircumstances would soon perish. Fragments of this papyrus have comedown to us, but only those which were preserved with exceptional care. Jerome tells us of a library in Cassarea that was partly destroyed, owing to the crumbling of its paper, though it was only a hundred yearsold. Parchment was sometimes used by the apostles; Paul requestsTimothy, in his second letter, to bring with him, when he comes, certainparchments that belong to him. But these materials were costly, and itis not likely that the apostles used them to any extent in thepreparation of the books of the New Testament. At any rate theautographic copies of these books disappeared at an early date. Thisseems strange to us. Placing the estimate that we do upon thesewritings, we should have taken the greatest care to preserve them. It isclear that the Christians into whose hands they fell did not value themas highly as we do. As Westcott says, "They were given as a heritage toman, and it was some time before men felt the full value of the gift. "

At the close of the second century there were disputes concerning thecorrect reading of certain passages, but neither party appeals to theapostolic originals, --showing that they must before that time haveperished. In after years legends were told about the preservation ofthese originals, but these are contradictory and incredible. 

No manuscript is now in existence which was written during the firstthree centuries. But we have one or two that date back to the fourthcentury; and from that time through all the ages to the invention ofprinting many copies were made of the Sacred Scriptures, in whole or inpart, which are still in the hands of scholars. It is from these oldGreek manuscripts that our received text of the New Testament isderived; by a comparison of them the scholars of the seventeenth centurymade up a Greek New Testament which they regarded as approximatelyaccurate, and from that our English version was made. 

The number of these old manuscripts is large, and the first generaldivision of them is into "uncials" or "cursives, " as they are called;the uncial manuscripts being written in capital letters, the cursives insmall letters more or less connected, as in our written hand. Theuncials are the oldest, as they are the fewest; there are only onehundred and twenty-seven of them in all; while of the cursives there areabout fifteen hundred. 

Yet most of these manuscripts are fragmentary. Some of them contain onlythe Gospels or portions of them; some of them contain the Acts and theCatholic Epistles; some of them the Epistles of Paul or a singleepistle; some are selections from the Gospels or the Epistles, preparedto be read in church, and called lectionaries. 

Professor Ezra Abbot gives us a classification of these manuscriptswhich will be found instructive. 

"For the New Testament, . .. We have manuscripts more or less complete, written in uncial or capital letters, and ranging from the fourth to thetenth century; of the Gospels twenty-seven, besides thirty smallfragments; of the Acts and Catholic Epistles ten, besides six smallfragments; of the Pauline Epistles eleven, besides nine small fragments, and of the Revelation five. All of these have been most thoroughlycollated, and the text of the most important of them has been published. One of these manuscripts, the Sinaitic, containing the whole of the NewTestament, and another, the Vatican, containing much the larger part ofit, were written probably as early as the middle of the fourth century;two others, the Alexandrian and the Ephraem, belong to about the middleof the fifth, of which date are two more, containing considerableportions of the Gospels. A very remarkable manuscript of the Gospels andActs--the Cambridge manuscript, or Codex Bezæ--belongs to the sixthcentury. .. . I pass by a number of small but valuable fragments of thefifth and sixth centuries. As to the cursive manuscripts ranging fromthe tenth century to the sixteenth, we have of the Gospels more than sixhundred; of the Acts over two hundred; of the Pauline Epistles nearlythree hundred; of the Revelation about one hundred, --not reckoning thelectionaries, or manuscripts containing the lessons from the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, read in the service of the church, of which thereare more than four hundred. " [Footnote: _Anglo-American BibleRevision_, p. 95. ]

Out of all this vast mass of extant manuscripts, only twenty-sevencontain the New Testament entire. 

The three oldest and most valuable manuscripts among those named byProfessor Abbot, in the passage above, are the Sinaitic, the Vatican, and the Alexandrian manuscripts. 

Of these old Bibles perhaps the oldest is the one in the Vatican Libraryat Rome. It was enrolled in that library as late as the year 1475; whatits history was before that time is unknown. By whose hands or at whatplace it was written, no one can tell. Some have supposed that it wasbrought from Constantinople to Rome, in the fifteenth century, by JohnBessarion, a learned patriarch; some that it was written in Alexandria, when that city was the metropolis of the world's culture; some that itwas produced in Southern Italy when that region was celebrated for itslearning. The signs favor the latter theory. The form of the letters islike those found on papyri in Herculaneum; and other manuscripts of theBible found in southern Italy agree remarkably with this one in manypeculiar readings. But this is all guess-work. Nobody knows where theold Bible came from or who brought it to Rome. 

Some things, however, the old book plainly tells us about its ownhistory. It bears the unmistakable marks of great antiquity. The scholarwho is familiar with old Greek manuscripts can judge by looking at adocument something about its probable age. By the form of the letters, by the presence or absence of certain marks of punctuation, by thegeneral style of the manuscript, he can determine within a century or sothe date at which it was written. 

This old Bible is written in the uncial or capital letters; this wouldmake it tolerably certain that it must be older than the tenth century. We have scarcely any uncial manuscripts later than the tenth century. But other unmistakable marks take it back much farther than this. Thewords are written continuously, with no breaks or spaces between them;there are no accents, no rough or smooth breathings, no punctuationmarks of any sort. These are signs of great age. Another peculiarity isthe manner of the division of the books into sections. I cannot stop todescribe to you the various methods of division adopted in antiquity. The present separation into chapters and verses was, as you know, aquite modern device. But the divisions of this old Bible follow a methodthat we know to have been in use at a very early day; and the conclusionof all the scholars is that it must have been written as early as theyear 350, possibly as early as 300. 

It is not, however, a roll, but a book in form like those we handleevery day. Before this date manuscripts were generally prepared in thisway. Martial, the Latin poet, who died about 100, mentions as a noveltyin his day books with square leaves, bound together at the edges. 

The Vatican Bible is a heavy quarto, the covers are red moroccodiscolored with age, the leaves, of which there are 759, are of fine anddelicate vellum. It contains the Septuagint translation of the OldTestament, except the first forty-five chapters in Genesis and a few ofthe Psalms, which have been torn out and lost. Of the New Testamentwritings, the last five chapters of Hebrews, First and Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and the Apocalypse are wanting. Otherwise bothTestaments are complete. 

We may recall another fact, to which allusion has been made, that thisold Bible contains among the Old Testament books those books which wenow call apocryphal, and that these apocryphal books, instead of beingdivided from the rest in a separate group, are mingled with them, the_order_ of the books being quite unlike that of our Bibles or ofthe Hebrew canon. The apocryphal First Book of Esdras _precedes_our Book of Ezra; while our Book of Ezra is united with Nehemiah, forming the Second Book of Esdras. Judith and Tobit follow Esther, andnext comes the twelve minor prophets, and so on. 

The same thing is true of all these oldest Bibles; they all contain theapocryphal books, and these books are mingled with the other books, either promiscuously, or by some system of classification which acceptsthem as equal in value with the other Old Testament writings. There isno indication in these old Bibles that the apocryphal books are any lesssacred or authoritative than the others. 

Another manuscript Bible, scarcely less venerable and no less preciousthan the Vatican Bible, is the one known as the Sinaitic manuscript Thiswas discovered by Constantine Tischendorf, a German scholar, in anancient convent at the base of Mount Sinai. The first journey ofTischendorf to the Sinaitic peninsula was undertaken in 1844, for theexpress purpose of searching in the old monasteries of this neighborhoodfor ancient copies of the Scriptures that might be preserved in them. The monks of this old convent admitted him to their ancient library, --aplace not greatly frequented by them, --and there in the middle of theroom he found a waste basket, filled with leaves and torn pieces of oldparchment gathered to be burned. In looking them over he discovered onehundred and twenty leaves of a Bible that seemed to him of greatantiquity. He asked for these leaves, but when they found that he wantedthem, the monks began to suspect their value, and permitted him to takeonly forty-three of them. In 1853 he returned again, but this time couldnot find the rest of the precious manuscript. He feared that it had beendestroyed long before, but this was not the case. Stimulated by hisdesire to possess the loose leaves, the monks had made search for therest of the volume, and, using as samples the leaves they had refused togive him, they had found them all and secreted them. Upon his secondvisit they did not show him the book, however, nor reveal to him in anyway its existence. 

Six years later, in 1859, he returned again, this time fortified with aletter from the Emperor of Russia, the head of the Greek Church; andthis mighty document made the monks open their treasures for hisinspection. He obtained permission, first, to carry the old Bible toCairo to be copied, and finally, under the imperial influence, the monkssurrendered it, and suffered it to be removed to St. Petersburg, wheresince 1859 it has been sacredly kept. 

"The Sinai Bible, " says Dr. F. P. Woodbury, "contains the New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas, a portion of the Shepherd of Hennas, andtwenty-two books of the Old Testament. The whole is written on finevellum made from antelope skins into the largest pages known in ourancient manuscripts. While most of the oldest manuscripts have onlythree columns to the page, and the Vatican Bible has three, the SinaiBible alone shows four. The letters are somewhat larger than those ofthe Vatican and much more roughly written. The book contains manyblunders in copying, and there are a few cases of willful omission. Itsremote age is attested by many of the same proofs that have beenmentioned in the description of the Vatican Bible. " [Footnote: From aninteresting sketch of "Three Old Bibles, " in _Sunday Afternoon_, vol. I pp. 65-71. ]

It is known that the Emperor Constantine, in the year 331, authorizedthe preparation of fifty costly and beautiful copies of the HolyScriptures under the care of Eusebius of Cæsarea. Tischendorf himselfthinks--and his conjecture is accepted by other scholars--that this isone of those fifty Bibles, and that it was sent from Byzantium to themonks of this convent by the Emperor Justinian, who was its founder. Atall events, it is incontestably a manuscript of great age, certainly ofthe fourth century, and probably of the first half of that century. 

The other great Bible is the one known as the Alexandrian, which waspresented, in 1628, to King Charles I of England by Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople, who had brought it from Alexandria. It wastransferred in 1753 from the king's private library to the BritishMuseum, where it is now preserved. It is bound in four folio volumes, three of which contain the text of the Old and one of the New Testament. The portion which contains the Old Testament is more perfect than thatwhich contains the New, quite a number of leaves having been lost fromthe latter. "The material of which this volume is composed is thinvellum, the page being about thirteen inches high by ten broad, containing from fifty to fifty-two lines on each page, each lineconsisting of about twenty letters. The number of pages is 773, of which640 are occupied with the text of the Old Testament and 133 with theNew. The characters are uncial, but larger than the Vatican manuscript. There are no accents or breathings, no spaces between the letters orwords save at the end of a paragraph, and the contractions, which arenot numerous, are only such as are found in the oldest manuscripts. Thepunctuation consists of a point placed at the end of a sentence, usuallyon a level with the top of the preceding letter. " [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit. _, i. P. 496. ] The general verdict of scholars is that thismanuscript belongs to about the middle of the fifth century. 

The contents of this old Bible are curious, and they are curiouslyarranged. The first volume contains the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, and the two booksof Chronicles. The second contains, first, the twelve minor prophets(from Hosea to Malachi), then Isaiah, Jeremiah, _Baruch_, Lamentations, _The Epistle of Jeremiah_, Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther, _Tobit_, _Judith_, _Esdras I. _ (the apocryphal Esdras), Esdras II. (including ourNehemiah and part of our Ezra), and _the four books of the Maccabees_. The third volume contains An Epistle of Athanasius to Marcellenus onthe Psalms; The Hypothesis of Eusebius on the Psalms; then the Book ofthe Psalms, of which there are one hundred and fifty-one, and fifteenHymns; then Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach. The fourth volume contains the fourGospels, the Acts, the seven Catholic Epistles (one of James, two ofPeter, three of John, and one of Jude), fourteen Epistles of Paul(including the one to the Hebrews), The Revelation of John, two Epistlesof Clement to the Corinthians, and eight Psalms of Solomon. 

This, it will be admitted, is a generous Bible. It contains most of theapocryphal books, and several others that we do not find in the othercollections. It is probable that the works of Athanasius and Eusebius onthe Psalms were admitted rather as introduction or commentary than astext; but the rest, judging from the positions in which they stand, musthave been regarded as Sacred Scriptures. 

These, then, are the three oldest, most complete, and most trustworthycopies of the Sacred Scriptures now in existence. By all scholars theyare regarded as precious beyond price; and any reading in which theyagree would probably be regarded as the right reading, if all the othermanuscripts in the world were against them. 

I have suggested that these old manuscripts do not always agree. Thefact is that no two of them are exactly alike, and that there are agreat many slight differences between those which are most closelyassimilated. Of these differences Professor Westcott says that "therecannot be less than 120, 000, --though of these a very large proportionconsists of differences of spelling and isolated aberrations ofscribes. " It is not generally difficult for the student on comparingthem to tell which is the right reading. A word may be misspelled, forexample, in several different ways; the student knows the right way tospell it, and is not in doubt concerning the word. "Probably, " says Mr. Westcott, "there are not more than from sixteen hundred to two thousandplaces in which the true reading is a matter of uncertainty, even if weinclude in this questions of order, inflection, and orthography; thedoubtful readings by which the sense is in any way affected are verymuch fewer, and those of dogmatic importance can be easily numbered. "

The ways in which these errors and variations arose are easilyexplained. The men who copied these manuscripts were careful men, manyof them, but all of them were fallible. Sometimes they would mistake aletter for another letter much like it, and change the form of a word inthat way; sometimes there would be two clauses of a sentence ending withthe same word, and the eye of the copyist, glancing back to themanuscript after writing the first of these words, would alight upon thesecond one, and go on from that; so that the clause preceding it wouldbe omitted. Sometimes in copying the continuous writing of the uncialmanuscripts, mistakes would be made in dividing words. For example, if anumber of English words, written in close order, with no spaces betweenthem, were given you to copy, and you found "infancy, " you might maketwo words of it or one; and if you were a little careless you mightwrite it "in fancy" when it should be "infancy, " or _vice versa_. Acase might arise in which it would be difficult for you to tell whetherit should be "in fancy" or "infancy. " Such uncertainties the copyistsencountered, and such mistakes they sometimes made. 

Mistakes of memory they also made in copying, just as I sometimes dowhen I undertake to copy a passage from Mr. Westcott or Mr. Davidsoninto one of these chapters. I look upon the book, and take a sentence inmy mind, but perhaps while I am writing it down I will change slightlythe order of the words, or it may be put a word of my own in the placeof another that much resembles it, as "but" for "though, " or "from" for"out of, " or "doubtless" for "without doubt. " I try to copy veryexactly, but there are, unquestionably, now and then such slips as thesein my quotations. And such mistakes were made by the copyists of the OldScriptures. 

There are some instances of intentional changes. Sometimes a copyistevidently substituted a word that he thought was plainer for one thatwas more obscure; a more elegant word for one less elegant; agrammatical construction for one that was not grammatical. 

Other differences have arisen from the habit of some of the copyists orowners of manuscripts of writing glosses, or brief explanatory notes, onthe margin. Some of these marginalia were copied by subsequent scribesinto the text, where, in our version, they still remain. Some of them, however, were removed in the late revision. 

The great majority of these errors are, however, as I have said, extremely unimportant; and nearly all of them seem to have arisen in theways I have suggested--through simple carelessness, and not with anyintent of corrupting the text. 

The translations of the Bible which were made in early days into otherlanguages than our own must be dismissed with the briefest mention. Themost important version of the Old Testament was the Septuagint, of whichnothing more needs to be said. 

You will remember that the Hebrew was a dead language while our Lord wason the earth, the Jews of Palestine speaking the Aramaic. For their use, translations of the Hebrew into the Aramaic, called Targums, were made. There is a great variety of these, and there are many opinions abouttheir age; but it is not likely that the oldest of them was committed towriting before the second century A. D. They are curious specimens ofthe translator's work, combining text and commentary in a remarkablemanner. Additions and changes are freely made; the simple sentences ofthe old record are greatly expanded; not only is a spade generallycalled a useful ligneous and ferruginous agricultural implement, butmany things are said concerning the aforesaid spade which Moses or Davidor Isaiah never dreamed of saying. 

For example, in Judges v. 10, the Hebrew is literally translated in ourEnglish Bible thus: "Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit injudgment and walk by the way. " The Targum of Jonathan expatiates thereonas follows: "Those who had interrupted their occupations are riding onasses covered with many colored caparisons, and they ride about freelyin all the territory of Israel, and congregate to sit in judgment. Theywalk in their old ways, and are speaking of the power Thou hast shown inthe land of Israel, " etc. This may be pronounced a remarkably freetranslation; and the Targums generally evince a similar liberality ofsentiment and phraseology. 

Besides these, the ancient translations of the Bible, which must bementioned, are the Old Latin, made in the second century, out of which, by many revisions, grew that Latin Vulgate which is now used in theCatholic ritual; an ancient Syriac version of about the same age; twoEgyptian versions, in different dialects, made in the third century; thePeshito-Syriac, the Gothic, and the Ethiopic in the fourth, and theArmenian in the fifth; besides several later translations, including theArabic and the Slavonic. These ancient translations are all of value tomodern scholars in helping them to reach more certain conclusionsrespecting the nature of the Sacred Scriptures and the right reading indisputed passages. 

The ages which we have been traversing in this chapter--when the Biblewas a manuscript--were ages of great darkness. The copies of the bookwere few, and the common people could neither possess them nor readthem. It is hard for us who have had the book in our hands from ourinfancy, who have gone to it so freely for light in darkness, forcomfort in sorrow, for wisdom to work with, for weapons to fight with, to understand how men could have lived the life of faith without it; howa godly seed could have been nourished in the earth without the sinceremilk of the word for them to feed on. 

It was indeed a great privation that they suffered, but we must notsuppose that they were left without witness. For there is another andeven a clearer revelation than the written word, and that is a godlylife. Godly lives there were in all these dark times; and it was attheir fires that the torch of gospel truth was kindled and kept burning. There may be reason for a question whether we have not come to trust inthese times too much in a word that is written, and to undervalue thatother revelation which God is making of his truth and love in thecharacters of his children. For it is only in the light that Christ isconstantly manifesting to the world in the lives of men that we can seeany meaning in the words of the book. "The Christian, " says Dr. Christlieb, "is the world's Bible. " This is the word that is known andread of men. Let it be our care to make it, not an infallible, but aclear, an adequate, and a safe revelation of the truth and love of Godto men. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

HOW MUCH IS THE BIBLE WORTH?

Of the Bible as a book among books, of the human elements which enterinto its composition, some account has been given in the precedingchapters. But in these studies the whole story of the Bible has not beentold. There is need, therefore, that we should enlarge our viewsomewhat, and take more directly into account certain elements withwhich we have not hitherto been chiefly concerned. 

Our study has, indeed, made a few things plain. Among them is thecertainty that the Bible is not an infallible Book, in the sense inwhich it is popularly supposed to be infallible. When we study thehistory of the several books, the history of the canon, the history ofthe distribution and reproduction of the manuscript copies, and thehistory of the versions, --when we discover that the "various readings"of the differing manuscripts amount to one hundred and fifty thousand, the impossibility of maintaining the verbal inerrancy of the Biblebecomes evident. We see how human ignorance and error have been sufferedto mingle with this stream of living water throughout all its course; ifour assurance of salvation were made to depend upon our knowledge thatevery word of the Bible was of divine origin, our hopes of eternal lifewould be altogether insecure. 

The book is not infallible historically. It is a veracious record; wemay depend upon the truthfulness of the outline which it gives us of thehistory of the Jewish people; but the discrepancies and contradictionswhich appear here and there upon its pages show that its writers werenot miraculously protected from mistakes in dates and numbers and theorder of events. 

It is not infallible scientifically. It is idle to try to force thenarrative of Genesis into an exact correspondence with geologicalscience. It is a hymn of creation, wonderfully beautiful and pure; thecentral truths of monotheistic religion and of modern science areinvolved in it; but it is not intended to give us the scientific historyof creation, and the attempt to make it bear this construction is highlyinjudicious. 

It is not infallible morally. By this I mean that portions of thisrevelation involve an imperfect morality. Many things are here commandedwhich it would be wrong for us to do. This is not saying that thesecommands were not divinely wise for the people to whom they were given;nor is it denying that the morality of the New Testament, which is thefulfillment and consummation of the moral progress which the bookrecords, is a perfect morality; it is simply asserting that the stagesof this progress from a lower to a higher morality are here clearlymarked; that the standards of the earlier time are therefore inadequateand misleading in these later times; and that any man who accepts theBible as a code of moral rules, all of which are equally binding, willbe led into the gravest errors. It is no more true that the ceremoniallegislation of the Old Testament is obsolete than that large portions ofthe moral legislation are obsolete. The notions of the writers of thesebooks concerning their duties to God were dim and imperfect; so weretheir notions concerning their duties to man. All the truth that theycould receive was given to them; but there were many truths which theycould not receive, which to us are as plain as the daylight. 

Not to recognize the partialness and imperfection of this record in allthese respects is to be guilty of a grave disloyalty to the kingdom ofthe truth. With all these facts staring him in the face, the attempt ofany intelligent man to maintain the theoretical and ideal infallibilityof all parts of these writings is a criminal blunder. Nor is there anyuse in loudly asserting the inerrancy of these books, with vehementdenunciations of all who call it in question, and then in a breathadmitting that there may be some errors and discrepancies andinterpolations. Perfection is perfection. To stoutly affirm that a thingis perfect, and then admit that it may be in some respects imperfect, isan insensate procedure. Infallibility is infallibility. The Scripturesare, or they are not, infallible. The admission that there may be a fewerrors gives every man the right, nay it lays upon him the duty, offinding what those errors are. Our friends who so sturdily assert thetraditional theory can hardly be aware of the extent to which theystultify themselves when their sweeping and reiterated assertion thatthe Bible can _never_ contain a mistake is followed, as it alwaysmust be, by their timid and deprecatory, "hardly ever. " The oldrabbinical theory, as adopted and extended by some of the post-Reformation theologians, that the Bible was verbally dictated by God andis absolutely accurate in every word, letter, and vowel-point, and thatit is therefore blasphemy to raise a question concerning any part of it, is a consistent theory. Between this and a free but reverent inquiryinto the Bible itself, to discover what human elements it contains andhow it is affected by them, there is no middle ground. That it isuseless and mischievous to make for the Bible claims that it nowheremakes for itself, --to hold and teach a theory concerning it which atonce breaks down when an intelligent man begins to study it with openmind--is beginning to be very plain. The quibbling, the concealment, thedisingenuousness which this method of using the Bible involves are notconducive to Christian integrity. This kind of "lying for God" hasdriven hundreds of thousands already into irreconcilable alienation fromthe Christian church. It is time to stop it. 

How did this theory of the infallibility of the Bible arise? Those whohave followed these discussions to this point know that it has notalways been held by the Christian church. The history of the canon, toldwith any measure of truthfulness, will make this plain. The history ofthe variations between the Septuagint and the Hebrew shows, beyond theshadow of a doubt, that this theory of the unchangeable and absolutedivinity of the words of the Scripture had no practical hold upontranscribers and copyists in the early Jewish church. The New Testamentwriters could not have consistently held such a theory respecting theOld Testament books, else they would not have quoted them, as they did, with small care for verbal accuracy. They believed them to besubstantially true, and therefore they give the substance of them intheir quotations; but there is no such slavish attention to the letteras there must have been if they had regarded them as verbally dictatedby God himself. The Christian Fathers were inclined, no doubt, to acceptthe rabbinical theories of inspiration respecting the Old Testament; butthey sometimes avoid the difficulties growing out of manifest errors inthe text by a theory of an inner sense which is faultless, franklyadmitting that the natural meaning cannot always be defended. As to theearly Reformers, we have seen how freely they handled the SacredWritings, submitting them to a scrutiny which they would not haveventured upon if they had believed concerning them what we have beentaught. It was not until the period succeeding the Reformation that thisdogma of Biblical Infallibility was clearly formulated and imposed uponthe Protestant churches. As taught by Quenstedt and Voetius andCalovius, the dogma asserts that "not only the substance of truth andthe views proposed in their minutest detail, but even the identicalwords, all and in particular, were supplied and dictated by the HolyGhost. Not a word is contained in the Holy Scriptures which is not inthe strictest sense inspired, the very interpunctuation not excepted. .. . Errors of any sort whatever, even verbal or grammatical, as well as allinelegancies of style, are to be denied as unworthy of the Divine Spiritwho is throughout the primary author of the Bible. " [Footnote: _TheDoctrine of Sacred Scripture_, ii. P. 209. ] This view was longmaintained with all strictness, and many a man has been made a hereticfor denying it. Within the last century the form of the doctrine hasbeen somewhat modified by theologians, yet the substance of it is stillregarded as essential orthodoxy. Dr. Charles Hodge, in his "Theology, "vol. I. P. 152, says, "Protestants hold that the Scriptures of the Oldand New Testaments are the word of God, written under the inspiration ofGod the Holy Ghost, and are therefore infallible, and consequently freefrom all error, whether of doctrine, of fact, or of precept. " And again(p. 163), "All the books of Scripture are equally inspired. All alikeare infallible in what they teach. " Such is the doctrine now held by thegreat majority of Christians. Intelligent pastors do not hold it, butthe body of the laity have no other conception. 

Whence is it derived? Where do the teachers quoted above get theirauthority for their affirmations?

Not, as we have seen, from any statements of the Bible itself. There isnot one word in the Bible which affirms or implies that this characterof inerrancy attaches to the entire collection of writings, or to anyone of them. 

The doctrine arose, as I have said, in the seventeenth century, and itwas in part, no doubt, a reflection of the teaching of the laterrabbins, whose fantastic notions about the origin of their sacred booksI have before alluded to. It was also developed, as a polemicalnecessity, in the exigencies of that conflict with the Roman Catholictheologians which followed the Reformation. The eminent German scholarand saint, Professor Tholuck, gives the following account of its origin:

"In proportion as controversy, sharpened by Jesuitism, made theProtestant party sensible of an externally fortified ground of combat, in that same proportion did Protestantism seek, by the exaltation of theoutward authoritative character of the Sacred Writings, to recover thatinfallible authority which it had lost through its rejection ofinfallible councils and the infallible authority of the Pope. In thismanner arose, _not earlier than the seventeenth century_, thosesentiments which regarded the Holy Scripture as the infallibleproduction of the Divine Spirit--in its entire contents and its veryform--so that not only the sense but also the words, the letters, theHebrew vowel points, and the very punctuation were regarded asproceeding from the Spirit of God. " [Footnote: _TheologicalEssays_, collected by George R. Noyes. ] The fact that the doctrinehad this origin is itself suspicious. A theory which is framed in theheat of a great controversy, by one party in the church, is apt to besomewhat extreme. 

The strength of the doctrine lies, however, in the fact that it is atheological inference from the doctrine of God. "God is the author ofthe Bible, " men have said; "God is omniscient; he can make no mistakes;therefore the Book must be infallible. To deny that it is infallible isto deny that it is God's book; if it is not his book it is worthless. "Or, putting it in another form, they have said, "The Bible is aninspired book. God is the source of inspiration. He cannot inspire mento write error. Therefore every word of the inspired book must be true. "This is what the logicians call an _a priori_ argument. The view ofwhat inspiration is, and of what the Bible is, are deduced from ourtheory of God. It amounts to just this: If God is what we think him tobe, he must do what seems wise to us. This is hardly a safe argument. Doubtless we would have said beforehand that if God, who is all-wise andall-powerful, should create a world, he would make one free fromsuffering and every form of evil. We find, however, that he has not madesuch a world. And it may be wiser for us, instead of making up our mindsbeforehand what God must do, to try and find out what he has done. Itmight seem to us, doubtless, that if he has given us a revelation, itmust be a faultless revelation. But has he? That is the question. We canonly know by studying the revelation itself. We have no right todetermine beforehand what it must be. We might have said with equalconfidence, that if God wished to have his truth taught in the world, hewould certainly send infallible teachers. He has not done so. Thetreasure of his truth is in earthen vessels, to-day. Has it not alwaysbeen so?

The trouble in this whole matter arises from the fact that men have madeup their theories of the Bible out of their ideas about God, and havethen gone to work to fit the facts of the Bible to their preconceivedtheories. This has required a great deal of stretching and twisting andlopping off here and there; the truth has been badly distorted, sometimes mutilated. The changed view of the Bible, which greatly alarmssome good people, arises from the fact that certain honest men havedetermined to go directly to the Bible itself and find out by studyingit what manner of book it is. They have discovered that it is notprecisely such a book as it has been believed to be, and the answer thatthey make to those who hold the old theory about it is simply this: "Wecannot believe what you have told us about the Bible, because the Biblecontradicts you. It is because we believe the Bible itself that wereject your theory. We believe that the Bible is an inspired book, nay, that it is by eminence The Inspired Book; but when you ask us 'What isan inspired book?' instead of making up a definition of inspiration outof our own heads, we only say, 'It is such a book as the Bible is, ' andthen we proceed to frame our definition of inspiration by the study ofthe Bible. Therefore, when you say that inspiration must implyinfallibility, we answer, No; it does not; for here is The Inspired Bookand it is not infallible. "

In what sense the book is inspired we may be able, after a little, tosee more clearly. For the present I only desire to point out the sourcesof the traditional doctrine of the Bible, and the sources of the newdoctrine. The one is the result of the speculations of men about whatthe Bible must be; the other is the result of a careful and reverentstudy of the Bible itself. 

What, then, do we find the Bible to be?

I. It is the book of righteousness. No other book in the world fixes ourthoughts so steadily upon the great interest of character. Whatever elsethe Bible may show us or may fail to show us, it does keep always beforeus the fact that the one great concern of every man is to be right inheart and in life. Righteousness tendeth to life; righteousness issalvation; Jehovah is He who loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity, and in his favor is life; these are the truths which form the verysubstance of this revelation. It is quite true that in the applicationof this principle to the affairs of every day, the early records show usmuch confusion and uncertainty; the definitions of righteousness whichsufficed for the people of that time would not suffice for us at all;but the fact remains that the only interest of this Book in theindividuals and the races which it brings before us is in their loyaltyor disloyalty to that ideal of conduct which it always lifts up beforeus. Righteousness is life; righteousness is salvation; this is the onemessage of the Bible to men. There are rites and ceremonies, but theseare not the principal thing; "To obey is better than sacrifice, and tohearken than the fat of rams. " "He hath showed thee, O man, what isgood; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and tolove mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" This great truth of theBible has been but imperfectly apprehended, even among modernChristians; there is always a tendency to make the belief in sounddogma, or the performance of decorous rites, or the experience ofemotional raptures the principal thing; but the testimony of the Bibleto the supremacy of character and conduct is clear and convincing, andthe world is coming to understand it. 

Now for any man who cares for the right, to whom character is moreprecious than anything else in the world, this book is worth more thanany other book can be. Even the Old Testament narratives, indistinctlyas they reveal the real nature of true conduct to us in this day, showus plainly the fact that nothing else in the world is to be comparedwith it; and the struggles and temptations of the heroes of that oldbook are full of instruction for us; their failures and follies and sinsadmonish and warn us; their steadfastness and fidelity inspire andhearten us. 

II. The Bible is the record of the development of the kingdom ofrighteousness in the world. Man knows intuitively that he ought to doright; his notion of what is right is continually being purified andenlarged. The Bible is the record of this moral progress in the onenation of the earth to which morality has been the great concern. Wehave seen, clearly enough, the imperfection of the ethical standards towhich the early Hebrew legislation was made to conform; we have alsoseen that this legislation was always a little in advance of the popularmorality, leading it on to purer conceptions and better practices. Thelegislation concerning divorce, the legislation regulating blood-vengeance, recognizes the evils with which it deals and accommodatesitself to them, but always with the purpose and the result of giving tomen a larger thought and a better standard. Laws which conformed to ourmoral ideal would have been powerless to control such a semi-barbarouspeople as the Hebrews were when they came out of Egypt. The highermorality must be imparted little by little; one principle after anothermust be drilled into their apprehension; they could not well be learningmore than one or two simple lessons at a time, and while they werelearning these, other coarse and cruel and savage practices of theirsmust be "winked at, " as Paul says. Against any rule more strict at thisearly time the Hebrews would have revolted; the divine wisdom of thislegislation is seen in this method which takes men as they are, and doesfor them the thing that is feasible, patiently leading them on and up tohigher ground. If you would seize a running horse by the rein and stophim, you had better run with him for a little. This homely parableillustrates much of the Old Testament legislation which we find sodefective, when judged by our standards. 

It is in this larger sense that we see the signs of divinity in this oldBook. It is a book of inspiration because it is the record of aninspired or divinely guided development; because the life it shows asunfolding is divine; because the goal to which we see the peoplesteadily conducted in its vivid chapters is the goal which God hasmarked for human progress; because it gives us the origin and growth ofthe kingdom of God in the world. 

"Whence came, " asks one, "and of what manner of spirit is this _anti-historic_ power in Israel and the Bible? Some inner principle ofdevelopment struggles against the outward historical environment, andwill not rest until it prevails. What was it which selected Israel, andin one narrow land, while all the surrounding country was sinking, lifted man up in spite of himself? which along the course of onenational history carried on a progressive development of religious lifeand truth, while other peoples, though taught by many wise men andseers, and not without their truths, still can show no one connected andprogressive revelation like this?" [Footnote: _Old Faiths in NewLight_, p. 81. ]

What is the power that has wrought all this but the divine Power? If youask for a proof of the existence of God, I point you to the life of theJewish people as the Bible records it. _That history is the revelationof God. _ In the record of this nation's life, in its privileges andits vicissitudes, its captivities and its restorations, its blessingsand its chastenings, its institutions and its laws, its teachers and itslegislators, its seers and its lawgivers, in all the forces that combineto make up the great movement of the national life, I see God presentall the while, shaping the ends of this nation, no matter how perverselyit may rough-hew them, till at last it stands on an elevation far abovethe other nations, breathing a better atmosphere, thinking worthier andmore spiritual thoughts of God, obeying a far purer moral law, holdingfast a nobler ideal of righteousness, --polytheism gradually and finallyrooted out of the national consciousness; the family established andhonored as in no other nation; woman lifted up to a dignity and purityknown nowhere else in the world; the Sabbath of rest sanctified; theprinciples of the decalogue fastened in the convictions of the people, the sure foundations laid of the kingdom of God in the world. 

We are quite too apt unduly to disparage Judaism. Doubtless theformalism that our Lord found in it needed rebuke; its worship and itsmorality were yet far away from the ideal when Jesus came to earth;nevertheless, compared with all the peoples round about them even then--compared with classic Greeks and noble Romans--the ethical and spiritualdevelopment of the Jews had reached a higher stage. It is notextravagant to claim for this race the moral leadership of the world. Hear Ernest Renan, no champion of orthodoxy, as you know: "I am eager, gentlemen, "--I quote from a lecture of his on "The Share of the SemiticPeople in the History of Civilization, "--"to come at the prime servicewhich the Semitic race has rendered to the world; its peculiar work, itsprovidential mission, if I may so express myself. We owe to the Semiticrace neither political life, art, poetry, philosophy, nor science. _Weowe to them religion. _ The whole world--we except India, China, Japan, and tribes altogether savage--_has adopted the Semiticreligions. "_ Speaking then of the gradual decay of the various paganfaiths of the Aryan races, Renan continues: "It is precisely at thisepoch that the civilized world finds itself face to face with the Jewishfaith. Based upon the clear and simple dogma of the divine unity, discarding naturalism and pantheism by the marvelously terse phrase, 'Inthe beginning God created the heavens and the earth, ' possessing a law, a book, the depository of grand moral precepts and of an elevatedreligious poetry, Judaism had an incontestable superiority, and it mighthave been foreseen then that some day the world would become Jewish, that is to say, would forsake the old mythology for monotheism. "[Footnote: _Religious History and Criticism, _ pp. 159, 160. ]

Here is the testimony of a man who can be suspected of no undue leaningstoward the religion of the Bible, to the fact that the world is indebtedfor its great thoughts of religion to the Semitic races, and chiefly tothe Hebrew race; that the religion of Judaism, brought into comparisonwith the other religions, is incontestably superior. Now any man whobelieves in religion and in God must believe that the people to whomsuch a task was committed must have been trained by God to perform it. The history of this nation will then be the history of this training. That is exactly what the Old Testament is. No disputes over the natureof inspiration must be suffered to obscure this great fact. The OldTestament Scriptures do contain in biography and history, in statute andstory and song and sermon, the records of the life of the nation towhich God at sundry times and in divers manners was revealing himself;which he was preparing to be the bearer of the torch of his own truthinto all the world. And now I ask whether anybody needs to be told thatthese records are precious, precious above all price? Are there anyauthentic portions of them that any man can afford to despise? Is notevery step in the progress of this people out of savagery into aspiritual faith, matter of the profoundest interest to every human soul?Even the dullness and ignorance and crudity of this people, --even thecrookedness and blindness of their leaders and teachers, are full ofinstruction for us; they show us with what materials and whatinstruments the divine wisdom and patience wrought out this greatresult. What other book is there that can compare in value with thisbook, which tells us the way of God with the people whom he chose, asRenan declares, to teach the world religion? And when one has firmlygrasped this great fact, that the Bible contains the history of thereligious development of the Jewish people under providential care andtuition, how little is he troubled by the small difficulties which growout of theories of inspiration! "We can listen, " says Dr. Newman Smyth, "with incurious complacency while small disputants discuss vehementlythe story of the ark or Jonah's strange adventure. .. . After all the workof the critics, the Bible still remains, the great, sublime, enduringwork of the Eternal who loves righteousness and hates iniquity. "[Footnote: _Old Faiths in New Light_, pp. 60, 61. ]

But what have I been vindicating? The Bible? Nay, I have carefullyrestricted my argument to the Old Testament. It is in behalf of the OldTestament writings alone that I have sought to establish this exaltedclaim. What I have shown you is only the pedestal on which the beautyand strength of the Bible rests, the enduring portals which open intothe glory that excelleth. The Old Testament shows us the progressiverevelation of God to the Jewish people; the New Testament gives us theconsummation of that work, the perfect flower of that growth ofcenturies. After shadows and hints and refracted lights of prophecy, breaks at last upon the world the Light that lighteth every man! Whenthe fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son. It was for thisthat the age-long discipline of this people had been preparing them. True, "He came to his own, and they received him not, " but where else inthe world would the seed of his kingdom have found any lodgment at all?The multitude rejected him, but there was a remnant who did receive him, and to whom he gave power to become the sons of God. So the word of God, that had been painfully and dimly communicated to the ancient people inlaws and ordinances and prophecies, in providential mercies andchastenings, in lives of saints and prophets and martyrs, was now madeflesh, and dwelt among men full of grace and truth, and they beheld hisglory. 

It is here that we find the real meaning of the Bible. "The end, " asCanon Mozley has so strongly shown, "is the test of a progressiverevelation. " Jesus Christ, who is himself the Word, toward whom theselaws and prophecies point, and in whom they culminate, is indeed theperfect Revelation of God. From his judgment there is no appeal; at hisfeet the wisest of us must sit and learn the way of life. With his wordsall these old Scriptures must be compared; so far as they agree with histeachings we may take them as eternal truth; those portions of themwhich fall below this standard, we may pass by as a partial revelationupon us no longer binding. He himself has given us, in the Sermon on theMount, the method by which we are to test the older Scriptures. When werefuse to apply his method and go on to declare every portion of thoseold records authoritative, we are not honoring him. The mischief andbane of the traditional theory is that it equalizes things which areutterly unlike. When it says that "all the books of the Scripture areequally inspired; all alike are infallible in what they teach, " it putsthe Gospels on the same level with Deuteronomy and Ecclesiastes andEsther. The effect of this is not to lift the latter up, but to drag theformer down. They are not on the same level; it is treason to our MasterChrist to say that they are alike; the one is as much higher than theother as the heavens are higher than the earth. 

It is here, then, in the simple veracious records that bring before usthe life of Christ, that we have the very Word of God. Whatever else thefour Gospels may or may not be, they certainly do contain the story ofthe Life that has been for many centuries the light and the hope of theworld. It is the same unique Person who stands before us in every one ofthese narratives, --

 "So meek, forgiving, godlike, high, So glorious in humility. "

What fault has criticism to find with this Life? What word or deed ishere ascribed to him that is not worthy of him, that is not like him? Isit any wonder to us when we read this record through, that the guilelessNathanael cried out as he communed with him, "Rabbi, thou art the Son ofGod, thou art the King of Israel. "

If, then, the New Testament gives us the artless record of the life andwords of this divine Person, the Son of God and the Saviour of theworld; if it brings Him before us and manifests to us, so far as wordscan do it, his power and his glory; if it shows us how, by bearingwitness to the truth in his life and in his death, he established in theworld the kingdom which for long ages had been preparing; if it makesknown to us the messages he brought of pardon and salvation; if it givesus the record of the planting and training of his church in the earlyages, is there any need that I should go about to praise and magnify itsworth to the children of men? If light is worth anything to those whosit in darkness, or hope to those who are oppressed with tormentingdoubt; if wisdom is to be desired by those who are in perplexity, andcomfort by those who are in trouble, and peace by those whose hearts arefull of strife, and forgiveness by those who bear the burden of sin; ifstrength is a good gift to the weak, and rest to the weary, and heavento the dying, and the eternal life of God to the fainting soul of man, then the book that tells us of Jesus Christ and his salvation is not tobe compared with any other book on earth for preciousness; it is the onebook that every one of us ought to know by heart. 

The value of the Bible, the greatness of the Bible, are in this Lifethat it discloses to us. "It is upon Jesus, " says a modern rationalist, "that the whole Bible turns. In this lies the value, not only of the NewTestament, a great part of which refers to him directly, but of the OldTestament as well. " Rationalist though he is, no man could have statedthe truth more clearly. "It is upon Jesus that the whole Bible turns. "The Old Testament shows us the way preparing by which the swift feet ofthe messengers approach that tell us of his coming; the New Testamentlifts the veil and bids us, Behold the man! The Bible is of value to us, just in proportion as it helps us to see him, to know him, to trust him. You may have a cast-iron theory of inspiration with every joint riveted;you may believe in the infallible accuracy of every vowel point andevery punctuation mark; but if the Bible does not bring you into a vitalunion with Jesus Christ, so that you have his mind and follow in hisfootsteps, it profiteth you nothing. And if, by your study of it, youare brought into this saving fellowship, your theories of inspirationwill take care of themselves. 

I fear that we do not always comprehend the fact that it is this divineLife shining out of its pages that makes the Bible glorious. We strainour eyes so much in verifying commas, and in trying to prove that thedot of a certain i is not a fly-speck, that we fail to get muchimpression of the meaning or the beauty of the Saviour's life. See thosetwo critics, with their eyes close to the wonderful "Ecce Homo" ofCorreggio, disputing whether there is or is not a visible stitch in thegarment of Christ that ought to be seamless. How red their faces; howhot their words! Stand back a little, brothers! look away, for a moment, from the garment's seam; let the infinite pain and the infinite pity andthe infinite yearning of that Face dawn on you for a moment, and youwill cease your quarreling. So, not seldom, do the idolaters of theletter wholly miss the meaning of the sacred book, and remain inmournful ignorance of him who himself is the Word. 

There are those to whom the view of the Bible presented in thesechapters seems not only inadequate but destructive. "If the Bible is notinfallible, " they say, "it is no more than any other book; we have nofurther use for it. " In one of the leading church reviews I find thesewords, the joint utterance of two eminent American theologians: "Aproved error in Scripture contradicts not only our doctrine but theScripture's claims, and therefore its inspiration in making thoseclaims. " [Footnote: _Presbyterian Review_, vol. Ii. P. 245. ] Aproved error in Scripture stamps the book as fraudulent and worthless!Worthless it is then! Proved errors there are, scores of them. It isfatuity, it is imbecility, to deny it. And every man who can find anerror in these old writings has the warrant of these teachers forthrowing the book away. Tens of thousands of ingenuous and fair-mindedmen have taken the word of such teachers, and have thrown the book away. May God forgive the folly of these blind guides!

But what stupid reasoning is this! "If the Bible is not infallible, itis worthless. " Your watch is not infallible; is it therefore worthless?Your physician is not infallible; are his services therefore worthless?Your father is not infallible; are his counsels worthless? Will you saythat the moment you discover in him an error concerning any subject inheaven or on earth, that moment you will refuse to listen to hiscounsel? The church of God is not infallible, and never was, whateverinfatuated ecclesiastics may have claimed for it; are its solemnservices and its inspiring labors and its uplifting fellowshipsworthless?

"A ship on a lee shore, " says one, "in the midst of a driving storm, throws up signal rockets or fires a gun for a pilot. A white sailemerges from the mist; it is the pilot boat. A man climbs on board, andthe captain gives to him the command of the ship. All his orders areobeyed implicitly. The ship, laden with a precious cargo and hundreds ofhuman lives, is confided to a rough-looking man whom no one ever sawbefore, who is to guide them through a narrow channel, where to vary afew fathoms to the right or left will be utter destruction. The pilot isinvested with absolute authority as regards bringing the vessel intoport. " [Footnote: _Orthodoxy; its Truths and Errors_, by JamesFreeman Clarke, p. 114. ] Is this because the man is infallible, becausehe has never been detected in holding an erroneous opinion? Doubtlessany of these intelligent passengers could find out, by half an hour'sconversation with him, that his mind was full of crass ignorance andmisconception. And nobody supposes that he is infallible, even as apilot. He may make a mistake. What then? Will these passengers gatheraround the captain, and demand that he be ordered down from the bridgeand thrown overboard if he disobeys? Will they say, "A pilot who is noton all subjects infallible is one whom we will not trust?" No; theybelieve him to be, not omniscient, but competent and trustworthy, and agreat burden is lifted from their hearts when they see him take commandof the ship. On all other subjects besides religion, people are able toexercise their common sense; why can they not use a modicum of the samecommon sense when they come to deal with religious truth?

It is not true, as a matter of fact, that the Bible no longer has anyvalue for those who have ceased to hold the traditional view of it. Notseldom, indeed, those who have been compelled by overwhelming evidenceto relinquish the traditional view have been driven by the naturalreaction against it to undervalue the Bible, and even to treat it withcontempt and bitterness; but even some of these have come back to itagain and have found in it, when they studied it with open mind, moretruth than they ever before had known. Let me cite an extreme case. Icould take you to a society of free-thinkers, consisting of people whohave long been outspoken in their rejection of all the doctrines ofhistorical Christianity, many of whom formerly flouted the Bible as abook of fables, but who are now studying it diligently week by week, inthe most sympathetic spirit. They do not now accept its supernaturalism;but they believe that as a manual of conduct, as a guide to life, itexcels all other books. The young people of their Sunday-school are toldthat the Bible is not like other books; that the men who wrote it knewmore about the human soul and its struggles and its aspirations aftergood than any other men who ever lived; and they are besought to attend, most carefully, to the lessons of life which this ancient book teaches. I should like to take some of our ultra orthodox friends, who arepettishly crying out that the Bible, if not infallible, is good fornothing, and set them down for a Sunday or two in the midst of thisfree-thinking Sunday-school; they might learn some things about itsvalue that they never knew before. 

This incident ought to be of service, also, to those who, havingdiscovered that the Bible contains human elements, have rushed to theconclusion that it is no more than any other book, and who, althoughthey do not cast it from them, hold it off, at arm's length, as it were, and maintain toward it an attitude of critical superiority. Even thesefree-thinkers treat it more fairly. They are learning to approach itwith open mind; they sit down before it with reverent expectancy. TheBible has a right to this sympathetic treatment. It is not just likeother books. Do not take my word for this; listen rather to thetestimony of one who was known, while he was alive, as the arch-hereticof New England:--

"This collection of books has taken such a hold on the world as noother. The literature of Greece, which goes up like incense from thatland of temples and heroic deeds, has not half the influence of thisbook, from a nation alike despised in ancient and in modern times. It isread of a Sabbath in all the ten thousand pulpits of our land. In allthe temples of religion is its voice lifted up week by week. The sunnever sets on its gleaming page. It goes equally to the cottage of theplain man and the palace of the king. It is woven into the literature ofthe scholar, and colors the talk of the street. The bark of the merchantcannot sail the sea without it; no ships of war go to the conflict, butthe Bible is there. It enters men's closets; mingles in all their griefand cheerfulness of life. The affianced maiden prays God in Scripturefor strength in her new duties; men are married by Scripture. The Bibleattends them in their sickness, when the fever of the world is on them. The aching head finds a softer pillow when the Bible lies underneath. The mariner escaping from shipwreck clutches this first of his treasuresand keeps it sacred to God. It goes with the peddler in his crowdedpack; cheers him at eventide when he sits down dusty and fatigued;brightens the freshness of his morning face. It blesses us when we areborn, gives names to half Christendom; rejoices with us; has sympathyfor our mourning; tempers our grief to finer issues. It is the betterpart of our sermons. It lifts man above himself; our best of utteredprayers are in its storied speech, wherewith our fathers and thepatriarchs prayed. The timid man, about awaking from this dream of life, looks through the glass of Scripture and his eye grows bright; he doesnot fear to stand alone, to tread the way unknown and distant, to takethe death angel by the hand and bid farewell to wife and babes and home. Men rest on this their dearest hopes; it tells them of God and of hisblessed Son, of earthly duties and of heavenly rest. " [Footnote:Theodore Parker, _Discourses on Religion_. ]

This is not mere rhetoric; it is simplest truth of human experience. Howis it possible for any man to treat this book just as he would any otherbook? He ought to come to its perusal with the expectation of finding init wisdom and light and life. He must not stultify his reason and stiflehis moral sense when he reads it; he must keep his mind awake and hisconscience active; but there is treasure here if he will search for it;search he must, yet the only right attitude before it is one ofreverence and trust. Any man of ripe wisdom and high character, who hasbeen known to you all your life, whose judgment you have verified, whosegoodness you have witnessed and experienced, commands your respectfulattention the moment he begins to speak. You do not believe him to beinfallible, but you listen to what he says with trustfulness; you expectto find it true. To say that you listen to him as you do to every otherman is not the fact; the posture of your mind in his presence isdifferent from that in which you stand before most other men. It oughtto be. He has gained, by his probity, the power to speak to you withauthority. The Bible has gained the same power. You do not use it fairlywhen you use it as you do every other book. 

There is the nation's flag proudly flying from the summit of theCapitol. It may be a banner that was borne upon the battlefield, decorated now with well-mended rents, and with stains of carnage. "Behold it!" cries the idolater. "It is absolutely faultless inperfection and beauty! There is not a blemish on its folds, there is notan imperfection in its web; every thread in warp and woof is flawless;every seam is absolutely straight; every star is geometrically accurate;every proportion is exact; the man who denies it is a traitor!"

"Absurd!" replies the iconoclast. "See the holes and the stains; thereis not one straight seam; there is not a star that is in perfect form;ravel it, and you will find no thread in warp or woof that is flawless;nay, you may even discover shreds of shoddy mixed with the fine fibre. Your flag is nothing more than any other old piece of bunting, and ifyou think it is, you are a fool. "

Nay, good friends, you are both wrong. The blemishes are there; it wouldbe fanaticism to deny them; and he who says that no man can be loyal tothe nation who will not profess that this banner is immaculate issetting up a fantastic standard of patriotism. But, on the other hand, this flag is something more than any other old piece of bunting, and hewho thinks it something more is not a fool. It is the symbol of liberty;it is the emblem of sovereignty; it is the pledge of protection; it isthe sign and guarantee of justice and order and peace. What memoriescluster round it, of dauntless heroism, and holy sacrifice, and nobleconsecration! What hopes are gleaming from its stars and fluttering inits shining folds--hopes of a day when wars shall be no more and allmankind shall be one brotherhood! The man to whom the flag of hiscountry is no more than any other piece of weather-beaten bunting is aman without a country. 

Is not my parable already interpreted? Are not the idolaters who make ittreason to disbelieve a single word of the Bible, and the iconoclastswho treat it as nothing better than any other book, equally far from thetruth? Is it not the part of wisdom to use the book rationally, butreverently; to refrain from worshiping the letter, but to rejoice in thegifts of the Spirit which it proffers? The same divine influence whichillumines and sanctifies its pages is waiting to enlighten our mindsthat we may comprehend its words, and to prepare our hearts that we mayreceive its messages. Some things hard to understand are here, but theSpirit of truth can make plain to us all that we need to know. No manwisely opens the book who does not first lift up his heart for help tofind in it the way of life, and to him who studies it in this spirit itwill show the salvation of God.