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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF
THE OLD TESTAMENT

I'he
RELIGIOUS VALUE of
the OLD TESTAMENT

BY

AMBROSE WHITE VERNON
Professor of Biblical Literature in
Dartmouth College

with an introduction by
ARTHUR S. PEAKE, M.A., D.D.
Professor of Biblical Exegesis in the
University of Manchester

LONDON
GEORGE T. BROWN
godliman house, godliman street
1908

To
FRANCIS BROWN
STEADIER AND ENLARGER OF
HUMAN LIVES

For rigorous teachers seized my youth.
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire
Showed me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Stanzas from ttie Grande Ctiartreuse,

8 INTRODUCTION
not interrupt its progress, it would simply
throw investigation into the arms of un
belief. Since, then, the work must go forward
whether we welcome it or not, it is a duty
incumbent upon us to deal tenderly with the
faith that is thus disturbed. We must teach
these timid souls the secret of a more robust
and intelligent faith, we must help them to
distinguish between the accident^ and essen
tials of belief. We must induce them to
plant their faith more firmly than ever on the
everlasting Rock.
For these reasons it is a pleasure to intro
duce the present volume to English readers.
Naturally I could not give my assent to every
detail, but I am in warm accord with its
general standpoint, and I am specially.pleased
with the large place which the author gives
to experience as the medium through which
revelation came. He has shown very clearly
the permanent religious value of the Old
Testament and will help many, who may have

INTRODUCTION 9
regarded it as superseded by the Gospel
or rendered obsolete by the advance of
criticism, to recognise in it one of the most
precious possessions of the Christian
Church.
Arthur S. Peake.

CONTENTS
PASS
I. The Change of Attitude to the Old
Testament  13
II. The Older Vie'w of the Religious
Value of the Old Testament . . 19
A . It establishes the existence of God and
the divinity of Christ
B. It gives infallible direction to the
believer
III. Defects of this Older View . . .27
A . In failing to apprehend Old Testament
religion
B. In externalising religion
C. In begetting a trivial conception of God
IV. The Untenability of the Older View . 36

1 2 CONTENTS
V. A Modern View of the Religious Value
of the Old Testament . . .43
A. It presents characters supremely
worthy of reverence
B. It records the discovery of our funda
mental religious truths
C. It is essential to a correct apprehension
of Jesus Christ
VI. Conclusion ..... -93

THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF
THE OLD TESTAMENT

the change of ATTITUDE TO THE OLD
TESTAMENT
It is obvious that the attitude of the educated
man to the Bible has undergone nothing less
than a revolution. Instead of the authori
tative pronouncement of Deity through arbi
trarily chosen instruments, the Bible is now
regarded as a great body of literature, one
part differing from another part in glory.
And the parts have been seen to be of far
greater value than the whole. As the Bible
lies before us, it is a misleading book. Both
in the Old and in the New Testaments,
the historical frajnework is untrustworthy.

14 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
The ecclesiastical writers of the Bible are no
better historians and no more free from pre
judice — to use no stronger word — than eccle
siastical writers generally. It is now clearly
understood that the priestly authors and
editors who are responsible for the final
form of the Old Testament history, from
Genesis to Chronicles and Ezra, thoroughly
misconceived its movement and its meaning.
And I think it is gradually being felt, though
not so universally insisted upon, that the
author of the Acts of the Apostles has repro
duced in somewhat less flagrant manner the
error of the Old Testament ecclesiastics.
The ecclesiastical writers of the Old Testa
ment wrote history from the view-point of
the temple ritual and priesthood, and the
author of the Acts was unduly influenced in
his choice of material by the theories of the
origin and unity of the Christian Church,
which were current in his time. The result is
unfortunate in two respects. In the first place,
the really vital forces in the history of the
Jews and the great conflicts in the history of
the Apostolic Age are almost totally ignored.

THE CHANGE OF ATTITUDE I 5
Had it not been for the preservation of the
writings of the prophets and of the letters of
Paul, we should have been utterly unable to
understand the actual historical develop
ment of the religion of Israel and of Christi
anity. In the second place, the writers push
much too far back the establishment of the
temple priesthood in the one case, and of
churchly authority in the other. In the Old
Testament this error of the priestly writers is
so marked that even were there no similar
tendencies among the prophetic school of
historians, Wellhausen would be fairly justi
fied in declaring that here "we have a
religious history that shuts history out."
It is not too much to say that the theory of
the Chronicler of the Old Testament and of
the historian of the New Testament, so far
from being an accurate guidepost to the his
torical student, is rather a protecting shell
which has to be broken through to find the
meat. It is just the material which had least
value to these historians and which was pre
served only through a reverence for the past
— such as the ancient stories of David,

1 6 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
tucked in at the end of Samuel, the strong
ringing strophes of the minor prophets, and
the parables of Jesus, preserved in Mark as
examples of spiritual mysteries (!) — which
constitute for us the most precious treasures
of the Bible. And so it has come to pass
that the attention of men is being diverted
from the Bible as a whole, that is to say,
from the Bible as an oracle, to the separate
writings of which it is made up.
But it is plain that the great literary power
of the Bible will be lost to us, unless its
religious power may somehow be retained.
The books of the Bible which make the
strongest literary appeal are precisely those
which are epoch-making in religion. The
permanence of their literary influence must
in the last analysis depend upon the value
of their religion. We may keep the Bible
on a remote shelf of our libraries in any
case ; its historical interest and significance
assures that ; but if we are to keep it on our
study tables, we must believe in and live
upon its religion. Now the portion of our
Bible th^t has seemed to be in the greatest

THE CHANGE OF ATTITUDE I /
danger of being put upon the shelf through
the influence of the keen criticism of recent
years is the Old Testament. Notwith
standing far-reaching discoveries in the field
of New Testament criticism, the supreme
character of Jesus has been more and more
clearly recognised as the great inspiration of
mankind, and the first three gospels as the
most immortal of books. We are dealing,
then, with what in one aspect is the most
critical question in regard to the future of the
Bible, if we ask ourselves if modern research
and scholarship have destroyed or enhanced
the religious value of the Old Testament.
For whether for good or ill, it seems indis
putable that the large results of modern
scholarship have become thoroughly estab
lished. In the more important matters a
striking agreement has been reached by
the leading biblical scholars of Germany,
England and America. It would expand
this essay into too large a book to marshal
the proof of even the main contentions of
scholars like Wellhausen and Duhm in
Germany, Robertson Smith and Driver in

I 8 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
England, George Moore and Henry Pre
served Smith in America. Suffice it to
say that the standpoint of this essay is the
standpoint of these men and of the men
they represent, and that its object is to show
that the most outspoken modern scholarship
ministers to our religious needs and to the
appreciation of the supreme religious value
of the Old Testament. I do not mean to say
that modern scholarship has not altered our
conception of the religious value as well as
of the historical accuracy of the Old Testa
ment — we shall begin the consideration of
our subject by pointing out the great differ
ence of view that it necessitates — I only mean
to say that the gain far exceeds the apparent
loss.

II

THE OLDER VIEW^ OF THE RELIGIOUS VALUE
OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Let me first, then, attempt to set forth the
chief religious value of the Old Testament to
the older scholarship and to that scholarship,
not as it has been modified in the last one
hundred years, but before biblical criticism
changed its attitude of awe for an attitude of
sympathy.^ To the older scholarship the Old Testament
was religiously valuable chiefly in two ways :
first, it served as one of the most important
proofs for the existence of God and the
divinity of Jesus Christ, and second, it gave
men infallible directions in regard to faith
and conduct. We must consider these two
great services in turn.
We cannot follow in detail the proof of the
1 Cf. Martineau, "The Rationale of Religious
nquiry," 1836.

20 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
existence of God which the Old Testament
afforded the fathers, but it was chiefly three
fold. It consisted in the miraculous inter
ventions in the course of Jewish history, in
the revelation of future events to the Jewish
prophets, and in the early and authoritative
proclamation of the perfect morality. Some,
if not all, of the older divines and scholars
insist that of these three proofs the first two
are of decidedly greater value. They point
out that they are more distinctly divine, less
open to any human admixture, and that they
have a wider appeal. A moral law impresses
only moral people, whereas a miracle con
vinces the wicked as well as the good. And
certainly if it can be established that the dew
fell one night on Gideon's fleece and not upon
the ground, and that the next night it fell on
the ground and not upon the fleece, and if it
may be further proved that it all happened
because Gideon asked God to have it so, the
circumstance — particularly when supported
by many other similar occurrences — proves
the existence o£ God much more easily than
the delivery of the ten commandments to

the older VIEW 2 I
Moses, or certainly more easily than the
content of the commandments.
The only thing requisite is to be sure that
the miracles actually happened. Of this the
older theologians were convinced, because
the infallible Bible said so. And the Bible
was proven to be an infallible book by the
remarkable fulfilment of its most detailed
and most mysterious prophecies about the
future of Israel and of Israel's foes. Further,
over and over again in this book were to be
found — as in no other with which our fathers
were acquainted — passages of the highest
spiritual quality introduced by the solemn
"Thus saith the Lord." These passages
naturally inspired reverence for the book in
which they were found, and from the earliest
time it was the universal belief that the very
accounts of the miracles themselves were
from the mouth of the Lord, written only
at the hand of some amanuensis. The infal
lible book proved the actuality of the miracle,
which in turn proved the existence and the
power of God.
The divinity of Christ also was proved, not

2 2 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
by the words of his mouth, or the meditations
of his heart, but to a very large extent by the
Old Testament prophecies of his coming. It
was, indeed, always felt that the prophecies
that concerned themselves directly with him
were meagre and hazy, but this very haze was
accounted to be an evidence of that God who
hideth himself and whose ways are not our
ways. A God who could wipe out whole cities
at his word and who could tell Abraham
the exact hour of their destruction could be
mysterious about the sending of his Son if he
so elected. There was enough that was clear
to impress "the fickle and the frail," and
enough that was covered to necessitate and to
repay the theologian. In this latter category
the ritual occupied a prominent place; in
itself it had no meaning ; it was ridiculous to
have so many sacred pages filled with the
description of mere temporaryrites ; it was the
province of the theologian to prove that they
constituted a detailed symbolic prophecy of
the atonement on Calvary. Hence there arose
the sacred science of typology, which supple
mented the meagreness of the direct Messianic

THE OLDER VIEW 23
prophecies. Side by side herewith, the theo
logian followed the lead of the writers of the
gospels in discovering numerous hidden refer
ences to Christ where a casual reader would
not suspect them. This allegorical interpreta
tion of Scripture ran riot in the early days of
the Church and was in great favour much
more recently than we care to think. It was
supposed to be a special gift of the Spirit,
who thereby enabled his favourites to find the
spiritual significance of seemingly secular
events. Thus was much of the Old Testa
ment redeemed from its worldliness and
made tributary to the revelation of Christ,
and to the establishment of his deity.
But allegorical interpretation is invariably
an interpretation of an oracle. It was,
therefore, but a short step from searching
for hidden references to Christ to searching
for hidden counsel for one's personal Hfe.
The historical sense was completely ignored
— at first on principle, at length as a matter
of course. The Bible became a vast store'
house of moral and spiritual food, equally

24 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
nutritious for all ages, and for all circum
stances. Many a saint in perplexity would
open his Bible for direction, and would twist
the passage to which he opened until he
found the guidance he sought. And even
where this was not done, the " devotional "
reader would be constantly expecting some
spiritual refreshment to shoot forth from the
ritual of Leviticus or the narratives of the
Kings. Samson's riddle became only one of
a vast number. The Old Testament became
an oracle like the books ol the Sibyl or the
utterances from Delphi. Any one of God's
children could hear him speak to him per
sonally, simply by opening the pages of the
Old Testament, or as it was preferably called,
The Word of God.
It would be utterly absurd for descendants
of the Puritans to deny that this conception
of the Old Testament had distinct religious
value. It made men certain of the existence
of God and of the divinity of Christ. It kept
everyday life open to the illumination of
God's counsel. It held men in the control
of God. It cannot be gainsaid that with the

THE OLDER VIEW 2 5
weakening of this conception, large numbers
of men are losing the encouragement and
the consolation of religion. The old divines
were right in saying that a moral argument
appealed only to moral men. Where a man
is devoid of spiritual insight, it will be much
harder to prove to him the divinity of Jesus
from the supremacy of his character than
from a detailed prophecy of his coming,
death, and resurrection, hundreds of years
before. Again, the character of the prophets is a
less direct proof of the existence of God, and,
therefore, of men's accountability to him, than
the staying of the sun by Joshua, or of the
processes of a whale's digestion for Jonah. It
would appear that not only perfect love but
imperfect conviction of God casteth out fear
of him. It seems patent that the absolute
certainty of God is passing away from very
large numbers of men. The world of
Western civilisation appears to be entering
on a curious epoch. It has been accustomed
to irreligion in the intellectual circles ; now
it seems that irreligion is rather to have its

26 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
seat among the masses. The problem of the
immediate past has been with the educated ;
the problem of the present is with the in
different, because unconvinced, labouring
classes. They could find God in an infallible
church or in an oracular book ; now they
" wander from sea to sea," but without even
" seeking the word of the Lord " — so sure are
they that " they shall not find it." In the face
of this threatening disaster, we are able to
appreciate the religious value of the Old
Testament of our fathers.

Ill
DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW
Before we turn from the Old Testament of
our fathers to the Old Testament of our
critics, we must in fairness point out three
serious limitations in our fathers' view.
First, the conception of the Old Testament
as the inerrant record of the miraculous and
the infallible oracle for all generations pre
vented men from apprehending the actual
religion of the authors and heroes of the Old
Testament. Even in the historical books, the
search for the miraculous blinded men's eyes
to the simple and affecting greatness of a Saul
or of a David and to their crude beliefs and
fears. The significance of the demand of
Elijah for the exclusive worship of Jehovah,
fraught with such untold consequences, was
quite overlooked in favour of the cruse of oil

2 8 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
and the mysterious chariot and the wonder
working mantle.
This defect is most plainly exhibited in the
estimate of the prophetic books. They were
valued almost exclusively for the predictions
they contained. The figures of the prophets
themselves were but slightly individualised
and their struggles and problems commanded
no sympathy ; they were hardly known to
exist. Only in very recent times has it been
discovered that the greatest of the prophets
were poets, and delivered their messages
from Jehovah in lyric poetry of exquisite
beauty and of unparalleled strength. There
was a lamentable ignorance of the very por
tions of Scripture which have been shown to
be of the highest literary power. And as
literature is not only an outcome, but in
large measure an index, of life, we are forced
to suspect that the older theologians had no
real understanding of Old Testament religion.
It was precisely the most vital parts of the
book for which they had no inner sympathy.
And the suspicion is confirmed by the
reconstruction of history which modern

DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 29
criticism has made. Through it we have
discovered that the creators of the Israelitish
religion are not so much Abraham and Moses
as Amos and Hosea and Jeremiah and the un
known authors of Deuteronomy and of some
of the later chapters of the Book of Isaiah.
The prevalent opinion among scholars is
that the ten commandments, instead of being
handed to Moses on Sinai, are the crystal
lisation of the insight of the great prophets
of Israel. We have found that what gave
power to the strophes of Amos and Hosea
was the sense of declaring to Israel what
they perhaps thought was forgotten, but what
was at any rate unknown, moral and spiritual
truth. We have learned that the religion of
the Old Testament was neither the religion
of the Protestant theologians nor even of
the New Testament. It was in such a con
stant state of development that to speak of
the religion of the Old Testament as though
it were a fixed quantity, is a misleading use
of language. In reality, Hebrew religion
did not become monotheistic until shortly
before the fall of Samaria.

30 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
The only glimpses of immortality in the
Old Testament come from the two centuries
preceding Christ, and Old Testament religion
never lost its national character. For a
long time its chief representatives sought
God exclusively through ritual and the cast
ing of lotsj worshipped him with the help of
images and regarded national exaltation as
his highest reward. Hebrew religion was
raised to its unique place only through the
inner experiences of the wonderful succes
sion of men, of whose hearts and hopes and
lonely, steadfast faith the theologians of the
Reformation had no apprehension. The
first great defect, then, of the older view
is its failure to realise the religion of
the men of the Old Testament, and thereby
to appreciate that our religion was the
outcome of centuries of struggle after
God. This emphasis on miracle and prophecy
on the part of our fathers made also for the
externalisation of religion. It is indeed
strange to find emphasis on Israelitish
prophecy making for such a result, but we

DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 3 I
must remember that prophecy was re
garded by the old theologians as predic
tion. This prediction had to do largely with
external events that could easily be verified
by the morally obtuse. The predictors
themselves, moreover, were chosen without
especial regard to their moral attainment, as
was peculiarly evidenced in the case of
Balaam. To have faith in God meant, not
to appropriate his holiness, but to believe in
his existence and power. It was the fact
rather than the character of God that was
of supreme importance. To believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ meant, not to understand
what God intended man to be, but rather to
be confident that the worth of Christ's
sacrifice balanced our account with the
Almighty. It was the cross rather than the
heart of Jesus that was the centre of Christi
anity. With this external view of God and
of Christ, it followed that eternal life was a
mark of duration rather than of quality.
What was acquired by this intellectual —
that is, external — acceptance of God and
Christ was an assurance of pleasurable

32 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
existence after death. In some most rigidly
orthodox quarters, religion became synony
mous with belief.
But the most serious religious defect in
this method of regarding the Old Testament
was the trivial conception of God that went
with it. God was supposed to have found in
an unchanging book a completely adequate
medium for revealing himself to men. He
had need of no further avenue of commu
nication. Spirit had deposited itself in
letters. The Bible was the surrogate of
God. To commune with the Almighty,
let man dig out the hidden meaning of
infallible words. A God that was to be
found in such fashion was of necessity a
trivial God.
The nature of the letters, moreover, in
which God had, as it were, deposited him
self, increased the triviality of his character.
For, as we have seen, the only way in which
long stretches of Chronicles and the Song of
Songs and Leviticus could be considered
worthy of being the speech of any God at
all was to regard them as conveyers of a

DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 3 3
hidden spiritual meaning. Even the older
theologians were sure that for a final and
exclusive communication of God to men,
there was too much in the Old Testament
about buying wells and measuring altars and
describing meats. Hence it was generally
assumed that these passages were intended
to convey subtle mysteries of redemption.
This assumption not only relieved the
speech of the Almighty from seeming
lapses, but gave him back again that
mystery which he had surrendered to the
clear-cut letters of the Bible, and which
men must needs feel about their God.
Thus the obscurity of his verbal revelation
was made to match the obscurity of
Providence, and in a double sense he
was felt to be " a God that hideth him
self." But this human method of invest
ing Jehovah with mystery only increases
our sense of his inadequacy. He is freed
from insisting on the exact measurements of
furniture only by being made a lover of
riddles. His message to men was thought
to be more adequately conveyed in plays
C

34 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
upon words than in the mountains and the
stars or in the heart of man.
Revelation was thus regarded as somethiiig
quite unnatural and unrelated to the currents
of the inner life. Only through artifice could
God reveal himself to his creatures; even his
Son must be accredited by hidden solutions
of prearranged conundrums. No wonder
that for the simple trustful reverence of
Jesus there was substituted the belief on the
"mysterious" dogma of the Trinity. No
wonder, further, that God was supposed, by
processes akin to magic, to reveal to men
definite directions of an arbitrary kind when
they found themselves in trifling perplexities.
Aaron was not allowed to enter the holy of
holies oftener than twice a year ; even the
Sibylline books on the Capitoline were con
sulted only at explicit command of the
Senate ; the God of the older theology,
however could always be consulted through
the biblical oracle at all times, for all causes,
by all persons. Superstition easily usurped
the place of reverence. The God of an oracle
is always to be preferred to no God at all, yet

DEFECTS OF TttIS OLDER VlEW 3S
he is not a God of order but of confusion,
and he is far removed from the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The
greatest evil of an infallible Bible is the
worship of a trivial God.

IV
THE UNTENABILITY OF THE OLDER VIEW
But with its good and ill alike, our fathers'
view of the Bible has been found untenable.
It cannot, of course, be said to have been
actually disproved. There is no possibility
of overturning by proof so subjective a belief
as the belief in the allegorical interpretation
of Scripture. Every contradiction, every false
statement, may be set aside simply by assert
ing that the obvious sense of the passage has
nothing to do with the real significance
thereof. But it can be said that, in the light
of common sense and science and com
parative religion and historical criticism,
this method of biblical interpretation has
been discarded by nearly all educated
men. Where this view has been given up, and
men have approached the pages of the Old
Testament to discover the simple meaning

UNTENABILITY OF THE OLDER VIEW 37
of its writers, it is well-nigh universally
admitted that the Bible is not an infallible
book. At many an important crisis in the
history of the Jews, different, and, in some
cases, directly conflicting, accounts have
been discovered, sometimes side by side,
sometimes dovetailed together by an ancient
and anxious editor. As both of two opposing
accounts cannot be true, the theory of biblical
inerrancy must be abandoned. It is only
necessary to instance the two narratives of
creation or of the conquest of Canaan or of
the origin of the monarchy in Israel to refute
it. Being compelled to reject the infallibility
of the Old Testament, we can no longer prove
the fact of the existence of God by the cita
tion of its miracles. Unless we have a super
natural record, we cannot be sure of the
reality of supernatural events. It has, more
over, been observed that the accounts of
the most stupendous biblical miracles are
usually much later — in some important
cases, as in the narratives of the Patriarchs
and of the Exodus, centuries later — than
the times in which these wonders arc

38 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
reported to have occurred. Great providen
tial deliverances, such, for instance, as the
deliverance of Israel in the time of Hezekiah,
though they still stand out in all their im-
pressiveness, are explainable by quite natural
causes. Nor does prophecy come out more un
scathed from the fires of modern historical
criticism. It has been found to be essentially
a forthtelling rather than a foretelling. Not
that the element of prediction is absent —
many modern writers have erred at this
point — but the prediction of doom is based
on moral failure, and the prediction of glory
on faith in the love of God and in the endur
ance of his kingdom. In other words, the
predictions are expressions of the moral in
sight of majestic men who spake as they were
moved, not by a magic, but by the Holy
Ghost. Wherever his judgment passes from the
general to the specific, we find unfulfilled, as
indisputably if not as frequently as fulfilled,
prophecy. It is only necessary to mention the
predictions of the restoration and confedera-

UNTENABILITY OF THE OLDER VIEW 39
tion of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms
in Palestine.^ And at the most important
point of all, the prophetic argument is a com
plete failure. It is simply impossible to
establish from it the divinity and the Messiah-
ship of Jesus. A careful study of the Messianic
prophecy of the Old Testament shows that,
while a small minority of the prophets antici
pated a personal " Messiah," no one of them
anticipated a figure like that of Christ. The
only possible exception of this statement
is the author of the marvellous fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah, but it is probable that
in the " Servant of Jehovah" he was per
sonifying the nation of Israel. Jesus referred
most sparingly to predictions of himself in
the Old Testament ; it was the evangelists,
and more particularly Matthew, that made
good this omission.
And typology, so elaborately developed and
systematised, is the weakest of all reeds to lean
upon. On the one hand, the ritual on which
it is based is found either to be similar to that
of the other Semitic nationsor to be borrowed
i fiosea i. 11 ; Jer. 1. 4 ; Ezek. xxxvii. 15 ff.

40 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
from the ritual of Baal ; and, on the other
hand, it is found to have been elaborated in
the more degenerate times of Jewish history
and to have been one of the chief objects of
prophetic denunciation. The best that can be
said for the ritual of the Old Testament in its
most developed and purified form is that it
preserved a great religion through times too
formal and too worldly to appreciate it. We
should regard the " divinely ordained " ritual,
not as the highest prophecy of the Messiah,
but rather — as ritual always is — as an evi
dence of religious stagnation. Jesus ignored
it almost completely. In his presence, anise
and cummin ceased to be important. It is
nothing but the simplest truth to say that
if we were left to the Old Testament to
prove the Messiahship of Jesus, we should
no longer be able to accept him as our
Lord. And it perhaps should be added that the
" thus saith the Lords" of the Old Testament
have lost in impressiveness through the dis
coveries of the archaeologists. We have found

UNTENABILITY OF THE OLDER VIEW 4 1
the King of Moab as sincerelybelieving in the
power and direction of his god, Chemosh, as
did the Israelite in that of his God, Jehovah.
There was dug up but the other day a code of
laws, almost identical in some of its statutes
with the code of Moses, antedating it by over
a thousand years. The stone, moreover, upon
which the code is inscribed, is headed by a
picture of its author, Hammurabi, either in
the act of receiving the law from his god —
in a similar fashion to that of Moses — or in
dicating by the posture of worship that the
inspirer of the code was a greater than man.
And so we have come to regard the solemn
formula of the prophets, not as an evidence
of a unique experience, but as the expression
of the sincere conviction of honest men,
whose conviction has been paralleled fre
quently, that they were under the guidance
of Deity. In many other respects, illustrated,
for example, in the borrowing of the material
underlying the stories of the creation and of
the flood from the Babylonians, we find the
Old Testament to be one of a class, rather

42 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
than an absolutely unique volume. It is not
the only sacred book of the nations ; it is
simply the sacred book of the Jews, which
many of us, however, believe is destined
soon to be a part of the sacred book of
mankind.

V

A MODERN VIEW OF THE RELIGIOUS VALUE
OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Now, it is maintained both in rigidly ortho
dox quarters and in quarters where they spell
modern with a capital " M," that with this
abandonment of the infallibility of the Old
Testament its religious significance is ex
hausted. And it must be frankly admitted
that we can no longer regard it as a demon
stration of the existence of God to immoral
men, nor as a demonstration of the divinity
of Christ to those unattracted by his person.
Nor is this an altogether unmixed evil. We
instinctively recall the words of Paul, the first
grave heretic, "The natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God, for they
are spiritually discerned," and the unequi
vocal words of Jesus, " Why doth this
generation seek a sign ? verily I say unto
you, There shall no sign be given unto this

44 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
generation," and again, "The kingdom of
God cometh not by observation." It may
prove that the coming of that kingdom is not
so much impeded as we fear by the diminu
tion of that large class who " believe and
tremble." Be that as it may, I am very con
fident that the Bible, 'and specifically the Old
Testament, may still with gratitude and
reverence be hailed as " the anchor of our
purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide," in
some measure even "the guardian of our
hearts." And, indeed, the relation of the
Old Testament to the religious man is not
unlike the relation which nature bore to the
rare soul of Wordsworth. It is that constant
element — objective, if you will — of great and
sublime beauty, which suggests and inspires
those abiding visions of the Eternal, which
are " the soul of all our moral being." It is
the fixed mountain peak, from which a soul,
if it ascend on a clear day, may catch sight
of " the hills where its life rose " and a faint
suggestion at least " of the sea where it goes."
This essay would sadly outgrow its limits,
and overtask its author, should it attempt to

A MODERN VIEW 45
set forth thoroughly the religious values of
the Old Testament, which criticism has either
confirmed or uncovered. It will be best to
confine our attention to three fundamental
services which the Old Testament, in the
modern understanding of it, is destined to
render to men of our time.
The first great and permanent service that
the Old Testament renders to a man is that
it presents to him personalities worthy of the
profoundest reverence. The beginning of all
ethical religion is the awakening of reverence.
This is occasioned by contact with persons
of moral earnestness and religious insight.
For all of us our religion began with the
initial trust we reposed in our parents. But
both they and our personal friends are too
close to us to call out that reverence for
character, detached completely from its
worth to ourselves, that is distinctively re
ligious. The Old Testament affords even the
most unfortunately circumstanced among
us characters which are so great, and whose
greatness lies so patently in their relation to
God, that we are inevitably led to ascribe to

46 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
them supreme worth. Of all ages and of
diversest gifts, they stand out more plastically
than the apostles and more massively than
the heroes of other races. It is the patient
scholarship of our time that has rendered
their individualities intelligible and self-con
sistent. It has set them in their proper
historical environment and has separated the
later narratives of their doings from the
earlier ones. It has made plain to us the
greatness of these men. It has shown that
greatness to consist in their loyalty to the
highest ideals of their time, in the zeal with
which they performed their divinely ordered
tasks, and, above all, in a religious insight
which enabled them to Hve just enough
beyond their time to lead it forward toward
ours. Their problems and their capaci
ties have been sufficiently disclosed to us to
convince us that God spoke to them more
plainly than he speaks to us, but only because
they had a greater faith, a deeper loyalty to
right, and a more unconscious devotion to
their race than we. There is no reason why
our time should not be as close to God as

A MODERN VIEW 47
theirs. There is nothing that has brought it
closer than this discovery of its possibilities.
Out of the large number of men which
inspire our reverence, let us take David for
an example. Modern scholarship has given
us the background necessary to an apprecia
tion of his remarkable character. We shall
never make anything out of David unless we
remember that he belonged generically to
Oriental despots. He had a large harem, he
cast lots superstitiously in the deciding of
grave questions, he did not hesitate to exact
a bandit's booty because he had kept his
men from stealing sheep, he made the inhabi
tants of conquered towns pass under saws
and hammers and through the terrible brick
kiln. He does not satisfy the lowest standards
of to-day ; but if we understand his time,
he comes before us as nearer God than
many a man of higher standards.
Of course, as long as we conceive such a
man, so cruel and so sensual, to be the author
of the exquisite twenty-third Psalm, it is im
possible to regard him as self-consistent or
to allow his personality any save a senti-

48 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
mental influence over our lives. His ode on
the death of Saul gives us the key to his
character. While it makes no explicit men
tion of Jehovah, it reveals a superb loyalty
to a king that unjustly sought his very life
and a love passing that of women for the
friend of his youth. He did not worship the
God of the prophets though he had the same
name for him ; he was not capable of so
exalted a conception ; but his personality did
much to create the ideals of manhood that
supported such a conception. Even to this
day fraternal societies can find no loftier
type of brotherhood than his affection for
Jonathan, nor Christian ministers higher
words of consolation to parents in bereave
ment than those in which this semi-barbarian
expressed his submission to Deity. His care
for his parents, his decree that those who
stayed by the stuff should share the spoil with
those that had been in the thick of the fray,
his unchangeable affection for the son he
knew was a traitor — all these were the highest
manifestations of the virtues of his day.
But the depth of his own loyalty led him

A MODERN VIEW 49
to religious conceptions in advance of those
of his time. He had the power of discrimi
nation in ritualistic values, so much more
important in his day than in ours. He did
not hesitate an instant to eat holy bread to
save his life, or to defy the wrath of an angry
plague-sending God for the marvellous
mother-love of Rizpah ; but he risked death
rather than slay the Lord's anointed, though
a king was something quite ^new to Israel
and without any traditional sanctity. He
had an inner standard by which he instinc
tively tested the elements of the religion of
his time. Perhaps his highest moment was
when he sent back the sacred ark to Jeru
salem, then in possession of his son, Absalom,
with words which seem to have pushed the
human race leagues along in its search for
God : " Carry back the ark of God into the
city ; if I shall find favour in the eyes of the
Lord, he will show me again both it and his
habitation ; but if he say, I have no delight in
thee, behold here am I, let him do as seemeth
good unto him." He would not risk the
home of Jehovah upon the rectitude of his
D

50 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
rule; he still thought of him as residing in ark
and city ; but the consciousness of his un
swerving loyalty to God led him to hope that
somehow God, whose holiest dwelling was
with his enemy, would find a way to be loyal
to him.
Thus was the insight of his steadfast heart
keen enough to pierce the theology of cen
turies and to break through the weight of
custom, " heavy as frost and deep almost as
life." The very man who at the beginning
of his career besought Saul to permit him to
stay in Judah, that he might not be cut off
from the only soil upon which God could be
worshipped, learned through the profound
qualities of his own spirit, that its God is
not confined to any dwelling-place however
sacred it be. It is not theoretical speculation,
but the experience of an untutored barbarian
of large heart and of tumultuous life, that
gave rise to the first words that shine with
" the peace that passeth understanding."
When the modern man of culture bows
before a hero of barbaric times, he has a
glimpse of eternal values.

A MODERN VIEW 5 1
Or take once more, before we leave this
portion of our subject, the grandest person
ality of the Old Testament, the prophet
Jeremiah. I wish there were space to
rehearse the story of his life as it lies so
confusedly but so grandly outlined in his
great prophecy. It is a story too subtle, too
emotional, too inwardly tumultuous, to
abbreviate with success, I can only hope to
direct some readers — perhaps under the
guidance of Duhm or Cornill — to an intelli
gent study of the prophecy which, though
complicated by additions from later ages, has
still the power to bring us into touch with a
man in whom faith achieved one of its most
notable victories,
Jeremiah was a country priest, timid and
desiring solitude, " A lodging-place for way
farers in the wilderness" was his idea of
happiness. The first part of his life fell in the
time of Josiah, who was the leader in one of
the most radical religious revolutions known
to history, and yet we hear no single word of
this from Jeremiah. His soul was untouched
by it. During its progress he received his

52 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
call from God through an intense inward
persuasion of the coming destruction of his
people. To a people that had passed through
the throes of a religious transformation, and
who thought themselves reformed, he was
constrained to proclaim the displeasure of
God because of the ineradicable iniquity ;
to a people casting wildly about for some
means of maintaining their independence, he
proclaimed that it was Jehovah's will that
they should submit to haughty Babylon. It
was a message foredoomed to rejection, a
message that the utterer would fain have left
unspoken, a message that exposed the
messenger to continuous obloquy. But it
was a message that had taken complete
possession of his souU The only dim hope
he saw for his people lay in their readjust
ment of their national ideals to the inevitable,
with the immovable conviction that God
was behind it. He realised the insuperable
difficulties of persuading a self-satisfied popu
lace to rise to a faith so heroic and so
indefinite. But he regarded himself as the
mouthpiece of the Almighty. He was

A MODERN VIEW 5 3
beyond his own control. From the call to
deliver such a message he shrank at the out
set, but he was over-mastered by the Omni
potent. "O Lord," he cries, "thou hast
enticed me and I was enticed ; thou art
stronger than I and hast prevailed." He
excuses his course to his diary thus, " If I say,
I will not make mention of him nor speak
any more in his name, then there is in my
heart a burning fire shut up in my bones and
I am weary with forbearing and can no
longer be still." So with eyes open to the
consequences and with a heart open to God,
he proclaimed, in season and out of season,
his message of gloom. When the nation was
at peace and gathered for worship, when the
king was plotting with Egypt against the
Babylonian inevitable, when the very armies
of Babylon surrounded the city and the
whole populace was aroused for its defence,
in his native town, in private before the weak
and unstable Zedekiah or among his two or
three disciples, in public in the very guard
room where the soldiers were preparing for
war against the Babylonian advance— every-

54 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
where and at all times he thundered forth
his message. Over and over he was arrested,
imprisoned, made fast in the stocks ; once he
was thrown into the lowest dungeon to sink
in the mire ; for a long period he was
threatened with death by his own townsmen.
Through all contumely he remained stead
fast. At last, as he had predicted, the arms
of Babylon were successful ; and the con
querors, on hearing of his course, treated him
with marked distinction. While his revilers
received the due reward of their deeds, the
man who had done nothing amiss was offered
a career of prominence in Babylon.
But the prophet refused to believe that the
enjoyment of such luxury and repose was the
purpose of his vindication. Turning his
back unhesitatingly on all such preferment,
with great joy he undertook to live in Pales
tine with a remnant of Israel which was not
worth the while of Babylon to deport, but
from which he expected to see the new Israel
arise. His hope, however, was short-lived.
The new Babylonian governor of Palestine
was murdered by a fanatic. Fearing that the

A MODERN VIEW 5 5
crime would be laid to their charge, the Jews
of Palestine, thoroughly terrified, sent a dele
gation to Jeremiah, whom events had ac
credited as a true prophet, to receive the
word of God. After many days of waiting
they received from him the message God had
finally vouchsafed; they should remain in
the land of Jehovah and trust in his protec
tion. Their fears had increased, however,
during the delay, and in spite of the council
of Jeremiah, they moved out in solid ranks
to that Egypt which had constantly lured
them to ruin.
The new Judea for which he had toiled and
in which he had believed was not to be.
The men of Israel may have hoped that with
a favourable Egyptian alliance their inde
pendence might be restored. Or they may
have abandoned all ambition for the sake of
comfortable living in Egypt. In any case
they were more interested in themselves than
in righteousness. But even with this outlook,
the prophet was true to his message. He
went in duress with these people to Egypt
rather than as governor of others to Babylon,

5 6 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
The last glimpse we have of him is of a man
prophesying in Egypt the universal sway of
Babylon as a part of the plan of Jehovah.
He was faithful unto death, a death so
obscure that its time and place are unknown.
But from him the world learned what every
attentive reader of his book still feels, the
unmatched grandeur of faith in performance
of a duty whose utiHty is hidden from men's
eyes. It is difficult to overestimate the effects in
the history of the inner life of mankind that
reverence for the character of Jeremiah has
produced. The truth of his insight and the
nobility of his faith so impressed the Jews
that his words were carefully preserved as
words of Jehovah. In their own despite,
they canonised a man who proved to them
that faith has its reward in the heart and not
in the market. More and more through the
centuries of disappointment they were drawn
to him as the incarnation of the Jewish spirit.
More and more they revered a faith so instinc
tive and so majestic that it asked for nothing
but God. It is recorded that one of thg

A MODERN VIEW 57
greatest of the Maccabean victories was won
through a vision in which he was seen hand
ing the sword to their leader. It is not un
likely that he may have been in the thoughts
of the author of the book of Job ; and some
modern scholars believe that he was the
modelforthepicture of theServantof Jehovah
in the immortal fifty-third chapter of Isaiah.^
It seems incredible that Jesus, who knew and
applied to himself a prophecy of Isaiah,
should not have had his mission made clear
to him by those words which helped many
men in the first centuries to receive him as
the Messiah :
" Surely he bore our griefs,
And carried our sorrows :
Yet we did esteem him stricken,
Smitten of God and afflicted.
" But he was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities :
The chastisement of our peace was upon him ;
And with his stripes we are healed."
It is then by no means impossible to connect
i Cf., for example, Cornill, " Das Buch Jeremia,'i
1905.

5 8 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
Jeremiah with Calvary ; and we are not as
tonished to find that Jesus was mistaken, by
one who revered him greatly, for the prophet
Jeremiah, risen from the dead.
If any one wants to receive the grace of
humility, " the highest virtue, mother of them
all," and to recover the fading glory of rever
ence, I know no surer method than by living
in the atmosphere of the Old Testament, with
men like Moses and Isaiah, Barak and Elijah,
David and Jeremiah, with men who convince
us that the noblest character, both in modern
andin ancient times, is that which tremblingly
confesses that it is the product of the Spirit
of God. The two men of whom I have
written are, of course, far too great for my
words to actualise. But no man of moral
perception and of spiritual longing can
study for six months the books of Samuel
or the prophecies of Jeremiah without
getting a new heart or at least a new
song. This transcendent service of the Old Testa
ment, in presenting to us personalities that
incite profound reverence, is as enduring as

A MODERN VIEW 59
virtue and is utterly independent of changing
scientific and philosophical views.
The second permanent religious service
that the Old Testament renders mankind is
to record the discovery of the most funda
mental truths of our religion.
The modern study of history has shattered
two widespread notions of the origin of
religion. The older of these held that God
revealed in the centuries between Adam and
Moses the entire content of religion. The
main significance of Christ was that he re
vealed more clearly and in final form what
had been in the minds of the Patriarchs and
of Moses. The primitive practices of the
period of the Judges and of great heroes
like Gideon and David were either not clearly
understood — fixed ideas are opaque glasses
through which to read history — or explained
as wilful departures from the ethical mono
theism of the primitive times. It is only
quite recently that the discovery has been
made that the reason for a higher conception
of God in parts of Genesis than in parts gf

6o RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
Samuel lies in the fact that they were written
later. Our fathers are not to be blamed for
their opinions. They were but following the
lead of the Hebrew editors of the Pentateuch,
who themselves credited the patriarchs with
the conceptions of the prophets and of Ezra.
They were sure that the omnipotent God
would not have withheld from his favourites
the sublime truths which these editors
assumed them to be capable of grasping.
But it has now been conclusively proven
that the Hebrew religion, which we have
inherited, is a product of long development
rather than a revelation to three or four men
at the dawn, or before the dawn, of history.
The other theory of religion that has been
shattered lies embedded in the phrase
" Natural Religion " and has, perhaps, its
most conspicuous representative in the
person of Rousseau. It is the theory held
in common by the Deists of England and by
the theologians of the German Aufklarung.
It postulated that a righteous and merciful
God, a high sense of moral obligation, and
the hope of immortality were the property

A MODERN VIEW 6 1
of mankind at creation ; that, while not given
by special revelation, as the older theologians
surmised, they were an inalienable part of
the constitution of the race. To recover
the true religion, it was necessary only to
remove the ddbris of history and disclose
the heart of primitive man. But an intelli
gent study of the Hebrew Scriptures alone
is enough to show that this is utterly false.
The hope of immortality is clearly a late
conception among the Jews, and the sublime
Jehovah of the prophets was as unknown to
Samson as to Agamemnon.
Our God is a Being gradually discovered
by the tremendous struggles of the men
whose lives and whose glorious enthusiasm
on emergence into the light the Old Testa
ment alone of all books describes. This is
the reason why the Old Testament will
endure and will be indispensable in the
creation of character for ever. No religious
truth can be grasped by the intellect. To be
discovered in its essential grandeur, it must
be seen by the eyes of the heart. It is only
the Old Testament that enables us to appre-

62 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
ciate the moral worth of the truths of our
religion, because only through it may we
enter into the enthusiasm and witness the
moral transformation of those majestic souls
who discovered these truths.
Let us take, for example, the sovereignty
of God. We take it for granted and fancy
we understand its significance. But until,
through the mediation of the Old Testament,
we stand close by the man who made it the
eternal property of the race, we no more
understand its supporting pillars and its
tremendous proportions than the foolish
Israelites of the court of Jeroboam II. They
believed in the power of Jehovah. Under
Jeroboam their country had advanced very
greatly in extent and power. The court was
full of prophets who assured them of the
approach of the Day of Jehovah, in which
Israel should rule over the proud kingdoms
that had oppressed them and Jehovah over
the boasting gods of the nations. They
believed in the might of Jehovah because it
was traditional to believe therein and because

A MODERN VIEW 63
recent events in history gave colour to such
belief. So we may believe in the sovereignty
of God because we read it in the creeds and
because there are certain mental and histori
cal facts that bear it out. But until we have
joined the crowd over which Amos, with
the enthusiasm of a discoverer, thundered
forth the truth, until we have been mastered
by the majesty of his soul, and entered
wonderingly into sympathy with his sublime
revelation, we do not understand the sove
reignty of God. Before Amos, the Old Testa
ment is the book of God ; after him, it is the
book of Almighty God. Before him, it was
the great record of men striving to find a
holy God ; after him it is the record of men
who had found him. The Old Testament
after Amos is rocked and swayed by the
colossal discovery of that moral world that
is created by the idea of the Unity of God.
He is the first prophet whose words have,
some of them, come to us in their original
form. The crashing thunderous numbers of
Hebrew prophecy seem, therefore, quarried
from the soul of the man who rose to such a

64 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
conception of the holiness of Jehovah that he
was forced to give over the whole world to
his rule. To the Israelites reposing in their
sole election by Jehovah he announces :
" You alone have I known of all the tribes of the
earth,
Therefore from you wiU I have satisfaction for all
your iniquities."
To the men who granted Jehovah some
power in nature, he proclaimed :
" For Adonai Jahveh of Hosts —
He toucheth the earth and it melteth
And all its inhabitants mourn ;
He buildeth his chambers in heaven
And foundeth his vault upon earth ;
For the waters of ocean he calleth
And poureth them over earth's surface ;
Jahveh is his name." *
Irritated beyond poetic measure by the arro
gance of the provincials, Amos in the midst
of his glorious wrath gives birth to absolute
monotheism in that stinging sentence : "Are
ye not as the Ethiopian children to me, ye
1 I have not seen my way clear to subscribe to the
almost universal opinion that the "Nature-Poems"
of Amos are later interpolations.

A MODERN VIEW 65
children of Israel ? Have I not brought up,
not only Israel from Egypt, but also the
Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians
from Kir ? " I am the God of your enemy
as well as of yourselves.
What was it in the soul off this man that
startled the earth into a new epoch and even
tually gave the world to his God ? Who
shall say ? But that it was moral splendour
that was the creator of this religious faith,
these words reveal, poured forth to a very
religious folk in the midst of their cere
monies :
" Woe to those eager for the Day of Jahveh !
'What is it to you, that Day of Jahveh ?
That Day shall be darkness ; it shall not be light,
Yea, sunless gloom, and not glittering splendour !
" Your feasts I hate, I despise.
Your festal assembUes I loathe.
The noise of thy songs remove.
Thy harp-music let me not hear :
As waters let justice run down.
Uprightness as a stream never failing."
Monotheism could arise only from a per
fectly unified experience that felt about it the
constraint of the inevitable. The only pillars

66 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
that can carry so tremendous a structure as
monotheism are moral monoliths. And it
tolerates no others. Amos was the spiritual
father of Kant, The philosopher set himself
to the demolition of the arguments of the
metaphysicians for the existence of God
because he saw that they were incapable of so
great a task. Then upon the imperative of
his moral nature he built again the walls to
carry the faith of humanity. But in so doing
he was only reverting to Amos, who, ignorant
of the arguments that Kant discarded and a
stranger to the long centuries of moral
endeavour that produced .the philosopher,
found God, twenty-five hundred years
earHer, just as confidently out of the strength
and imperiousness of his vision of righteous
ness. Although he did not know it the
greatest of philosophers was but confirming
the discovery of the first great Hebrew pro
phet. To apprehend monotheism we must
realise the solidity of the foundation-stones
on which it is builded, and these lie dis
closed in no laboriously wrought system of
thought, but, fresh hewn and rugged, only in

A MODERN VIEW 67
the strophes of the book of the prophet
Amos. Take once more — for we can only touch the
borders of our vast subject — the conception
of the love of God. No more than the sove
reignty of God was it the property of man
either by nature or by revelation at the out
set. Like that conception, it had a long
prenatal history in the womb of the race.
But like that also, it came into life at one
point in the history of our religion. And
that point is to be found, not in the specu
lations of the theologian, not in the ritual of
the temple, not in the rapture of spring-time
nor in the common joy of harvest, but in the
heart of a man who was made a prophet by
the persistence of his love for a faithless wife.
For not as an allegory, whose rise would then
be unexplainable, but as the most literal fact,
do I, in company with many modern writers,
regard the pathetic story of the prophet
Hosea. In the company of Hosea, we do not, in
the phrase of Jeremy Taylor, have to practise
the presence of God. Released from our

68 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
own imaginations and from all mystical
exercises of our spirits, we immediately are
ushered into the audience-room of the Eter
nal. Living in the same great eighth century
before Christ, a younger contemporary of
Amos, he caught the righteousness of the
earHer prophet to his heart and warmed it
there with love. In Hosea, the deepest per
sonal grief of man becomes the means of
creating the conception of a righteous God,
who loves sinners. Hosea was not the first
man who had an unfaithful wife, nor the
first, who, after discovering her unfaithful
ness, still loved her with jealous and animal
devotion. But, so far as we know, he was
the first who loved so impure a woman with
so pure an affection. Hosea did not cast off
Gomer as King Arthur did Guinevere. His
IjOve refused to let her go. Through the long
years of her harlotry he pursued her, and,
when all her gay lovers had forsaken her, he
took her into his home, buying her in open
market as a slave. And after all is done and
the inevitable redemption accomplished, this
humble victor out of the profound depths of

A MODERN VIEW 69
his life perceives his love to be a symbol of
God's own. Hosea is forced with joy to
confess that his love for Gomer is no more
patient and certainly can be no more trium
phant than Jehovah's for Israel. It is a mis
fortune that the prophecies of Hosea have
come to us in so corrupt a text and weighted
down with so many additions. But every
now and then a few lines of exquisite beauty
are revealed. The second chapter of the
book, though sadly marred, is full of the
lyrical tenderness we might expect in the
poem which is the record of man's discovery
of the changeless love of God. Mindful of
the way of his own love, he reveals God's
method of redeeming Israel in words which
he does not hesitate to lay in the very mouth
of God himself.
" Behold, I will hedge her way with thorns
And fence her about with walls
So that she may not find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers,
But she shall not overtake them.
In vain shall she seek them.
Then, behold, I will allure her,
I will lead her to the wilderness,

70 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
I will speak home to her heart,
And there will I give her vineyards,
The vale of Achor as a gate of hope.
As in her youth will she answer me.
As in the days when she came out of Egypt."
Hosea is not content with the revenge of
the Almighty : his love has taught him the
emptiness of such a victory as Amos would
have God win ; he is content with nothing
less than redemption, and knowing that love
cannot degrade, he sets forth God as the
wooer of shameless Israel. Thus doth
human love reveal its right in the holy of
holies. The lot of Hosea was cast in evil
times, and, like all the prophets, he is forced
to denunciation : but through all the attacks
on idolatry and iniquity in the remainder of
the book we find the plaintive note recurring
again and again. It is thus that the Almighty
utters himself :
" When Israel was a child, then I loved him ;
It was I taught him to walk ;
I took him in my arms.
" How can I give thee up, Ephraim ?
How shall I abandon thee, Israel ?
How make of thee an Admah ?

A MODERN VIEW 7 I
How let thee share Zeboim's fate ?
My heart is changed within me.
My compassions are kindled together.
I will not act in burning wrath :
I will not set out to destroy Ephraim,
For God am I and no man.
" I will heal their faithlessness,
I will love them freely." j
Here we may feel something of the wonder
and the transport that dwelt in the man
whose love for a woman was so holy that he
started a whole race on its great journey to
the heart of God. Only as a man stands by
the wondering prophet can he grasp the
significance of believing in the love of God.
Amos and Hosea are conspicuous, but after
all typical, examples of the service of the Old
Testament in revealing to men the full sig
nificance of the essential elements of our
religion. And even where the great concep
tions — for they are not many — do not come
to such unique expression out of the lips of
distinct individuals, the religious reader is
continually conscious of moving in creative
times. The Old Testament introduces us to
the beginnings of personal communion with

72 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
God. This is harder to trace than the birth
of the great truths of the sovereignty and
love of God. While it is true that adumbra
tions of these ideas are to be found in many
parts of the Bible, they may be said to have
emerged into the light out of the experience
of the prophets Amos and Hosea.
But it is somewhat hard to say when an
Israelite first approached God for himself
instead of for his nation or as a part of his
nation. It is easy to see that at the begin
ning of Israelitish history religion was a
national thing ; in spite of the curious en
deavours of some critics, it is clear that in
the Psalter religion is an individual thing. It
may indeed be that this tendency never fully
revealed itself until Jesus came, but that it
had begun in Old Testament times is evident.
In the earliest Hebrew song that has come
to us — the "song of Deborah " — we find in
dividuals singled out for remembrance before
Jehovah for their services to his people in war.
The grotesque Samson definitely calls upon
Jehovah for aid in overthrowing the pillars
that uphold the temple of the Philistines.

A MODERN VIEW 73
He seems thus early to have dispensed with
oracle and image and priest in converse with
his God. But we must remember that there
are grave doubts as to the meaning and his
toricity of the story of Samson, even should
we not share these doubts ourselves. In any
case it is to be noted that Samson called
upon Jehovah as the national God to aid him
in a deed that would avenge his people.
But with David we come upon one whose
individuality was so powerful that he called
upon Jehovah, not merely for aid in national
crises, but for reHef in his own personal
sorrows. It is true that in national concerns
he employed a priest to consult a tenderly
prized oracle to discover the issues of war.
In his pursuit by Saul, too, his actions were
governed by the outcome of Abiathar's con
sultation of the ephod ; but at least twice the
need of his heart was so great that he dared
to ignore ah priestly sentries in his approach
to the presence of his God. He loved a
child so much that he prayed and fasted
many days in the hope that Jehovah would
spare its life, evidently not for the sake of

74 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
Israel, but for the sake of his love. And,
although he danced before the ark on its
return to Jerusalem because he believed that
he was then dancing before Jehovah, we
nevertheless find him believing that God
would save his life, if he so pleased, even
though the ark was in the possession of his
enemy. It appears therefore that, at the
great crises of his life he felt that neither
God nor he was bound by ecclesiastical
machinery.^ In the story of Elijah, again of uncertain
date and embellished with legendary addi
tions, we find that its author believed
Jehovah to be concerned about the life of the
prophet, and that he thought it natural for
the prophet to beseech God to make good to
a woman the kindness she had shown him.
But with Jeremiah, the personal communion
of God enters on a deeper phase. He does
not simply beseech God for his life. He
1 It must be recognised, however, that no actual
prayer of his has been preserved, and that the phrase
in 2 Samuel xii. i6, " he besought God for the child,"
may not be meant as spiritually as we suppose ; he
may even then have besought him through an ephod.

A MODERN VIEW 75
throws himself upon God and pours out his
soul before him. Wellhausen is not far wrong
when he says : " In the midst of his pain
and agony, there arose the certainty of his
personal communion with the Deity ; the
deepest essence of personal religion was set
fi-ee through him. He is the father of true
prayer in which the frail soul expresses its
less than human ^ misery and its more than
human confidence." ^ He bears the indig
nities from his people and scorns the
treasures that have blinded their eyes, in
order that he may still hear the speech of
God. He is the first Israelite whose per
sonal prayers, written by himself in the
midst of his prophecies for the nation, have
come down to us. He laments his loneli
ness and his fate, evidently feels the distinc
tion between himself and his people, and
apparently intercedes for them. His soul is
so completely filled with the majesty of
being the mouthpiece of God that he cannot
but pour out his complaints before him.
1 Untermenschliches.
2 " Israelitische and Jiidische Geschichte," igoi,
p. 147.

•]6 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
And we feel that from these outpourings of
soul he goes back to his task strengthened
and uplifted.
Yet communion is still imperfect. There
is no real joy in God ; only a sense of his
righteousness and his irresistible power over
the nation and over the prophet's will. It is
still only the nation that is immortal, only
Israel that is the real object of the plan of
God. Had Jeremiah not been engrossed in
the fate of his nation, he might have felt
that sense of the injustice of God in his
dealings with himself that comes to the
surface in the Psalms and in the Book of
Job. Only when the soul is immortal and
stands before the eternal God can real com
munion exist ; only then are joy and faith
possible. But the Jews were pushed onward
toward the belief in immortality largely by
the necessity of discriminating between the
men who served God and those that scoffed
at him. And it was undoubtedly the
prophets who, looming so large before them,
and so differently estimated by various
groups of the people, forced the emphasis

A MODERN VIEW TJ
from national success to individual faithful
ness to God and to righteousness.
A long development preceded the Lord's
Prayer, and the two throw light on each
other. It is only we who have the Lord's
Prayer that can rightly estimate the long
tarrying in the outskirts of prayer, it is only
we who can see the vastness of the contri
bution these men were making to human
life ; on the other hand, the Lord's Prayer
is even more gratefully offered when we
realise both the silence and the stammering
that preceded it. It is only as we share the
struggle after truth and the enthusiasm at its
initial discovery, it is only as we apprehend
the grandeur of the men out of whose hearts
the foundation-stones of our religion were
quarried, that we apprehend the significance
of the truth and the holiness of our faith.
The Old Testament permits us thus to
stand at the cradle of the great fundamental
ideas that have sanctified human life. They
are now so ingrained in the texture of
humanity that it is hard to believe that they
were not always there. It is but recently

78 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
that historical criticism has let us a little way
into the secret of their discovery. In com
parison with the conception of the unity of
God, of the changeless tenderness of his love
and of the imperativeness of duty, all other
ideas are secondary. It is the Old Testament
alone which enables the soul to partake in
the discovery of the great foundations upon
which Jesus Christ so confidently erected the
Kingdom of God.
But the question may well be raised :
Why is it necessary for us, who, whatever
our peculiar intellectual mood at the moment
may be, form our lives and are ruled in our
spirits by these ideas — why is it necessary
for us to read continually of the record of
their discovery ? We do not find it necessary
to our intellectual development to be for ever
reading Darwin and Koch and the diaries of
Columbus ; why should it be necessary to
our religious development to be constantly
reading the Old Testament ?
The answer has already been partly given.
For it is clear that the stuff out of whjgh

A MODERN VIEW 79
Columbus and Koch and Darwin made their
discoveries — the face of nature — is still the
object of attentive study by all who are
interested in their discoveries ; they must
verify them for themselves. But the stuff
out of which the great spiritual discoveries
were made is the souls of the discoverers, of
the men whose records are preserved in the
pages of the Old Testament. It was the soul
of Amos from which the conception of a
righteous God was taken ; it was the suffer
ing love of Hosea for his sinful wife that was
the stuff in which the love of God was first
discovered ; it was the heart of Jesus Christ
that gave rise to the final conception of the
Fatherhood of God. Religious discoveries
are wholly personal ; they are made by men
from their own hearts ; and in reliance on
what is written there, they defy the world.
One of the surest methods of verification
of spiritual truth is close understanding of
the souls that were profound and pure
enough to disclose it. A scientific discovery
may be perfected by the generations which
succeed the discoverer ; a religious discovery

8o RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
is always clearest and mightiest in the soul
of the discoverer ; indeed we may in a sense
assert that whereas a scientific truth may be
verified, a religious truth must be imparted.
That is doubtless the underlying meaning of
the Sacrament, which the author of the
fourth gospel so profoundly expressed in the
words : " Except ye eat the flesh and drink
the blood of the Son of Man, ye have no life
in yourselves." The only method of obtain
ing the belief of Jesus is to share his Spirit.
If this be so, the unique religious value of
the Old Testament is clearly seen and is
wellnigh impossible to over-estimate. In
recording the discoveries of the fundamental
truths of our religion, it preserves in a very
important sense the truths themselves.
The third great service that the Old Testa
ment renders mankind is that it affords the
presuppositions that are indispensable to
apprehend the character of Christ. It is the
Old Testament religion that Christ came to
fulfil. It is as necessary to understand what
the material was which Christ completed as

A MODEKJN VUiW 8 1
the method of his completion. Christ was
addressing a definite situation. It was a
nation of very strong and definite religious
conviction to which he spoke. We do not
understand him unless we understand the
effect which his words produced upon the
people to whom they were uttered. It is
impossible to gain a complete idea of Jesus
and his purposes from the Gospels alone.
We must understand the problems of his
own time and the deepest spirit of his race.
To understand the Christian ideal, it is
almost as essential to appreciate what Jesus
took for granted as what he felt it necessary
to add. His God was the God of Abraham
and Isaac and Jacob. He had come, not to
destroy, but to fulfil. He was put to death
because he claimed to be the one in whom
the hopes of the prophets culminated.
It is as impossible, therefore, to understand
the purpose and spirit of Jesus without some
thing of his reverence for the Old Testament
and something of his intimacy with it, as it
would be to understand a proposed amend
ment to a constitution without a knowledge F

82 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
of the original constitution, or to compre
hend an advanced course in physics without
studying the elementary laws of heat and
light. The most fatal misapprehensions of
Jesus are those that fail to see the spirit of
the Old Testament in all his ideas and deeds.
All his words of grace and love are cari
catured in our apprehension of them unless
we remember that they were addressed to
a people that hungered and thirsted for
righteousness. He was still insistent that it
was to destruction that the easy way led. The
errors that he corrected in the Old Testament
were created by searching for substitutes for
righteousness, not by undue insistence there
on. He came to bestow upon men a power
to attain righteousness that the scribes had
missed. He was the Messiah of the Jews,
because he revealed to men the splendour of
righteousness and because he planted it in
their hearts.
The old commentators were right in
believing that Jesus fulfilled prophecy ; they
were wrong in not placing the emphasis upon
the fundamental in prophecy, but upon

A MODERN VIEW 83
mere accidents of verbiage or of ioretelling.
What was the reason why Jesus appeared in ^
Palestine rather than in India or in Japan ?
The reason is the Old Testament. The
reason is that in Israel men sought com
munion with God and that they sought it
through the discovery and the doing of his
will. From beginning to end the Old Testa
ment is a book of great moral emotion. It
is not content with contemplation. It knows
nothing of the immanence of God. It seeks
with might and with unparalleled grandeur
the conformity of human will to the divine.
The possibility and delight of such confor
mity is the inspiration of the prophet and the
experience of the psalmist. Morality is not
a social order, it is the invitation of a wise
and merciful God to a feast.
And yet the careful reading of the Old
Testament makes it evident also that in turn
ing from it to the New Testament we are
turning to a new religion. It not only helps
us to an appreciation of Jesus by revealing to
us the moral fotmdations on which he built,
but it allows us to apprehend that individual

84 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
contribution of his to the Jewish religion
that made it the religion of mankind.
It should be said immediately that it is
hard to prove that Jesus introduced any
absolutely new religious conception. He
himself felt that he was not revolutionising,
but completing. He was conscious of break
ing at serious points with the religion of his
times, but he was also insistent that the reli
gion of his times was a degenerate form of
the religion of the Old Testament. To the
teachers of his day he said : " Ye have made
the word of God of none effect through your
tradition." The Old Testament was his re
fuge in temptation and the keeping of its
commandments was the method he recom
mended to obtain eternal life. In it we find
the central truths of his gospel either clearly
uttered by some rare man, or at least sug
gested. If we think of Jesus as demanding
mercy rather than sacrifice, we find that he
was anticipated by Amos and by Micah ; if
we think of him as emphasising the love of
God rather than the struggles of man after
righteousness, we find Hosea doing the same ;

A MODERN VIEW 85
if we think of him as rejoicing in present
personal trust on God rather than in expecta
tion of national purification and supremacy,
we can say no less of the author of the twenty-
third Psalm ; if we realise that he lived in an
inner and eternal world, we see in the
seventy-third Psalm the ecstasy of one of
the earliest venturesome believers in immor
tality, and we find the belief in immortality
widespread among the Jews when Jesus
came ; if we think of his wonderful declara
tion of the fatherly attitude of God, we find
a dim suggestion of it in Isaiah, as applied
to a group of Israelites, though for a clear
belief in it as applied to individuals we must
look to the Apocrypha ; ^ if, finally, we re
member his summary of the moral law and
his refusal to separate the love of God from
the love of man, we discover an unusually
close parallel in Jeremiah's summary of
Josiah's life, which he addressed to Josiah's
scoffing son : " Did not thy father eat and
drink and do justice ? then it was well with
him. He judged the cause of the poor and
1 Wisdom of Solomon ii. 12-Z4.

86 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
the needy ; then it was well. Was not this
to know me, saith the Lord ? " It is no
wonder that he said : " I am come not to
destroy but to fulfil."
And yet on the other hand we have but to
read the fifth chapter of the Gospel according
to Matthew to find that Jesus did not regard
the Old Testament as the infallible and final
word of God to men. He did not bow to it
as his authority ; he deliberately corrected
it and substituted words of his own for sacred
commands of the law. With aU its insight
and sancity, he knew something holier, the
judgment of his own soul. He was not de
pendent upon the Old Testament ; he did
not hesitate to say that while the prophets
were the servants of God, he was his son.^
He rejoiced in the suggestions that the Old
Testament offered of the truth of his own
heart, but he found them in his heart more
clear and more spontaneous and more com
pelling than in the book.
It is a truism to assert that every man has
one original contribution that he makes to
1 Mark xii. 1-13,

A MODERN VIEW 87
religion, namely, his own personality. And
yet the original element in Christianity is the
personality of Christ. His personality is
recognised as absolutely supreme in the
annals of history and stands before men with
the value of God. From it there is no appeal ;
to his teaching there is no need to add ; no
one dreams of " fulfilling " his religion. He
seems to have attracted to himself all the
noblest traits of the deepest seers of the Old
Testament and to have rejected all their im
perfections. And yet there is no suggestion
of borrowing. The whole nation seems to
haVe groaned and travailed together to pro
duce him. He seems to be the incarnation
of the Spirit that had feebly and transiently
touched one and another ot the loftiest souls
of Israel. In his person all the loftiest im
pulses of the prophets and psalmists are
blended in such a perfect harmony that it is
hard to believe we have ever been moved by
them, even singly, before. It does not seem
to express the truth to say that he made these
different impulses his own ; they seem to have
been his own from the beginning ; he has no

88 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
acquisitions; truth was native to him, because
he was pure in heart. Although coming at
the end of Jewish history, he seems the foun
tain from which the prophets have drawn.
We remember the profound word attributed
to him, in the fourth gospel : " Before Abra
ham was, I am." The word is true, if
divested of crass realism ; there is no other
word that seems so adequate.
It is futile to analyse his person ; it is mis
leading to put him into opposition with the
book that he completed or with the impulses
of the individuals which he fulfilled or with
the teachings of the prophets, which aH find
their significance as they take their place in
his full-orbed utterances. He includes ;
that is his method of correction ; he does
not oppose. It is a new emphasis that we
detect in his gospel rather than a new truth,
a new emphasis that finds its explanation
and its significance in his character. And
yet with him we enter a different world.
Such is the power of his person.
With this explanation, with the conscious

A MODERN VIEW 89
ness that the great secret of Jesus' relation
to God and to men can never be explained,
it is, perhaps, not out of place to say that
Jesus laid a new emphasis on the indivi
dual as distinguished from the nation, on the
inner as distinguished from the outer, on the
present as distinguished from the future.
The Old Testament is a book of such
unique power that we sometimes wonder
why it did not redeem the world. After be
coming acquainted with Jesus, we see that
what it lacked was the supreme character
that was his alone. And in his light we see
that it never quite shook off the chrysalis out
of which it came. The Jews were a nation,
constantly expecting dominion and esti
mating dominion by outward prosperity and
power. What they expected God to give
was national righteousness and national
dominion and national prosperity, and the
greatest of the prophets either expected
these things also or announced their impossi
bility as utmost ruin. While in harmony
with all their best, Jesus seems to move in a
different world from this. It is an inner

90 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
world ; some of the Old Testament writers
caught sight of such a world ; the authors
of the twenty-third and the seventy-third
Psalms lived in it for moments ; Jesus first
showed us what it means to find in converse
with God and in the doing of his will the
whole of life. He, like Amos and Jeremiah,
seems to have believed that Jerusalem was
speedily to be destroyed, but it was not the
burden of his message as of theirs ; it was
indeed of so Httle importance that he referred
to it but rarely, of so little importance that
some find it hard to believe that he referred
to it at all. What was national life compared
with the trust of the individual on God and
God directing and loving and controlling
the individual ? The outer world, outer re
wards, outer comforts, outer aims, how
little they all mattered to one who saw God 1
And the future — Jesus derived constant
encouragement from its splendour, but
when God was to be trusted and served in
the present, what need of planning for the
future that was secure with God. " Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof."

A MODERN VIEW 9 1
The change of emphasis all depends on
an inner experience, unexplainable, unpa
ralleled. Jesus and God lived together
as Son and Father. God could love no
nation as he loved him, as he loved this
brother of his and that brother of his.
As Luther has it, " The worship of God is
the service of God, and the service of God is
the service of men." I am sure Luther has
the emphasis of Christ. It is the service of
men, not of man ; of the sons and daughters
of God, not of the human race. Righteous
ness is lofty and somewhat vague, and no in
dividual can claim it. Jesus demands some
thing higher, which seems to be service of
those we love — for no man is to go unloved by
us. Jesus saved the race by forgetting it in the
saving of men. Jesus did not announce prin
ciples ; he spoke home to the heart of men. A
prominent Japanese writer appears to under
stand the genius of Christianity when he
says : " It is as a state and not as a society
that we [Japanese] have made progress, and
now the time has come to make changes in
society. This is dependent on the personal

92 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
character of those in authority and personal
character is best improved or changed by
Christianity." ^
The Old Testament impresses us as a
book of longing, the New as a book of joy ;
the Old Testament as a book of national
righteousness and national faith, the New
as a book of individual men, set face to face
with God by an individual man ; the Old
Testament as a book of a great ambition, the
New as a book of a great sacrifice. But in
the last analysis, the difference lies in the
character of Christ. It is this character
which the failure of the Old Testament to
redeem the world emphasises, a character,
however, deeply reverent toward the book
which it alone made " Old."
1 Dr. Nitobe, in " Bushido," quoted by Rev. Morton
Dunning in "The Need of the World," Boston, 1906.

VI
CONCLUSION
I CHERISH the hope that enough has been
adduced to prove that modern scholarship,
far from being a foe to religion, is its servant.
These religious goods that I have mentioned
are very simple — otherwise they would not
be of high religious value. But they have
been clearly offered only by modern scholar
ship. It alone has sketched the times of
these widely separated individuals with
sufficient clearness of outline to enable us to
sympathise with the individuals themselves ;
only recently have they become real men
with power to grip our souls. Modern
scholarship alone has demonstrated that the
great truths of religion have been actually
discovered in the course of history. It has
enabled us to stand reverently at the birth
hours of those sublime conceptions on which
the world of moral thought and religious

94 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT
splendour is founded. It alone has aroused
that historical understanding of the times of
Jesus which has allowed us to perceive the
Hebrew spirit in the Son of God. It alone
has shattered the shocking limitations of the
older view to which I have alluded. It has
shown us that the Old Testament is God's
great means for making us acquainted with
him rather than a sure proof that he is, but
that we can never know him well.
The religious value of the Old Testament
consists in too many things for us even to
mention them, but it at least may be said to
consist partially in these that 1 have named.
The Old Testament presents to our souls
characters that are supremely worthy of our
reverence because consciously centred in
God and full of his power. It permits us to
share the enthusiasm of the men who dis
covered the fundamentals of our religion
and the character of our God. It is indis
pensable to complete discipleship of Christ,
because it is the creator of the mould which
his soul expanded.

CONCLUSION 95
Higher values than these, religiously, there
are not. No man save Jesus ever had the
right to lay the book that offered these aside.
And he made it immortal.

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THE LORD'S PRAYER
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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OR
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Crown 8vo. as. 6d.
From the Author's Preface i
"I am encouraged to yield to the request or their publication
because I learnt from trustworthy sources that they had been found
profitable by many of those who heard them,
"The number of young men who were content to stand for hours in the
transepts of the Abbey in order to hear them was unusually large, and my
sense of responsibility in delivering them was greatly increased by the fact
that they had awakened the interest of so important a section of the
community. The letters which reached me from youths and young men,
who were entire strangers to me, showed that some hearts had been
touched by them and some consciences awakened.
" I may therefore indulge a bumble hope that they may be of service to
a much wider range of hearers than can be reached even from the pulpit of
Westminster Abbey."
'* The Spectator" says t
" Measured by his influence over bo^ hearers, who are commonly hard
to reach, Dean Farrar was a most eflective preacher."
" Scotsman" :
" This book is one which speaks to the conscience and the heart, and it
sets_ an example of fearless, faithful and practical preaching, which
ministers in general would do well to imitate."
GEORGE T. BROWN, Publisher
Godliman House, Godliman St., London, E.C.

TRUTHS TO LIVE BY
By the Late Very Rev.
FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
(Dean of Canterbury)
New and Cfieaper Edition. Seventli Tliousand.
Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
CONTENTS.
Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Source of Life— Fellowship and
Joy— The Nature of God— The Nature of Man— The Nature of
Sin — The Divine Remedy for Sin— Christ our Advocate — Tests of
the Efficacy of Redemption for Ourselves — The Second Test of our
Knowing God— Love the True Imitatio Christi— Love not the
'World— Antichrist : or False Forms of Religion— Realised Sonship
— The Results of the Sense oi Sonship—" All Have Sinned "—
"¦We Have Sinned"— The Forgiveness of Past Sins— Christ a
Ransom and a Propitiation — The Law cannot give Life — "In
Christ," L— "In Christ," IL — " In Christ," HI.— St. Paul's
Theology — The Ideal and the Real in Christianity.
CHRISTMAS CAROLS.— In the Fields with their Flocks Abiding
— In Sorrow and in 'Want — All Jubilant with Psalm and Hymn.
EASTER CAROL.— On the Cross we Saw Him Dying.
From the Author's Preface t ¦
"The sermons differ from those in 'Everyday Christian Life because
they are devoted almost exclusively to the exposition of doctrine, as the
others were to the enforcement of practice ; but it need hardly be said that
as doctrinal teaching was not excluded from the former sermons, so
practical exhortation is still a main object in these. They are an effort to
make clear some of the most essential irulhs of the Christian faith in simple
and untcchnical phraseology ; and with this end in view they set fonh the
main elements in the theology of St. John and St. Paul."
" Daily Telegraph " ,
'_' No theologian is better qualified to speak with lucidity of the
cardinal tenets of the Christian creed. Dean Farrar has attempted to set
forth those tenets, ' in simple and untechnical language,' and he has
admirably succeeded."
"Church Bells",
'* We may without insincerity say that any one who will carefully and
reverently read the book-^in the same earnest spirit in which it has
manifestly been written — cannot fail to be helped and strengthened by its
manly pleadings. The ciiculation of the book is sure to be large ; its
influence and its value are bound lo he great.'
GEORGE T. BROWN, PUBLISHER
Godliman House, Godliman St., London, E.c.

EVERYDAY CHRISTIAN LIFE
OR
SERMONS BY THE WAY
By the Late Very Rev.
FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
(Dean of Canterbury)
New and Cheaper Edition. Tenth Thousand.
Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
CONTENTS.
Heaven in Earthly Homes — Hovv to Make Earth Like Heaven —
What to Think About— Children, and the Child Christ— Unseen
Realities — Wherewith to Measure Life — The Essentials of Prayer —
The Sanctity of Principle — The Possibility of Goodness and the
Example of the Saints — The Bible — Temptation — Selling the Birth
right — Known by its Fruits — Death-bed Repentance On the Inner
Reverence of a Man for His Own Person — Honour AU Men —
Counsels to the Defeated — The Services of the Despised — The
Marks of the Lord Jesus— The True Glory of Humanity.
From the Author's Pf eface r
In the title to this volume of sermons I have endeavoured to express the
humbleness of their pretensions. They are ordinary parochial exhortations,
mainly delivered on Sundays after Trinity, during that great division ot
the Church year in -which she endeavou'S to impress on us the reiterated
lessons of daily duty — that duty towards God and duty towards our neigh
bour, on which hang all the Law and the Prophets.
"Pali MaU Gazette" *
" Altogether a kindly, manly book, meeting a real need of a practical,
earnest age in an able, refreshing and understandable way."
" Literary Churchman" t
"A book we can thoroughly recommend . . supplies an excellent
mode for imitation."
GEORGE T. BROWN, PUBLISHER
GODLIMAN HOUSE, GODLIMAN ST., LONDON, E.C.

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