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Fromjlie Estate of
HENRY H. STRONG, Y '83
1930

1

A LAYMAN'S STUDY

THE ENGLISH BIBLE.

A LAYMAN'S STUDY

OF

THE ENGLISH BIBLE

CONSIDERED IN ITS

LITERARY AND SECULAR ASPECT.

FEANCIS BOWEN, LL. D.
ALPORD PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD COLLBOB.

NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
1885.

Copyright, 1885,
Bi FRANCIS BOWEN.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge ¦
Elcctrotyped and printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAP. PA8B
I. Introdttction: the Bible as an English Classic 1
II. The Narratives in the Old Testament .... 19
III. The Parables op Oitr Lord. — The Gospel Nar
rative  ... 31
IV. The Philosophy op the Bible  57
V. The Poetry op the Bible  90
VI. The History contained in the Bible. — The
Character and the Institutions op Moses . U6

A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.

CHAPTER L
INTEODUCTION: THE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC.
What I purpose here to consider is the study of
the English Bible, regarded exclusively in its lit
erary and secular aspect, and the due place of such
study in a system of liberal education. Hence the
discussion will not be either philological or theolog
ical in character. I shall have little to say, except
in the way of occasional reference, either about the
original tongues, whether the Hebrew or the Greek,
in which these books were first written, or about
the religious dogmas which the various churches of
Christendom have founded upon the interpretation
of them. These branches of the subject must be
left to the professional experts, the philologists and
theologians, who have been fitted respectively for
their peculiar tasks by their special studies. But
it is perhaps unfortunate for the claims of the
Bible to universal attention and respect that the

2 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
thorough study of it should have been raade over
almost entirely to these two classes of experts.
The subject is interesting to others also, especially
to the students of poetry, of English literature, of
history and philosophy, and, indeed, of what may
be called the science of human nature. At any
rate, I propose now to look at the Scriptures only
in the ordinary English version of them, just as if
they were now, for the first time, placed before us,
without any opinions previously formed respecting
their character and purport ; just as one might first
enter upon the study of Gibbon's great historical
work, or attempt to ascertain the characteristics of
the Elizabethan age of English literature. To ac
cept all the results of such an examination as is
here intended, it is not necessary to belong to any
one household of faith, or even to be a believer in
Christianity. Romanist or Protestant, an intelli
gent pagan, a cultivated agnostic, even a Moham
medan, if he were a man of taste and education,
might accept gladly, and without prejudice, any
statements which I shall here have occasion to
make. Yet even as thus limited, the subject is a very
broad one, and might well occupy the labor of a
lifetime. For we have first to observe that the
title, "The Bible," — the Book, in a special and
eminent sense, — is a misnomer in one respect.

THE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 3
oince it is not one work, but a collection of many
scriptures, widely differing from each other in
their subjects and characteristics, and purporting
to have been written respectively at very distant
periods of time. Hence the title of the Latin Vul
gate, Biblia Sacra Vulgatce Editionis, "The Sa
cred Books in the commonly received Edition," is
more precise and appropriate than their English
appellation. The earlier portion of the collection
contains thirty-nine distinct books, the later part
twenty-seven others, having but little family like
ness to each other, either in style or mode of treat
ment, either in the topics which they "consider or
in the ends which they subserve. Some are nar
rative in form, some didactic or hortatory, others
epistolary, others still poetical. They contain le
gends, histories, biographies, poems, ethical and po
litical injunctions, proverbs and parables, medita
tions on life and death or what we call ' philosophy,'
and what purport to be revelations of the supernat
ural and of immortality. How far these distinct
works are from being exclusively theological or re
ligious in character appears at once frora the fact
that, in at least two of them, the Book of Esther
and Solomon's Song, the name of God is not once
mentioned from beginning to end. There is no
other or better reason for lumping all these dissim
ilar writings together, and giving them one name as

4 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
" the Book," than there would be for including in
a like collection, under a similar distinct appella
tion, works as heterogeneous as Chaucer's Canter
bury Tales, the Paston Letters, Shakespeare's Son
nets, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Holinshed's
and Hall's Chronicles, Bacon's Essays, Milton's
Paradise Lost, and a dozen other books taken at
random from the Elizabethan or Stuart period.
This great diversity of subject and treatraent is
only what we ought to expect when it is further
considered, that the thirty-nine books of the Old
Testament, as it is called, purport to contain the
whole surviving literature, down to a period about
500 years before Christ, of one of the oldest and
most remarkable races of men on earth, covering in
its composition a space of nearly 900 years, consid
erable portions of it being unquestionably the old
est literature in the world which has come down to
us in any but a merely fragmentary state. Let me
go farther, and as our present purpose is only to
mark. out a preliminary outline of the subject in
hand, let me venture to make some assertions which
may at first seem hazardous, but which will appear
amply substantiated by the evidence and considera
tions which will hereafter be adduced. I say,
then, that these books contain a body of history,
poetry, and philosophy, the study of which has
done more than any other single cause to modify

TBE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 5
the course and happiness of thinking men on the
earth, and to color and direct the whole course of
modern civilization. Human life is governed and
made what it is not so much by outward circum
stances, differences of external position, and mate
rial aids and appliances, as by the development of
character, by the prevailing turn of passion and sen
timent, andby the general current of opinion. Not
what we have, but what we are, — not our material
surroundings, but our ruling passions and habits of
thought, together with the presence or absence of
a bridle on the manifestation of them, — is what
shapes our lives and determines our destinies.
Great epochs in the history of the modern civilized
world, such as the conversion of the northern tribes,
the growth of the temporal power of the Church,
the establishment of the monastic orders, the Cru
sades, the development of the Scholastic philosophy,
the Reformation, the rise of Puritanism, are all at
tributable more or less directly to the one moral
cause which we are now considering, the study of
the Bible. It is not too much to say, that the
Books of the Old and New Testament have exerted
more influence, whether for weal or woe, on the
course of human affairs among civilized nations than
all other books put together. Their imprint is on
most of the literature, the philosophy, the legisla
tion, and the history, of the last 1700 years.

6 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
Leaving these general considerations, let us now
come to particulars, and consider that aspect of the
study of the English Bible which makes it interesting
to the mere lover of literature. Look first at the dic
tion, and weigh its merits regarded simply as a spec
imen of English prose. The opinion of scholars is
unanimous that its excellence in this respect is un
matched ; English literature has nothing equal to it,
and is indeed largely indebted to conscious or un
conscious imitation of it for many of its best and
most characteristic qualities. The diction is re
markable for clearness, simplicity, and strength.
It is as simple and natural as the prattle of children
at play, yet never lacking in grace and dignity, or
in variety and expressive force. Till our attention
is called to it, we seldom notice what I may call the
homeliness of the style, the selection of short and
pithy Saxon turns of expression, and the wealth and
strength of idiomatic phrase. One who should at
tempt to imitate it, would easily lapse into vulgar
and colloquial language, or, in striving to avoid
this fault, into a certain primness and stiffness of
speech, which is even worse. In truth, it cannot be
imitated ; to write such prose as that of our Com
mon Version is now one of the lost arts. And I
have not yet mentioned what is to many persons
the peculiar and most striking charm of the style ;
that is, its musical quality, the silvery ring of the

THE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 7
sentences, and the rich and varied melody of its ca
dences whenever the sense coraes to a close. An
excellent and, learned ecclesiastic, who went over
from the English to the Romish Church about
forty years ago, thus speaks, after his conversion
to Romanism, of the charm of this Biblical lan
guage. " Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvel
lous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the
great strongholds of heresy in this country ? It lives on
the ear like a music that can never be forgotten ; like
the sound of church bells which the convert hardly knows
how he can forego. Its felicities seem often to be almost
things rather than mere words. It is part of the national
mind, and the anchor of the national seriousness. . . .
The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent
traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The
power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden be
neath its words ; it is the representative of his best mo
ments ; and all that there has been about him of soft and
gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him for
ever out of his English Bible." — Fabee, Lives of the
Saints. We are wont to speak of our Common Version
as if it were, in the main, the work of King James's
translators, who first published the results of their
labors in 1611. But this is a great mistake. The
Version was gradually perfected by a slow process

8 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
of development which occupied the greater part of
a century. A succession of eminent scholars and
theologians labored one after another, for more than
eighty years, to perfect the English translation of
the Bible, each aiming to revise and improve the
work of his predecessors. William Tyndale, the
martyr, was the first of them ; his version of the
New Testament was published in 1525 ; several
revised editions of it appeared in the next ten
years ; but he had not time to finish his translation
of the Old Testament before he was seized by
order of the Emperor, and burned at the stake as a
heretic, in 1536. Yet Miles Coverdale was allowed
to complete and publish his own translation, which
appeared a year before Tyndale's death, with a ded
ication to King Henry. The Psalms in it are
those now used in the Book of Common Prayer of
the English Church. Coverdale also contributed
largely to what was called Cranmer's, or "the
Great Bible," which appeared in 1539, and in
which much of Tyndale's language was preserved.
He afterwards went to Geneva, where, in company
with several English exiles, and with the aid of
John Calvin and Theodore Beza, he produced what
is called the Geneva translation, published in 1560,
being founded mainly on Tyndale's and his own
previous labors, but with a more careful compari
son with the original texts. The so-called Bishops'

THE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 9
Bible, a revision of " the Great Bible," appeared
about 1570 ; and the Roman Catholic translation
from the Vulgate, usually styled the Rhemish and
Douay Version, was printed, the New Testament
in 1572, and the Old in 1610. Our Common Ver
sion, which dates from 1611, is based upon all
these previous translations, being intended to com
bine their merits and improve upon them ; it is
largely indebted to them for its accuracy, its fin
ish, and its phraseology. It was formed by fifty-
four learned men, selected for the work, who were
divided into six committees ; and they were spe
cially instructed that the Bishops' Bible was " to be
followed, and as little altered as the original will
permit." The other versions were to be used,
however, "when they agree better with the text
than the Bishops' Bible." It is obvious that the
King James Translators did not have much more
liberty assigned them than has been taken by the
so-called Revisers in our own day, who have recently
finished their work. They were enjoined to build
upon the foundations that had been already laid ;
and they obeyed the injunction, their own labor
being chiefly one of selection and amendment,
which was admirably perforraed. It appears on-
comparison, that Tyndale contributed most to the
diction and phraseology of our Common Version,
while its accuracy and fairness were due to follow-

10 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
ing the lead of the Genevan and the Rhemish trans
lators. If any names were worthy to be printed
upon the title-page of our English New Testaraent,
they should be those of William Tyndale and
Miles Coverdale ; for in the main it is their work.
The later " translators," as they are styled, were
merely committees of revision.
Now the century beginning about 1520, during
which our English Bible thus gradually obtained
its present beauty and finish, was precisely that in
which our noble mother tongue completed its proc
ess of development and attained its highest stage
of perfection. Since this period, there has been
indeed an enlargement of its stores, in order to
keep pace with the progress of science, invention,
and art ; but we witness no further process of or
ganic growth. We see change, but no further amend
ment; rather a deterioration. This was the age
of Hooker, Shakespeare, and Bacon ; of Spenser,
Latimer, and Raleigh ; and it prepared the way
for Hobbes and Dryden. It was the golden age of
the English drama. These are great names, and
many passages in their writings show a complete
mastery of the English language, and form a grand
display of its versatility, its sweetness, and its
strength. But beside them all, and above them all,
is the prose of our Common Version. It is more
sustained than any of them, more uniformly strong

THE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 11
and melodious in its flow, reminding one of the
famous couplet of Denham on the Thames : —
" Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull.
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
And it has largely contributed to the fixation of
the language at this its best estate, since the num
ber of words in it the meaning of which has become
obsolete in the course of nearly three subsequent
centuries is so small that they may almost be counted
on the fingers. True, the diction seeras often to
have a slightly archaic tinge ; but this is an ad
vantage rather than a fault, as it tends to preserve
the dignity and impressiveness of the style. We
no longer habitually use such words and phrases as
howbeit, spiritually-minded, heavy-laden, peradven
ture, handmaiden, waxed strong, dayspring, wine-
bibber, husbandman, and the like ; hut they are
vigorous Anglo-Saxon English, and we are never
at a loss how to understand them.
One other work, the " Common Prayer " of the
Anglican Church, has a similar history, having
grown up by successive revisions during the same
period, and by the labor of the same class of per
sons, the clergy of the time, and has therefore
nearly equal merits of style. In it, the translation
of the Te Deum, the Litany, and many of the Col
lects and Prayers, are noble specimens of English

12 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
prose, at once simple and grand, varied and musi
cal. Cranmer was its chief reviser and translator ;
but in other passages, his liking for stateliness of
phrase, and for a certain balanced dualism of ex
pression, imitated from the parallelism of Hebrew
poetry, appears as a mannerism, and as such is a
mark of inferiority. Such are the phrases " ac
knowledge and confess," "dissemble nor cloak,"
" assemble and meet together," " requisite and
necessary," and the like.
I will cite one familiar passage from Tyndale's
version, what is called the Magnificat, Mary's song
of praise after the Annunciation, to show how
closely the translators of 1611 followed his phra
seology. His words are here copied exactly, thongh
their spelling and probably their pronunciation are
modernized. " And Mary said, My soul magnifieth the Lord; and my
spirit rejoiceth in God my Saviour. For he hath looked
on the poor degree of his handmaiden. Behold now from
henceforth shall all generations call me blessed. For he
that is mighty hath done to me great things, and blessed
is his name : and his mercy is always on them that fear
him throughout all generations. He hath showed strength
with his arm ; he hath scattered them that are proud in
the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the
mighty from their seats, and hath exalted them of low
degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and

THE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 13
hath sept away the rich empty. He hath remembered
mercy, and hath holpen his servant Israel ; even as ho
promised to our fathers, Abraham and to his seed for
ever." Memory will tell you how little change this lan
guage has undergone in our Common Version. One
listens to it as to a familiar chime of the bells heard
at evening in the distance. The Revisers of 1881
have altered it, and not for the better. For " put
down the mighty from their seats," they have sub
stituted " put down princes from their thrones."
Stilted ! For " his mercy is on them that fear him
from generation to generation," as it stands in the
Common Version, they have put "his mercy is unto
generations and generations on them that fear him."
Awkward, and a spoiling of the rhythm ! " In re
membrance of his mercy, as he spake to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his seed forever," they have
altered into " that he might remember mercy, (as
he spake unto our fathers,) toward Abraham and
his seed forever." Uncouth and unEnglish ! Such
are the consequences of intruding nineteenth cen
tury phraseology into the pure and musical idiom of
the sixteenth century ! And who will say that the
meaning or the poetry of this grand old psalm has
profited by the change ? It should be added that
the Revision of the Old Testament, which appeared
in 1885, has been far more successfully executed.

14 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
The alterations in it are less numerous and impor
tant, and they follow more closely the diction and
the spirit of the earlier translators.
I ought to cite specimens in justification of the
high praise here awarded to the English style of
the Bible. But one is at a loss what to choose out
of the wealth of material at hand; and then, so
much of the charm of passages from the Scriptures
is due to associations going back to one's childhood,
and to the intrinsic power and sweetness of the
thought, the precept, or the sentiment, that it is
hard to fasten our attention on the mere diction.
But in what follows, let me ask the reader to divest
his mind, if he can, from all thought of the doctrine
conveyed, or of the tenderness and pathos of the
sentiment, and to consider the felicity and the music
of the words alone.
" Come uuto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and
learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart ; and ye
shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and
my burden is light." — Matthew xi. 28-30.
Again :
" O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets,
and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often
would I have gathered thy children together, even as a
hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would
not ! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For

TEE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 15
I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye
shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the
Lord." — Matthew xxiii. 37-39.
Once more :
" For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it
will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will
not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth,
and the stock thereof die in the ground ; yet through the
scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a
plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away : yea, man giveth
up the ghost, and where is he ? As the waters fail from
the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up : so man lieth
down and riseth not : till the heavens be no more, they
shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep." — Job
xiv. 7-12.
Lastly :
"I will take no bullock out of thy house,
Nor he goats out of thy folds.
For every beast of the forest is mine,
And the cattle upon a thousand hills.
Will I eat the flesh of bulls,
Or drink the blood of goats?
Offer unto God thanksgiving;
And pay thy vows unto the Most High :
And call upon me in the day of trouble :
I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me."
Psalm 1. 9-15.
I may seem to have labored this point too much.
But what is here said is particularly addressed to

16 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
young students, since it may be supposed that one
leading purpose of their education is the formation
of a good prose style, at once clear and flowing,
strong and pure. I hope to show that the proper
study of the Bible may be, and ought to be, a means
of comprehensive and thorough training, not only
in theology, to which it is but too often exclusively
devoted, arid in philosophy, poetry, and history, but
also in literature and English style. In any scheme
of University studies, it is a great mistake to make
over any one department altogether to mere special
ists, and thereby to lead the mind of the student
along one narrow track, strictly fenced in against
any excursion over the other broad fields of human
culture which lie around it on every side. Now
this end, the formation of a good prose style, cannot
be attained by precept and system, by conscious
effort or the observance of fixed rules. But just as
a man's character and conduct are mainly deter
mined by the company that he keeps, so his modes
of utterance are silently fashioned by unconscious
iraitation of the models which he has often before
him, that is, by the books which he most familiarly
reads. It is said of Voltaire, that he always had a
copy of the " Petit Careme" of Massillon lying on
his writing-table, to be taken up during any odd
quarter of an hour, for the sake of its influence on
his style. The method was good, though perhaps

TEE BIBLE AS AN ENGLISH CLASSIC. 17
the choice was not happy. I think Pascal, Roche
foucauld, or La Bruydre would have served his pur
pose better. But there can be no doubt what Eng
lish models we ought to select. Keep the Bible, a
volume of Shakespeare, and Lord Bacon's Essays
always within arm's-reach ; half an hour devoted
to either of them will be mere recreation, and will
never be unprofitably spent. Only when your minds
and memories have become saturated with the prose
of our Common Version, with the phraseology of
Shakespeare, and even, if one has command of
French, with the neat succinctness, precision, and
point of Pascal, will you have mastered the elements
of a good English style. Then only will you have
a copious vocabulary to draw from, a rich store of
words and phrases and a variety of allusions always
at hand, and not be obliged painfully to ransack a
meagre and hidebound diction in order to set forth
your meaning. But as most people nowadays read
little except the newspapers and ten-cent novels,
one need not wonder tbat they talk and write slang,
or adopt only a slipshod, stilted, or uncouth phrase
ology. Coleridge rightly says, in his Table-Talk,
" intense study of the Bible will keep any writer
from being vulgar in point of style."
John Ruskin is certainly the greatest master that
the present century has produced of pure, idiomatic,
vigorous, and eloquent English prose; and as the

18 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
first volume of his " Modern Painters," perhaps
his best work, appeared over forty years ago, when
he was a recent " Graduate of Oxford," his style
was perfectly formed while he was yet a young
man. How was it formed ? In one of his latest
writings he has told us, that in his childhood, as a
part of his home education, his mother required
him to commit to memory, and repeat to her, pas
sages from the Bible. A similar custom, as some
of us old men know, prevailed here in New Eng
land over half a century ago, and I hope that in
some families it lingers still. Ruskin gives us the
exact list, twenty-six in number, of the Psalms and
Chapters which he thus learned by heart ; and as
the selection was, in the main, an excellent one,
we need not seek further for the secret of his ad
mirable diction and perfect command of English
phraseology. In his list are contained two Chapters
from the Pentateuch, the 15th and 20th of Exodus ;
eight of the Psalms, among which are the 90th, the
119th, and the 189th ; the 5th, 6th, and 7th of
Matthew, being the whole Sermon on the Mounts
and others.

CHAPTER II.
THE NAEEATIVES IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.
But the books of the Hebrew and Christian
Scriptures have other and higher characteristics
than those which concern merely the language in
which they are written ; and these I proceed to
consider. Among their contents are a large num
ber of narratives, sorae legendary, some biographical,
others purely didactic and spiritual, in purport. Let
us distinguish these in thought, so far as is possible,
from what is history properly so called on the one
hand, and from poetry on the other. Perhaps the
lines of division here are not clearly drawn ; but no
matter. They are visible enough for the purpose in
hand, which is to regard this collection of books
simply as a body of literature, avoiding all contro
verted matter, and putting aside, for the nonce, the
questions in theology and history to which they
have given rise. To children of tender years, who
have been properly taught, the Bible is simply a
big story-book, and one of a very fascinating and
instructive character. Some of these stories pur
port to be of real personages and events, while

20 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
others are avowedly fictitious, being of the nature of
parables or allegories. But the incidents narrated,
the characters which are introduced, and the con
versations which are reported are of the simple yet
lively character which belongs to the most ancient
literature, and which seeras to be the original aspect
of primeval man. The earliest profane historians
whose writings have come down to us have this
childlike manner. Herodotus, for instance, tells
stories like an old gossip, often with much liveliness
and dramatic power, but with less feeling and im
pressiveness than the writers of the Pentateuch and
the Books of Judges and Samuel. Xenophon is
more studied and artificial, as belonging to a later
age ; but especially in the legends which he has
preserved or composed concerning the elder Cyrus,
he has much of the raciness, simplicity, and nciivetS
which characterize the olden time. The story which
he tells of the death of Abradates and Panthea,
through its unstudied gracefulness, its pathos, and
the minuteness of detail with which the incidents
and the talk are reported, is altogether in the
ancient manner, and is inimitably fine. But it is
too long to be cited here. As a single and brief
specimen of the artless fashion, the graphic heaping
together of particulars, and the frankness and fresh
ness with whieh the oldest story-tellers spoke and
wrote, take these few lines from the opening of the

TEE NARRATIVES IN TEE OLD TESTAMENT. 21
16th book of the Iliad; — for the great Homer is
only an old story-teller. I borrow Frank W. New
man's translation, somewhat modified, to make it
conform more nearly to the original: —
" Patroolus, wherefore weepest thou, like to an infant maiden,
Who, tripping at her mother's side, and clinging to her gar
ment,
Imploreth to be lifted up, impedes her hurried going,
And, to be lifted in her arms, with many a tear uplookest?
So weepest thou, Patroolus."
" One touch of nature makes the whole world
kin." We don't know whether Homer, who lived
about one thousand years before Christ, did or did
not witness the Trojan war. But we may be sure
that he was a lover of children and had a good wife,
besides being a shrewd observer, and that he often
had a nice time of it in a happy and orderly house
hold. If further evidence of the fact is needed,
take the noted scene of Hector and Andromache,
with the young Astyanax ; or turn to the Odyssey
for a domestic scene of the Princess Nausicaa, with
her maidens, washing the linen at the waterside.
Now go back to a period over six hundred years
before Homer was born, and take the story of
Joseph and his brethren, as told in the Book of
Genesis. It is one of a group of narratives, gene
alogies, and traditions about the dealings of God
with primeval men, all referring more or less

22 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
distinctly to the origin of the Hebrew race, and
indicating the development of some of its pecul
iar institutions, such as circumcision, and the heb
domadal division of time on which is founded the
Jewish Sabbath. This group appears first to have
been brought together and reduced to writing in
the Mosaic age, at the time of the Exodus, and, I
doubt not, under the direction of Moses hiraself, as
one means of reconciling his people to the act of
leaving Egypt and returning to the land which had
been the home and the burial-place of their fore
fathers, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The story of Joseph is simply the traditional ac
count of the events whieh first led to the prolonged
sojourn of the Israelites in a land which was neither
their original nor their destined home, but one in
which, in their own affecting phrase, they were
strangers in a far country. Evidently, before it
was vrritten out in Genesis, the legend had often
been repeated orally in their tents, at their camp-
fires, and by the mothers of the tribe in teaching
their children. For it is essentially a family narra
tive, and we can fancy the hearts of these mothers
swelling within them as they fondled their special
favorites among the numerous children, and told
them about Joseph, whom Jacob, his father, loved
more than all his children, because he was the son
of his old age, andwas good and dutiful ; and about

THE NARRATIVES IN TEE OLD TESTAMENT. 23
Benjamin, who, as the youngest born, was the pet
and darling of the whole household. And the story
also had a strong local coloring ; at that early day,
the very dawn of the historical epoch of mankind,
it would have been intelligible only to a people who
knew all about Egypt, and had also heard much
about Canaan, and the long journey through the
desert between these two countries. Apart from
the inevitable changes of text, the omissions and'
interpolations which must have attended its trans
mission, mostly in the form of successively tran
scribed manuscripts, through a period of some
thirty-five centuries, I can no more doubt the es
sential genuineness and authenticity of the story,
than I could deny those qualities, for instance,
to the recently discovered history of Plymouth
Colony, by Governor Bradford. It has the true
ring of genuineness ; it breathes the air of Egypt
and the desert in the old, old times.
We can easily see why the narrative was so dear
to the people whose origin it illustrates, and who
so jealously watched over its preservation. More
than any other people, the Hebrews had the in
stinct of nationality, the full pride of race. In
their own eyes, they were Jehovah's chosen people,
with whose fathers the Deity made a special cov
enant, that they should be his people and he should
be their God. Their history illustrates the patri-

24 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
archal theory of the origin of a state as the natural
expansion of a single family, which successively is
developed into a clan, then branches off into a num
ber of clans, and finally becomes a nation like unto
the sands of the sea for multitude. All the Israel
ites are lineal descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and, as compared with other races, they are
of astonishingly pure blood. The story of Joseph
and his brethren is simply the account of the de
velopment of this one family into the twelve tribes
of Israel. Their faith is, that they have thus mul
tiplied in the fulfilment of the promise of God unto
their fathers. And they have clung to this faith
through the long lapse of centuries, keeping them
selves apart, and refusing intermarriage with other
races. In captivity and exile, scattered abroad
among all the nations of the earth, persecuted, im
prisoned, burned at the stake, dl-iven from one coun
try into another, as in our own day from Germany
and Russia into the United States, they are still
Jews of the circumcision and the Passover, Jews
of pure blood. Other races mingle with each other
like rivers having a common outlet, which soon lose
all trace of their separate identity. Where now
are the Ionian or Attic Hellenes, the Greeks of the
days of Pericles, or the Romans of Ctesar's day?
Where the Goths and Huns, who overran half of
Europe, or the Normans who fought under William

TEE NARRATIVES IN TEE OLD TESTAMENT. 25
the Conqueror ? Lost, swallowed up, in the great
deep of the bastard races which have succeeded
them. But the Jews are like a mighty river, which,
winding its way of descent from the mountains
through thousands of miles, pours at last into the
great ocean with so vast a flood and rush of waters
that the current repels the brine and preserves the
sweetness of its stream far out to sea. Instead of
asking how the story in Genesis and Exodus could
be so long preserved, I ask rather how bj' such a
people could it ever be forgotten. For, to adopt the
fine remark of Pascal, there is a vast difference be
tween a book which one makes and throws among a
people, and a book which of itself makes a people.
We then cannot doubt that the book is at least as
old as the people.
The story of Joseph possesses in a marked degree
all the features which have been noticed as belong
ing to the narrations which have come down to us
from the earliest times. And it is, so to speak,
more completely worked out than any other of the
earlier legends in Scripture ; that is, there are no
apparent gaps or obscure passages in it, while the
details are so full, and the personages so strongly
marked and admirably supported, the conduct and
talk of each being in perfect keeping with his char
acter, that the narrative has an inimitable air of
verisimilitude.- It has all the sweetness, natural-

26 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
ness, and pathos which mark unmistakably a chron
icle of the primeval times. It is too familiarly
known to all to need here to be analyzed; but I
ought to select sorae touches from it, in order to
justify the high praise here given to it exclusively
in its literary and secular aspect.
There is much dramatic vividness in the account
given of the feelings of Joseph when first in pres
ence of his brethren after their long separation, and
still unknown to them, though he had recognized
them instantly. He assumes to speak roughly to
them, in order to preserve his disguise, while his
heart is bursting with affection and anxiety for the
two members of the family, who are not in the
company, and whom he most loves, as they had
no part in the horrible crime which the others
had committed against him ; namely, his aged fa
ther and the youngest born, his own mother's son.
Hence the artifice through which he succeeds in
compelling them to bring Benjamin with them on
their second visit, Simeon meanwhile being retained
as a hostage for his coming. And when they came
again, nothing can be finer than the account of his
demeanor, and the air of assumed indifference and
mere courtesy, with which lie questions them,
though he is really in distressing suspense.
" And he asked them of their welfare, and said, Is your
father well, the old man of whom ye spake, is he yet alive ?

THE NARRATIVES IN TEE OLD TESTAMENT. 27
And they answered. Thy servant our father is in good
health, he is yet alive."
His quick eye has recognized Benjamin now in
the troop, towards whora his heart is yearning,
though he must not be recognized openly for fear
of discovery.
" And he said, Is this your younger brother, of whom
ye spake unto me ? God be gracious unto thee, my son.
And Joseph made haste ; for his bowels did yearn upon
his brother ; and he sought where to weep ; and he en
tered into his chamber and wept there.''
Very touching is the remonstrance offered by Ju
dah, on behalf of his brethren, when Joseph, really
unwilling to part again from his young brother,
threatens to detain Benjamin in Egypt, on a pre
tended charge of having stolen the goblet which
was found in his sack.
" Now therefore," he says, " when I come to thy ser
vant my father, and the lad be not with us, seeing that
his life is bound up in the lad's life, it shall come to pass,
when he seeth that the lad is not with us, that he will
die ; and thy servants shall bring down the gray hairs of
thy servant our father to the grave. . . . Now, therefore,
I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of the lad a
bondman to my lord ; and let the lad go up with his
brethren. For how shall I go up to my father, and the
lad be not with me ? lest peradventure I shall see the evil
that shall come on my father."

28 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
There is great dignity, as well as pathos, in the
manner in which Joseph now relents, makes him
self known to his brethren, and announces his full
forgiveness of the great sin which they had com
mitted against him, showing also how Jehovah had
overruled it for good.
"And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye
sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved nor angry
with yourselves, that ye sold me hither ; for God did send
me before you to preserve life." Seeing that five years
still remain of famine, " in the which there shall nei
ther be earing nor harvest," " God sent me before you to
preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your
lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you that
sent me hither, but God."
Here the delicacy as well as nobleness of Joseph's
speech and conduct, founded on his piety, are ad
mirably set forth, with an instinctive appreciation
of what we moderns are wont to call a true gentle
man's character. Let me repeat Coleridge's re
mark, that earnest study of the Bible is a sure safe
guard against vulgarity.
Thus far I have commented on but one of the
narratives found in the Old Testament, taking by
preference the story of Joseph and his brethren,
because it is nearly the earliest, and most complete
in itself, and is certainly one of the most character
istic and attractive. A multitude of others invite

TEE NARRATIVES IN TEE OLD TESTAMENT. 29
and would reward notice, the Book of Judges, in
particular, being a repertory of legendary tales and
ballads or songs of triumph, all belonging to the ear
lier history of the Israelites in the Promised Land, j
and heaped together with little concern for their
connection with each other, or to filling the gaps so
as to form a continuous record. Such are the sto
ries of Jael and Deborah, of Gideon and his tri
umph over the Midianites, of Abimelech, of Jeph
thah and his daughter, of Samson and Delilah and
the Philistines. These are not history, but the im
perfect materials and data from which, in combina
tion with other sources, history may be drawn.
They are not religious records ; they do not teach
us a theology. But they are Hebraistic to the
core ; they are built round a nucleus of theocratic
polity ; and underlying thera all is a foundation of
spiritual faith, of rooted belief in the unity and
the government of the eternal and invisible God.
They are national traditions, such as had been re
peated for centuries in the tents and at the camp-
fires of the Tribes ; deeply tinged with national
pride, and exaggerated through the same feeling
and the natural love of the marvellous. Most of
them are admirably told, with much energy and
fire, and as much minuteness of detail as if the nar
rators of them had actually witnessed the triumphs
which they record. Through these legends thus

30 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
mossed with hoar antiquity, we catch indistinct
glimpses of the heroes of the olden time, the
ancient Judges of Israel, — grand figures, looming
through the mist of ages, of men who trusted in
God, and triumphed over their enemies because
Jehovah fought with them. Looked at in this
light, and regarded as objects of literary study,
they are profoundly interesting and instructive.
But as to defending the authenticity of the ac
counts in all their marvellous details, or praising
the conduct in every respect of the personages en
gaged in them, or setting up their characters as
models for imitation, or believing that some of the
actions attributed to them were specially enjoined
by the Almighty, or accepting the estimate of the
magnitude of the forces arrayed against each other
in some of the great battles, — I should as soon
think of attempting to whitewash the reputations
of the oflicers in command in some of the incidents
of our recent Civil War, or to indorse the official
reports concerning them. On the other hand, scep
ticism must not be carried too far. While we may
doubt the return of numbers, both of those who
fought and those who fell, we are not to deny that
a great battle was fought at Antietara, or that, after
a siege not quite as long as that of Troy, Richmond
was captured. I have not much respect for the
arithmetical computations and criticisms of the
Colenso school.

CHAPTER III.
THE PARABLES OP OUR LORD. — THE GOSPEL NARRA
TIVE.
Leaviistg for the present the legends and stories
in the Old Testament, we turn to the fictitious nar
ratives which constitute a distinctive feature of the
teachings of our Lord ; I mean the Parables. It is
difficult to do justice to these in thought, because
their very excellence has rendered them so familiar
that their beauty is obscured by their triteness, and
one seems in treating of them to trespass on the
limits of the commonplace. A theme may be so
grand that even great familiarity with it, though
failing to breed contempt, yet does not fail to gen
erate weariness and neglect. Thus, no visible ob
ject whatever, when viewed through some knowl
edge of the immensities of space and the eternity
of duration and unchangeableness which it involves,
is in itself so beautiful and impressive as the starry
heaven above us at evening, especially when seen in
the gloriously clear atmosphere which our cliraate
so often gives us in the suramer and autumn. But
though the poet defiantly asks of such a sky,

32 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
" Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually, bright : —
Who ever looked upon them shining.
And turned to earth without repining, —
Nor wished for wings to flee away
And mix with their eternal ray? " —
I am afraid all of us will be obliged to confess, that
we have more frequently than not walked home on
such a night without casting a single glance up
ward. ' Just so has it been with those stars of the
Gospel, the Parables of our Lord. We have heard
so much about thera ever since infancy, in talks,
readings, lectures, and sermons, that the mind
seems almost to recoil from the well-worn theme.
A prejudice thus conceived is the more difficult to
be encountered, since it is not merely an unfounded
opinion, which is always open to argument, but a
feeling or sentiment, an aversion, which we cannot
away with, however unreasonable it may be made
to appear. But this difficulty must be met, as the
theme is a necessary portion of the full develop
ment of the whole subject.
Consider, first, that what is most peculiar and dis
tinctive in the form of our Lord's discourses to the
multitudes who heard him is the use which he
makes of parables to illustrate and enforce the spir
itual doctrine that he teaches and the precepts that
he enjoins. In this respect, he had no prototype.

TEE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 33
and in early times he found no imitator. Not his
immediate disciples, not the great apostle to the
Gentiles, none of the early fathers of the Church,
seems even to have essayed in this respect to walk
in his steps, or to have made his example the pat
tern for their own discourse. Images, similitudes,
types, and allegories, indeed, abound in their writ
ings ; for many of them had an oriental wealth of
imagination, and much subtlety, ingenuity, and
fancy in tracing out a resemblance or an analogy
even to its minutest details. But the proper Para
ble — on the face of it as simple as a nursery tale,
and yet involving such a profundity of meaning, so
vivid in its presentation of truth and portraiture of
character, and so impressive in bringing the lesson
home to men's hearts and lives — seems to me
unique in all literature. I find no genuine speci
mens of it in ancient times, save those which came
from Jesus of Nazareth. But with him it is so
perpetually recurrent that it seems the natural garb
of his thought; "and without a parable," we are
told, "spake he not unto them." Even his disci
ples wondered at this peculiarity of manner, and
asked him, " Why speakest thou unto them in par
ables ? " Of course, there is another meaning of the
word parable, according to which it signifies any
dark saying in which some great truth is involved
or dimly intiraated, when, for some temporary rea-

34 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
son, it would be unfit to announce it openly. And
it is to this meaning, as I think, that the answer of
Jesus to the question put by his disciples exclu
sively refers, though they evidently misunderstood
it by making it general, and thus wrongly made it
applicable to the majority of cases, in which the
purpose is not to veil the truth, but to set it forth
as vividly as possible, and, as it were, to brand it in
letters of fire upon the conscience and the memory.
I find but one parable properly so called in the
whole of the Old Testament, and that is the brief
and touching apologue of the one ewe Iamb, with
which the prophet Nathan rebukes the crying sin
of David. The lively fiction of the talking trees,
in the 9th chapter of Judges, is not a parable, but
a fable, altogether in the manner of Pilpay and
^sop. And when, in the grand old legend of
Balak and Balaam, in the Book of Numbers, the
latter is said to " take up his parable," the phrase
evidently means " began his prophetic song." It
is not denied that, in some Rabbinical writings of
uncertain date, similitudes and illustrations may be
found which are carried so much into detail that
they may be called parables ; and in a few cases,
the phrases and thought in these are so like those
in the Gospels that we must suspect their writers
of conscious imitation or plagiarism. But they are
all either so feeble and insipid, or so strained

TEE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 35
and unnatural, that I find nothing in them to de
serve attention. After the eighth or ninth century
of our era, indeed, both among the Greeks and the
Latins, attempts were made to imitate the Parables
of our Lord ; and some of these attempts are pleas
ing and forcible. But they are immeasurably infe
rior to their divine originals, which stand alone in
all literature, matchless alike in conception and
form. Let us first endeavor to point out the peculiar
features of a parable, whereby it is distinguished
both from the fable and the proverb. In the fable
properly so called, plants or animals, sometimes
even inorganic things, appear as personages in the
narrative, talk and act like men, while the ethical
or spiritual meaning would seem to lurk far be
neath. Here the fabulous or fictitious feature of
the illustration is put forward and made prominent,
the moral, or what is called " the improvement " of
the fable, really becoming more distinct and em
phatic, when man is made to look at a conceivable
exemplification of it in the lower orders of being,
and human nature is thus taught to recognize its
imperfection, folly, or sin, through seeing it carica
tured, as it were, by the fox, the grasshopper, or
the wolf, by the willow or the bramble. " Go to
the ant, thou sluggard," exclaims king Solomon ;
" consider her ways, and be wise." But always the

36 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
story is put first, and the lesson which it is to teach
comes afterward, as if by necessary, though pot
avowed, implication.
In the proverb, on the other hand, this order is
reversed ; the precept or truth is put first, or is
directly inculcated, while the image or illustration
follows, its function being that of a barb to the
hook, the truth being thereby made so pungent
that it clings to the attention and the memory.
Thus Dr. Franklin, a great master of this homely
and popular wisdom, says, " Poverty often deprives
a man of all spirit and virtue ; it is hard for an
empty sack to stand upright." In the best prov
erbs, the illustration is so apt and striking, that
the truth needs not to be separately expressed, but
forces its own way, as it were, by irresistible im
plication. " There will be sleeping enough in the
grave," as Poor Richard says. Here the thought
was anticipated by " the great Arnauld," who, when
he had already completed eighty years of a most
laborious life, and was implored by his friend Nicole
to take some repose, exclaimed impatiently, "Rest!
Shall we not have all eternity in which to rest? "
The proper parable is an imaginary scene from
real life vividly set forth, in order to bring some
truth home to the hearts and consciences of men.
It is a brief drama, not resting, like the fable, on
some extravagant fiction as its groundwork, nor

TEE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 37
condensed, like the proverb, into a single pithy
phrase or striking image; but dependent for its
effect on the naturalness and probability of the
story, and on the lifelike manner in which it is
told. Through a short narrative, or a single famil
iar incident strikingly depicted, the most abstract
and comprehensive truth may be presented in a con
crete form, and thus, as it were, what would be a
dry skeleton is clothed with living flesh and blood.
Each of the Parables deserves study not only in
reference to the occasion which suggested it and to
the doctrine which it teaches, but also as a revela
tion of the character of him who uttered it, and of
the general spirit and purpose of his ministry on
earth. Thus, one considerable group of them ap
pears inspired chiefly by ineffable pity for mankind
who have wandered so far away from the true path,
and by the spirit of divine compassion which seeks
to reclaim them from the blindness of error and the
misery consequent upon sin. This is the godlike
purpose so forcibly expressed as the conclusion of
one of them, in the solemn declaration, " I say unto
you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one
sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and
nine just persons which need no repentance." Still
more distinctly and earnestly is this spirit of his
ministry announced in his stern rebuke of the Phar
isees, when they blamed him for eating with pub-

38 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
licans and sinners : — "Go ye and learn what that
meaneth, ' I will have mercy and not sacrifice ; ' for
I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance." Observe now the tenderness of feeling and the pic
turesqueness of detail with which this grand assur
ance is brought home to the understanding and the
conviction of those who heard him through the brief
but beautiful Parable of the Lost Sheep. Let me
say, that in studying this Parable, you should com
bine, as I have attempted to do here, the two inde
pendent reports of it given respectively by Matthew
and Luke ; for, while agreeing in substance and, in
the main, in language, each preserves some minute
incident or graphic touch in the narrative or the
comment, which is omitted in the other. The ear
lier report is prefaced by repeating once again that
announcement of the leading purpose of his mission
which Jesus now proceeds to illustrate and enforce.
" For the Son of Man is come to save that which
was lost. How think ye ? If a man have a hun
dred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth
he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the
mountains, or into the wilderness, and seeketh that
which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it,
verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that one
than of the ninety and nine, which went not astray.
And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his

THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 39
shoulders, rejoicing. And when he coraeth home,
he calleth together his friends and neighbours, say
ing unto them. Rejoice with me ; for I have found
my sheep which was lost. Even so it is not the
will of your Father which is in heaven, that one
of these little ones should perish."
And here let me apologize for the treatment to
which I am now subjecting the narratives in tbe
Bible, including even those uttered by our Lord, by
again remarking that I am not a clergyman endeav
oring to preach a sermon (though I may seem to
come perilously near to it), but am merely a lay
man and a teacher, seeking only, as far as it may
be done reverently and with an honest purpose, to
set forth the literary merits of the English Bible,
especially those most deserving study and imita
tion by persons who are seeking what University
men proudly call a classical and liberal education.
I am attempting to do for this Book just what
other writers, with greater learning and success,
have attempted to do for the poems of Homer and
the drama of JEschylus and Sophocles. With any
other than such an end in view, I should be justly
chargeable with unspeakable folly and impertinence
in thus presuming, through a critical examination,
to set forth what may be called the external char
acteristics of the discourses of our Lord, or their
merely literary merits.

40 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
Going back to the particular passage just cited,
observe how some incidents in it, as in most of the
other Parables, have so vivid a local coloring that
they strongly suggest the circumstances and the
scene which were before the eyes of Jesus and his
audience when it was uttered. Life in Palestine,
as in most other hot countries in the East, was
mainly spent out of doors, and the chief occupations
of the people were agriculture and tending flocks
and herds. It is evident from the Gospel record,
that during his whole ministry our Lord taught and
lived principally in the open air. Indeed, there
was another reason why he should do so. He had
no home ; and at times, we know, this fact and his
hearers' frequent want of sympathy with hira gave
him a sense of loneliness in his work. There is
deep pathos in the remark which fell from him al
most involuntarily, when an ardent proselyte' ex
claimed to him, " Master, I will follow thee whither
soever thou goest." The sad answer is returned,
not as a complaint, but as a warning : — " Foxes
have holes, and birds of the air have nests ; but the
Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." Even
an upper room had to be borrowed in which the
little company were to celebrate what was to be
the Last Supper. Thus living and teaching, face to
face, with outward nature, we can understand why
so frequently in our Lord's discourses lessons are

TEE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 41
^drawn from the lilies of the field and the fowls of
the air, from the sower and his seed, the vineyard,
the barren fig' tree, the shepherd and his flock.
Each of these objects, as they came successively
into view during their wanderings is pointed out by
gesture, and made to enforce the doctrine already
in hand, or to suggest some new moral or spiritual
truth. Thus we can easily imagine the surround
ings amid which the parable just commented, upon
was first spoken ; — an opening among the hills of
Palestine expanding into a range of pastoral coun
try, with a flock of sheep in the foreground, seem
ingly for a while without a shepherd ; but in the
distance, just issuing from a mountain pass, the
shepherd is seen bearing a sick or tired sheep on
his shoulders, and hastening back to his flock.
Jesus points to him, and makes the familiar scene
illustrate and enforce the great truth which he is
never weary of teaching.
The same eagerness of divine compassion to
reclaim the fallen, the same encourageraent to re
pentance, shines through several of the other par
ables ; as in that of the Two Debtors, the Friend
at Midnight, the Lost Piece of Money, the La
borers in the Vineyard, where even those who come
at the eleventh hour are welcomed, and especially
in what seems to me the most beautiful and affect
ing of them all, the Prodigal Son. Here, the ful-

42 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
ness of effect is produced through the number of
incidents and characters, the skill with which these
are grouped or contrasted with each other, the deep
feeling which pervades the whole, and the dra
matic force and liveliness with which the whole
story is conceived and told. Merely as a literary
study, I know of nothing finer in all literature, the
language in which the narrative is presented in
our Coramon Version being luckily an adequate
and graceful garb for every feature of the thought.
Observe how the selfish and arrogant character of
the Younger Son is marked at the outset in his
imperious demand, " Father, give me the portion
of goods that falleth to me." There was no legal
ground for such a claim, but the loving father at
once assents; the reckless and unfeeling son then
grasps together all that he has, and goes to a dis
tant place, where he can indulge his taste for riot
and debauchery without reading in the eyes of all
who had known him a stern censure of his conduct.
Guilt is shamefaced, and instinctively seeks a hid
ing place, even when it has no immediate cause for
dread. But the punishment is swift to coin,e. Far
from friends, without resource, and pinched by hun
ger, he is obliged to accept the most degrading
form of menial service, and even to fill his belly
with the husks that the swine did eat. Remorse
visits him, and wrings from him at last the agoniz-

TEE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 43
ing resolve, "I will arise and go to my father, and
will say unto him. Father, I have sinned against
heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy
to be called thy son ; make me as one of thy
hired servants." The passionate force of this lan
guage shows that the measure of repentance at
length is full; and the touching account of his wel
come home and entire pardon follows. " But when
he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and
had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and
kissed him." But the lesson would still be incom
plete if without mention of the jealous sullenness,
the hard and ungracious remonstrance, of the Older
Son ; for this brings out still more forcibly the
patience which cannot be wearied, the tenderness
which knows no bounds, the infinite pity, of the
Father. How gentle is his reproof of the ingrati
tude and resentment of his first-born ! " Son, thou
art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."
And then the exultation of his heart at the return
of the prodigal breaks out again into the sort of
triumphant song with which the parable ends. " It
was meet that we should make merry, and be glad ;
for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again ;
and was lost, and is found." It is a mistake to re
gard the story merely as an encouragement for the
sinner to repent ; it is also the most beautiful
picture ever revealed to the world of the loving
fatherhood of God.

44 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
Let me in conclusion of this portion of my sub
ject, in respect both to the two parables which I
have tried to analyze, and to the others upon which
I now have not time to dwell, ask the reader to
consider how deeply their imagery and phrase
ology, during these many centuries, have imprinted
themselves on the hearts and consciences of all
Christendom ; how they have filled all minds with
trains of pleasant and tender associations, which
the slightest touch at any moment is enough
to awaken ; how widely and intimately they are
worked into the art, the eloquence, and the poetry
of all modern times. A mere enumeration of their
titles — the Good Samaritan, the Pearl of Great
Price, the Talents, the Sower, the ten Virgins, five
of whom were wise and five were foolish, the Rich
Man and Lazarus, the Unmerciful Servant, the
Pharisee and the Publican — is enough to call
back many of the happiest memories of our child
hood, and to strengthen the better resolutions of
our riper years. Dispute as you may about the
inspiration of other portions of the Bible ; there
can be no question that he who uttered the Ser
mon on the Mount and the Parables spake as never
man spake, and that the message which he brought
was one of inestimable importance for the salva
tion of mankind. " How knoweth this man letters,
having never learned ? " Consider for a moment

THE GOSPEL NARRATIVE. , 45
the time and the place of his ministry, and the
people to whom he spoke ; and then say whether
to speak such lessons then and there, and to the
countless millions who have heard them since, was
not as great a miracle even as raising Lazarus from
the dead.
Besides the Parables and the other discourses and
conversations of our Lord, we find in the Gospels
four brief and artless narratives of the principal
incidents in his life and ministry, beginning with
his nativity, and ending with his crucifixion and
resurrection from the dead. The first three of
them — the Synoptic Gospels, as they are called
— tell what is essentially the same story ; they
agree with each other very perfectly in the record
both of what he spake and of what he did and suf
fered, with no greater differences or discrepancies
than are to be expected from three independent
accounts of the same life. They are independent,
since no one of them makes any direct reference to
either of the other two, and each has sorae charac
teristics of its own, and reports some events and
sayings, or adds some touches of description and
phraseology, not to be found elsewhere. Except a
cursory allusion in the proem to Luke's Gospel, that
others had arranged an orderly account (whether
by dictation, or preaching, or in writing, is not men
tioned) of what we have been told by eye-witnesses

46 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
and ministers of the word, each Evangelist .seems
to write as if his own record was the only one.
But the Fourth Gospel has some strongly marked
traits distinguishing it from the others ; it describes
many events of which they make no mention, and
reports long discourses in respect to which they are
entirely silent. Moreover, these discourses preserved
only in John's Gospel, while their general tone,
their spirit and tendency, are not unlike the words
of Jesus recorded by the first three Evangelists,
are more figurative, mystical, and abstruse ; they are
harder to be understood. Harmonizing in spirit,
they seem to offer a new aspect and a subsequent
chapter of the same character and life. These pecul
iarities may at least partially be explained by the
later period at which this Book was written, and by
the strongly marked temperaraent and intellect of
its author, by which in his old age his recollections
of his Lord and Master were deeply colored. The
first Epistle of John exhibits the sarae character
istics as the Gospel which bears his name ; it is
equally refined, mystical, and tender; equally im
passioned in setting forth God's love to man, and
the consequent duty of men to love one another.
This was the chief lesson which his affectionate and
somewhat dreamy disposition had imbibed from in
timate personal intercourse with Jesus, from lis
tening to the words which he spake, and witnessing

TEE GOSPEL NARRATIVE. 47
the wonders that he did. It was the doctrine of
the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,
the doctrine which breathes throughout the Sermon
on the Mount and the Parables of the Lost Sheep,
the Good Saraaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the
Separation of the Sheep from the Goats. And
when, in extreme old age, in a distant city of Asia
Minor, he undertook for the first time to dictate or
write the Gospel which bears his name, or one of
his hearers wrote it for hira as a summary of the
discourses which he had preached so often and so
long, what wonder that his recollection of the very
words used by our Lord should have been inextri
cably mixed up with his own somewhat mystical
exposition and paraphrase of them, which had been
the burden of his instructions to his flock during
the more than fifty years which had elapsed since
the crucifixion. The spirit of the discourses so re
ported, and the great truths taught in them, are
always those of Jesus ; the words and the bold fig
ures of speech, as it seems to me, are often those of
John alone.
According to the best evidence now attainable,
no one of the three Synoptics was written till more
than a quarter of a century had passed after the
death of Jesus. Down at least to A. D. 61, Jewish
and Gentile converts to the Church owed all their
knowledge of the life and the sayings of Christ to

48 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
the preaching of the twelve Apostles, and probably
of many other eye-witnesses and hearers of the word
in Galilee and Jerusalem ; for these things were
" not done in a corner." During all this time they
had no written word and they needed none ; for
they were encompassed with a cloud of witnesses
who told them of what they had both seen and
heard, of what had occurred during their lifetime,
perhaps in their own neighborhood, and thereby
preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection
from the dead. This period of the Gospel delivered
orally and not by writing was the time of the most
rapid growth and diffusion of the Church, branches
of it being instituted at Antioch, Damascus,
Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, and many other cities of
many lands. The multitude of believers increased
daily at' Jerusalem and throughout Asia Minor,
Greece, and Italy, under the preaching of Paul and
his companions and coadjutors. About half of
Paul's Epistles were then written, and the earliest
account that we possess of the institution of the
Lord's Supper is contained in his first letter to the
Corinthians. His version of this memorable event
agrees wonderfully, both in the spirit and the letter,
with the corresponding accounts in the first three
Gospels, though of course he wrote by hearsay from
the other Apostles ; and this shows the attention
that was paid to verbal exactness in the spoken

TEE GOSPEL NARRATIVE. 49
word through which exclusively the early Church
was founded. Of this early period we can piece
together a tolerably full history frora the rather
broken and desultory record of it in the Acts of the
Apostles, and from numerous allusions and indica
tions in the Epistles. The Twelve appear to have
acted in concert, and generally with great harmony
both in doctrine and conduct, holding conferences
with each other whenever points of difference
arose. Towards the close of this period came the terrible
Neronian persecution, of which we have a minute
account from the Pagan historian, Tacitus, who
wrote on the spot concerning what, though then a
young child, he may actually have witnessed. His
recital is further confirmed by another Pagan his
torian, " the diligent and accurate Suetonius," who
was born but a few years after the Christians at
Rome were subjected to this fiery trial. As our
own learned historian. Gibbon, whose bias was cer
tainly to discredit the narrative if he had been able
to do so, frankly acknowledges that " the most
sceptical criticism is obliged to respect the truth of
this extraordinary fact, and the integrity of this
celebrated passage of Tacitus ; " and since the
strong prejudice of Tacitus himself against the
Christian belief is conspicuous enough in the ac
count, thus unintentionally adding to the weight of
4

60 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
his testimony in favor of those who then held and
openly maintained that belief, I will here insert the
whole narrative, borrowing Gibbon's translation of
it, which is both elegant and faithful. The pretext
for the persecution originated in a terrible conflagra
tion at Rome, by which more than half of the city
was reduced to ashes. To divert the popular sus
picion that Nero himself had set Rome on fire, and
had chanted in mockery the fall of Troy while it
was burning, " the emperor resolved to substitute
in his own place some fictitious criminals."
"With this view (continues Tacitus), he inflicted the
most exquisite tortures on those men, who, under the
vulgar appellation of Christians, were already branded
with deserved infamy. They derived their name and
origin from Christ, who, iu the reign of Tiberius, had
suffered death by the sentence of the procurator, Pontius
Pilate. For a while this dire superstition was checked ;
but it again burst forth, and not only spread itself over
Judea, the first seat of this mischievous sect, but was
even introduced into Rome, the common asylum which
receives and protects whatever is impure, whatever is
atrocious. The confessions of those who were seized
discovered a great multitude of their accomplices, and
they were all convicted, not so much for the crime of
setting fire to the city, as for their hatred of human kind.
They died in torments, and their torments were embit
tered by insult asd derision. Some were nailed on
crosses ; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts,

TEE GOSPEL NARRATIVE. 61
and exposed to the fury of dogs ; others again, smeared
over with combustible materials, were used as torches
to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens
of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle,
which was accompanied with a horse race, aud honored
with the presence of the emperor, who mingled with the
populace in the dress and attitude of a charioteer.
The guilt of the Christians deserved indeed the most
exemplary punishment ; but the public abhorrence was
changed into commiseration, from the opinion that those
unhappy wretches were sacrificed, not so much to the
public welfare as to the cruelty of a jealous tyrant."
Even Gibbon is impressed with the force of the
contrast when he reminds his readers, that these
gardens and circus of Nero on the Vatican hill are
now the site of a Christian temple whose magnifi
cence mocks the ancient glories of the Roman capi
tol, — a temple erected by sovereign pontiffs who
have extended their claims to spiritual dominion
throughout the civilized world.
This early period of an unwritten Gospel natu
rally came to a close when the generation of those
who had been eye-witnesses and hearers of Jesus
was rapidly dying out, and when the extension of
the Christian faith to distant lands had created a
need of some permanent means of preserving and
diffusing their testimony and instructions. The
four Gospels as we now possess them appear to be

52 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
brief and simple records of the teachings of the
Apostles. It is not certain that each of them was
entirely written by the person whose name it bears,
though it undoubtedly contains the substance of
what one Apostle, perhaps of what several Apostles,
had preached, of that to which they had borne wit
ness, during many years. The headings of the man
uscripts, " According to Matthew," " According to
John," etc., merely signify that the story of Jesus is
therein told according to the version of it which had
been so often repeated by that Apostle. Mark was
not an attendant on Jesus Christ during his minis
try, but appears to have been an intimate friend
and companion of Peter, who, in his first Epistle,
affectionately calls him his son. There has been a
constant tradition in the Church, vouched by the
earliest authors, that he was only the amanuensis or
interpreter of Peter, who either dictated this Gospel
to him, or supplied the materials for it in the numer
ous discourses to which his friend had listened. In
the proem to the third Gospel, we have Luke's di
rect assertion that he wrote in view of the declara
tions made by many others respecting " those things
which are most surely believed among us ; " he does
not even imply that he was himself an eye-witness
of what he narrates, but only that he had had
" perfect understanding of all things from the very
first ; " that is, that he had been thoroughly in-

TEE GOSPEL NARRATIVE. 53
structed in them by those who were " eye-witnesses
and ministers of the word."
The four Gospels as we now possess them seem to
be brief and imperfect transcripts from that original
oral testiraony of the companions and disciples of
Jesus to the frequent repetition of which the earli
est converts to Christianity had listened for nearly
thirty years, and which was the sole foundation of
their faith. Each separate transcript is imperfect,
because either the writer of it, or the Apostle whose
testimony it records, had some special purpose,
taste, or principle of selection which made certain
portions of the narrative more interesting to him
than the parts which he omitted. Matthew re
ports by preference the sayings and discourses of
our Lord, giving but a brief and hurried account
of the outward events in his ministry, except of its
beginning and its close. Mark, on the other hand,
is minute and full in the narration of events, often
adding little incidents and touches of description
which are wanting elsewhere, and which make his
statements seem more lively and truthful ; but his
report of what Jesus said is very concise, and some
times appears incomplete. Matthew's Gospel was
primarily intended for the Jews, and gives in great
detail the circumstances and speeches, especially the
cases of apparent fulfilment of prophecy, which
would naturally be most interesting to that people.

54 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
Again, Matthew and Mark are evidently simple
and unlearned men, who furnish a plain and unvar
nished account of what seemed to them most inter
esting in the ministry of Christ. But Luke was
certainly a person of considerable literary taste
and culture, and wrote with some special reference
to the Greeks and Romans, because he was long a
travelling companion of Paul and Barnabas in their
mission to the Gentiles. The Jewish and Messi
anic element is not brought forward so promi
nently in his Gospel as in its two predecessors. All
three of the Synoptics dwell at length upon the
ministry of Jesus in Galilee and at a distance from
Jerusalem ; while John, who wrote at least a quar
ter of a century after them, with full knowledge of
their contents, and with an evident purpose to sup
plement their accounts by preserving passages in the
life and teachings of Jesus which they had oraitted,
confines his report in the main to what took place
in Judea.
From the view here taken of the origin of the
Gospels, it is easy to understand why the authors
of them, though writing without concert with each
other, and except in the case of John, without any
knowledge of what the others had already written,
should frequently adopt the same language in their
several reports. The words and phrases which
they employ in corresponding passages are some-

TEE GOSPEL NARRATIVE. 55
times identical, and often strikingly similar. Be
cause it is so evident that there was no concerted
action between the Evangelists, these frequent
cases of verbal agreement have greatly puzzled the
commentators. I find in them nothing surprising.
Each gives an independent report of a common
original, — of that oral Gospel, that original testi
mony of the Apostles and other eye-witnesses, which
had been for more than a quarter of a century the
sole nutriment, the only means of edification, of the
primitive Church. Through frequent repetition,
the very words and phrases of that primitive story
had become stereotyped in the hearts and memories
of the listeners who became the early converts to
Christ. Especially in reporting the precepts, con
versations, and discourses of Jesus, this verbal co
incidence is natural, and therefore is frequent and
manifest. In this case, the very words are hal
lowed, and great attention was naturally paid to
the exact preservation of them. We cannot doubt
that most of the phraseology of the Sermon on the
Mount and the Parables was as familiarly known
to the primitive Church before as after our present
Gospels were written.
It is obvious that the account here given tends
strongly to confirm the genuineness and authenticity
of the whole Gospel narrative ; since it appears that
this narrative contains the testiraony not merely of
the four Evangelists whose names it bears, but of

56 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
the whole body of the disciples, the hearers and
eye-witnesses, of our Lord's ministry on earth. In
fact, it contains the evidence of all the contempora
ries of Jesus, both in Galilee and at Jerusalem, who
had listened to his discourses and beheld the won
ders that he did, and who constituted or taught his
Church during the first generation ; for the original
testimony, the oral Gospel, must have been fre
quently preached in their hearing, and they would
have been sure to detect and discredit misstate
ments or unfounded additions to the story. Nay,
even the multitude of those who saw and heard,
but did not believe, — the sceptical Sadducees, the
persecuting Scribes and Pharisees, — may be said
to bear testimony indirectly in his favor ; for they
were eager to calumniate, to contradict and dis
prove ; and what escaped or vanquished their irri
tated watchfulness- and scrutiny, their jealousy and
hate, must be true. Take, for instance, the mocking
and shouting crowd who were present at his trial
before Caiaphas and Pilate, when " all the disciples
forsook him and fled ; " many of this crowd must
subsequently have followed him to Calvary, and
there witnessed the crucifixion ; and how prompt
they would have been to detect and expose, either
in the oral Gospel, which was preached to their con
temporaries, or in the written narratives by which
this was succeeded, any statements which were ex
aggerated or false.

CHAPTER IV.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE.
It might seem that the next properly succeeding
portion of my topic would be the poetry of the Bi
ble. But I find that both the poetry and the his
tory in the Hebrew Scriptures are so thoroughly
underwoven and colored by what I have been
obliged, through the want of a better term, to call
their ' philosophy,' that some consideration of this
last must precede, before any full comment upon
the two former would be intelligible. Let us there
fore try first to understand the meaning of this
much abused word, and thus perhaps to find an ex
planation of what is most peculiar in the character
and the writings of the Hebrew people.
The proper function of philosophy is to determine
accurately the being, the nature, and the mutual
relations of the three great objects of human
thought, — namely, the Universe, Man, and God.
This is Kant's definition of it, and I know not that
a better one has ever been offered. Thus under
stood, philosophy is not science, and is not religion ;
but it is the foundation on which alone both science

68 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
and religion must be built. That foundation con
sists of those priraitive and fundamental truths upon
which the whole fabric of our knowledge rests, and
by which it is regulated ; it is the aggregate of
first principles, which constitute the essence of the
human mind, and determine- the whole course and
tendency of human thought. According to sorae,
these principles are authoritative because they are
innate ; they are born with us, and must be ac
cepted as such, because nothing lies behind them,
through which they could either be proved or re
futed. Now the Hebrews virtually teach the same
doctrine when they declare that these primary
truths are a revelation from God. They profess
with Elihu in the Book of Job, " Behold there is a
spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty
giveth him understanding." To accept these truths
is for them an act of religious faith ; and in this
sense, certainly, their philosophy and their theology
are one. Hence we have first to ascertain the rela
tion of their sacred books, especially of the Penta
teuch, which is in the highest sense their " Book of
the Law," to this supposed revelation of divine
truth ; and this question may be most conveniently
considered here in respect to the whole body of the
Scriptures. In what sense, then, and to what ex
tent, does the Bible purport to be a revelation from
God?

TEE PEILOSOPHY OF TEE BIBLE. 59
I answer, first, that, strictly speaking, it does not
even claim to be a revelation in itself, but only to
contain the record of several revelations. This is
evident from the fact already mentioned, that the
Old Testament includes the whole body of Hebrew
literature down to a comparatively recent period.
As such, it is a miscellaneous aggregate of historical
documents, of various forms of poetry, of hortatory
and didactic discourses, which have often no other
or higher claira to be divinely inspired than the cor
responding portions of the English or French liter
ature of modern times. As already mentioned, we
find in it two Books, Esther and Solomon's Song,
in neither of which is the name of God once men
tioned from beginning to end, and which do not even
profess to be an exposition either of moral or relig
ious truth. "Search the Scriptures," says our
Lord ; "for in them ye think ye have eternal life;
and they are they which testify of me ; " that is,
you must search in order to find in them either the
law or the testimony. But search and ye will find
both ; for the Bible does purport to contain a rec
ord, though a broken and imperfect one, of the
word of God as made known unto man in three
successive and distinct revelations. The earliest of
these is the patriarchal or primitive revelation, the
record of which is wholly contained in the Book of
Genesis. It was the faith of Abraham and the

60 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
other patriarchs, men who walked with God, to
whom he made known his will, and with whom he
entered into a covenant, in which his favor was
conditioned upon their obedience to his law. This
primeval revelation was not abrogated, but con
firmed and enlarged, and made the foundation of
the special polity of the Jews, in the second grand
announcement of the law, which was made by Moses
in the wilderness. Under this Mosaic dispensation
the believing Jews continue to this day. In the
New Testament, we find a record of the third and
far the most complete and adequate revelation of
God to man, based as before on what had preceded
it, which it does not supersede, but sanctions and
reaffirms in all its essential features, while sup
plementing them with new and higher truth.
Christianity is related to Judaism as the splendor
of the noonday sun is to the early twilight. " Think
not," its author exclaims, " that I am come to de
stroy the law or the prophets : I am not come to
destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you,
until heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one
tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be
fulfilled." Now these fundamental truths, which the Bible
assumes to have been first made known to the
world by primeval revelation, which were adopted
and built upon by the later and more special mani-

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE- BIBLE. 61
festations and disclosures of God's will and purpose,
and are still imprinted as birthmarks upon the
hearts and consciences of men, constitute what I
have ventured to call the ' philosophy ' both of the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures. I shall endeavor
hereafter to show more particularly what they are,
and to show what are their relations to each other,
and to the various other doctrines which have been
set forth as systems of philosophy either in ancient
or modern times.
Meanwhile, let me call attention for a moment
to the general fact here taken for granted, that we
find in the Book of Genesis, and indeed throughout
the Bible, clear and indisputable indications that
there was, and is, a primeval revelation of God's
truth to man, and to the bearing of this fact upon
some theories broached in our own day respecting
the priraitive state of man on earth and the origin
of his civilization. The theory of the evolutionists,
as you know, is that man is the son of a monkey ;
the philosophy of the Bible teaches throughout that
he is a child of God. The former make out a sup
posititious history of what they suppose to be the
several stages of unassisted progress from bar
barism to civilization, and rashly conclude that
man actually has risen by his own efforts, merely
because they see no reason why he might not so
rise under favorable circumstances. But accord-

62 A STUDY OF TEB ENGLISE BIBLE.
ing to the account in Genesis, man has fallen from
a former state of innocence and happiness through
his own fault in weakly yielding to temptation, and
so plunging into corruption and wickedness. Ac
cording to the one doctrine, man has steadily risen
without external aid, by a process of necessary de
velopment, from an organization and a condition
identical with the organization and the condition
of the brutes, to the heights of civilization, refine
ment, and religion now occupied by the most
favored races. Against this hypothesis, for it is
nothing more, we cite the objection urged by Arch
bishop Whately, and confirraed by all history and
observation, that mere savages " never did, and
never could, raise themselves, unaided, into a
higher condition." In support of the opposite doc
trine, that savagery has arisen through degradation
from a former happier state, we cite the undeniable
fact, that eastern Europe and western and central
Asia are strown with the wrecks of empires and
civilizations that have perished ; and that most of
the barbarous races which now exist afford evidence
through traditions, or the possession of ingenious
tools and implements which they are evidently in
competent to invent, or through other manifest
external indications, that their progenitors were
vastly wiser and more cultivated than they. Even
our North American Indians were preceded by the

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 63
mound-builders, a comparatively intelligent race.
The native Mexicans and Peruvians, whom the
Spaniards found here, possessed some relics of the
comparatively advanced civilization of the ancient
nations frora whom they sprang. Still further:
the two exclusively human endowments of lan
guage and the use of fire prove conclusively that
man was originally taught by God. They could
not have been invented except by a highly civilized
people ; for without them, even a beginning of civ
ilization would be obviously impossible, and man,
if he was a brute to begin with, must always have
remained a brute. The divine origin of one of
them is indicated in the beautiful myth of the
Greeks, that Prometheus stole fire from heaven.
And of language, as soon as we perceive that it
does not consist merely in giving names to things,
but that it is an organic structure, marvellously
complex and intricate, founded on a philosophical
analysis of the elements of human thought, may
we not well say, that it could no more have been a
human invention than is the anatomical structure
of the human body, but that in both cases the in
ventor and fashioner was divine ? That mere sav
ages, as yet hardly raised above their kindred
brutes, and unaided by a divine instinct specially
implanted in them for the purpose, could have in
vented both language and the use of fire, or could

64 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
have taken the first step towards civilization with
out the aid of both, is a doctrine which can be en
tertained only by those who can believe in a chance
development of all things out of mud.
In what sense, and to what extent, these two
momentous agencies, which first made human civili
zation possible, together with those primitive and
innate truths and injunctions which form the
groundwork of man's moral and spiritual nature,
are to be regarded as special revelations from a
superhuman source of wisdom and power, may be
learned from Kant's exposition of the functions of
conscience and the absolute character of the moral
law. The ' Categorical Imperative,' which is his
phrase for the voice of conscience, is the expression,
not of any general and abstract truth, but of an ab
solute and universal ' Command,' which assumes to
regulate man's whole inner being and outward con
duct through governing all his desires, volitions,
and aims. It is a ' Categorical ' command, that is, a
law of inherent and unconditional obligation, over
riding all considerations of prudence, personal af
fection, or general utility, and asserting its own
supreme authority over all other precepts and in
junctions whatsoever. Putting aside the consider
ation of external things, the authority thus made
known to us by internal revelation erects its throne
in the soul of man, and judges, not the outward

THE PHILOSOPHY OF TEE BIBLE. 65
act, but the motives and intentions which lead to
it and solely constitute its moral character. Com
pliance with the dictates of this internal monitor is
the only Absolute Good made known to man ; that
is, a good will, dictated solely by reverence for the'
Moral Law, irrespective of any outward conse
quences, is good in and for itself alone, and not for
what it produces, not for its utility, not through its
fitness for anj'^ higher end, for there is no higher
end. It is therefore to be prized infinitely higher
than that which gratifies any desire, higher even
than the satisfaction of all our desires taken to
gether. All other goods are merely relative ; that
is, the attainment of them is to be sacrificed with
out hesitation whenever they come in conflict with
the Moral Law. Every other form of law, whether
human or divine, whether it is announced as the
law of the land or as the law of God, is binding
upon man only so far as it is sanctioned and en
forced by this higher law within the breast. The
action is not right because God commands it, but
God commands it because it is right.
Now I say that the existence of this " Categorical
Imperative," this absolute injunction of the Moral
Law as supreme in authority and universal in ob
ligation, irrespective of any outward consequences
whatsoever, is a fact which could not have been
discovered by the cognitive faculties of man in their
5

66 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
ordinary and unaided mode of operation, but must
have been first made known, like the structure of
language and the uses of fire, by what may be
called a divine instinct or a special revelation. If
known to have been first announced by an audible
voice from heaven, under circumstances as impres- ,
sive as those which, according to the Jewish scrip
ture, attended the communication of the law at
Sinai, its immediate divine origin would be univer
sally admitted. And if, instead of a trumpet call
from above accompanied by the earthquake and the
fire, the will of God comes to man as " a still small
voice " frora within the mind, constantly repeated,
and making known to him his duty on all occasions,
shall we say that its divine origin and authority are
any the less obvious ?
But I did not intend to discuss at length this
subject of a primitive revelation to mankind, but
only to point it out as one of many important prob
lems the thorough investigation of which may be
greatly aided by attentive study of the philosophy
of the Bible.
We have next to enumerate and consider sepa
rately those primitive and fundamental truths re
specting the universe, man, and God, and their
relations to each other, which underlie these three
revelations, and constitute what I have called the
philosophy both of the Hebrew and Christian

THE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 67
Scriptures. The first of them was grandly an
nounced in the solemn declaration by Moses,
" Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord."
It was repeated in the first law of the Decalogue,
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" or
more clearly, according to the reading in the Sep
tuagint, " no other gods but me." This great truth,
the unity of God, is the first peculiar feature of the
philosophy of the Bible. It was not first made
known by Moses, but appears from the account in
Genesis to have been equally the undoubted faith
of Abraham and the other patriarchs ; and it is as
sumed, or taken for granted, through the whole his
tory and all the literature of the Jews. It has been
their distinctive national faith during the whole
period, about 3500 years, of their existence as a
separate and peculiar people. . What were the con
dition and the belief of the other nations of the
earth, even those who had the most culture and
refinement, during the first half of this long period ?
Throughout the night of ages that preceded modern
civilization, polytheism or fetichism was the prevail
ing faith of raankind, as it still is of those tribes
and races upon whom the light of Christianity has
not dawned. The classic nations of antiquity
erected altars and temples to that crowd of coarse,
vindictive, and licentious gods and goddesses whom
all the glories of Grecian poetry and art could not

68 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
ennoble, nor all the refinements of modern specula
tion allegorize into decency. Egypt bowed down
before its deified dogs, cats, and bulls. Assyria
worshipped its winged and human-headed lions, its
sphinxes, and its monsters with the body and arms
of a man united with the head of an eagle or vul
ture, and with the tail of a dragon or fish. The
Magians worshipped fire, or divided their homage
between Ormuzd and Ahriraan, which are but syn
onyms for the good Deity and the Evil One. In
India, the dreamy and meditative spirit of the peo
ple forged monstrous schemes of theology and cos
mogony which Hume fitly characterized as " the
playful whimsies of monkeys in human shape,"
and which Southey has vainly tried to elevate into
poetry in the " Curse of Keharaa."
In this long and dreary night, one race alone —
and one by no means the most distinguished for
art, learning, and refinement — upheld the torch
of a spiritual faith and a belief in the one true
God. The Hebrew theology appears in those re
mote ages, amid the otherwise universal preva
lence of the grossest idolatry, as a miraculous light
" streaking the darkness radiantly." I do not need
here to insist upon anything in the literature or the
history of this wonderful people which has been
called into doubt by the subtle questionings of
modern scepticism. I throw overboard for the

THE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 69
nonce to the unbeliever the Book of Genesis and
all the contested points in the history of the Jews.
I will take only the Psalms, which, as products of
the Hebrew mind of a very high antiquity, whether
they were all written by David or not, no scholar
has ever thought of questioning. Many of them are
undoubtedly as old as the Iliad aud the Odyssey,
some are probably much older. ' Contrast their
pure and sublime monotheism with the theogony
of Homer and Hesiod, and with the popular gods of
Egypt and India ; and account for it, if you can,
consistently with the laws of the human mind, and
with the history of human progress in civilization,
philosophy, and religion, without the aid of imme
diate inspiration or an antecedent revelation.
But what we are here specially concerned to re
mark is, that monotheism is the only possible form
of theism properly so called, and that any scherae
of polytheisra, even the dualism of the Manichaeaii
belief, is self-contradictory and absurd, being a
denial of the essential attributes which constitute
our only idea of Deity. Either there is but one
God, or there is no God at all, but only two or
more limited, finite, and derivative beings, each
negativing the infinity and omnipotence of the
other. Neither can be self-sustaining, increate, in
destructible, and almighty, except by reducing the
other to insignificance. The reasoning of Spinoza

70 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
is irrefutable : there cannot be two infinite beings,
since there would always be one thing which neither
of them could do, namely, to destroy the other.
Hence the word is in truth a proper name, and
since it was not commonly so understood, the
Hebrews were right in giving Hira a special and
distinctive appellation. " And God spake unto
Moses and said unto him, I am Jehovah ; and I
appeared unto Abraham, and unto Isaac, and unto
Jacob by the name of God Almighty ; but by my
name JehovAH was I not known to them." Exod.
vi. 2, 3. And again, in the 83d Psalm, " That men
may know that thou, whose naine alone is Jehovah,
art the Most High over all the earth." Then the
Hebrews were right again, in putting this sublime
doctrine of the unity of God in the foreground, as
the first truth of their philosophy and theology, and
as the basis on which all the other truths depend.
The second of these fundaraental truths is best
expressed in the emphatic declaration of our Lord,
" God is a spirit, and they that worship him must
worship him in spirit and in truth." It was en
forced in the second law of the Decalogue, " Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness of what is in heaveii above, or in the earth
beneath, or in the water under the earth." In ac
cordance with this prohibition, the theology of the
Hebrews throughout their whole history is dis-

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 71
tinguished by nothing so much as by their horror
of anthropomorphisra, or rather of attributing to
Deity any definite shape or likeness whatsoever.
Every other nation on earth worshipped God under
some bodily image or similitude, and therefore
raised to him statues or representations in stone,
wood, or iron. To the Jews alone this was the
unpardonable sin of idolatry, for it was a limitation,
or rather a denial, of the infinity of God. The in
junction in the Decalogue is simply an enforce
ment of that grand doctrine of the omnipresence of
Deity which underlies the most sublime passages of
Hebrew poetry. You might open the Old Testa
ment almost at random for confirmations of this
remark. Take the following from the 139th Psalm :
" Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? Or whither
shall I fiee from thy presence ? If I ascend up
into heaven, thou art there : if I make my bed in
hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings
of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of
the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy
right hand shall hold me." Again, in Solomon's
sublime prayer at the dedication of the Temple : —
" But will God indeed dwell on the earth ? Behold
the heaven, and heaven of heavens, cannot con
tain thee ; how much less this house that I have
builded ? " Even where God appears most directly
in intercourse with man, as in speaking face to

72 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
face with Moses or with Job, He comes not in any
visible shape, but only as a voice in the inward ear,
a voice out of the bush, or out of the fire, or ont of
the whirlwind. And that there may be no mistake
on this cardinal point, the people were reminded in
Deuteronomy (iv. 15), " for ye saw no manner of
similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you
in Horeb out of the midst of the fire ; " therefore
"take good heed unto yourselves, lest you make
any graven image, the similitude of any figure ;
and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and
when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the
stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be
driven to worship them and serve them."
We find, where we should least expect it, in the
great Roman historian who was nearly a contem
porary of our Lord, a striking account of this pe
culiarity in the doctrine and institutions of the Jews,
though it evidently caused him more astonishment
than admiration. In the fifth book of his Histories,
before beginning his account of the siege and cap
ture of Jerusalem by Titus, Tacitus gives a pre
liminary sketch of the character and origin of the
Jewish people, which in some respects is candid and
faithful, though the errors in it are enough to prove
that it was compiled from hearsay and vulgar rumor,
and not from direct examination of the Hebrew
sacred books. After glancing at the supposed

TEE PEILOSOPHY OF TEE BIBLE. 78
reasons for their hebdoraadal division of time, and
for the observance of the weekly Sabbath and the
Sabbatical year, he goes on to say, they believe that
" the souls are immortal of those who fall in battle
or are put to death by their conquerors ; hence they
are pleased with the increase of their numbers, and
they are fearless of death. After the Egyptian
fashion, they bury the bodies of the dead instead of
burning them. Also, they have the same belief and
rites as the Egyptians regarding Hades or the under
world, but differ from them in respect to celestial
beings, or the heavens above us. For the Egyptians
worship many animals and images made by hand ;
but the Jews hold that there is only one God,
that he is pure mind or spirit, (' ludcei mente sola
unumque numen intelligunt,') and that those are
impious who, out of perishable raaterials, fashion
images of gods in the likeness of men. They be
lieve this God to be supreme, eternal, inimitable
because without forra, and imperishable. There
fore they allow no statues in their cities, nor even
in their temples ; they will not pay this flattery to
kings, nor even to the Roman emperors." He sub
sequently adds, that " Pompey was the first of the
Roraans who subdued the Jews, and exercised his
right as conqueror by entering their temple ; and
it thus became known that it contained no divine
similitude, but the innermost shrine was tenantless

74 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
and bare : " ^^ nulla intus deum effigie vacuam sedem
et inania arcana.^'
The third primary truth of the philosophy of
the Bible is the simple affirmation, God made the
world. " In the beginning, God created the heaven
and the earth." Here are no metaphysical subtle
ties about something being generated from nothing,
but it is obviously implied that the creation thus
spoken of was one of order out of confusion, of a
cosmos out of chaos ; since it is said in the second
verse of the account, " And the earth was without
form and void," that is, was shapeless and empty ;
" and darkness was upon the face of the deep ; and
the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the wa
ters. And God said. Let there be light ; and there
was light." The unequalled majesty and force of
this description so impressed Longinus, a Pagan
philosopher and rhetorician of the third century of
our era, that he cites the words, in his treatise on
the Sublime, as a striking instance of sublimity in
discourse ; but the citation must have been made
from meraory, without sight of the text, as he adds
to the quotation this clause, which really enfeebles
it by repetition, "Let the earth be, and the earth
was : " — words not to be found in Genesis, though
they are contained in a passage in the Apocrypha.
(2 Esdras xvi. 55.)
We have here to look only at the face of the ac-

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 75
count and at the primal truths which may underlie
it, disregarding the details which have given rise to
so much vain speculation in theology and science.
Thus viewed, it must be obvious to any one, I
think, that the first three chapters of Genesis con
tain an ancient Hebrew poem, or rather the frag
ments of several such poems somewhat imperfectly
dovetailed together, in praise of the Creator, and
embodying in an imaginative form the national
faith respecting the act of creation and the primi
tive state of man on earth. These are no more to
be construed literally into articles of belief than
are the first three books of Milton's Paradise Lost,
which are a sort of modern version or imitation of
them. It has all the marks of such poetry, — ¦ par
allelism of thought and diction, division into irregu
lar stanzas each having a sort of refrain, magnifi
cence of imagery, and vivid personifications. Take,
for instance, the fourth stanza, or as it is here
called, the work of the fourth day ; it is all aglow
with stateliness of phraseology, picturesque repeti
tions, and liveliness of imaginative detail. "And
God said. Let there be lights in the firmament of
the heaven to divide the day from the night ; and
let thera be for signs, and for seasons, and for days
and years. And let them be for lights in the firma
ment of the heaven, to give light upon the earth:
and it was so. And God made two great lights ;

76 "a study OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser
light to rule the night ; he made the stars also."
I must abridge the lyric repetitions, and pass at
once to the refrain, " and God saw that it was
good. And the evening and the morning were the
fourth day." Now to treat this magnificent passage
as plain didactic prose, and to inquire curiously
what language was used when " God said ; " or
how the sun and moon came first to be created three
days after light itself was generated ; or how long
a period of time was embraced in what is here
called "the fourth day," is a mode of interpretation
which is enough to drive frantic one who has any
feeling for poetry, or any reverence for the Bible.
The next time either believing or infidel geologists
come to discuss the exact meaning of the six days
required for the work of creation, gravely supposing
that such speculations involve the validity of the
faith of Christendom, I hope they will also consider
the complaint of Job, when he was being talked to
death by his three tormentors : " No doubt but ye
are the people, and wisdora shall die with you. O
that ye would altogether hold your peace ; and it
should be your wisdom." The Hebrew poet, de
voutly attached to his weekly Sabbath and Sabbat
ical year, carried back in idea these institutions to
the foundation of the earth, and made the septen
nial division of time, marking out the periods of

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. TJ
labor and repose, one of the imaginative embellish
ments of his record of the creation of the world ;
though he was fully aware that, to the infinite and
omnipotent God, whom he worshipped, the very
words work and rest have no meaning, and are
really profane. One might as well take literally
the sublime declaration in Job, that, at the crea
tion, " the morning stars sang together, and all the
sons of God shouted for joy."
But are we not thus sublimating the truths of
God's word into the idle fancies and poetical imag
inings of mortal men ? Certainly not. Remember
what has been already said, that we are dealing
not directly with a revelation, but with the rec
ord of a revelation, a record which is at least 500
years older than Homer. Poetry is older than
prose. In that early age, history, morality, and
religion, all the thoughts of men, assumed the out
ward form of poetry as their natural garb. The
kernel of truth always had a framework of imagina
tive surroundings. Within these few last years,
the marvellous discoveries of Dr. Schliemann have
proved, that what Homer, .^schylus, and Sophocles
wrote were not mere idle tales, but genuine tradi
tions of historical personages and real facts. Un
der the poetry of Genesis and Exodus, if we are not
slaves to the letter, it is easy to penetrate to the
spirit which lies beneath, and to discern the sober

78 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
features of truth lit up by the vivid coloring of the
imagination. This Hebrew cosmogony, this old, old
story Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
is not more poetical than it is instructive. Verse
has generally been the outward form of the oracles
of God; the inspiration of the poet is naturally
connected with that of the lawgiver, the religious
reformer, the priest, and the seer. Truth is taken
home, is lodged in the meraory, and affects the life,
only so far as it stirs the emotions and touches the
heart. And when the record is studied for edifica
tion at a later day, it must be studied as poetry, and
not as prose ; we must penetrate to the heart of the
flower, in order to reach the fruit.
This oldest and most inspired of all poems teaches
plainly enough, first, as has been said, that God
made the world ; next, that creation was not a sin
gle act completed as soon as it was begun, but that
it extended through many stages, covering vast pe
riods of time ; and finally that it culminated in the
birth of man. " And the Lord God formed man of
the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nos
trils the breath of life ; and man became a living
soul." This agrees with the account given in the
earlier version of the poem, where we read, " And

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 79
God said. Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness." Herein is plainly taught the distinct
personality both of raan and God, and that each is
a spiritual being capable of holding intercourse
with the other, that is, of imparting and receiving
comraands. For as Plato tells us in the concluding
sentence of the Timseus, oSc o /cdcr/ios, " this orderly
arranged universe, having received animals both
mortal and immortal, and being filled with them,
has become the sensible iniage of the intelligible
God, and thereby of what is greatest, best, fairest,
and most perfect." The whole account of Eden,
which follows, teaches clearly tliat man is created
innocent and pure, with a revelation through his
conscience of God's law of holiness ; but that the
temptations of appetite and passion, the lusts of the
flesh, are too strong for him, and he falls into dis
obedience and sin, with all their sad consequences,
" With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat."
All this is taught by the poet under the lively alle
gory of the serpent tempting the motlier of man
kind, which is no more to be construed literally
than the corresponding passage in Milton, where
he represents personified Sin and Death as guard
ing the portal to the infernal regions ; the underly
ing truth to the story of the enticement in Eden

80 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
being the treacherous approaches of sin through
wicked thoughts dallying with temptation. In a
like imaginative manner, the writer thus sets forth
the sharae which follows the awakening of con
science and the detection of guilt : " And they
heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the
garden in the cool of the day ; and Adam and his
wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord
God amongst the trees of the garden." This is
only saying, what all Christian moralists admit,
that the voice of conscience is the voice of God.
It has been falsely charged that it is an anthro-
popathic conception of Deity to represent him as
holding intercourse directly with the human soul.
But it is not so to one who believes, what the Bible
teaches throughout, the distinct personality both of
God and man, that each is a spirit, and each may
communicate with the other spiritually, through the
inward ear, while the organs of sense are closed, or
do not exist. All of this is involved in the doctrine
and practice of silent prayer. It is anthropomor
phism and idolatry to think of God as being in the
outward likeness of a man ; but it is piety and truth
to believe that man is made in the spiritual likeness
of God. And this I would rank as the fourth primi
tive truth distinctlj' taught throughout the succes
sive revelations of which we have a broken and
fragmentary record in our English Bible.

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 81
The fifth fundaraental truth clearly taught in
each of these three revelations is the grand declara
tion that God governs the world in righteousness.
Properly considered, it is the most important of
them all. The other three are the foundations of
the theology, that is, of the doctrine concerning
God, which was or is held by the patriarchs, and by
the Hebrew and the Christian alike. But they are
merely intellectual truths, like the primary maxims
concerning time, space, and nuraber, which are the
foundations of metaphysics and mathematics, and
like these again, not necessarily or immediately
affecting the conduct or the life of raen. I raay
believe with my whole soul, as firmly as I do in the
multiplication table, that God is one, that he is a
spirit, and that he made the world ; and still hold
with the Epicurean and the agnostic, that for all we
know to the contrary, his work was completed at
the creation, and that ever since he has remained
apart, not regarding the affairs of men or in any
way interfering with the course of things in the
universe. But this fifth truth, solemnly proclaimed
in each of the three Biblical revelations, is the
basis not only of a theology, but of a religion. It
is a practical truth, and not one of mere specula
tion. It is the most momentous truth ever sounded
in the hearing of man. The announcement ' God
governs the earth in righteousness ' means that he

82 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
has made known his will and his law unto men, and
that the whole course of events, both in outward
nature and in the human soul, is a manifestation
and an enforcement of that divine law. The cove
nant which the Lord made with Moses and the
people of Israel was, that it should be well with
the righteous and ill with the wicked ; and their
faith that this covenant was binding, and would be
rigidly kept, pervades all their literature and fur
nishes a key to their whole history. Their lawgiv
ers, their psalmists, and their prophets teach but
one lesson ; they only reiterate what was the faith
of Abraham and the word which was spoken by
Moses at Sinai. " Know therefore this day and con
sider it in thine heart, that the Lord he is God in
heaven above and upon the earth beneath ; there is
none else. Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes
and his commandments which I command thee this
day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy
children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong
thy days upon the earth, which the Lord thy God
giveth thee, forever."
So strong was the belief of the Jews in the en
forcement of the divine law during the present life
of man on the earth, that they do not seem to have
thought of the probability of a future life beyond
the grave. Save the questionable interpretation of
one or two obscure phrases, there is not the slights-

THE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 83
est proof in the Old Testament that the Hebrews,
before the period of the Captivity, ever thought of
the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Even
so late a writer as Ecclesiastes, probably subsequent
to the Captivity, seeming to allude to the primeval
sentence pronounced after the fall from Eden, says
in his usual gloomy fashion, " All go unto one
place ; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust
again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth
upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth
downward to the earth? " And again, " Then shall
the dust return to the earth as it was; and the
spirit shall return unto God who gave it." At the
time of the Saviour, as is known, the large and in
fluential sect of the Sadducees positively rejected
the doctrine of the resurrection ; and even the Phar
isees seem to have entertained it only as a doubt
ful speculation, as one guess among raany, and not
as a certified belief. Only the doctrine and the
resurrection of our Lord brought life and immor
tality to light. Why should the Jews before his
time have entertained this doctrine, when they be
lieved so firmly, that holiness carried with it its
own blessings, and sin bore its own punishment, in
the life that now is? Whatever misfortunes befell
them, if their crops failed, if pestilence came among
them, or if they were delivered into the hands of
their enemies, they acknowledged that it was be-

84 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
cause they had sinned, because they had forgotten
the commandments of the Lord their God, and only
through repentance and reformation could they
look for returning prosperity. Even though ap
pearances were against them, they were strong in
believing that " the just shall live by faith." As
their prophet (Habakkuk) grandly told them, " Al-
though the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall
fruit be in the vines ; the labour of the olive shall
fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock
shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no
herd in the stalls ; Yet will I rejoice in the Lord,
I will JOY in the God of my salvation." This is
the great truth which is recognized and expressly
taught even in all worldly systems of utilitarianism,
and as such is accepted and formulated by such
men as John S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. They
too inculcate morality because it is useful, useful
both to society and to the individual; that. is, be
cause a blessing goes along with it. But their
system is an inversion of the true doctrine. They
hold that the action is right because it is useful ;
whereas conscience and the Bible declare, that it is
useful because it is right. Even Matthew Arnold
talks of "that stream of tendency by which all
things seek to fulfil the law of their being ; " of that
"stream of tendency, the Eternal not-ourselves,
which makes for righteousness." This is teaching

THE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 85
the doctrine of the moral government of the world,
but with a fantastic endeavor to cover up both the
personality and the name of the Divine Governor,
the God of righteousness, in a meaningless abstrac
tion. According to this doctrine of Hebrew philosophy,
even the external aspect of the life that now is be
comes the visible expression of the sovereignty of
God ; and this sovereignty may be regarded as the
sixth fundamental truth taught in the Scriptures.
He reigns supreme ; He is the Lord God. of Saba-
oth, the ruler of nations, the king whose majesty,
dominion, and power are revealed in every outward
event and in the whole course of human affairs.
He binds the sweet influences of Pleiades and loos-
eth the bands of Orion. He is the king of glory,
the Lord strong and mighty, even the Lord mighty
in battle.
Over against this grand conception of the majesty
of Jehovah, and of the immediacy of his govern
ment of the whole earth, yet not as abrogating but
as supplementing it, and bringing it nearer to the
hearts and consciences of men, is placed the Chris
tian idea of God as " Our Father," who pitieth his
children, who forgiveth their sins and healeth their
iniquities, whose loving kindness and tender mer
cies are over all his works. To the Jew, God is
king; to the Christian, God is love. The promi-

86 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
nent idea of the whole New Testament is the father
hood of God and the consequent brotherhood of
men. The whole decalogue is summed up in the
emphatic declaration of Jesus Christ : — " Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is
the first and great commandment. And the second
is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself. On these two commandments hang all the
Law and the Prophets."
Recapitulating, we find these seven fundamental
truths underlying the three successive revelations
of which the Bible purports to be the more or less
perfect record : —
1. God is one.
2. God is a spirit.
3. God made the world.
4. The distinct personality both of man and God,
so that each is a spiritual being capable of
holding intercourse with the other.
6. God governs the world in righteousness, re
warding those who keep, and punishing those
who disobey. His commands.
6. In each of His functions, as Creator, Sovereign,
Lawgiver, and Judge, God is love.
7. As he is our Father, all mankind are our
brethren; and the whole duty of man is
summed up in the comprehensive injunction,

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE. 87
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thy
neighbour as thyself.
It is obvious that these seven simple truths, if
taken together, cease to be a raere philosophy, and
already constitute a theology and a religion. Con
sidered separately, each one may be regarded, per
haps, as only a philosophical or ethical truth, which
may be confirmed by reasoning from the light of na
ture ; though all of them could not have been collec
tively first discovered and established by any such
process ; certainly not then and there, when they
were originally announced. And it is as a revela
tion from God, and not as a discovery of human rea
son, that they are taught in the Bible ; for they are
therein proclaimed and inculcated as by authority
from heaven, and not simply reasoned out as conclu
sions from certain premises. They are published
in the simple formula, " Thus saith the Lord."
He who accepts them as such may properly be said
to believe that the Bible contains the word of God,
whatever other ingredients, claiming no such au
thority, may be found in it when considered merely
as an aggregate of early Hebrew literature. Such
foreign elements may rightfully be subjected to
searching examination and criticism, often to dis
paraging and destructive criticism ; since I do not
see why Jewish literature should be exempted from
the application of such scrutiny any more than the

88 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
literature of any other nation, say of the Hindoos
or the Greeks.
But the distinctive element of Christianity, as its
very name imports, is not merely the authoritative
presentation of these truths, but the perfect exem
plification of them in a living form, in the match
less Idea incarnate, the person of Jesus Christ. In
his life, his character, acts, and discourses, to which
no parallel ^v approximation can be found in any
other history or literature, we behold the perfect
manifestation of the truth that God is love, and the
enforcement of his own injunction, " Be ye there
fore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is per
fect." The doctrines which he taught, the com
mands which he uttered, and the incidents in his
earthly career form one uniform and harmonious
whole, every portion of which illustrates and con
firms every other portion. The Sermon on the
Mount and the Parables are the expression of his
life, and are summed up in his prayer when dying
npon the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do." And what a character
and life are here presented for our contemplation, in
its union of humility with majesty, of the human
with the divine! Such a Person could not pass
across the stage of the world's history without
leaving, as he has done, an ineffaceable imprint on
all subsequent ages ; without becoming, what he has

TEE PEILOSOPEY OF TEE BIBLE. 89
been, a prime factor in the life and civilization of
the human race. He has given a new meaning to
the spirit which constitutes our true being and to
the doctrine of its immortality. In the highest
sense of the phrase, he has illuminated life and in
corruption.

CHAPTER V.
THE POETRY OP THE BIBLE.
I PASS now from the philosophy to the poetry
of the Bible. This is hardly a change of theme ;
for the only subject of Hebrew poetry, the only
matter which the Hebrew poets have before them,
is that body of grand fundamental truths which has
just been analyzed as underlying equally the three
revelations recorded in the Scriptures. They sing
nothing else than the unity and infinity of God, his
spiritual being, his distinct personality, his creation
of the world, and his government of the world in
righteousness. They have no epics, seldom any
narrative, and no proper drama, though the Book of
Job is in the dramatic form, while its purport is
theological discussion. All their poetry is lyric,
devotional, and hortatory or didactic. From avery
early day, the Jews seem to have possessed a number
of musical instruments, of which they were prob
ably the inventors, though we know little about
their peculiar construction, and nothing of their
modes of musical composition. Accompanied by
these instruments, the singers and Levites appear

TEE POETRY OF TEE BIBLE. 91
to have intoned or chanted their psalms and other
sacred songs, often having double choirs, who an
swered each other alternately, processions and
dances being frequently added. The poetry of the
Hebrew Prophets, however, could not have been
originally sung, but must have been declaimed
or recited. As is always the case in very ancient
times, nearly all the literature, even that which
is chiefiy historical, legislative, or didactic, seems
naturally to lapse into poetry, instead of preserving
rigidly the sober form of prose. Thus, not only in
the historical books, but in those chiefly occupied
with the details of the Hebrew ritual, we often find
snatches of song, and other passages which are
evidently derived from earlier poems that have not
been preserved, as the poetical coloring remains.
In the 25th chapter of the first Book of Chronicles
is an elaborate account of David's institution of
numerous choirs, who were instructed in the songs
of the Lord, " with cymbals, psalteries, and harps,
for the service of the house of God, according to
the king's order." I do not place much stress upon
this account, however, as the date of the Books of
Chronicles is uncertain, and is probably much later
than the time of David.
But in spite of its connection with music, Hebrew
poetry comes to us only in the form of poetical and
rhythmical prose. It seems entirely destitute of

92 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
proper metrical arrangement, that is, of the regu
lar recurrence of similar feet disposed in various
rhythms, such as we find in all Greek and Latin
poetry. Some think that in the ancient mode of
pronouncing the Hebrew language, such measures
may have existed ; but this true pronunciation being
irretrievably lost, no trace of the original metre can
now be discerned. To our ears, the only distinctive
feature of Hebrew poetry, its parallelism, is just as
obvious in a translation as in the original ; for it is
a rhythm, not of sound, whether accent or quantity,
but of thought and sentiment. The leading thought
is expressed usually in couplets, sometimes in trip
lets, of which the first member really contains the
guiding idea, and the second, — or the second and
third, as the case may be, — simply repeats this
thought, or amplifies it, or balances it by reply or
contrast. Usually, the second meraber corresponds
to the earlier one not only in thought, but in the
form of expression, whereby the similarity or con
trast is, as it were, emphasized. The pendulum of
the clock seems to beat in periods of two or three
measures, returning after the completion of each to
the starting point for a new departure. This pecul
iarity of Hebrew poetry can be better explained
by an example than by analysis and description. I
gladly take for illustration a part of the magnificent
description, in the 18th Psalm, of the Lord God

TEE POETRY OF TEE BIBLE. 93
coming to succor the righteous in their distress, the
imagery being mainly taken from a thunderstorm.
I adopt the' language of the Common Version as
slightly modified by Dr. Noyes, in order to bring
out more distinctly the parallelism of which the
earlier translators were not observant.
" In my distress, I called upon the Lord,
And cried unto my God.
" He heard my voice out of his temple.
And my cry came before him, into his ears.
" Then the earth shook and trembled ;
The foundations of the hills rocked and were shaken,
Because his wrath was kindled.
" There went up a smoke out of his nostrils,
And fire out of his raouth devoured ;
Coals were kindled by it.
" He bowed the heavens also, and came down ;
And darkness was under his feet.
" He rode upon a cherub, and did fly ;
Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.
" He made darkness his covering,
His pavilion round about him was dark waters and thick
clouds of the skies.
"At the brightness before him his thick clouds passed away ;
Then came hailstones and coals of fire.

94 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
" The Lord also thundered from heaven.
And the Most High uttered his voice,
Amid hailstones and coals of fire.
" He sent forth his arrows and scattered them,
He shot out lightnings and discomfited them.
" Then the channels of the deep were seen,
And the foundations of the earth were laid bare,
" At thy rebuke, O Lord,
At the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.
" He stretched forth his hand from above,
And drew me out of deep waters.
" He delivered me from my strong enemy,
From my adversaries who were too powerful for me."
I know not anything in all Greek, Latin, or
English poetry, that matches the sublimity and
grandeur, the magnificent sweep, of this descrip
tion of the providence of God as manifested in the
phenomena of nature. It is Hebraistic to the core ;
Gentile poetry has nothing like it.
Thus far I have considered only what may be
called the external characteristics of Hebrew poetry ;
that is, its pervading lyrical form, its lack of any
proper metrical arrangement, and its parallelisms
in thought and sentiment. Its internal peculiari
ties, which are strongly marked, and by which it is

TEE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. 95
broadly distinguished from the poetry of any other
nation, are all clearly traceable, as it seeras to me,
to the nature of the subject of which it treats.
With a single exception, Hebrew poetry has but
one theme, which is a very broad and grand one ;
this is, the providence of God, or as otherwise ex
pressed, the dealings of God with raan. The excep
tion referred to is the Book of Canticles, or Solo
mon's Song as it is often called, which, as a mere
love poem, though a very beautiful one, seeras to
have no better claira than the idylls of Theocritus,
or the amatory verses of Catullus, to a place in the
Jewish Scriptures, except as it is in the Hebrew
language. Putting this book aside, therefore, all
the poetry of the Old Testament is devotional in
tone, and treats of the moral government of the
world. It thus has to speak of the duty and the
destiny of man as affected by the commands and
promises, by the character and attributes, of the
Almighty. This is at once the grandest and most
interesting theme which can be presented for human
contemplation. The unity and infinity, together
with the holiness, of God are topics which the
Hebrew poets are never weary of enforcing.
Hence their sustained loftiness of expression, their
grandeur of conception, the unequalled majesty
and force of their style. The truths which they
have to present are of no doubtful import, are no

96 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
matters of human speculation, but are absolute and
eternal ; they express the unchangeable purposes
of the infinite One, of Him who created and gov-
erneth all things. The ideas of eternity and in
finity, of absolute holiness, justice, and truth, are
the most awful and impressive that can be placed
before the human mind. They not only stimulate
the imagination, but produce the emotions of sub
limity and awe which no other theme can equally
generate. It is on this account that Hebrew poetry
stands alone in all literature. Except so far as ad
miration of it has induced in modern times attempts
to imitate it, and has thus created such poems as
Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost,
and Byron's Cain, there is not only nothing second
to it, but nothing like it in the whole recorded range
of human thought. These imitations are certainly
great efforts of human genius; but like most imita
tions, they are but distant and faint reflections,
copies in water, of a grand original. In them, mere
fancy is constantly usurping the functions of the
imagination. Hence the whole framework or ma
chinery of Dante's poem is fantastic and absurd ;
we cannot accept it, it produces no illusion, we only
pardon it for the sake of the poetry with which it
is surrounded. The plot and most of the incidents
either of Milton's or Byron's work are equally un
real and extravagant ; when stripped of their poet-

TEE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. 97
ical garb and presented naked to the thought, they
are seen to border closely on the grotesque.
These doctrines respecting the nature and at
tributes of the Deity, moreover, are not presented
merely as abstract truths, but in the concrete, as
constantly raanifested in the course of outward
events and in the conduct of human affairs. They
are presented as practical truths, affecting the heart
and the life, and shining out in all the phenomena
of the external universe. Hence, more than any
other poetry, that of the Hebrews lies near to
nature, paints its scenes, and reflects all its varied
aspects. The course of the stars is God's ordinance,
and every member of the vegetable and aniraal
kingdom testifies to his greatness and obeys his law.
He " alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth
upon the waves of the sea." He " binds the sweet
influences of the Pleiades and loosens the bands of
Orion." The God whora the Hebrews worshipped
is he " Who layeth the beams of his chamber in
the waters, who maketh the clouds his chariot, and
walketh on the wings of the wind." " He shut
up the sea with doors, and caused the dayspring to
know its place." " The voice of the Lord breaketh
the cedars, yea, it breaketh the cedars of Lebanon."
"He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which
run among the hills." " The young lions roar after
their prey, and seek their meat from God." He

98 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
clotheth the neck of the horse with thunder ; " he
causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb
for the service of man." " O Lord, how manifold
are thy works ! in wisdom hast thou made them
all : the earth is full of thy riches."
All of this is so peculiar and distinctive of the
manner of the Hebrew poets, that if I had not
mentioned the sources whence these extracts are
taken, any person would immediately have rec
ognized them as drawn from the Bible. All of
them are based upon those fundamental truths
which underlie the revelations recorded in the
Bible. The spirit of polytheism is entirely differ
ent ; that of pantheism and materialism points in
the opposite direction. You find little or nothing
in all Greek and Latin poetry of this sublimity of
conception, this grandeur of utterance, this close
sympathy with nature. To Homer and Virgil, the
outward universe does not reflect the character, or
move responsive to the wishes, of the dwellers on
Olympus. At most, they exercise only a fitful and
liraited dorainion over it. Indeed, if it did mirror
their character and attributes, it would be far less
good, less pure and bright, than it now appears ;
since the action of these deities is such, that if
brought before one of our police courts for licen
tious and immoral conduct, it would go hard with
all of them. The pantheistic theory, because ex-

TEE POETRY OF TEE BIBLE. 99
clusively metaphysical, is vague and dreamy ; it
does not come near to life, or touch individual
events, but affects one with a painful sense of the
unreality of all things. Hence it is wholly unsuited
to the purposes of poetry, which requires the par
ticular and the concrete. Materialism is still more
destructive of the essence of poetry, as it is gross
and mechanical. It offers us a wooden universe, in
which there is neither mind nor spirit, but brute
force and blind necessity govern all things. Lucre
tius announced the whole philosophy of materialism
nearly two thousand years ago.
" The Gods, the Gods !
If all be atoms, how then should the Gods,
Being atomic, not be dissoluble,
Not follow the great law ? "
— Tennyson's Lucretius.
The philosophy of the Hebrews, on the contrary,
is eminently spiritual and human. Through its
pure and noble raorality, it touches the feelings,
wakens the affections, and guides the life. Even
the Decalogue, broad, just, and unerring though it
be in defining tlie limits of right and wrong, is
but a partial expression of the moral law. As a
judicial system, aiming to define and establish the
relations between the human and divine, and be
tween man and man, it lays down only the duties
of perfect and universal obligation, leaving the

100 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
guidance of the humane affections for another por
tion of the code. Hence it furnishes only a foun
dation for ethics ; it expresses the law of justice,
but not as yet the law of love. It is therefore sup
plemented even in the Mosaic code by injunctions
which touch more directly the heart and the life,
since they are an anticipation of the spirit of Chris
tian morality. In the same portion of the Book
of Exodus which contains the Ten Commandments,
we find also these precepts : (xxii. 21-24 ; xxiii.
4—8.) " Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor
oppress him ; for ye were strangers in the land of
Egypt. Ye shall not afflict any widow or father
less child. If thou afflict them in any wise, and
they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their
cry, and my wrath shall wax hot, . . . and your
wives shall be widows, and your children father
less." And in the same spirit is the terrible im
precation of the Psalmist upon the wicked man : —
"Let there be none to extend mercy upon him,
neither let there be any to favor his fatherless
children ; Because that he remembered not to show
mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man,
that he might even slay the broken in heart." In
the directions for the Sabbatical year, it is written,
"But the seventh year, thou shalt let the land
rest and lie still ; that the poor of thy people may
eat; and what they leave, the beasts of the field

TEE POETRY OF TEE BIBLE. 101
shall eat." And again : " If thou meet thine ene
my's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely
bring it back to him again. Thou shalt not wrest
the judgment of thy poor in his cause. Keep thee
far from a false matter ; and the innocent and
righteous slay thou not; for I will not justify the
wicked. And thou shalt take no gift ; for the gift
blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the
righteous." This pure and beautiful morality, this sympathy
with all living things, but especially with the weak,
the needy, and the unfortunate, is the source of
what is tender and pathetic in Hebrew poetry,
which is its second great characteristic, and one
which forms a chief feature of the Book of Psalms.
What is distinctive in it is that it aims to direct the
outward conduct only by correcting the spirit which
is within, by purifying the heart and cultivating all
the kindly affections. Hence it has nothing of the
formalism and stiffness of ethical theory, but finds
its natural expression, without effort or straining,
in kind words and deeds and the formation of a
beautiful character. It is the Christian virtue de
scribed by St. Paul in the single word rendered by
our translators as charity, though its meaning is not
limited to mere alms-giving, but properly stands
for universal love, so that it coincides with the ex
cellence which John is never weary of inculcating.

102 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
It is undoubtedly the element which Christianity
has added to the civilization of the world.
The earliest poetry found in the Bible consists of
the triumphal songs and fragments of song which
are interspersed in the Pentateuch and other an
cient books of the Old Testament. Such are the
exultant chant of Moses and Miriam after crossing
the Red Sea, the song of Deborah and Barak, the
songs of blessing uttered by Jacob and Moses when
on their death-beds, the lamentation of David over
Saul and Jonathan, and the fragments which con
stitute the story of creation and the fall, together
with the legend of Balaam and Balak. These are
specially interesting not only on account of their
intrinsic merits, their marvellous grandeur, bold
ness, and imaginative force, but because they con
tain the materials of history, because they represent,
so to speak, the process of history in the -making.
Traditions respecting the earlier life of a nation are
naturally embodied in popular ballads and songs,
such as those from which Livy is supposed to have
extracted his legendary story of ancient Rome.
These have perished, and Macaulay has tried to re
produce them in his spirited Lays. English and
Scotch ballads of a far later day answer a similar
purpose. Such ballads are the best material for
the dawn of history, as they cannot be counter
feited. Handed down from father to son by fre-

TEE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. 103
quent repetition, they have the true ring of genu
ineness ; they are faithful and lively pictures of a
people's infant life. They reproduce in vivid color
ing the men and the events of the olden time.
Such are the poetical fragments which we find in
the Pentateuch and the Book of Judges. I cannot
doubt the substantial verity of the great events of
which these noble songs are a contemporaneous and
graphic, though iraperfect, record. Doubtless there
are poetical exaggerations and embellishments in
them; this follows from the very nature of ancient
ballad poetry. (So in Chevy Chase.) Correct sta
tistics, plain and exact narratives of facts, do not
belong to hoar antiquity. The record is magnified
by national pride ; it is gilded by the warm hues of
the imagination. Allowances must be made in in
terpreting it; but substantial truth lies beneath.
In studying the earlier history of Greece and Rome,
we make such deductions and admissions as a mat
ter of course, without giving up our faith in tho
general accuracy of the accounts. No one doubts
that the Greeks had a naval victory at Salamis, and
triumphed against great odds at Platsea ; but I sup
pose no scholar believes Herodotus when he states
that the armament which Xerxes led into Greece
consisted of more than two millions of fighting men.
The number of Persians who were defeated by a
handful of Greeks at Marathon is variously said by

104 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
different historians to have been from 110,000 to
over half a million ; but we do not therefore deny
that a great battle was then and there fought. Go
ing back to a period nearly a thousand years before
Marathon and Plataea, one may reasonably refuse
to believe that the Hebrews whom Moses led out
of Egypt in one day and night numbered about
600,000 men, besides women and children ; or that
this vast multitude, with their flocks and herds,
"even very much cattle," subsisted for forty years
in the wilderness. But we do not thereby abate
our faith in the general correctness of the story of
the Exodus as told in the Pentateuch, or in the mi
raculous nature of the revelation at Sinai. Jewish
institutions, like the feasts of the Passover and the
Tabernacles, which have been handed down by
constant tradition through the lapse of over 3,000
years, our Christian institution of the Lord's Supper
being in some sort a continuation of the former of
them, supply collateral and irrefutable proof that
the story is authentic ; belief in it permeates all
Hebrew literature and Hebrew life. And the grand
triumphal song of Moses and Miriara, the oldest
still extant poetry that vras ever sung, confirms the
legend and brings the main incident in it vividly
before us. Such an inspired creation cannot have
been the forgery of a later age. In its bold and
lofty imagery, its picturesque phrases, its lyric rep-

TEE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. lOo
etitions, we have the genuine starap of remote
antiquity. The tramp of the Egyptian cavalry, the
rush of Pharaoh's chariots of war, and the roar of
mighty waters which suddenly overwhelmed them,
become almost audible as we listen to the song.
Not to the fugitives' own strategy or prowess, but
to the might of Jehovah, of the God of Sabaoth, is
the victory ascribed.
" Sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously ;
the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea."
" Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath he cast into the
sea ; his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red
Sea." " The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, .
I will divide the spoil ; my lust shall be satisfied upon
them ; I will draw my sword, mine hand shall destroy
them. Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered
them ; they sank as lead in the mighty waters. Who
is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods ? Who is
like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing
wonders ? " " But the children of Israel went on dry
land in the midst of the sea."
In like manner, in the inspired song of Deborah
and Barak, perhaps one or two hundred years later,
we have the truth of history as to the leading inci
dents of the narrative, whatever may be the incor
rectness of the details.
" Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou
marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled.

106 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water.''
" The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of
Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo." " They
fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera. The river of Kishon swept them away,
that ancient river, the river Kishon." " Then were the
horsehoofs broken by means of the prancings, the pranc
ings of their mighty ones." " At her feet he bowed, he
fell, he lay down ; at her feet he bowed, he fell ; where
he bowed, there he fell down dead." " The mother of
Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the
lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming ? Why
tarry the wheels of his chariots ? Her wise ladies an
swered her, yea, she returned answer to herself. Have
they not sped ? have they not divided the prey ; to every
man a damsel or two ; to Sisera a prey of divers colors,
a prey of divers colors of needlework on both sides, meet
for the necks of them that take the spoil ? So let all
thine enemies perish, O Lord ; but let them that love
him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might. And
the laud had rest forty years."
A corresponding fragment of song, celebrating
the victory of Joshua over the Amorites, has been
strangely misunderstood by the literal interpreters,
as if it were a prose narrative of what actually took
place. Grandly the old Hebrew poet sings, —
" Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon,
And thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
And the sun stood still,

TEE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. 107
And the moon stayed.
Till the people had avenged themselves on their enemies."
" Is not this written," it is added, " in the book of
Jasher ? " Who does not recognize this as poetry,
even if it had not been quoted from a book of
poems ? In the common language of the Hebrews,
such expressions were neither bold nor unusual. If
similar passages were thus literally construed, the
result would be curious ; as when it is said that
" the hills melted like wax at the presence of the
Lord." The meaning plainly is, that the sun and
moon witnessed the triumph of Joshua, and while
they still held their course in the heavens during
one day, the victory was completed.
But the Bible has other and more continuous
poetry than these ancient fragments of legendary
song. About one half of the Old Testament is
pure lyric poetry, mostly devotional and didactic in
purport, all of it profoundly serious and majestic in
tone. There is the noble collection of the Psalms,
150 in number, a large portion of which are un
questionably either by David or belonging to
David's age, and so at least as old as the Iliad and
the Odyssey, while the later ones were certainly
written before Herodotus was born. There is the
Book of Proverbs, the earlier chapters of which are
assigned by the best critics either to King Solomon
or Solomon's age, while the others are not much

108 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.
later ; and the unique Book of Job, the period of
which is uncertain, though Renan conjectures that
it belongs to the seventh or eighth century B. C.
My own belief is, that with the exception of the
prologue and the epilogue, which are in prose, and
which were probably added or altered at a later
day, the body of the poem belongs to a considerably
earlier age ; it may be older than the larger portion
of the Pentateuch. Then come Isaiah and the other
Prophets, ranging from about 800 B. c. to a period
somewhat later than the Captivity, perhaps to the
fourth century B. c. We have a full Greek transla
tion of them and of the other boojis of the Old
Testament in the Septuagint, as it is called, exe
cuted in the third century before the Christian
era. Of course, we need not here regard Sanscrit
literature, that is, the Vedas or sacred books of the
Hindoos, as comparatively little is known about
them, and the full consideration of them belongs
only to a very few Sanscrit scholars. They are
chiefly interesting in their philological aspect;
either as poetry or history they can hardly be com
pared with Hebrew literature. I believe the ear
liest of the Vedas are now held by scholars to be
two or three centuries later in origin than the sup
posed date of the Pentateuch.
Concerning this great body of Hebrew poems,

THE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. 109
my point is, that with respect to their antiquity, to
the. araount of history which is wrapped up in thera,
many of the Psalms and all of the Prophets being
semi-historical, and to their intrinsic poetical merits,
they are at least as interesting and important to
scholars, even in their exclusively secular aspect,
as the masterpieces of Greek literature. A system
of liberal education cannot be regarded as com
plete without much study of them. The Psalras
differ from the earlier fragments of Hebrew song
especially in the amazing variety and fertility of
the subjects considered in them, and in the compre
hensiveness of their range. They pass through
every mode of the lyre, and strike every chord of
the human heart. There is hardly any devout senti
ment or tender affection of which man's nature is
capable to which they do not give utterance. There
is no lofty topic of contemplation in the outward
universe, or in the relations of God with man, which
they do not set forth and elevate with new grandeur
and impressiveness. Some of them, such as the
19th, the 90th, the 104th, and the 139th, are so
majestic and sublime that they can hardly be read
from beginning to end without awe and tears. Un
happily, as Dr. Noyes remarks, the hearing of most
persons has become so accustomed to them at an
early period of life, before the mind could compre
hend their meaning or feel their beauty, that no

110 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
little effort is needed in later years to waken the
soul afresh to the full effect which they might pro
duce. What a sensation would they create, if they
could now be brought before the world for the first
tirae! In the sweetness, tenderness, and trustful spirit
of the earlier Psalras, in their pastoral character
reflecting the scenes and incidents of nomadic life,
we discern the special element which was added to
Hebrew poetry by the royal bard, the shepherd-
king, who rescued Israel so often from her enemies,
and ruled her so long and through so many vicissi
tudes. Who but David can be the singer when we
hear the chant, " The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall
not want. He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures ; he leadeth me beside the still waters."
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art
with me ; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."
In nearly the first incident which is reported of
David's life, we find foreshadowed the influence
which his songs were to exert over restless con
sciences and troubled hearts through all future time.
" And it came to pass when the evil spirit from
God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and
played with his hand ; so Saul was refreshed, and
the evil spirit departed from him." Again, in the
pathetic earnestness of other royal Psalms, in their

TEE POETRY OF TEE BIBLE. Ill
penitent confessions and cries for pity, we see mir
rored the other and darker features of David's
strangely chequered character and life. His was
by no means a faultless career ; portions of it were
deeply stained with guilt. But there was a noble,
even a kingly spirit in him ; his is the most deeply
interesting figure in the whole Jewish record.
Study the incidents in his earlier career, when
Jonathan was befriending him, but Saul was trying
to hunt him out like a wild beast in the wilderness,
and you recognize the true chivalrous element in
his character ; he has the noble heart of a Christian
knight-errant. And Saul, too ; what a grand figure
he is in the dimly lighted hall of early Hebrew
history, and what tragic interest in the mournful
narrative of his wasted life !
Two other of the poetical Books of the Old Tes
tament are distinguished by a pervading tone of
melancholy ; they are Job and Ecclesiastes. The
burden of the former is, that " although affliction
cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble
spring out of the ground, yet man is born unto
trouble, as the sparks fly upward;" while "the
Preacher " declares that " in much wisdom is much
grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth
sorrow." But there is nothing defiant or denuncia
tory in the tone of either ; the expression is of sad
ness, not of bitterness of soul. The plaint is that

112 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
of the poet, not of the pessimist. It is the tendency
to melancholy which usually belongs to the poetical
temperament, and seems a natural accompaniment
of the highest genius. It springs from a lively
imagination, and from cultivating aspirations which
are so lofty that nothing earthly corresponds to
them. As manifested by these old Hebrew poets,
it would seem as if they were groping anxiously
after the doctrine of a future life, and were not able
to find it. Neither of them shows the least tendency
to scepticism or unbelief; both maintain an un
broken faith throughout their troubles. The spirit
expressed is always that of submission and trust.
" What ! shall we receive good at the hand of God,
and shall we not receive evil?" And Ecclesiastes
declares the conclusion of the. whole matter to be,
" Fear God, and keep his commandments ; for this
is the whole duty of man."
The Book of Job is further remarkable because
it has no connection with the customs or institutions
of the Jews, or with the great events of their na
tional history. It is rather a Semitic or Arab, than
a Jewish, poem ; only the language, and the grand
underlying truths of the patriarchal and Mosaic
revelations, are Hebrew. Even the scene is laid in
the land of Uz or Idumsea, a part of Arabia ; and
there are no allusions to Lebanon or Carmel, or to
anything which is distinctive of the climate or

TEE POETRY OF THE BIBLE. 113
geography of Judea. On this account alone, in the
absence of any positive indications of the date of
its composition, the body of the Book seems to me
to belong to patriarclia-l times, and probably to be
the most ancient portion of Hebrew literature. The
characters and the manners described remind us
rather of Abraham and Lot, than of Moses, or
Samuel, or Solomon. It raay well be doubted
whether a Hebrew poet of a later age could have
thus entirely put aside the history and the institu
tions of his race, could have so forgotten his pride
at being one of God's chosen people, and have
transported himself in imagination to the time,
the place, and the life of the patriarchs.
However this may be, it is certain that the in
cidents, the characters, and the speeches which are
described or reported are entirely the work of the
imagination, and are in no sense real or historical.
The Book of Job is a grand philosophical poem, not
a record of actual occurrences. The subject con
sidered is the ways of Providence in dealing with
man and distributing good and evil in this world.
An eminently righteous man, highly respected as
having always maintained his integrity and prac
tised the works of love, is represented as suddenly
overwhelmed with the most cruel calamities alike
in his property, his family, and his person. He
breaks out, as is natural, into passionate lamenta-

114 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
tions at his hard fate, and declares that it is en
tirely undeserved. But his three friends, who had
come to condole with him, in fact aggravate his
sufferings and exasperate him by maintaining un
seasonably that God is just, and that Job must
have been a great sinner, or such evils could not
have come upon him. Long discussions ensue, not
in the way of conversation, but of earnest and pro
tracted debate. The three friends are hard and
Pharisaical in their discourse, and the sufferer makes
head as best he raay against them, repelling their
unjust accusation, but not blaspheming or directly
impeaching the wisdom and justice of God. At
last, Jehovah himself answers Job out of the whirl
wind, and sets forth in the most impressive and
sublime manner his own majesty and omnipotence,
teaching thereby the duty of submission and un
limited trust in the infinite One. Job humbles
himself accordingly, and in the end is fully recom
pensed, while the three friends are sharply censured
and dismissed.
Such is the slight framework upon which the
author has built up the grandest philosophical poem
in the literature of the world. In boldness of im
agery and descriptive power, in fervid eloquence
and sublimity of thought, there is nothing equal to
it in the whole range of ancient and modern poetry.
In our Common Version of it we clearly recognize

THE POETRY OF TEE BIBLE. 115
those qualities of style by which the language of
the original, in the opinion of a great Oriental
scholar, is distinguished. " The language of the
Book of Job," says M. Renan, "is at once the most
Urapid, condensed, and classical Hebrew. We find
in it all the qualities of the antique style, such as
conciseness, frequent obscurity and abruptness of
expression, as if the words were struck out by blows
of a hammer, together with a breadth of phrase
which seems always to leave some hidden meaning
to be discerned, and a delightful ring like that of
hard and pure metal." Let me recommend to
you Renan's own masterly version of Job into the
French tongue, and the learned and eloquent intro
duction to the study of the poem by which it is
preceded.

CHAPTER VL
THE HISTORY CONTAINED IN THE BIBLE.  THE CHAR
ACTER AND THE INSTITUTIONS OP MOSES.
The whole history of the Jews, so far as it is
contained in the Old Testament, may properly be
said to be anterior even to the beginning of secular
history. The Book of Ezra, the latest portion of
it, does not bring down the narrative of events later
than 450 B. c, which is probably about the time
when Herodotus, who is rightly called the father
of profane history, as he is the earliest professed
historian whose work has come down to us entire,
began to write ; and the narrative is carried back
by Herodotus only about one hundred years, to
546 B. c, when Cyrus conquered the kingdom of
Croesus. Of course, I put aside any consideration
of the mere fragraents which the industry of the
learned, chiefiy within the present century, has col
lected pertaining to the early history of India, Egypt,
and Assyria ; these are not so much history as broken
and imperfect data which at some future time, per
haps under the light thrown upon them by the
Hebrew records, raay be pieced together into some-

THE HISTORY CONTAINED IN TEE BIBLE. 117
thing like a connected narrative. Of the history
of the world for at least one thousand years, begin
ning about 1600 B. c, the only continuous portion
having any claim to genuineness and authenticity
is to be found in the Books of the Old Testament.
In the countless discussions to which what is
called the higher historical criticism of the Hebrew
Scriptures has given rise, I do not think this fact
has been sufficiently considered or allowed its due
weight. These records, purporting in great part to
have been made almost contemporaneously with
the events narrated in thera, have been scrutinized
as if they had been written, under the full light of
modern civilization, by scholars practised in literary
art and skilled in weighing testimony, estimating
numbers, and discerning the truth amid contradic
tory reports. But it was far otherwise. The Jew
ish historical Books are the rude compositions, or
frequently the hasty compilations, of unlearned
men, who were fond of story-telling, and remarka
ble for their clannish spirit, their pride of race, and
the fervor of their religious faith. They are emi
nently inartistic. We must not expect to find in
them either continuous narrative or precision of
statement. Their contents are often loosely heaped
together, consisting of national ballads or songs,
genealogical lists, ritualistic injunctions, and frag
mentary legends or vivid contemporaneous accounts

118 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
of their heroes and kings. A flood of light is
thrown upon a few passages flattering to their na
tional pride or important for their religious belief ;
but these are separated from each other by broad
gaps in which darkness rdigns. The writers evi
dently purpose to narrate or compile only what was
specially interesting to their countrymen, or what
reflected light upon their institutions and confirmed
their faith. But these very faults of raethod, this
lack of order, consecutiveness, and precision, instead
of impeaching the correctness of the narrative, are
proofs of its antiquity, and vouchers for the fidelity
and truthfulness of its authors. They are precisely
what we ought to expect in genuine memorials
handed down to us from the early morning in the
history of the world.
The ponderous erudition and perverse ingenuity
of professorial German critics have invented any
number of theories respecting the genuineness, and
the particular periods of composition, of the differ
ent fragmentary materials which are rudely patched
together in the historical Books of the Old Testa
ment. No two of these hypotheses resemble each
other ; they are so unlike that any one may find in
the heap a theory to his mind ; especially as each
of the authors of them, not content with differing
widely from the others, is usually much at variance
with himself during the intervals of publication of

THE HISTORY CONTAINED IN THE BIBLE. 119
his book, often painfully demolishing in the second
edition the very hypothesis which he had elabo
rately set forth and defended in the former issue.
The better class of them give most attention to
summing up the labors of their predecessors, so as
to make it appear, for instance, that the genuineness
and early date of a certain passage are stoutly de
nied by six learned critics, and quite as stoutly
asserted perhaps by eight others equally erudite,
the compiler of these statistics seldom failing to
slip in araong them a coraproraise theory of his
own. It does not seem to me that much wisdom is
to be learned from these critical speculations, and
I should not even have alluded to them here but for
one consideration, which is, that most of the ques
tions mooted in them, and of the arguments offered
on the one side or the other, lie, so to speak, on the
very surface of the text, and can be studied by you
just as well in your English Bible as under the guid
ance of a learned German professor, be he even a De
Wette or an Ewald. If you seek English help, let
me recommend to you Dr. John Quarry's two Dis
sertations on Genesis and its Authorship, our own
Dr. Stebbins's " Study of the Pentateuch," and sev
eral of Dean Stanley's later publications. You will
find these works distinguished at any rate for sturdy
English common sense and soundness of judgment,
qualities which are not conspicuous in the writings

120 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
of German critics, whose erudition appears to have
been heaped up by the shovel rather than the pen.
The Book of Genesis appears on the face of it to
be a collection of poems, legends, and genealogies,
which had been handed down by oral tradition from
an indefinite antiquity, and which it is tolerably
certain were first selected, put together, and reduced
to writing in the Mosaic age, probably under the
direction of Moses himself, aided by his elder
brother, Aaron, and his sons. They embody the
early national faith of the Semitic race in those doc
trines of spiritual monotheism and a Divine Provi
dence as manifested in the governrii%'it of men on
earth, which 1 have already designatevJe> the patri
archal revelation. I see no way of^j^j,rP'^'^''^"g ^oi^
the origin of so pure doctrine in so j ^^^H age ex
cept through a divine instinct lod^d in the hearts
and consciences of men, just as language and the
use of fire were first mad' known to them through
a corresponding r^velatioi to their intellects. The
success of scholiTT'! ^'t> -cmr own day in deciphering
Egyptian papy»ipt-,,id cuneiform inscriptions has
proved, beyond all doubt, that the traditions con
tained in the i^arlier chapters of Genesis respecting
the first state of man upon the earth and the Del
uge were originally common to the whole Semitic
race. Only with the story of Abraham does the
distinctively Hebraistic portion of the record begin.

TEE HISTORY CONTAINED IN THE BIBLE. 121
In the Book of Exodus we find the earliest con
temporaneous record of the history of the Jews as a
distinct people and the development in the desert of
their peculiar theocratic institutions. Here, again,
there is presented to us a somewhat loose aggregate
of all sorts of historical material put together with
out any attempt at systematic arrangement, the
transitions being abrupt, and the matter left un
finished at the close of one chapter being suddenly
resumed several chapters farther on. The Book
opens with a tolerably eoraplete narrative of the
means by which the assent of Pharaoh to the de
parture of the Israelites was at last obtained, and
of the consequent exodus of the whole people under
the guidance of Moses and Aaron, of their passage
through the Red Sea, together with the destruction
of the Egyptian pursuing army them, and of other
incidents in their journey until they arrived at the
foot of Mt. Sinai. This is followed by a confused
and fragmentary record of the various portions of
the Mosaic legislation, as they were successively
communicated to the people with a claim of divine
inspiration and authority ; and by an account of
the conduct of the people meanwhile, during their
long stay at Sinai, preparing for their expected entry
upon the promised land. The statutes are assumed
throughout to be of divine origin ; they are an
nounced as revelations of the will and purpose of

122 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
Jehovah, under the prefatory formula, " Thus saith
the Lord," or "the Lord spake unto Moses, say
ing." Some of thera, especially those relating to
institutions and to religious rites and cereraonies,
are given with great minuteness of detail ; while
others are recorded only in general and vague direc
tions. The chief personage in the Book, and in the re
maining portions of the Pentateuch, around whom
the interest centres, is the commaoding figure of
Moses, who is, humanly speaking, the great deliv
erer, leader, and legislator of the Hebrew people.
The work accomplished by him has no parallel in
history. No other legislator, no prophet, priest, or
king, ever wrought to such purpose, or with so last
ing efficiency, as he did. No other one's work ever
lived after him as his has done. The institutions
and the laws of Cyrus the Elder, Solon, Lycurgus,
Numa, Pythagoras, and a host of others, where are
they? As fleeting contributions to the world's his
tory as drops of fresh and pure rain falling upon
the bosom of the great ocean, they have been swal
lowed up in it and lost, without having in the
slightest perceptible degree lessened its bitterness.
Moses lived nearly a thousand years earlier thari
the oldest of them, among an ignorant and despised
people, fugitives then and fugitives now upon the
face of the earth; and his work endured and stiU

CHARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 123
endures, and we, the civilized Christian nations of
the earth, are still living in the light of it, uphold
ing some of his institutions and professing at any
rate to conform our lives to some of his laws. For
if they were not the institutions and the laws of
God, which I am not permitted now to assume,
having to look only at their secular aspect, they
were at any rate, if historical evidence can estab
lish anything, first announced and made obligatory
by Moses in the desert from the top of Sinai. Our
Christian Sunday set apart as a day of rest conse
crated unto the Lord, and still observed, as it al
ways has been, more or less perfectly, throughout
Christendom, is only the Jewish Sabbath so little
modified as to be often mistaken for it ; and that
was first instituted by Moses in the wilderness, no
trace of it as a religious observance existing before
his day. The Decalogue, first announced by him as
the Law of God, is still recognized as such by all
civilized nations, is still taught to our children, is still
inscribed in thousands of churches, so as to be con
stantly before the eyes of the worshipper in a forra
symbolizing the two tables of stone on which it was
first written when Moses brought it down from the
Mount. What other work of raan, if this indeed
be man's work, has been as lasting and efficient as
this? But it is in its special influence on the Hebrew

124 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
race, for whom, as God's chosen people, it was pri
marily and exclusively designed, that the legislation
of Moses has most clearly shown its wisdom and its
lasting power. He formed their national charac
ter; he stamped upon them those peculiarities of
faith and practice by which they have been distin
guished from his day to ours. The Jews as we now
behold them,' scattered broadcast among the nations,
but still holding themselves apart from, their sur
roundings, refusing to mingle with the Gentiles
among whom they have been compelled to make
their temporary home, and still professing the faith
of Abraham and obedience to "the Book of the
Law," — the Jews as they are now, I say, and as
they always have been, bear testimony to the wis
dom and the thoroughness with which their great
legislator did his work. He formed thera into a
church and a state unlike anything else which then
existed on the face of the earth ; he determined the
main features of their polity for all coming time.
The Jews are to this day what Moses made them.
For the mere student of political science, of the
origin of government, of the theory of legislation,
and of the determining causes of national character,
I know of no study more instructive and fruitful
than that of the history, the institutions, and the
laws of the Hebrew people.
Consider for a moment how far Moses was fitted

CHARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 125
for his great undertaking by his character, his train
ing, and his previous life. Adopted as an infant
foundling by Pharaoh's daughter, he was educated
in the royal household, and became learned in all
the wisdom of the Egyptians. Notwithstanding
his exceptional position, he seems to have been in
tensely patriotic, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, not
only in his attachment to the faith of Abraham,
but in hi? sympathies with his unhappy country
men, then enslaved under cruel taskmasters, and in
a more feeble, ignorant, and debased condition than
are now the Fellaheen in Egypt. His first recorded
act, after attaining manhood, was killing an Egyp
tian whora he saw maltreating a Hebrew. To es
cape punishment for this deed, he was compelled
to go into long exile, where he became inured to
a hardy nomadic life, tending in the desert the
flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law, a priest of Mid
ian. His wanderings certainly extended to Mount
Horeb, and probably even to the borders of Canaan.
The knowledge of the wilderness thus acquired
made him subsequently an excellent local guide to
the Israelites, knowing where water and pasture
could be had, and what might serve even for the
food of man in the desert. While thus employed
at Horeb, there came to him what he deemed his
first revelation, the word of God to his strong faith
and patriotic soul, saying, " I have surely seen the

126 A STUDY OF THE ENGLISE BIBLE.
affliction of my people which are in Egypt," how
they sigh by reason of their bondage. " Come now
therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that
thou mayest bring forth my people, the children of
Israel, out of Egypt," and lead them into a good
land, the land of their forefathers, Canaan, a land
flowing with milk and honey. He had many doubts
and hesitations about obeying what he naturally
believed to be a divine command ; for the undertak
ing seemed a desperate one, on account both of the
feebleness of the Israelites and the natural unwill
ingness of Pharaoh to set free so large a body of
his slaves. These fears and misgivings are faith
fully recorded, and thus seem to vouch for the gen
uineness of the narrative, and that it was in fact
written by Moses himself, since no other person
could have known what was then his state of mind,
or would have chronicled what seemed discredita
ble to the leader of so great an enterprise ; but he
finally conquered his timidity and reluctance, and
set forth on the noble work, in which, through a
thousand perils and difficulties, by the blessing of
God, he finally succeeded. The exodus was accom
plished, and the people conducted in safety through
the Red Sea and the desert till they reached the
foot of Sinai.
Here the second revelation, still more imposing
and circumstantial than the former one, came unto

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 127
Moses. Looking at the record of it in its merely
secular aspect, to which our present view is limited,
I find no difficulty in understanding its general na
ture and purport. Moses had left for a while the
care and direction of the people to his elder brother,
Aaron, and his sons, and withdrawn alone, amid the
warfare of the elements, to the top of Sinai, for the
purposes of meditation upon the greatness of the
task which still lay before hira, and of silent com
munion with his God. The voice which there
seemed to come to his inward ear out of the light
nings and the tempest, as he had formerly heard it
from the burning bush at Horeb, seemed to say
unto him virtually, — " Take this feeble band of
fugitives as they are now, broken in spirit and cor
rupted in morals and religion by their long servitude
in Egypt, and by their continued familiarity with
the idolatries and wickedness of the people there,
and make them a great and strong nation, fearing
the Lord. Kindle in their hearts anew the faith of
their father Abraham ; wean them from the wor
ship of false gods, and from their attachment to the
fleshpots of Egypt ; and make them walk in the
ways of righteousness. Make them hardy in their
habits and valiant in war, so that they may be
fitted to drive out or exterminate the heathen be
fore them, and to take possession of the good land
which was promised to their fathers. Guard them

128 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
especially from contact or intermarriage with the
surrounding nations, so that they may be preserved
from the contagion of bad example. Isolate them
and keep thera pure, and my blessing shall attend
them." This is the command which that strong
and courageous soul seeraed to hear in the mount;
and we have now only to consider the wisdom of the
means which were proposed for its accomplishment.
On coming down from his first stay on the
mount, he had a striking and melancholy proof how
far the people had become corrupted and estranged
from the faith of their fathers through their long
sojourn in one place and their consequent familiar
ity with Egyptian life and the idolatrous forms of
Egyptian worship. They had induced even Aaron
to make for thera such an idol, that of a calf, as
they had often seen worshipped in Egypt, and had
bowed down before it in adoration as their deity.
This revolt was quickly and sternly suppressed ;
but it seems to have convinced Moses that the at
tempt to enter upon and possess the promised land,
driving out its pagan inhabitants before them, must
be still postponed for some forty years, till a new
generation of Israelites should have arisen, desert-
born and desert-trained, made hardy and valiant
by the habits of nomadic life, having no memo
ries of the blandishments and corruptions of life in
Egypt, but isolated and kept pure by the very

CHARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 129
nature of a life in the wilderness, and educated
there under the institutions and the laws which he
was to announce to them as the commands of Je
hovah. This surely was the idea, the forecast, of a
great statesman. He was in no hurry to finish the
great undertaking, and thus to secure for himself
a share of the triumph in the accomplished work.
With noble self-denial he told the people, that not
till after his death must they attempt to cross the
Jordan, and " little by little," as he assured them,
to win possession of Canaan. In fact, the conquest
of that country, even of Jerusalem which became
its capital city, was not fully accomplished till Da
vid's tirae, some four hundred years afterwards.
Moses knew full well that a new polity, new insti
tutions, new laws, and a revived spiritual religion
could not be made, as it were, to spring up at once
out of the earth, but must have time to grow up
slowly, and thus to become inrooted in the hearts
and habits of the people. Hence the persistency,
the abiding character, of the Mosaic legislation.
During those forty years in the wilderness, Moses
made the Jews what they were, what they have
been during these many centuries, and what they
are such as we behold them now ; — a peculiar peo
ple, isolated from all others in their habits and con
victions, still clinging to the faith of Abraham in
the unity of God and the divine government of the

130 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
world, and still hoping for a return to the promised
land. Our materials for forming a full and correct idea
of what the institutions of Moses were are confused
and incomplete, as might have been expected in
view of the fact that the account of them has come
down to us from so remote an antiquity, and of the
changes which the manuscript must have under
gone in the successive transcriptions of it during
the many centuries before the comparatively mod
ern idea of the sacredness of the text, and the great
importance of preserving it inviolate, had as yet
dawned upon the minds of the transcribers. Schol
ars tell us that none of the manuscripts of the He
brew text now extant are older than the eleventh
century of our era, and that all of these are marvel
lously consistent with each other, the various read
ings to be detected in thera being few and unira-
portant. But granting even what perhaps we have
no full right to assurae, that these manuscripts cor
rectly show what the text was as early as the be
ginning of our era, it is certain that it underwent
many and signal changes during fourteen centuries
before that date ; for on comparing it with two in
dependent standards, the Samaritan Pentateuch
and the Greek translation of the Septuagint, the
discrepancies found are numerous and some of them
of considerable significance. Some of the priestly

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 131
copyists evidently had their own ideas as to what
really was the word of the Lord as delivered unto
Moses; and hence they made interpolations and
other changes with much freedom. A translitera
tion must have taken place when the Chaldee or
square character was substituted for the earlier
Phoenician alphabet ; and this cause alone must
have induced many changes of the text through mis
taking one letter for another, especially when nu
merals were concerned. Similar errors were prob
ably committed when the vowel points were first
introduced into the manuscripts, the Hebrew hav
ing then already, and long before, passed out of use
as a living and spoken language. Hence minute
criticisms upon the details of the record, upon iso
lated statements in it found here and there in single
verses or fragments of a verse, are singularly mis
leading and out of place. These concern at the ut
most the state of preservation of the text through
the many casualties to which it was exposed while
coming down to us from so remote an age. They
do not at all affect the correctness of the narrative
taken as a whole, or the authenticity of the broad
features of that revelation which it purports to re
cord. It is only by looking away from the details of
the account to its general and leading characteris
tics, that we can gain any correct idea of the "Mo
saic legislation.

132 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
The system of government which Moses first set
up did not recognize either the elective or the he
reditary principle as its basis, though the latter
was partially admitted in determining the succes
sion to the priestly office. The system was the
ocratic throughout. The Lord was the only ruler ;
Jehovah alone was king. Moses claimed no rank or
title, demanded no observance, assumed no author
ity as for himself, but always appears only as the
mouthpiece through whom the God of their fathers
spake to the people. He was simply a prophet, not
a priest, not a ruler, not even a magistrate ; for
though he "judged the people," that is, settled dis
putes among the tribes, or between man and man,
he did so only as the organ and mouthpiece of the
power above that really dictated the decision. Al
ready, by the advice of Jethro, his father-in-law,
who came to meet him in the wilderness, he had
appointed subordinate judges, to aid him in thus
settling disputes among the people. He chose " out
of all the people able men, such as feared God, men
of truth, hating covetousness." These, as Jethro
said, were to "judge the people at all seasons."
" Every great matter they shall bring unto thee ;
but every small matter they shall judge." And
this distinctive function also was assigned to Moses
himself : — " Thou shalt teach them ordinances and
laws, and shalt show them the way wherein they

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 133
must walk, and the work that they must do."
The whole scheme of government, then, both the or
dinances and laws, and the selection of the men by
whom these were to be administered, emanated di
rectly from Jehovah speaking through the mouth
of Moses. In this way, too, the succession to the
leadership of the people, after the death of him who
was, humanly speaking, their great deliverer, guide,
legislator, and judge, was to be provided for ; — not
through election by the people ; not by hereditary
descent, so as to pass to the children of Moses;
but by the favor of the Lord attending all the en
terprises, and crowning with success all the under
takings, of the valiant and righteous raan, who, in
spired by Jehovah, should step forward to assume
the vacant place. This was the promise made unto
them by their great leader in his last speech to Is
rael preparatory to his own death. " The Lord thy
God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the
midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; unto
him ye shall hearken." And this promise was
kept; a succession of valiant and righteous men,
Joshua, Gideon, Jephthah, Samuel, did come for
ward, and sat in Moses' seat, and became judges of
Israel. This Hebrew polity, together with the ordinances
and laws to be observed by the people which accom
panied it, was evidently based upon the great under-

134 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISH BIBLE.
lying truth already adverted to, that God directly
and immediately governs the life that now is, over
ruling and disposing all events in it so as to justify
and confirm the law of righteousness. " This do
and thou shalt live" is the oft-repeated injunction.
" All these blessings shall come on thee and over
take thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of
the Lord thy God." "But if ye will not do so,
behold, ye have sinned against the Lord ; and be
sure your sin will find you out." Under this grand
sanction the Decalogue was proclaimed from Mt.
Sinai and engraved upon tables of stone ; and the
many supplementary injunctions to be merciful to
the poor and the stranger, to the widow and the
fatherless, and to do justice even to an enemy,
were added. What we are first concerned to notice
in these ordinances is this pure and beautiful moral
ity which they thus inculcate, so unlike what could
reasonably be expected in that remote age, amid
those desert surroundings, and addressed to a peo
ple just rescued from debasing servitude, while the
nations around them were still sunk in the vilest
corruption and wickedness. In his conception of
what constitutes holiness unto the Lord, Moses has
not been surpassed by any moralist or legislator of
ancient or modern times. His is still the law to
which every Christian man of culture and refine
ment assumes to conform his conduct and life, even

CHARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 135
at this late day. In this respect, all of us are, or
ought to be, disciples of Moses.
In marking out a broad scheme of polity and life
for his people, at once coraprehensive and rainute in
its details, Moses seeras to have attributed the chief
importance to his institution of the Sabbath, repeat
ing the injunction again and again in earnest and
solemn words, as if he would fain raake it more im
pressive and binding by repetition. Its nature and
the plan for its observance were simple enough.
Each seventh day was to be a period of absolute
rest both for man and beast, " holy unto the
Lord ; " — that is, observed from a religious motive,
or as a sacred duty. No special act or ceremony
was required to be then performed. Merely, " in
it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son,
nor thy daughter, thy man-servant nor thy maid
servant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is
within thy gates." This was inserted in the Deca
logue, and is the only positive institution so placed,
the nine other Commandments being moral and re
ligious injunctions of natural and universal obliga
tion. And the penalty by which this observance
was enforced was stern enough : " whosoever doeth
any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from
among his people ; " " he shall surely be put to
death." As already remarked, the institution then
and there enjoined has been adopted in its main

136 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
features by cultured and enlightened Christendom.
Imperfectly observed though it be, it has become a
badge and safeguard of modern civilization. With
out a fixed period of emancipation from the other
wise constantly recurring pressure of animal wants
and bodily toil, man gradually loses the capacity of
continuous reflection and a truly spiritual life. Un
der the hardening influence of habit, accustomed
only to low aims and purely mechanical pursuits, he
becomes degraded in the scale of being. He is no
longer capable of acting from a sense of duty or of
communing with himself, but sinks into a dreary
routine of sensual enjoyments and purely physical
exertions which would scarcely tax the energies of
a brute. The Mosaic institution of the Sabbath, or
a modification of it, gives him a period of enforced
leisure for pure thought, and thus opens a door for
honorable ambition and virtuous effort.
Three annual festivals, each of them covering a
period of seven or eight days, and having its own
peculiar rites and observances, together with the
Sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee, were added
by Moses to his institution of the Sabbath. The
idea was the same throughout, frequently to remind
the people through these recurrent holy-days or holi
days, that there was a service to be performed for
the wants of the spirit, as well as for those of the
body ; that over and above their secular cares and

CHARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 137
the labor required to satisfy their raerely animal
needs, they owed a duty to the government under
which they lived, a duty of allegiance to the God
of their fathers who had rescued them from servi
tude, fed them in the desert, and brought them to
the borders of the promised land. Church and
state being blended into one in their theocracy, pa
triotism was identified with religious obligation, so
that the observance of these festivals corresponded
to the military service and other duties imposed by
modern communities on all their citizens. Two of
these annual feasts, the Passover and the Feast of
Tabernacles, were strictly commemorative in char
acter, and the special rites and acts with which
they were celebrated served to perpetuate the peo
ple's memory of the great events in their early na
tional history. To us in these modern days they
are interesting, as the traditional observance of
them, coming down from so remote an antiquity,
is a complete voucher for the authenticity of the
written narrative of those events.
We are thus brought to the general question, the
last one which I shall have to consider ; namely, of
what use is this broad and complex system of ex
ternal religious acts, that is, of rites and ceremonies,
which was constituted by the Levitical law, this
body of ritualism more comprehensive and minute
than is found in any other religion under the sun ?

138 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
Since God is a spirit, and those who worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth, why en
join any pious observance beyond that of the silent
internal communion of the soul with itself and with
its Maker, and that of the virtuous life to which
such pious meditation points, and which, if continu
ous or sufficiently frequent, it would surely pro
duce ? Of what real use or significance in pure re
ligion is an external rite, a mere ceremony ? In
all frankness I answer, that if men were angels or
pure disembodied spirits, it would be of no use
whatever ; and therefore, in the future life, in the
spiritual state of being which awaits us beyond the
grave, I don't believe there will be any fixed obser
vances, for we shall not need them. But while on
this earth, man is of the earth, earthy. The con
stantly recurring wants of the body, the necessity
of providing for its material support, make us de
pendent upon the senses, and upon the relations of
the senses to external material things. Even the
imagination is only a duplication of the sense, since
we can imagine only what is sensible, particular,
and concrete. In short, man is a compound, a dual
being; on the one side, an animal, formed from
the dust of the ground, and subject to all the limi
tations and defects, all the passions and appetites,
of an animal ; on the other side, he is a spirit, cre
ated, not formed, when his Maker breathed into his

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 139
nostrils the breath of life, so that he " became a liv
ing soul." Hence the necessity imposed upon us of
leading a dual life ; if either side of human nature
is exclusively developed and fostered, the other is
famished and dies out, and one becomes at best but
half a man. If enslaved altogether to flesh and
sense, he is a mere brute ; if he tries to refine and
sublimate his life into pure spirit, he becomes un
fitted for the duties of this world, and might as well
pass out of it altogether. A monk shut up all the
time in his cell, a Simeon Stylites wearying out ex
istence on the top of a column, though incessantly
occupied with pious meditations, are useless and
worthless beings.
It is no paradox, then, to affirm that just in pro
portion as Moses taught his people a purely spiritual
religion, and strictly forbade " any similitude," any
form of idolatry, in the same proportion he saw it
was necessary to fence round this revived faith with
ceremonies and external forms, or it would speedily
die out, and Israel would lapse again into the wor
ship of a golden calf. The polytheism of Egypt,
of Greece and Rome, surrounded man with visible
and tangible objects of worship, with images and
statues, with temples, altars, sacrifices, and victims.
Gods were placed everywhere, in every fountain,
grove, and stream, in each of the heavenly bodies,
and in each individual tree of an oak forest. The

140 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
very air was thick with deities. The faith of Moses
swept away this whole complex apparatus as gross,
heathenish, and idolatrous. But if he had stopped
there, leaving only the bodiless worship of one God
as pure spirit, leaving nothing for sense and imagi
nation to feed upon, he would have reduced religion
to an abstract idea ; and this, with the rude and un
lettered people whora he had led into the wilder
ness, would not, humanly speaking, have survived
the second generation. He showed the wisdom of
a statesman, if not the inspiration of a saint, by
building up the elaborate and imposing scheme of
Hebrew ritualism, which was not idolatrous, be
cause each rite and cereraony was expressly held to
be merely commemorative or symbolical. Nothing
outward was worshipped, but the inward meaning
of each observance was the spiritual recognition and
adoration of the one true God.
The wisdom of the Mosaic . institution has been
proved and illustrated in these modern times by the
varying fortunes of the several churches and de
nominations which have been developed out of the
great Reform movement of the sixteenth century.
The early Reformers, in their eagerness to depart as
far as possible from Rome, made a great mistake in
their excessive iconoclasm. The Puritans threw
down not only the images of the saints, but every
cross and crucifix ; they dispersed the choirs, broke

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 141
the painted windows, took down the two tables of
the Law, upset the font, put a pine table in place
of the altar, and reduced the public worship of God
to extemporaneous prayer, the rudest psalm sing
ing, and a sermon of fearful length and aridity.
They did their best to strip religion bare of all
external apparel, and reduce it to pure thought, to
an abstract idea. They proscribed the observance
even of the two great festivals of the Church,
Christmas and Easter, substituting Thanksgiving
for the one and Fast-day for the other, — two insti
tutions which, as they commemorate nothing and
symbolize nothing save two religious states of mind,
gratitude and penitence, have in themselves no root
of permanence, but are conventional and temporary.
One of them is practically dead already, and the
other is moribund. The inevitable result followed,
weariness and indifference creeping in when men
found that the only public worship of God con
sisted in going to meeting on Sunday, and listening
to a sermon which too frequently degenerated into
a sensational lyceum lecture. The state of mind
thus induced is set forth with much liveliness by
Wordsworth in his half-heathenish sonnet, wherein
he exclaims, —
"It moves us not. — Great God ! I 'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

142 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
But within our own day, a reaction from this ex
cessive iconoclasm has been produced, and the tide
now sets strongly towards those "fair humanities
of old religion " which have always constituted the
strength of the Mother Church. In the Anglican
church we have witnessed a convulsive outburst of
Ritualism, which seems to out-Herod Herod by aim
ing not merely to equal, but to surpass, Romanism
in the gorgeous display of external forms and ordi
nances. And in denominations of Puritan, and
even of Unitarian, parentage, a corresponding move
ment is going on. Elaborate choral services and
responsive readings are introduced ; the visible sign
of the cross appears both without and within.
Painted windows again cast a " dim religious light,"
' sometimes through the colored forms of saints and
martyrs ; the two tables of the Law are again hung
up in sight of the congregation. Prayers are simul
taneously uttered from pew and pulpit. And our
" meeting-houses " are again dressed with evergreen
at Christmas, and with flowers at Easter. I almost
anticipate the time when our churches will be open
during the week, as well as on Sunday, so that, at
any hour, the solitary penitent may enter to kneel
and pray before the visible symbols of the Body

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 143
and Blood of Christ. Think what we may of this
revival, it springs from a real want, a craving, of
our common nature, which cannot be withstood;
and it manifests at this late day the wisdom or the
inspiration of Moses, call it which you please, in
ordaining rich and complex rites and ceremonies
for observance by the Hebrew people.
I hoped to add some farther consideration of the
history and the institutions of the Hebrew people,
as these are set forth in our English Bible, and
especially of the lives and characters of their great
kings and prophets. But time and opportunity
were wanting, and this portion of the subject must
reraain for treatment by another hand and on some
future occasion. In view, however, merely of what
has been said, however imperfectly, of the external
merits of our Common Version, and of the nar
ratives, the poetry, and the philosophy which are
set forth in it, it is for the studfent to determine
whether any system of liberal education can be re
garded as complete and generous which does not
include thorough study of this great body of He
brew and Christian literature. My own strong con
viction is, that the only hope for the civilization
and the happiness of the generations that are to
come in this English-speaking world depends on
the continued reverent study of the English Bible.
Especially is this true in regard to those few great

144 A STUDY OF TEE ENGLISE BIBLE.
doctrines, those underlying truths, so simply and
briefly expressed, which I have ventured to call the
philosophy of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.
For, know it well, the only choice for us, in this
piping nineteenth century, lies between this old
philosophy of the Hebrews and the philosophy of
despair, the pessimism of Hartmann and Schopen
hauer. I know it is said by those who deprecate
any sucl\ regard for the consequences of our opin
ions, that we have only to follow out loyally our
own doubts or convictions, be they what they may,
since the interests of truth are pararaount. But
they misconstrue their own adage. We hold as
firmly as they do, that the truth can do no harm ;
and it is just because the acceptance of their doc
trine does, and will do, immeasurable harm to the
best interests of humanity, that we are firmly con
vinced their doctrine is not the truth. For, either
the one God, father of all, the God alike of Jew,
Christian, and Mahometan, still lives and reigns
enthroned above all height, still moves and governs
the universe which he created, or there comes a
wail of never dying sorrow from an orphan world
and a dead eternity, a pitiable cry which declares
existence to be a burden and a wrong, and bids
us eat, drink, and rot, for to-morrow we sleep and
never wake again. Atheism and pessimism are as
naturally and closely related to each other as Sin

CEARACTER AND INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES. 145
and Death, whom Milton's sublime allegory repre
sents as keeping guard at the gates of hell over
" The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound.
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,
And time and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand :
For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce,
Strive here for mastery, and to battel bring
Their embryon atoms."
Whether, out of such a Chaos, these "embryon
atoms " could of- themselves, unguided by any or
ganizing mind, have evolved and maintained a uni
verse in which law and order, intellect and con
science, appear and reign, is a question which will
hardly be of doubtful decision by any competent
thinker. Science herself tells us that they could
thus only perpetuate Night and Chaos, since noth
ing could be evolved out of atoms which was not
previously involved in them.