Your last letter now comes to the point which I have been long
anticipating, or rather it recurs to the point from which our
correspondence started—the credibility of the miracles attributed to
Christ. You tell me that during the long vacation you have been rapidly
reviewing my letters and attempting to enter into my views. There is
much, you say, that is new, and there is something that improves on
acquaintance, in this form of “Christian Positivism” as you call it; its
intellectual security has attractions for you, and it seems to you to
satisfy at once the aspirations of those who are drawn to worship
humanity, and of those who are drawn to worship something above
humanity. All this looks very well on paper, you say; but when you take
up the Gospels, it seems to fade away into a mere student’s dream: and
you state the objection thus: “For our knowledge of Christ, we depend
almost entirely upon the New Testament; now the New Testament contains
accounts of miracles; these miracles we are unable to accept as
historical; consequently the New Testament must be regarded as
non-historical, and the whole story of Christ becomes a myth.”
In return for this argument about the New Testament let me supply you
with a similarly sceptical one about the Old Testament, and ask you
whether you are prepared consistently to adopt it. “For our knowledge of
the children of Israel, we depend almost entirely upon the Old
Testament; now the Old Testament contains accounts of miracles; these
miracles we are unable to accept as historical; consequently the Old
Testament must be regarded as non-historical, and the story of the
descendants of Israel becomes a myth.”
Now are you really satisfied with this argument? The so-called Law of
Moses, the wandering in the Wilderness, the conquest of Canaan, the
lives of the wonder-working Gideon and of Barak, the wars and songs of
David, the denunciations, warnings, consolations, sorrows, visions, of
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the other prophets, are they indeed, in
your judgment, converted into mere myths by the admixture of the
miraculous element? Are they even made so far mythical as not to reveal
the story of the training of one of the most remarkable of nations, a
nation theologically quite singular upon earth? I contend on the
contrary, that the removal of the miraculous element results in a
two-fold advantage, on the one hand placing the story of Israel in the
province of history, and on the other hand, not bringing it down to the
level of the common-place, but elevating it to a pinnacle among the
histories of nations, and making it in a certain sense more wonderful
than before. If Moses was a plenipotentiary miracle-worker from God,
then there was nothing unexpected or wonderful in the spiritual results
that he achieved; and the wonder rather is that he achieved so little.
Give me the thunders of Sinai, with power to burn, blast, and plague my
opponents; add to these the power of producing without labour and
without delay miraculous supplies of manna, quails, and water, and I
myself would undertake to terrify or allure any nation into obeying a
far less noble and attractive code of laws than was set forth in the
name of Moses. But when I see a lawgiver with no such powers, doing what
Moses did, and shaping, or preparing the way for shaping, one of the
most carnal and unspiritual of races into a nation of Priests and
Prophets for the civilised world, then I am ready to fall upon my face
and to take my shoes from off my feet, saying from the depth of my
heart, “Truly God is in this place.” “But,” say you, “the so-called Law
of Moses is no more due to Moses than trial by jury is due to Alfred.”
That matters not. It is not any one Israelite; it is Israel as a whole,
Israel and its lawgivers and poets and prophets collectively; it is the
evolution of the spiritual from the carnal Israel that I revere; and all
the more, if that evolution be natural. Regarded as miraculous, the
history of Israel is somewhat of a failure and a bathos; but, regarded
as non-miraculous, it becomes a most miraculous triumph of divine
intention and persistence, even though the walls of Jericho succumbed to
the trumpets of Israel only in hyperbole, and although the sun stood
still at the bidding of Joshua only in the impassioned language of an
Oriental poet.
I am quite sure you must feel this as strongly as I do; you cannot
honestly and sincerely put aside all the history of Israel as a myth
because it contains a non-historic element of miracles, any more than
you put aside the battles of Salamis and Regillus because they too have
received their miraculous adornment. But some are probably perplexed and
scandalized at the task that is apparently set before them of
disentangling the true from the false, the myth from the non-myth: “How
strange,” they say, “that the story of the training of the Priests of
the world, that story which should have been a light to guide our feet,
has been suffered to shed darkness instead of light and falsehood
instead of truth! Is it probable, is it even decent and reverent, to
suppose that God should have allowed the Book of Revelation to be so
falsified that the simple and unlearned cannot depend upon it without
the aid of scholars and specialists?”
My reply is that, as long as men reason in this way, assuming that
Revelation ought to have been conveyed by some perfect medium, and
therefore that it must have been conveyed by some perfect medium, so
long it will be as impossible to refute them as it was to refute the
Aristotelian astronomers who argued that “The planets ought to move in
perfect curves; and the circle is a perfect curve; and therefore the
planets must move in circles.” We are like children crying for the moon
if we demand that this world, or that anything in this world, shall be
arranged as if the world were the best of all possible worlds. It is not
the best possible world, and we know it is not. Some things attest the
glory of God more perfectly than others; but nothing attests it quite
perfectly. You might as well hope to remove refraction from the
atmosphere, as to remove from the human mind the prejudices which compel
and always have compelled mankind to exaggerate and misrepresent divine
truth by forcing us to think that God must have acted as we should have
acted had we been in His place.
If you and I were omnipotent and had to re-make the Universe, I suppose
there is no question but we should make man perfectly good (according to
our notions of goodness) and that we should force him to remain good.
And if you or I were omnipotent and had to reveal anything to men, we
should write it large and clear in the sky, or in the heart, legible to
all without effort, so that men should be forced to understand it. But
God has neither done this nor anything like it. Therefore, since in
other respects He has departed so very far from our notions of the best
method, we cannot be surprised if He has not composed the Old Testament
quite in the manner which would commend itself to us as the best. From
our point of view the Bible teems with obvious imperfections. In the
first place there are none of the modern arrangements for securing
accuracy. No special newspaper reporters, not even contemporary writers
of memoirs or histories, have handed down to posterity the exact words
and deeds of Moses, David, Isaiah, and the great heroes and prophets of
Israel. Might we not almost say that there have been as it were
arrangements for securing inaccuracy? The authors wrote, in many cases,
long after the events they recorded, under conditions which rendered
accuracy of detail quite impossible. They have often been lengthy where
we could have desired brevity (as for example in the enumerations of
pedigrees and in the details of the furniture and ritual of the Temple
or the Tabernacle) and very brief where we should have prized amplitude.
Writing as Orientals for the most part write history, without
statistical exactness, they have sometimes made mistakes (sometimes
self-contradictory mistakes) in numbers and names, which it is now
impossible to rectify. Nay, we can hardly acquit them sometimes of moral
error; they have at all events sometimes appeared to praise, or at least
not to blame, sometimes even to impute to God, acts that would seem to
us—even when all due allowance is made for difference between ancient
and modern standards of morality—deserving of express and severe
censure.
But their special error which we are now considering remains yet
unmentioned. You know that nations, like individuals, in their infancy
have very vague notions of the uniformity of Nature, and very strong
notions of the personality of Nature or of some Beings behind Nature.
Even in modern times Orientals would say that God or Allah did this or
that, where we say that this or that “happened;” and I remember hearing
not many years ago that some Jews of Palestine, suffering from the
consequences of extensive conflagration, wrote to England for relief in
a letter which declared—in perfect good faith, and without any intention
to imply a miracle—that God had “sent down fire from heaven upon their
town.” An Eastern traveller of modern times tells an amusing story to
the same effect how a camel-driver, when questioned as to the cause of
his rheumatism, could not be induced for a long time to make any other
answer except that “Allah had caused it;” and even when the traveller
had elicited the immediate cause, the man would still persist that
“Allah had sent the rheumatism, though it had followed upon drinking a
great quantity of camels’ milk when he was in a violent heat.” You
should therefore accustom yourself, if you want to understand the Bible,
to look at Western narrative from an Oriental point of view. Take for
example the interesting account given by the African traveller Mungo
Park of the manner in which a trifling incident saved his life in the
desert. Alone and desperate, faint and famished, he had thrown himself
down to die, when he suddenly caught sight of a small but exquisitely
shaped plant of great rarity and interest: “And can God have taken so
much thought and care for the creation of this little plant,” he cried,
“and have no thought or care for me?” In the strength of this suggestion
he started up, pressed on his way, and reached safety. Now compare this
striking little story with the similar incident of the gourd, recorded
in the Book of Jonah, and imagine how a prophet of Israel could have
described the message of salvation. He would have told us (as the
prophet Jonah tells us) how the Lord God in the same day caused a plant
to grow up before the face of the man, and how the Lord God said unto
the man “Hath the Lord thy God taken thought for this plant, and shall
He take no thought for thee? Arise, go on thy way”—giving, as from God,
the actual words of the thought which the Western traveller describes as
suggesting itself or occurring to his mind. You must surely see how
naturally this conversion of the natural into the seemingly miraculous
would have been effected by a penman of Israel, without the least
intention to imply a real suspension of the laws of nature.
Keeping yourself still in the position of an Oriental historian,
consider what you would be called on to describe, in setting down the
story of Israel. You would find, as your materials, various traditions,
mostly oral, mostly perhaps poetic, describing a great deliverance
wrought in every particular by the hand of Jehovah Himself: you would
find the nation around you, and yourself among the rest, believing that
Jehovah Himself had drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea, that His
terrible voice had given the Law from Sinai, that He had been to
wandering Israel a cloud in the noontide to protect them from the sun,
and a light in the darkness to give them guidance, that He had supplied
them with food from Heaven and spread a table for them in the
wilderness, that He had Himself given them water from Himself (the Rock
of Israel!) to quench their thirst. If the Jordan’s fords, unusually
shallow, had allowed the whole nation to pass across, as upon dry land,
you would be taught as a child to hear and sing, in hymns that
reiterated the national deliverance, that the Lord Himself had done
this: “The waters saw thee, O Lord, the waters saw thee, and were
afraid.” If, in the general terror of the Canaanites, a strong city
suffered itself to be taken on the mere onset and war cry of the
invaders as easily as though it had been an unwalled hamlet, the
traditions would tell how the walls fell flat at the sound of the
trumpets of Joshua; if some sudden storm, accompanied with hail and
immediately followed by an inundation of swollen streams, threw the
chariots and horses of the enemy into confusion and ensured their speedy
rout; or if, on another occasion, the sudden gloom of a storm had been
succeeded by a long evening of peculiar brightness and clearness
facilitating the pursuit and destruction of the foe, then you would hear
that the “stars in their courses” fought against Sisera, or that in the
day of Beth-horon the Lord Himself sent down hailstones upon the enemy
and stopped the sun at the prayer of Joshua:—
“The sun and moon stood still in their habitation;
At the light of thine arrows as they went,
At the shining of thy glittering spear.”[9]
All these materials, expressed in terse poetic phrase, you, as a
historian, would have to amplify into prose. Is it not easy to see how,
in the process, without any fraud or conscious exaggeration on your
part, you would transmute the natural into the miraculous?
To go through the whole of the miracles in the Old Testament and to
attempt to shew how in almost every case the miraculous part of the
story may have crept in without intention to deceive, would be a task
far above my powers; and it would require a book not a letter. If you
were to study with care the articles in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on
the books of the Old Testament they would give you a good deal of light
on this subject. But the problem is complicated by the fact that the
causes that originated the miraculous element are not always the same.
For example the seven miracles of Elijah and the fourteen miracles of
Elisha (the latter number being exactly the double of the former in
order to fulfil the prayer of Elisha for a “twofold” portion of the
spirit of his master) cannot be explained in the same way as the
miracles of the Wanderings or as those in the life of Samson. The
eminent Hebraist to whom we are indebted for the Articles
above-mentioned would confer on all students of the Bible a very great
benefit, if he would give us a separate treatise on the Old Testament
miracles. Meantime I must content myself with shewing how some miracles,
of what I may call a “grotesque” kind, may be explained as the mere
result of misunderstood names. You must be familiar with this kind of
explanation, I think, in ancient history, and even in modern English
history, although you have never thought of applying it to the Bible.
Perhaps you have read in Mr. Isaac Taylor’s _Words and Places_ how the
sexton in Leighton Buzzard used to show the eagle of the lectern as the
identical _buzzard_ from which the place derived its name—little
guessing that “Buzzard” is a mere corruption of “Beaudésert;” and the
porter at Warwick Castle, when he shows you the bones of the “dun cow”
slain by Guy of Warwick, hands down a similar erroneous tradition
probably derived from a misunderstanding of “dun.”[10] A far more famous
instance connects itself with the Phœnician name of “Bosra,” belonging
to the citadel of Carthage. This name meant, in the Phœnician language,
“citadel;” but the Greeks confused it with the Greek word “Bursa,” a
“hide;” and then they proceeded to invent a story to explain the name.
Queen Dido, they said, had bought for a small price as much ground as
she could encompass with a hide; she had cut the hide into thin thongs
and thereby purchased the site of a city for a trifle: hence the city
received the name of “Hide.” Thus subtilized the Greeks; but it may
interest you to know that our own ancestors consciously or unconsciously
followed in their footsteps. There is near Sittingbourne a castle called
Tong or Thong Castle, situated on a “tongue” of land (Norse, _tunga_)
which has given it its name. But tradition has invented or imitated the
old Greek story, and has declared that the castle was so-called because
the site was bought like Dido’s, a trifling price being given for so
much land as could be included in the “thong” made from a bull’s hide.
But now to come to the particular instance which is the only one I shall
give from the Old Testament. You must recollect, and I think you ought
to have been perplexed by, the astounding incident in the life of
Samson, connected with the “ass’s jawbone.” The hero is said first to
have slain some hundreds of men with the jawbone of an ass, and then to
have thrown away the jawbone in the anguish of a parching thirst. Upon
this, the Lord is said, (in the Old Version of the Bible) to have opened
a fountain of water in the hollow of the jawbone in answer to his cry:
and the fountain was henceforth named En-hakkore, _i.e._ the “fountain
of him that calleth,” because Samson “called upon the Lord.” Moreover,
when he cast away the jawbone, he is said to have called the place
Ramath-lehi; which the margin (not of the New Version but of the Old)
interprets, “the lifting up of the jawbone” or “the casting away of the
jawbone.” Without pausing to dwell on the extreme improbability of the
details of the story, I will merely state the probable explanation. It
is probable that the valley containing the “hollow” in which the
fountain lay, was called, from the configuration of the place, “the
Ass’s Jawbone,” before the occurrence of any exploit of Samson in it.
Indeed we find it actually called “Lehi,” or “Jawbone,” in the narrative
now under discussion, just before the supposed incident of the jawbone
took place: “The Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread
themselves in _Lehi_ (_Jawbone_),” Judges xv. 9. This latter fact indeed
is not conclusive (as the narrator, living long after the event, might
possibly use the name of the place handed down to him, even in writing
of a time when he believed the name to have been not yet given): but the
probability of a natural explanation of the origin of the name receives
strong confirmation from a passage in Strabo (303) who actually mentions
some other place (I think in Peloponnesus) called the “Ass’s Jawbone.” I
need not say that Strabo narrates no such Samsonian incident to explain
the name, and that it was probably derived (like Dogs Head, Hog’s Back
and many other such names) from some similarity between the shape of an
ass’s jawbone and the shape of the valley. Moreover, the word translated
“hollow,” though it might represent the cavity in an ass’s jawbone,
might also represent the hollow in a valley, as in Zephaniah (i. 11)
“Howl, ye inhabitants of the _hollow_.” Again, the name Ramath-lehi
cannot mean “casting away of the jawbone;” it means “lifting up,” or
“_hill_,” of Lehi: and accordingly the Revised Version translates, “that
place was called Ramath-lehi;” and the margin interprets the name thus,
“_The hill_ of the jawbone”. I should add also that the Revisers—instead
of the Old Version, “clave an hollow place _that was in the jaw_”—give
us now, “clave the hollow place that _is_ in _Lehi_.” You must see now
surely how on every side the old miraculous interpretation breaks down
and makes way for a natural and non-miraculous explanation of the
legend. But we have still to explain the name of the fountain, said to
have been given from the “calling” of Samson. This is easily done. It
appears that the phrase “him that calleth,” or “the Caller,” is a Hebrew
name for the Partridge, so named from its “call,” or cry. The “Fountain
of the Caller,” therefore, in the “hollow place” of the “Ass’s Jawbone,”
was simply, as we might say, Partridge Well in Jawbone Valley, which lay
below Jawbone Hill.
But now, many years after the champion of Israel had passed away, comes
the legendary poet or historian, who has to tell of some great exploit
of deliverance wrought by the hero Samson in this Valley of the Jawbone
of the Ass by the side of the Fountain of the Caller. Straight-way,
every local name must be connected with the incident that fills his mind
and the minds of all his countrymen who live in the neighbourhood. And
so “Jawbone Valley” became so called because it was there that Samson
smote the Philistines with “the jawbone of an ass;” and “Jawbone
heights” are so-called because on this spot Samson “lifted up” the
jawbone against his foes, or “threw it away” after he had destroyed
them; and “the Well of the Caller” derives not only its name but even
its miraculous existence from “_the calling_ of Samson upon Jehovah.”
I think you will now perceive the kind of reasoning which has compelled
me to give up the miracles of the Old Testament. It is not in any way
because I have an _a priori_ prejudice against miracles: on the
contrary, I started with an _a priori_ prejudice for miracles in the
Bible, though against miracles in general. It is not simply because
there is not sufficient evidence for them; it is in great measure
because there is evidence against them. For, when you can shew how a
supposed miracle may naturally have occurred, and how the miraculous
account may naturally and easily have sprung up, I think that amounts to
evidence against the miracle. And of course when you find yourself
compelled to explain in this way a large number of miracles in the Old
Testament, it becomes far more probable than before that the rest are
susceptible of some natural explanation. I do not pretend to have
investigated in detail every miraculous narrative in the Old Testament.
I am ready to admit that at the bottom of the miraculous, there may have
been in many cases something very wonderful. Being for example
personally very much inclined to the mysterious, I would not deny that
in the Hebrew race, as in some others, there may have been some strange
power, natural but at present inexplicable, of “second sight;” but, on
the whole, looking at the evidence for and against the miracles of the
Old Testament, I have now no hesitation in rejecting them as miracles,
however much I may admire the spirit that suggested the narratives, as
exhibiting a profound and spiritual sense of the sympathy of God with
men.
But we may perhaps be called upon to believe in the miracles of the Old
Testament on the authority, so to speak, of the miracles of the New
Testament. Such at least I take to be the meaning of the following
extract from an author who has done so much good educational as well as
episcopal work, and has manifested such an openness to new truth, that I
differ from him with diffidence where I may possibly have misunderstood
his meaning, and with regret where I am confident that I have understood
him correctly. The passage is from Bishop Temple’s Bampton Lectures,[11]
and I will give it at full length, partly because I may have to refer to
it again, partly because I am afraid of misinterpreting it if I separate
one or two sentences from the context:
“We have to ask what evidence can be given that any such miracles as
are recorded in the Bible have ever been worked? It is plain at once
that the answer must be given by the New Testament. No _such_[12]
evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles of the Old
Testament. The times are remote; the date and authorship of the
Books not established with certainty; _the mixture of poetry with
history, no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts_;
and, if the New Testament did not exist, it would be impossible to
show such a distinct preponderance of probability as could justify
us in calling many [? any] to accept the miraculous parts of the
narrative as historically true.”
If I understand this argument, I fear I must dissent from it. But let us
try at least to understand it. Dr. Temple admits (what I should not be
disposed to have admitted without a good deal of qualification) that
“the mixture of _poetry with history_” (and the context makes it clear
that he is referring to the miraculous accounts of the Old Testament) is
“no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts.” This is a
very important admission indeed. A plain Englishman may miss, at first
sight, the full importance of it. He may be disposed to say, “What does
this matter to me? What do I care whether a miracle is told in poetry or
in prose, provided only it is true?” But by “poetry” Dr. Temple does not
mean “verse;” he means hyperbole, poetic figures of speech and
metaphors; in plain English, he means language that is literally and
historically untrue. Consequently the admission amounts to this, that it
is now no longer possible in the miraculous narratives of the Old
Testament to separate what is historically true from what is
historically untrue. If this be so, I cannot understand how the question
is substantially affected by the New Testament. Let us suppose for a
moment that, many centuries after the times of Moses and Samson, real
miracles were wrought by Christ and the apostles; suppose even, in
addition, that the reality of the miracles wrought by Christ and his
followers could constitute any evidence for the Mosaic Miracles or could
refute the evidence against such stories as that of the Ass’s jawbone;
yet even then, what is the use of knowing that there may be a miracle
somewhere concealed in an Old Testament narrative in which it is
impossible to “make any sure separation” of the historically true from
the historically untrue?
But for my part I am quite unable to adopt either of these suppositions.
I cannot see how “a distinct preponderance of probability” for the
Samsonian myth or the story of the stopping of the sun could be secured
by the fact that miracles were really, long afterwards, performed by
Christ. All that could fairly be said, as it seems to me, would be this,
that since miracles were actually wrought by the Redeemer of the race,
who was Himself a child of Israel, it is not so improbable as before
that miracles might have been also wrought by other previous deliverers
of Israel. But this could not go far, and certainly cannot constitute “a
distinct preponderance of probability,” if we find positive evidence for
a miracle almost wanting, and negative evidence against it very
strong.[13]
So far as Dr. Temple’s argument has weight, so far it appears to me to
be capable of being used in the opposite direction to that which he
intended. For if there is any connection between the miracles of the Old
and of the New Testament, so that the probability of the latter may be
fairly said—I will not say to constitute “a distinct preponderance of
probability,” but to contribute slightly to the probability of the
former, then surely we must also admit that the demonstrated
improbability of the former must contribute slightly to the _a priori_
improbability which we ought to attach to the latter. If the Bible is to
be regarded as a whole, and Bible miracles as a whole, then the fact
that the Divine Author of the Bible allowed revelation in the earlier
part of the Book to be conveyed through an imperfect and non-historical
medium will constitute a reasonable probability that He may also have
conveyed His later revelations through the same means. In other words,
the acknowledged presence of the law of “Truth through Illusion” in the
Old Testament should prepare us not to be disappointed if we find the
same law traceable in the New Testament: and the collapse of miracles in
the former should prepare us for a collapse of miracles in the latter.
Do not however suppose for a moment that a collapse of miracles implies
a collapse of the Bible, and do not be disheartened by such expressions
as that “the mixture of poetry with history is no longer capable of any
sure separation into its parts.” If that expression refers merely to
some of the legends of the times of the Patriarchs, or to a few isolated
passages elsewhere, it may be accepted without fear; but it cannot apply
to the great bulk of the history of the Chosen People. Here you will
find very little difficulty in rejecting the obviously non-historical
and miraculous element; and you will lose nothing by the rejection. Read
through Stanley’s _Lectures on the Jewish Church_ and ask yourself
whether you have missed anything from the campaigns of Joshua and the
exploits of Gideon and Samson because the miracles have vanished from
his pages. Where miraculous narratives are manifestly not deliberate
fabrications, but (as here) late prosaic interpretations of early poetic
traditions, they very often afford trustworthy evidence of ancient
historical events which imprinted themselves upon the hearts of a simple
people. Certainly I can say for myself that I never realized Israel as a
nation and had not half my present appreciation of the wisdom and wonder
of the deliverance and training of Israel by Jehovah till I had learned
to interpret the miracles as being nothing more than man’s inadequate
attempt to set forth in visible shape the unique redemption of the
Chosen People. Spiritually as well as intellectually, my enjoyment of
the Old Testament has been doubled ever since I have been able, however
imperfectly, to separate the historical element in it from the
non-historical, and to interpret the prose as prose and the poetry as
poetry.
Footnote 9:
Habakkuk iii. 11.
Footnote 10:
“The legend of the victory gained by Guy of Warwick over the dun cow
most probably originated in a misunderstood tradition of his conquest
of the _Dena gau_ or Danish settlement in the neighbourhood of
Warwick.”—Taylor’s _Words and Places_, p. 269.
Footnote 11:
Page 206.
Footnote 12:
The italics are in the text. In the next sentence, the italics are
mine.
Footnote 13:
A more plausible argument might be derived from any expressions of
Jesus which might appear to imply a belief in the historical nature of
the Old Testament miracles. This argument appeals strongly to our
sense of reverence. We do not like to think that Jesus was mistaken
even in a purely intellectual matter. Yet do we really suppose that
Jesus, in His humanity, was exempt from the popular intellectual and
scientific errors of contemporary humanity? For example, do we really
suppose that Jesus was exempt from the popular belief that the sun
moves? For those who realize His humanity it is hard to think that He
was intended to be so far separated from the men and women around Him;
and, if He was not so separated, I find little more difficulty in
supposing that He would have had the same belief as was held by all
His countrymen concerning the historical character of the Old
Testament.
XV
THE MIRACLES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT