HAVING in the former two Letters defined the doctrine which I reject, I
am now to communicate the views that I would propose to substitute in its
place.
Before, however, I attempt to lay down on the theological chart the
road-place to which my bark has drifted, and to mark the spot and
circumscribe the space within which I swing at anchor, let me first thank
you for, and then attempt to answer, the objections—or at least the
questions—which you have urged upon me.
“The present Bible is the Canon to which Christ and the Apostles
referred?”
Doubtless.
“And in terms which a Christian must tremble to tamper with?”
Yea. The expressions are as direct as strong; and a true believer will
neither attempt to divert nor dilute their strength.
“The doctrine which is considered as the orthodox view seems the obvious
and most natural interpretation of the text in question?”
Yea, and nay. To those whose minds are prepossessed by the doctrine
itself—who from earliest childhood have always meant this doctrine by the
very word Bible—the doctrine being but its exposition and paraphrase—Yea.
In such minds the words of our Lord and the declarations of St. Paul can
awaken no other sense. To those on the other hand who find the doctrine
senseless and self-confuting, and who take up the Bible as they do other
books, and apply to it the same rules of interpretation—Nay.
And, lastly, he who, like myself, recognises in neither of the two the
state of his own mind—who cannot rest in the former, and feels, or fears,
a presumptuous spirit in the negative dogmatism of the latter—he has his
answer to seek. But so far I dare hazard a reply to the question—In what
other sense can the words be interpreted?—beseeching you, however, to
take what I am about to offer but as an attempt to delineate an arc of
oscillation—that the eulogy of St. Paul is in nowise contravened by the
opinion to which I incline, who fully believe the Old Testament
collectively, both in the composition and in its preservation, a great
and precious gift of Providence;—who find in it all that the Apostle
describes, and who more than believe that all which the Apostle spoke of
was of Divine inspiration, and a blessing intended for as many as are in
communion with the Spirit through all ages. And I freely confess that my
whole heart would turn away with an angry impatience from the cold and
captious mortal who, the moment I had been pouring out the love and
gladness of my soul—while book after book, law, and truth, and example,
oracle, and lovely hymn, and choral song of ten thousand thousands, and
accepted prayers of saints and prophets, sent back, as it were, from
heaven, like doves, to be let loose again with a new freight of spiritual
joys and griefs and necessities, were passing across my memory—at the
first pause of my voice, and whilst my countenance was still
speaking—should ask me whether I was thinking of the Book of Esther, or
meant particularly to include the first six chapters of Daniel, or verses
6–20 of the 109th Psalm, or the last verse of the 137th Psalm? Would any
conclusion of this sort be drawn in any other analogous case? In the
course of my lectures on Dramatic Poetry, I, in half a score instances,
referred my auditors to the precious volume before me—Shakespeare—and
spoke enthusiastically, both in general and with detail of particular
beauties, of the plays of Shakespeare, as in all their kinds, and in
relation to the purposes of the writer, excellent. Would it have been
fair, or according to the common usage and understanding of men, to have
inferred an intention on my part to decide the question respecting _Titus
Andronicus_, or the larger portion of the three parts of _Henry VI._?
Would not every genial mind understand by Shakespeare that unity or total
impression comprising and resulting from the thousandfold several and
particular emotions of delight, admiration, gratitude excited by his
works? But if it be answered, “Aye! but we must not interpret St. Paul
as we may and should interpret any other honest and intelligent writer or
speaker,”—then, I say, this is the very _petitio principii_ of which I
complain.
Still less do the words of our Lord apply against my view. Have I not
declared—do I not begin by declaring—that whatever is referred by the
sacred penman to a direct communication from God, and wherever it is
recorded that the subject of the history had asserted himself to have
received this or that command, this or that information or assurance,
from a superhuman Intelligence, or where the writer in his own person,
and in the character of an historian, relates that the _word of the Lord
came_ unto priest, prophet, chieftain, or other individual—have I not
declared that I receive the same with full belief, and admit its
inappellable authority? Who more convinced than I am—who more anxious to
impress that conviction on the minds of others—that the Law and the
Prophets speak throughout of Christ? That all the intermediate
applications and realisations of the words are but types and
repetitions—translations, as it were, from the language of letters and
articulate sounds into the language of events and symbolical persons?
And here again let me recur to the aid of analogy. Suppose a life of Sir
Thomas More by his son-in-law, or a life of Lord Bacon by his chaplain;
that a part of the records of the Court of Chancery belonging to these
periods were lost; that in Roper’s or in Rawley’s biographical work there
were preserved a series of _dicta_ and judgments attributed to these
illustrious Chancellors, many and important specimens of their table
discourses, with large extracts from works written by them, and from some
that are no longer extant. Let it be supposed, too, that there are no
grounds, internal or external, to doubt either the moral, intellectual,
or circumstantial competence of the biographers. Suppose, moreover, that
wherever the opportunity existed of collating their documents and
quotations with the records and works still preserved, the former were
found substantially correct and faithful, the few differences in nowise
altering or disturbing the spirit and purpose of the paragraphs in which
they were found; and that of what was not collatable, and to which no
test _ab extra_ could be applied, the far larger part bore witness in
itself of the same spirit and origin; and that not only by its
characteristic features, but by its surpassing excellence, it rendered
the chances of its having had any other author than the giant-mind, to
whom the biographer ascribes it, small indeed! Now, from the nature and
objects of my pursuits, I have, we will suppose, frequent occasion to
refer to one or other of these works; for example, to Rawley’s _Dicta et
Facta Francisci de Verulam_. At one time I might refer to the work in
some such words as—“Remember what Francis of Verulam said or judged;” or,
“If you believe not me, yet believe Lord Bacon.” At another time I might
take the running title of the volume, and at another the name of the
biographer;—“Turn to your Rawley! _He_ will set you right;” or, “_There_
you will find a depth which no research will ever exhaust;” or whatever
other strong expression my sense of Bacon’s greatness and of the
intrinsic worth and the value of the proofs and specimens of that
greatness, contained and preserved in that volume, would excite and
justify. But let my expressions be as vivid and unqualified as the most
sanguine temperament ever inspired, would any man of sense conclude from
them that I meant—and meant to make others believe—that not only each and
all of these anecdotes, adages, decisions, extracts, incidents, had been
dictated, word by word, by Lord Bacon; and that all Rawley’s own
observations and inferences, all the connectives and disjunctives, all
the recollections of time, place, and circumstance, together with the
order and succession of the narrative, were in like manner dictated and
revised by the spirit of the deceased Chancellor? The answer will
be—must be—No man in his senses! “No man in his senses—in _this_
instance; but in that of the Bible it is quite otherwise; for (I take it
as an admitted point that) it _is_ quite otherwise!”
And here I renounce any advantage I might obtain for my argument by
restricting the application of our Lord’s and the Apostle’s words to the
Hebrew Canon. I admit the justice—I have long felt the full force—of the
remark—“We have all that the occasion allowed.” And if the same awful
authority does not apply so directly to the Evangelical and Apostolical
writings as to the Hebrew Canon, yet the analogy of faith justifies the
transfer. If the doctrine be less decisively Scriptural in its
application to the New Testament or the Christian Canon, the temptation
to doubt it is likewise less. So at least we are led to infer; since in
point of fact it is the apparent or imagined contrast, the diversity of
spirit which sundry individuals have believed themselves to find in the
Old Testament and in the Gospel, that has given occasion to the
doubt;—and, in the heart of thousands who yield a faith of acquiescence
to the contrary, and find rest in their humility—supplies fuel to a
fearful wish that it were permitted to make a distinction.
But, lastly, you object that—even granting that no coercive, positive
reasons for the belief—no direct and not inferred assertions—of the
plenary inspiration of the Old and New Testament, in the generally
received import of the term, could be adduced, yet—in behalf of a
doctrine so catholic, and during so long a succession of ages affirmed
and acted on by Jew and Christian, Greek, Romish, and Protestant, you
need no other answer than:—“Tell me, first, why it should not be
received! Why should I not believe the Scriptures throughout dictated,
in word and thought, by an infallible Intelligence?” I admit the
fairness of the retort; and eagerly and earnestly do I answer: For every
reason that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures;—prize them, love
them, revere them, beyond all other books! _Why_ should I not? Because
the doctrine in question petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ
with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations—the flexile and the
rigid—the supporting hard and the clothing soft—the blood _which is the
life_—the intelligencing nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft and
springy, cellular substance, in which all are imbedded and lightly bound
together. This breathing organism, this glorious _panharmonicon_ which I
had seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man’s voice given to it,
the doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal Memnon’s head, a
hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men,
and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same; and no
man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived. _Why_
should I not?—Because the doctrine evacuates of all sense and efficacy
the sure and constant tradition, that all the several books bound up
together in our precious family Bible were composed in different and
widely-distant ages, under the greatest diversity of circumstances, and
degrees of light and information, and yet that the composers, whether as
uttering or as recording what was uttered and what was done, were all
actuated by a pure and holy Spirit, one and the same—(for is there any
spirit pure and holy, and yet not proceeding from God—and yet not
proceeding in and with the Holy Spirit?)—one Spirit, working diversely,
now awakening strength, and now glorifying itself in weakness, now giving
power and direction to knowledge, and now taking away the sting from
error! Ere the summer and the months of ripening had arrived for the
heart of the race; while the whole sap of the tree was crude, and each
and every fruit lived in the harsh and bitter principle; even then this
Spirit withdrew its chosen ministers from the false and guilt-making
centre of Self. It converted the wrath into a form and an organ of love,
and on the passing storm-cloud impressed the fair rainbow of promise to
all generations. Put the lust of Self in the forked lightning, and would
it not be a Spirit of Moloch? But God maketh the lightnings His
ministers, fire and hail, vapours and stormy winds fulfilling His word.
_Curse ye Meroz_, _said the angel of the Lord_; _curse ye bitterly the
inhabitants thereof_—sang Deborah. Was it that she called to mind any
personal wrongs—rapine or insult—that she or the house of Lapidoth had
received from Jabin or Sisera? No; she had dwelt under her palm tree in
the depth of the mountain. But she was a _mother in Israel_; and with a
mother’s heart, and with the vehemency of a mother’s and a patriot’s
love, she had shot the light of love from her eyes, and poured the
blessings of love from her lips, on the people that had _jeoparded their
lives unto the death_ against the oppressors; and the bitterness,
awakened and borne aloft by the same love, she precipitated in curses on
the selfish and coward recreants who _came not to the help of the Lord_,
_to the help of the Lord_, _against the mighty_. As long as I have the
image of Deborah before my eyes, and while I throw myself back into the
age, country, circumstances, of this Hebrew Bonduca in the not yet tamed
chaos of the spiritual creation;—as long as I contemplate the
impassioned, high-souled, heroic woman in all the prominence and
individuality of will and character,—I feel as if I were among the first
ferments of the great affections—the proplastic waves of the microcosmic
chaos, swelling up against—and yet towards—the outspread wings of the
dove that lies brooding on the troubled waters. So long all is well,—all
replete with instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate I am
made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer radiance which
shines on a Christian’s paths, neither blunted by the preparatory veil,
nor crimsoned in its struggle through the all-enwrapping mist of the
world’s ignorance: whilst in the self-oblivion of these heroes of the Old
Testament, their elevation above all low and individual interests,—above
all, in the entire and vehement devotion of their total being to the
service of their divine Master, I find a lesson of humility, a ground of
humiliation, and a shaming, yet rousing, example of faith and fealty.
But let me once be persuaded that all these heart-awakening utterances of
human hearts—of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning,
rejoicing, suffering, triumphing—are but as a _Divina Commedia_ of a
superhuman—O bear with me, if I say—Ventriloquist;—that the royal harper,
to whom I have so often submitted myself as a _many-stringed instrument_
for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of
emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common
humanity, responded to the touch,—that this _sweet Psalmist of Israel_
was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an _automaton_ poet,
mourner, and supplicant;—all is gone,—all sympathy, at least, and all
example. I listen in awe and fear, but likewise in perplexity and
confusion of spirit.
Yet one other instance, and let this be the crucial test of the doctrine.
Say that the Book of Job throughout was dictated by an infallible
intelligence. Then re-peruse the book, and still, as you proceed, try to
apply the tenet; try if you can even attach any sense or semblance of
meaning to the speeches which you are reading. What! were the hollow
truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, the false assumptions and malignant
insinuations of the supercilious bigots, who corruptly defended the
truth:—were the impressive facts, the piercing outcries, the pathetic
appeals, and the close and powerful reasoning with which the poor
sufferer—smarting at once from his wounds, and from the oil of vitriol
which the orthodox _liars for God_ were dropping into them—impatiently,
but uprightly and holily, controverted this truth, while in will and in
spirit he clung to it;—were both dictated by an infallible
intelligence?—Alas! if I may judge from the manner in which both
indiscriminately are recited, quoted, appealed to, preached upon by the
_routiniers_ of desk and pulpit, I cannot doubt that they think so—or
rather, without thinking, take for granted that so they are to think;—the
more readily, perhaps, because the so thinking supersedes the necessity
of all afterthought.
Farewell.