PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH
TO THE REV. CANON STANLEY.
My Dear Stanley,
I dedicate these Sermons to you, not that I may make you responsible
for any doctrine or statement contained in them, but as the simplest
method of telling you how much they owe to your book on the Jewish
Church, and of expressing my deep gratitude to you for publishing
that book at such a time as this.
It has given to me (and I doubt not to many other clergymen) a fresh
confidence and energy in preaching to my people the Gospel of the
Old Testament as the same with that of the New; and without it, many
of these Sermons would have been very different from, and I am
certain very inferior to, what they are now, by the help of your
admirable book.
Brought up, like all Cambridge men of the last generation, upon
Paley's Evidences, I had accepted as a matter of course, and as the
authoritative teaching of my University, Paley's opinions as to the
limits of Biblical criticism, {0a} quoted at large in Dean Milman's
noble preface to his last edition of the History of the Jews; and
especially that great dictum of his, 'that it is an unwarrantable,
as well as unsafe rule to lay down concerning the Jewish history,
that which was never laid down concerning any other, that either
every particular of it must be true, or the whole false.'
I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubt
not, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shall
read these lines who has not read Paley's Evidences, he may be
stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so become
acquainted with a great book and a great mind.
A reverent and rational liberty in criticism (within the limits of
orthodoxy) is, I have always supposed, the right of every Cambridge
man; and I was therefore the more shocked, for the sake of free
thought in my University, at the appearance of a book which claimed
and exercised a licence in such questions, which I must (after
careful study of it) call anything but rational and reverent. Of
the orthodoxy of the book it is not, of course, a private
clergyman's place to judge. That book seemed dangerous to the
University of Cambridge itself, because it was likely to stir up
from without attempts to abridge her ancient liberty of thought; but
it seemed still more dangerous to the hundreds of thousands without
the University, who, being no scholars, must take on trust the
historic truth of the Bible.
For I found that book, if not always read, yet still talked and
thought of on every side, among persons whom I should have fancied
careless of its subject, and even ignorant of its existence, but to
whom I was personally bound to give some answer as to the book and
its worth. It was making many unsettled and unhappy; it was (even
worse) pandering to the cynicism and frivolity of many who were
already too cynical and frivolous; and, much as I shrank from
descending into the arena of religious controversy, I felt bound to
say a few plain words on it, at least to my own parishioners.
But how to do so, without putting into their heads thoughts which
need be in no man's head, and perhaps shaking the very faith which I
was trying to build up, was difficult to me, and I think would have
been impossible to me, but for the opportune appearance of your
admirable book.
I could not but see that the book to which I have alluded, like most
other modern books on Biblical criticism, was altogether negative;
was possessed too often by that fanaticism of disbelief which is
just as dangerous as the fanaticism of belief; was picking the body
of the Scripture to pieces so earnestly, that it seemed to forget
that Scripture had a spirit as well as a body; or, if it confessed
that it had a spirit, asserting that spirit to be one utterly
different from the spirit which the Scripture asserts that it
possesses.
For the Scripture asserts that those who wrote it were moved by the
Spirit of God; that it is a record of God's dealings with men, which
certain men were inspired to perceive and to write down: whereas
the tendency of modern criticism is, without doubt, to assert that
Scripture is inspired by the spirit of man; that it contains the
thoughts and discoveries of men concerning God, which they wrote
down without the inspiration of God; which difference seems to me
(and I hope to others) utterly infinite and incalculable, and to
involve the question of the whole character, honour, and glory of
God.
There is, without a doubt, something in the Old Testament, as well
as in the New, quite different in kind, as well as in degree, from
the sacred books of any other people: an unique element, which has
had an unique effect upon the human heart, life and civilization.
This remains, after all possible deductions for 'ignorance of
physical science,' 'errors in numbers and chronology,'
'interpolations' 'mistakes of transcribers' and so forth, whereof we
have read of late a great deal too much, and ought to care for them
and for their existence, or non-existence, simply nothing at all;
because, granting them all--though the greater part of them I do not
grant, as far as I can trust my critical faculty--there remains that
unique element, beside which all these accidents are but as the
spots on the sun compared to the great glory of his life-giving
light. The unique element is there; and I cannot but still believe,
after much thought, that it--the powerful and working element, the
inspired and Divine element which has converted and still converts
millions of souls--is just that which Christendom in all ages has
held it to be: the account of certain 'noble acts' of God's, and
not of certain noble thoughts of man--in a word, not merely the
moral, but the historic element; and that, therefore, the value of
the Bible teaching depends on the truth of the Bible story. That is
my belief. Any criticism which tries to rob me of that I shall look
at fairly, but very severely indeed.
If all that a man wants is a 'religion,' he ought to be able to make
a very pretty one for himself, and a fresh one as often as he is
tired of the old. But the heart and soul of man wants more than
that, as it is written, 'My soul is athirst for God, even for the
living God.' Those whom I have to teach want a living God, who
cares for men, works for men, teaches men, punishes men, forgives
men, saves men from their sins; and Him I have found in the Bible,
and nowhere else, save in the facts of life which the Bible alone
interprets.
In the power of man to find out God I will never believe. The
'religious sentiment,' or 'God-consciousness,' so much talked of
now-a-days, seems to me (as I believe it will to all practical
common-sense Englishmen), a faculty not to be depended on; as
fallible and corrupt as any other part of human nature; apt (to
judge from history) to develop itself into ugly forms, not only
without a revelation from God, but too often in spite of one--into
polytheisms, idolatries, witchcrafts, Buddhist asceticisms,
Phoenician Moloch-sacrifices, Popish inquisitions, American spirit-
rappings, and what not. The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor,
the sorrowing, the truly human, all demand a living God, who has
revealed himself in living acts; a God who has taught mankind by
facts, not left them to discover him by theories and sentiments; a
Judge, a Father, a Saviour, and an Inspirer; in a word, their hearts
and minds demand the historic truth of the Bible--of the Old
Testament no less than of the New.
What I needed therefore, for my guidance, was a book which should
believe and confess all this, without condemning or ignoring free
criticism and its results; which should make use of that criticism
not to destroy but to build up; which employed a thorough knowledge
of the Old Testament history, the manners of the Jews, the
localities of the sacred events, to teach men not what might not be
in the Bible, but what was certainly therein; which dealt with the
Bible after the only fair and trustful method; that is, to consider
it at first according to the theory which it sets forth concerning
itself, before trying quite another theory of the commentator's own
invention; and which combined with a courageous determination to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that
Christian spirit of trust, reverence and piety, without which all
intellectual acuteness is but blindness and folly.
All this, and more, I found in your book, enforced with a genius
which needs no poor praise of mine; and I hailed its appearance at
such a crisis as a happy Providence, certain that it would be, what
I now know by experience it has been, a balm to many a wounded
spirit, and a check to many a wandering intellect, inclined, in the
rashness of youth, to throw away the truth it already had, for the
sake of theories which it hoped that it might possibly verify
hereafter.
With your book in my hand, I have tried to write a few plain
Sermons, telling plain people what they will find in the Pentateuch,
in spite of all present doubts, as their fathers found it before
them, and as (I trust) their children will find it after them, when
all this present whirlwind of controversy has past,
'As dust that lightly rises up,
And is lightly laid again.'
I have told them that they will find in the Bible, and in no other
ancient book, that living working God, whom their reason and
conscience demand; and that they will find that he is none other
than Jesus Christ our Lord. I have not apologised for or explained
away the so-called 'Anthropomorphism' of the Old Testament. On the
contrary, I have frankly accepted it, and even gloried in it as an
integral, and I believe invaluable element of Scripture. I have
deliberately ignored many questions of great interest and
difficulty, because I had no satisfactory solution of them to offer;
but I have said at the same time that those questions were
altogether unimportant, compared with those salient and fundamental
points of the Bible history on which I was preaching. And therefore
I have dared to bid my people relinquish Biblical criticism to those
who have time for it; and to say of it with me, as Abraham of the
planets, 'O my people, I am clear of all these things! I turn
myself to him who made heaven and earth.'
I do not wish, believe me, to make you responsible for any statement
or opinion of mine. I am painfully conscious, on reviewing for the
Press Sermons which would never have been published save by special
request, how imperfect, poor, and weak they seem to me--how much
worse, then, they will appear to other people; how much more may be
said which I have not the wit to say! But the Bible can take care
of itself, I presume, without my help. All I can do is, to speak
what I think, as far as I see my way; to record the obligation
toward you under which I, with thousands more, now lie; and to
express my hope that we shall be always found together fellow-
workers in the cause of Truth, and that to you and in you may be
fulfilled those noble and tender words, in which you have spoken of
Samuel, and of those who work in Samuel's spirit:
'In later times, even in our own, many names spring to our
recollection of those who have trodden or (in different degrees,
some known, and some unknown) are treading the same thankless path
in the Church of Germany, in the Church of France, in the Church of
Russia, in the Church of England. Wherever they are, and whosoever
they may be, and howsoever they may be neglected or assailed, or
despised, they, like their great prototype and likeness in the
Jewish Church, are the silent healers who bind up the wounds of
their age in spite of itself; they are the good physicians who bind
together the dislocated bones of a disjointed time; they are the
reconcilers who turn the hearts of the children to the fathers, or
of the fathers to the children. They have but little praise and
reward from the partisans who are loud in indiscriminate censure and
applause. But, like Samuel, they have a far higher reward, in the
Davids who are silently strengthened and nurtured by them in Naioth
of Ramah--in the glories of a new age which shall be ushered in
peacefully and happily after they have been laid in the grave.' {0b}
That such, my dear Stanley, may be your work and your destiny, is
the earnest hope of
Yours affectionately,
C. KINGSLEY.
EVERSLEY RECTORY,
July 1, 1863.