WE are told that we have in our possession the inspired will of God. What
is meant by the word "inspired" is not exactly known; but whatever else
it may mean, certainly it means that the "inspired" must be the true. If
it is true, there is, in fact, no need of its being inspired--the truth
will take care of itself.
The church is forced to say that the Bible differs from all other books;
it is forced to say that it contains the actual will of God. Let us then
see what inspiration really is. A man looks at the sea, and the sea
says something to him. It makes an impression upon his mind. It awakens
memory, and this impression depends upon the man's experience--upon
his intellectual capacity. Another looks upon the same sea. He has a
different brain; he has had a different experience. The sea may speak
to him of joy, to the other of grief and tears. The sea cannot tell the
same thing to any two human beings, because no two human beings have had
the same experience.
A year ago, while the cars were going from Boston to Gloucester, we
passed through Manchester. As the cars stopped, a lady sitting opposite,
speaking to her husband, looking out of the window and catching, for the
first time, a view of the sea, cried out, "Is it not beautiful!" and the
husband replied, "I'll bet you could dig clams right here!"
Another, standing upon the shore, listening to what the great Greek
tragedian called "the multitudinous laughter of the sea," may say: Every
drop has visited all the shores of the earth; every one has been frozen
in the vast and icy North; every one has fallen in snow, has been
whirled by storms around mountain peaks; every one has been kissed to
vapor by the sun; every one has worn the seven-hued garment of light;
every one has fallen in pleasant rain, gurgled from springs and laughed
in brooks while lovers wooed upon the banks, and every one has rushed
with mighty rivers back to the sea's embrace. Everything in nature tells
a different story to all eyes that see and to all ears that hear.
Once in my life, and once only, I heard Horace Greeley deliver a
lecture. I think its title was, "Across the Continent." At last he
reached the mammoth trees of California, and I thought "Here is an
opportunity for the old man to indulge his fancy. Here are trees that
have outlived a thousand human governments. There are limbs above his
head older than the pyramids. While man was emerging from barbarism
to something like civilization, these trees were growing. Older than
history, every one appeared to be a memory, a witness, and a prophecy.
The same wind that filled the sails of the Argonauts had swayed these
trees." But these trees said nothing of this kind to Mr. Greeley. Upon
these subjects not a word was told to him. Instead, he took his pencil,
and after figuring awhile, remarked: "One of these trees, sawed into
inch-boards, would make more than three hundred thousand feet of
lumber."
I was once riding on the cars in Illinois. There had been a violent
thunder-storm. The rain had ceased, the sun was going down. The
great clouds had floated toward the west, and there they assumed most
wonderful architectural shapes. There were temples and palaces domed
and turreted, and they were touched with silver, with amethyst and gold.
They looked like the homes of the Titans, or the palaces of the gods.
A man was sitting near me. I touched him and said, "Did you ever see
anything so beautiful!" He looked out. He saw nothing of the cloud,
nothing of the sun, nothing of the color; he saw only the country and
replied, "Yes, it is beautiful; I always did like rolling land." On
another occasion I was riding in a stage. There had been a snow, and
after the snow a sleet, and all the trees were bent, and all the boughs
were arched. Every fence, every log cabin had been transfigured, touched
with a glory almost beyond this world. The great fields were a pure and
perfect white; the forests, drooping beneath their load of gems, made
wonderful caves, from which one almost expected to see troops of fairies
come. The whole world looked like a bride, jewelled from head to foot.
A German on the back seat, hearing our talk, and our exclamations of
wonder leaned forward, looked out of the stage window and said: "Yes, it
looks like a clean table cloth!"
So, when we look upon a flower, a painting, a statue, a star, or a
violet, the more we know, the more we have experienced, the more we
have thought, the more we remember, the more the statue, the star,
the painting, the violet has to tell. Nature says to me all that I am
capable of understanding--gives all that I can receive.
As with star, or flower, or sea, so with a book. A man reads
Shakespeare. What does he get from him? All that he has the mind to
understand. He gets his little cup full. Let another read him who knows
nothing of the drama, nothing of the impersonations of passion, and what
does he get? Almost nothing. Shakespeare has a different story for each
reader. He is a world in which each recognizes his acquaintances--he may
know a few, he may know all.
The impression that nature makes upon the mind, the stories told by sea
and star and flower, must be the natural food of thought. Leaving out
for the moment the impression gained from ancestors, the hereditary
fears and drifts and trends--the natural food of thought must be the
impression made upon the brain by coming in contact through the medium
of the five senses with what we call the outward world. The brain is
natural. Its food is natural. The result, thought, must be natural. The
supernatural can be constructed with no material except the natural. Of
the supernatural we can have no conception. Thought may be deformed, and
the thought of one may be strange to, and denominated as unnatural
by, another; but it cannot be supernatural. It may be weak, it may be
insane, but it is not supernatural. Above the natural man cannot rise,
even with the aid of fancy's wings. There can can be deformed ideas,
as there are deformed persons. There can be religions monstrous and
misshapen, but they must be naturally produced. Some people have ideas
about what they are pleased to call the supernatural; but what they
call the supernatural is simply the deformed. The world is to each man
according to each man. It takes the world as it really is and that man
to make that man's world, and that man's world cannot exist without that
man.
You may ask, and what of all this? I reply, as with everything in
nature, so with the Bible. It has a different story for each reader. Is
then the Bible a different book to every human being who reads it? It
is. Can God then, through the Bible, make the same revelation to two
persons? He cannot. Why? Because the man who reads it is the man who
inspires. Inspiration is in the man, as well as in the book. God should
have inspired readers as well as writers.
You may reply: "God knew that his book would be understood differently
by each one, and that he really intended that it should be understood as
it is understood by each." If this is so, then my understanding of the
Bible is the real revelation to me. If this is so, I have no right to
take the understanding of another. I must take the revelation made to me
through my understanding, and by that revelation I must stand. Suppose
then, that I do read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through
I am compelled to say, "The book is not true." If this is the honest
result, then you are compelled to say, either that God has made no
revelation to me, or that the revelation that it is not true, is the
revelation made to me, and by which I am bound. If the book and my brain
are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the
book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book
to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book.
The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who
reads. There was a time when its geology, its astronomy, its natural
history, were inspired. That time has passed. There was a time when
its morality satisfied the men who ruled mankind. That time has passed.
There was a time when the tyrant regarded its laws as good; when the
master believed in its liberty; when strength gloried in its passages;
but these laws never satisfied the oppressed, they were never quoted by
the slave.
We have a sacred book, an inspired Bible, and I am told that this book
was written by the same being who made every star, and who peopled
infinite space with infinite worlds. I am also told that God created
man, and that man is totally depraved. It has always seemed to me that
an infinite being has no right to make imperfect things. I may be
mistaken; but this is the only planet I have ever been on; I live in
what might be called one of the rural districts of this universe,
consequently I may be mistaken; I simply give the best and largest
thought I have.