violent. In the Lower House Archdeacon Denison insisted on the greatest
severity, as he said, "for the sake of the young who are tainted, and
corrupted, and thrust almost to hell by the action of this book." At
another time the same eminent churchman declared: "Of all books in any
language which I ever laid my hands on, this is incomparably the worst;
it contains all the poison which is to be found in Tom Paine's Age of
Reason, while it has the additional disadvantage of having been written
by clergymen."
Hysterical as all this was, the Upper House was little more
self-contained. Both Tait and Thirlwall, trying to make some headway
against the swelling tide, were for a time beaten back by Wilberforce,
who insisted on the duty of the Church to clear itself publicly from
complicity with men who, as he said, "gave up God's Word, Creation,
redemption, and the work of the Holy Ghost."
The matter was brought to a curious issue by two prosecutions--one
against the Rev. Dr. Williams by the Bishop of Salisbury, the other
against the Rev. Mr. Wilson by one of his clerical brethren. The first
result was that both these authors were sentenced to suspension from
their offices for a year. At this the two condemned clergymen appealed
to the Queen in Council. Upon the judicial committee to try the case in
last resort sat the lord chancellor, the two archbishops, and the Bishop
of London; and one occurrence now brought into especial relief the power
of the older theological reasoning and ecclesiastical zeal to close
the minds of the best of men to the simplest principles of right and
justice. Among the men of his time most deservedly honoured for lofty
character, thorough scholarship, and keen perception of right and
justice was Dr. Pusey. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that
he would have gone to the stake sooner than knowingly countenance wrong
or injustice; and yet we find him at this time writing a series of
long and earnest letters to the Bishop of London, who, as a judge, was
hearing this case, which involved the livelihood and even the good name
of the men on trial, pointing out to the bishop the evil consequences
which must follow should the authors of Essays and Reviews be acquitted,
and virtually beseeching the judges, on grounds of expediency, to
convict them. Happily, Bishop Tait was too just a man to be thrown off
his bearings by appeals such as this.
The decision of the court, as finally rendered by the lord chancellor,
virtually declared it to be no part of the duty of the tribunal to
pronounce any opinion upon the book; that the court only had to do with
certain extracts which had been presented. Among these was one adduced
in support of a charge against Mr. Wilson--that he denied the doctrine
of eternal punishment. On this the court decided that it did "not find
in the formularies of the English Church any such distinct declaration
upon the subject as to require it to punish the expression of a hope
by a clergyman that even the ultimate pardon of the wicked who are
condemned in the day of judgment may be consistent with the will of
Almighty God." While the archbishops dissented from this judgment,
Bishop Tait united in it with the lord chancellor and the lay judges.
And now the panic broke out more severely than ever. Confusion became
worse confounded. The earnest-minded insisted that the tribunal had
virtually approved Essays and Reviews; the cynical remarked that it had
"dismissed hell with costs." An alliance was made at once between
the more zealous High and Low Church men, and Oxford became its
headquarters: Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon Denison were among the leaders,
and an impassioned declaration was posted to every clergyman in England
and Ireland, with a letter begging him, "for the love of God," to sign
it. Thus it was that in a very short time eleven thousand signatures
were obtained. Besides this, deputations claiming to represent one
hundred and thirty-seven thousand laymen waited on the archbishops
to thank them for dissenting from the judgment. The Convocation of
Canterbury also plunged into the fray, Bishop Wilberforce being the
champion of the older orthodoxy, and Bishop Tait of the new. Caustic
was the speech made by Bishop Thirlwall, in which he declared that he
considered the eleven thousand names, headed by that of Pusey, attached
to the Oxford declaration "in the light of a row of figures preceded
by a decimal point, so that, however far the series may be advanced, it
never can rise to the value of a single unit."
In spite of all that could be done, the act of condemnation was carried
in Convocation.
The last main echo of this whole struggle against the newer mode of
interpretation was heard when the chancellor, referring to the matter
in the House of Lords, characterized the ecclesiastical act as "simply a
series of well-lubricated terms--a sentence so oily and saponaceous that
no one can grasp it; like an eel, it slips through your fingers, and is
simply nothing."
The word "saponaceous" necessarily elicited a bitter retort from Bishop
Wilberforce; but perhaps the most valuable judgment on the whole
matter was rendered by Bishop Tait, who declared, "These things have
so effectually frightened the clergy that I think there is scarcely a
bishop on the bench, unless it be the Bishop of St. David's (Thirlwall),
that is not useless for the purpose of preventing the widespread
alienation of intelligent men."
During the whole controversy, and for some time afterward, the press was
burdened with replies, ponderous and pithy, lurid and vapid, vitriolic
and unctuous, but in the main bearing the inevitable characteristics of
pleas for inherited opinions stimulated by ample endowments.
The authors of the book seemed for a time likely to be swept out of
the Church. One of the least daring but most eminent, finding himself
apparently forsaken, seemed, though a man of very tough fibre, about to
die of a broken heart; but sturdy English sense at last prevailed. The
storm passed, and afterward came the still, small voice. Really sound
thinkers throughout England, especially those who held no briefs for
conventional orthodoxy, recognised the service rendered by the book. It
was found that, after all, there existed even among churchmen a great
mass of public opinion in favour of giving a full hearing to the
reverent expression of honest thought, and inclined to distrust any
cause which subjected fair play to zeal.
The authors of the work not only remained in the Church of England, but
some of them have since represented the broader views, though not always
with their early courage, in the highest and most influential positions
in the Anglican Church.(481)
(481) For the origin of Essays and Reviews, see Edinburgh Review, April,
1861, p. 463. For the reception of the book, see the Westminster Review,
October, 1860. For the attack on it by Bishop Wilberforce, see his
article in the Quarterly Review, January, 1861; for additional facts,
Edinburgh Review, April, 1861, pp. 461 et seq. For action on the book
by Convocation, see Dublin Review, May, 1861, citing Jelf et al.;
also Davidson's Life of Archbishop Tate, vol. i, chap. xii. For the
Archepiscopal Letter, see Dublin Review, as above; also Life of Bishop
Wilberforce, by his son, London, 1882, vol. iii, pp. 4,5; it is there
stated that Wilberforce drew upon the letter. For curious inside views
of the Essays and Reviews controversy, including the course of Bishop
Hampden, Tait, et al., see Life of Bishop Wilberforce, by his son, as
above, pp. 3-11; also pp. 141-149. For the denunciation of the present
Bishop of London (Temple) as a "leper," etc., see ibid., pp. 319, 320.
For general treatment of Temple, see Fraser's Magazine, December, 1869.
For very interesting correspondence, see Davidson's Life of Archbishop
Tait, as above. For Archdeacon Denison's speeches, see ibid, vol. i,
p. 302. For Dr. Pusey's letter to Bishop Tait, urging conviction of the
Essayists and Reviewers, ibid, p. 314. For the striking letters of
Dr. Temple, ibid., pp. 290 et seq.; also The Life and Letters of Dean
Stanley. For replies, see Charge of the Bishop of Oxford, 1863;
also Replies to Essays and Reviews, Parker, London, with preface by
Wilberforce; also Aids to Faith, edited by the Bishop of Gloucester,
London, 1861; also those by Jelf, Burgon, et al. For the legal
proceedings, see Quarterly Review, April, 1864; also Davidson, as above.
For Bishop Thirlwall's speech, see Chronicle of Convocation, quoted in
Life of Tait, vol. i, p. 320. For Tait's tribute to Thirlwall, see
Life of Tait, vol. i, p. 325. For a remarkable able review, and in most
charming form, of the ideas of Bishop Wilberforce and Lord Chancellor
Westbury, see H. D. Traill, The New Lucian, first dialogue. For the
cynical phrase referred to, see Nash, Life of Lord Westbury, vol. ii, p.
78, where the noted epitaph is given, as follows:
"RICHARD BARON WESTBURY
Lord High Chancellor of England,
He was an eminent Christian,
An energetic and merciful Statesman,
And a still more eminent and merciful Judge.
During his three years' tenure of office
He abolished the ancient method of conveying land,
The time-honoured institution of the Insolvent's Court, And
The Eternity of Punishment.
Toward the close of his early career,
In the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, He dismissed Hell with costs,
And took away from the Orthodox members of the Church of England
Their last hope of everlasting damnation."
IV. THE CLOSING STRUGGLE.
The storm aroused by Essays and Reviews had not yet subsided when a far
more serious tempest burst upon the English theological world.
In 1862 appeared a work entitled The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua
Critically Examined its author being Colenso, Anglican Bishop of Natal,
in South Africa. He had formerly been highly esteemed as fellow and
tutor at Cambridge, master at Harrow, author of various valuable
text-books in mathematics; and as long as he exercised his powers within
the limits of popular orthodoxy he was evidently in the way to the
highest positions in the Church: but he chose another path. His
treatment of his subject was reverent, but he had gradually come to
those conclusions, then so daring, now so widespread among Christian
scholars, that the Pentateuch, with much valuable historical matter,
contains much that is unhistorical; that a large portion of it was
the work of a comparatively late period in Jewish history; that many
passages in Deuteronomy could only have been written after the Jews
settled in Canaan; that the Mosaic law was not in force before the
captivity; that the books of Chronicles were clearly written as an
afterthought, to enforce the views of the priestly caste; and that in
all the books there is much that is mythical and legendary.
Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced this work of a
churchman relegated to the most petty of bishoprics in one of the most
remote corners of the world, as a proof "that the problems of biblical
criticism can no longer be suppressed; that they are in the air of our
time, so that theology could not escape them even if it took the wings
of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea."
The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused
horror. Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical arguments,
and among them those which showed that an army of six hundred thousand
men could not have been mobilized in a single night; that three millions
of people, with their flocks and herds, could neither have obtained food
on so small and arid a desert as that over which they were said to have
wandered during forty years, nor water from a single well; and that
the butchery of two hundred thousand Midianites by twelve thousand
Israelites, "exceeding infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore,
had happily only been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the
scoffer in him. While preserving his own independence, he had kept in
touch with the most earnest thought both among European scholars and in
the little flock intrusted to his care. He evidently remembered what had
resulted from the attempt to hold the working classes in the towns of
France, Germany, and Italy to outworn beliefs; he had found even the
Zulus, whom he thought to convert, suspicious of the legendary features
of the Old Testament, and with his clear practical mind he realized the
danger which threatened the English Church and Christianity--the danger
of tying its religion and morality to interpretations and conceptions of
Scripture more and more widely seen and felt to be contrary to facts. He
saw the especial peril of sham explanations, of covering up facts which
must soon be known, and which, when revealed, must inevitably bring
the plain people of England to regard their teachers, even the most
deserving, as "solemnly constituted impostors"--ecclesiastics whose
tenure depends on assertions which they know to be untrue. Therefore it
was that, when his catechumens questioned him regarding some of the Old
Testament legends, the bishop determined to tell the truth. He says: "My
heart answered in the words of the prophet, 'Shall a man speak lies in
the name of the Lord?' I determined not to do so."
But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first.
The outcry against the work was deafening: churchmen and dissenters
rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison, chairman of the
committee of Convocation appointed to examine it, uttered a noisy
anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and a zealous colonial
bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, deposed and excommunicated
its author, declaring him "given over to Satan." On both sides of
the Atlantic the press groaned with "answers," some of these being
especially injurious to the cause they were intended to serve, and none
more so than sundry efforts by the bishops themselves. One of the points
upon which they attacked him was his assertion that the reference in
Leviticus to the hare chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this
Prof. Hitzig, of Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time,
remarked: "Your bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock of
Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus
is really the hare;... every zoologist knows that it does not chew the
cud."(482)
(482) For the citation referred to, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iv,
chap. ii. For the passages referred to as provoking especial wrath, see
Colenso, Lectures on the Pentateuch and the Moabite Stone, 1876, p. 217.
For the episode regarding the hare chewing the cud, see Cox, Life of
Colenso, vol. i, p. 240. The following epigram went the rounds:
"The bishops all have sworn to shed their blood To prove 'tis true
that the hare doth chew the cud. O bishops, doctors, and divines,
beware--Weak is the faith that hangs upon a HAIR!"
On Colenso's return to Natal, where many of the clergy and laity who
felt grateful for his years of devotion to them received him with signs
of affection, an attempt was made to ruin these clergymen by depriving
them of their little stipends, and to terrify the simple-minded laity by
threatening them with the same "greater excommunication" which had been
inflicted upon their bishop. To make the meaning of this more evident,
the vicar-general of the Bishop of Cape Town met Colenso at the door of
his own cathedral, and solemnly bade him "depart from the house of
God as one who has been handed over to the Evil One." The sentence of
excommunication was read before the assembled faithful, and they were
enjoined to treat their bishop as "a heathen man and a publican." But
these and a long series of other persecutions created a reaction in his
favour.
There remained to Colenso one bulwark which his enemies found stronger
than they had imagined--the British courts of justice. The greatest
efforts were now made to gain the day before these courts, to humiliate
Colenso, and to reduce to beggary the clergy who remained faithful to
him; and it is worthy of note that one of the leaders in preparing the
legal plea of the com mittee against him was Mr. Gladstone.
But this bulwark proved impregnable: both the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's favour. Not only
were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him of his salary, but their
excommunication of him was made null and void; it became, indeed, a
subject of ridicule, and even a man so nurtured in religious sentiment
as John Keble confessed and lamented that the English people no longer
believed in excommunication. The bitterness of the defeated found vent
in the utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had excommunicated
Colenso--Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town"--who denounced the
judgment as "awful and profane," and the Privy Council as "a
masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the English Church." Even
Wilberforce, careful as he was to avoid attacking anything established,
alluded with deep regret to "the devotion of the English people to the
law in matters of this sort."
Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence of the
attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England and America,
was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and various dissenting
bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains were taken to root out
his reputation: it was declared that he had merely stolen the ideas
of rationalists on the Continent by wholesale, and peddled them out in
England at retail; the fact being that, while he used all the sources of
information at his command, and was large-minded enough to put himself
into relations with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he
was singularly independent in his judgment, and that his investigations
were of lasting value in modifying Continental thought. Kuenen, the most
distinguished of all his contemporaries in this field, modified, as
he himself declared, one of his own leading theories after reading
Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less
eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English scholar for
original suggestions.(483)
(483) For interesting details of the Colenso persecution, see Davidson's
Life of Tait, chaps. xii and xiv; also the Lives of Bishops Wilberforce
and Gray. For full accounts of the struggle, see Cox, Life of Bishop
Colenso, London, 1888, especially vol. i, chap. v. For the dramatic
performance at Colenso's cathedral, see vol. ii, pp. 14-25. For a very
impartial and appreciative statement regarding Colenso's work, see
Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix. For
testimony to the originality and value of Colenso's contributions, see
Kuenen, Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, Introduction, pp. xx,
as follows: "Colenso directed my attention to difficulties which I had
hitherto failed to observe or adequately to reckon with; and as to
the opinion of his labours current in Germany, I need only say that,
inasmuch as Ewald, Bunsen, Bleek, and Knabel were every one of them
logically forced to revise their theories in the light of the English
bishop's research, there was small reason in the cry that his methods
were antiquated and his objections stale." For a very brief but
effective tribute to Colenso as an independent thinker whose merits are
now acknowledged by Continental scholars, see Pfleiderer, Development of
Theory, as above.
But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He was
socially ostracized--more completely even than Lyell had been after the
publication of his Principles of Geology thirty years before. Even
old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison Maurice, who, when
himself under the ban of heresy, had been defended by Colenso. Nor was
Maurice the only heretic who turned against him; Matthew Arnold attacked
him, and set up, as a true ideal of the work needed to improve the
English Church and people, of all books in the world, Spinoza's
Tractatus. A large part of the English populace was led to regard him
as an "infidel," a "traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean
being"; servants left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and
Sweetheart were let loose upon him"; and one of the favourite amusements
of the period among men of petty wit and no convictions was the devising
of light ribaldry against him.(484)
(484) One of the nonsense verses in vogue at the time summed up the
controversy as follows:
"A bishop there was of Natal,
Who had a Zulu for his pal;
Said the Zulu, 'My dear,
Don't you think Genesis queer?'
Which coverted my lord of Natal."
But verses quite as good appeared on the other side, one of them being
as follows:
"Is this, then, the great Colenso,
Who all the bishops offends so?
Said Sam of the Soap,
Bring fagots and rope,
For oh! he's got no friends, oh!"
For Matthew Arnold's attack on Colenso, see Macmillan's Magazine,
January, 1863. For Maurice, see the references already given.
In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of whom has
connected his name with it permanently.
First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of Oxford.
The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been honoured throughout
the world for his efforts in the suppression of the slave trade, he
had been rapidly advanced in the English Church, and was at this time
a prelate of wide influence. He was eloquent and diplomatic, witty and
amiable, always sure to be with his fellow-churchmen and polite society
against uncomfortable changes. Whether the struggle was against the
slave power in the United States, or the squirearchy in Great Britain,
or the evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views promulgated by the
Essayists and Reviewers, he was always the suave spokesman of those
who opposed every innovator and "besought him to depart out of their
coasts." Mingling in curious proportions a truly religious feeling with
care for his own advancement, his remarkable power in the pulpit gave
him great strength to carry out his purposes, and his charming facility
in being all things to all men, as well as his skill in evading the
consequences of his many mistakes, gained him the sobriquet of "Soapy
Sam." If such brethren of his in the episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn
and Tait might claim to be in the apostolic succession, Wilberforce
was no less surely in the succession from the most gifted and eminently
respectable Sadducees who held high preferment under Pontius Pilate.
By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached the
sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and one
passage in it may be cited as showing the preacher's gift of prophecy
both hortatory and predictive. Wilberforce then said to Colenso:
"You need boldness to risk all for God--to stand by the truth and its
supporters against men's threatenings and the devil's wrath;... you need
a patient meekness to bear the galling calumnies and false surmises
with which, if you are faithful, that same Satanic working, which, if it
could, would burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the
pens and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of
a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your
motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek
by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your powers of
service."(485)
(485) For the social ostracism of Colenso, see works already cited; also
Cox's Life of Colenso. For the passage from Wilberforce's sermon at the
consecration of Colenso, see Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, The Church of England
and the Teaching of Bishop Colenso. For Wilberforce's relations to the
Colenso case in general, see his Life, by his son, vol. iii, especially
pp. 113-126, 229-231. For Keble's avowal that no Englishman believes
in excommunication, ibid., p. 128. For a guarded statement of Dean
Stanley's opinion regarding Wilberforce and Newman, see a letter from
Dean Church to the Warden of Keble, in Life and Letters of Dean Church,
p. 293.
Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice his adviser became
the most untiring of his persecutors. While leaving to men like the
Metropolitan of Cape Town and Archdeacon Denison the noisy part of the
onslaught, Wilberforce was among those who were most zealous in devising
more effective measures.
But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance between the two
prelates. Colenso is seen more and more of all men as a righteous leader
in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from fatal entanglements with
an outworn system of interpretation; Wilberforce, as the remembrance
of his eloquence and of his personal charm dies away, and as the
revelations of his indiscreet biographers lay bare his modes of
procedure, is seen to have left, on the whole, the most disappointing
record made by any Anglican prelate during the nineteenth century.
But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of
England; for the second of the three who linked their names with that of
Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster.
His action during this whole persecution was an honour not only to the
Anglican Church but to humanity. For his own manhood and the exercise
of his own intellectual freedom he had cheerfully given up the high
preferment in the Church which had been easily within his grasp. To
him truth and justice were more than the decrees of a Convocation of
Canterbury or of a Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he
braved the storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to
last held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the most
critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.(486)
(486) For interesting testimony to Stanley's character, from a quarter
from whence it would have been least expected, see a reminiscence of
Lord Shaftesbury in the Life of Frances Power Cobbe, London and New
York, 1894. The late Bishop of Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks, whose
death was a bereavement to his country and to the Church universal, once
gave the present writer a vivid description of a scene witnessed by him
in the Convocation of Canterbury, when Stanley virtually withstood alone
the obstinate traditionalism of the whole body in the matter of the
Athanasian Creed. It is to be hoped that this account may be brought to
light among the letters written by Brooks at that time. See also Dean
Church's Life and Letters, p. 294, for a very important testimony.
The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England whose
names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall. He was undoubtedly
the foremost man in the Church of his time--the greatest ecclesiastical
statesman, the profoundest historical scholar, the theologian of
clearest vision in regard to the relations between the Church and his
epoch. Alone among his brother bishops at this period, he stood "four
square to all the winds that blew," as during all his life he stood
against all storms of clerical or popular unreason. He had his reward.
He was never advanced beyond a poor Welsh bishopric; but, though he
saw men wretchedly inferior constantly promoted beyond him, he never
flinched, never lost heart or hope, but bore steadily on, refusing to
hold a brief for lucrative injustice, and resisting to the last all
reaction and fanaticism, thus preserving not only his own self-respect
but the future respect of the English nation for the Church.
A few other leading churchmen were discreetly kind to Colenso, among
them Tait, who had now been made Archbishop of Canterbury; but, manly as
he was, he was somewhat more cautious in this matter than those who most
revere his memory could now wish.
In spite of these friends the clerical onslaught was for a time
effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was discredited and
virtually driven from his functions. But this enforced leisure simply
gave him more time to struggle for the protection of his native flock
against colonial rapacity and to continue his great work on the Bible.
His work produced its effect. It had much to do with arousing a new
generation of English, Scotch, and American scholars. While very many
of his minor statements have since been modified or rejected, his main
conclusion was seen more and more clearly to be true. Reverently and in
the deepest love for Christianity he had made the unhistorical character
of the Pentateuch clear as noonday. Henceforth the crushing weight of
the old interpretation upon science and morality and religion steadily
and rapidly grew less and less. That a new epoch had come was evident,
and out of many proofs of this we may note two of the most striking.
For many years the Bampton Lectures at Oxford had been considered as
adding steadily and strongly to the bulwarks of the old orthodoxy. If
now and then orthodoxy had appeared in danger from such additions to the
series as those made by Dr. Hampden, these lectures had been, as a rule,
saturated with the older traditions of the Anglican Church. But now
there was an evident change. The departures from the old paths were many
and striking, until at last, in 1893, came the lectures on Inspiration
by the Rev. Dr. Sanday, Ireland Professor of Exegesis in the University
of Oxford. In these, concessions were made to the newer criticism, which
at an earlier time would have driven the lecturer not only out of the
Church but out of any decent position in society; for Prof. Sanday
not only gave up a vast mass of other ideas which the great body
of churchmen had regarded as fundamental, but accepted a number of
conclusions established by the newer criticism. He declared that Kuenen
and Wellhausen had mapped out, on the whole rightly, the main stages of
development in the history of Hebrew literature; he incorporated with
approval the work of other eminent heretics; he acknowledged that very
many statements in the Pentateuch show "the naive ideas and usages of
a primitive age." But, most important of all, he gave up the whole
question in regard to the book of Daniel. Up to a time then very recent,
the early authorship and predictive character of the book of Daniel were
things which no one was allowed for a moment to dispute. Pusey, as we
have seen, had proved to the controlling parties in the English Church
that Christianity must stand or fall with the traditional view of this
book; and now, within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in his
own university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had
so often insisted upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the older
view, this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of divinity,
showing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that the critical
view had won the day; that the name of Daniel is only assumed; that the
book is in no sense predictive, but was written, mainly at least, after
the events it describes; that "its author lived at the time of the
Maccabean struggle"; that it is very inaccurate even in the simple facts
which it cites; and hence that all the vast fabric erected upon its
predictive character is baseless.
But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even more
striking.
To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even every germ
that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a special movement
was begun, of which the most important part was the establishment,
at the University of Oxford, of a college which should bring the old
opinion with crushing force against the new thought, and should train up
a body of young men by feeding them upon the utterances of the fathers,
of the medieval doctors, and of the apologists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; and should keep them in happy ignorance of the
reforming spirit of the sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the
nineteenth century.
The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet most widely
beloved among high churchmen; large endowments flowed in upon it; a
showy chapel was erected in accordance throughout with the strictest
rules of medieval ecclesiology. As if to strike the keynote of the
thought to be fostered in the new institution, one of the most beautiful
of pseudo-medieval pictures was given the place of honour in its hall;
and the college, lofty and gaudy, loomed high above the neighbouring
modest abode of Oxford science. Kuenen might be victorious in Holland,
and Wellhausen in Germany, and Robertson Smith in Scotland--even
Professors Driver, Sanday, and Cheyne might succeed Dr. Pusey as
expounders of the Old Testament at Oxford--but Keble College, rejoicing
in the favour of a multitude of leaders in the Church, including Mr.
Gladstone, seemed an inexpugnable fortress of the older thought.
But in 1889 appeared the book of essays entitled Lux Mundi, among whose
leading authors were men closely connected with Keble College and
with the movement which had created it. This work gave up entirely the
tradition that the narrative in Genesis is a historical record, and
admitted that all accounts in the Hebrew Scriptures of events before the
time of Abraham are mythical and legendary; it conceded that the books
ascribed to Moses and Joshua were made up mainly of three documents
representing different periods, and one of them the late period of the
exile; that "there is a considerable idealizing element in Old Testament
history"; that "the books of Chronicles show an idealizing of history"
and "a reading back into past records of a ritual development which
is really later," and that prophecy is not necessarily
predictive--"prophetic inspiration being consistent with erroneous
anticipations." Again a shudder went through the upholders of tradition
in the Church, and here and there threats were heard; but the Essays
and Reviews fiasco and the Colenso catastrophe were still in vivid
remembrance. Good sense prevailed: Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury,
instead of prosecuting the authors, himself asked the famous question,
"May not the Holy Spirit make use of myth and legend?" and the
Government, not long afterward, promoted one of these authors to a
bishopric.(487)
(487) Of Pusey's extreme devotion to his view of the book of Daniel,
there is a curious evidence in a letter to Stanley in the second volume
of the latter's Life and Letters. For the views referred to in Lux
Mundi, see pp. 345-357; also, on the general subject, Bishop Ellicott's
Christus Comprobator.
In the sister university the same tendency was seen. Robertson Smith,
who had been driven out of his high position in the Free Church of
Scotland on account of his work in scriptural research, was welcomed
into a professorship at Cambridge, and other men, no less loyal to the
new truths, were given places of controlling influence in shaping the
thought of the new generation.
Nor did the warfare against biblical science produce any different
results among the dissenters of England. In 1862 Samuel Davidson, a
professor in the Congregational College at Manchester, published his
Introduction to the Old Testament. Independently of the contemporary
writers of Essays and Reviews, he had arrived in a general way at
conclusions much like theirs, and he presented the newer view with
fearless honesty, admitting that the same research must be applied
to these as to other Oriental sacred books, and that such research
establishes the fact that all alike contain legendary and mythical
elements. A storm was at once aroused; certain denominational papers
took up the matter, and Davidson was driven from his professorial chair;
but he laboured bravely on, and others followed to take up his work,
until the ideas which he had advocated were fully considered.
So, too, in Scotland the work of Robertson Smith was continued even
after he had been driven into England; and, as votaries of the older
thought passed away, men of ideas akin to his were gradually elected
into chairs of biblical criticism and interpretation. Wellhausen's great
work, which Smith had introduced in English form, proved a power both in
England and Scotland, and the articles upon various books of Scripture
and scriptural subjects generally, in the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, having been prepared mainly by himself as
editor or put into the hands of others representing the recent critical
research, this very important work of reference, which had been in
previous editions so timid, was now arrayed on the side of the newer
thought, insuring its due consideration wherever the English language is
spoken.
In France the same tendency was seen, though with striking variations
from the course of events in other countries--variations due to the
very different conditions under which biblical students in France
were obliged to work. Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the
orthodoxy of Bossuet, stiffly opposing the letter of Scripture to
every step in the advance of science, had only yielded in a very slight
degree. But then came an event ushering in a new epoch. At that time
Jules Simon, afterward so eminent as an author, academician, and
statesman, was quietly discharging the duties of a professorship, when
there was brought him the visiting card of a stranger bearing the
name of "Ernest Renan, Student at St. Sulpice." Admitted to M. Simon's
library, Renan told his story. As a theological student he had devoted
himself most earnestly, even before he entered the seminary, to the
study of Hebrew and the Semitic languages, and he was now obliged,
during the lectures on biblical literature at St. Sulpice, to hear the
reverend professor make frequent comments, based on the Vulgate, but
absolutely disproved by Renan's own knowledge of Hebrew. On Renan's
questioning any interpretation of the lecturer, the latter was wont
to rejoin: "Monsieur, do you presume to deny the authority of the
Vulgate--the translation by St. Jerome, sanctioned by the Holy Ghost and
the Church? You will at once go into the chapel and say 'Hail Mary' for
an hour before the image of the Blessed Virgin."
"But," said Renan to Jules Simon, "this has now become very serious; it
happens nearly every day, and, MON DIEU! Monsieur, I can not spend ALL
my time in saying, Hail Mary, before the statue of the Virgin." The
result was a warm personal attachment between Simon and Renan; both were
Bretons, educated in the midst of the most orthodox influences, and both
had unwillingly broken away from them.
Renan was now emancipated, and pursued his studies with such effect that
he was made professor at the College de France. His Life of Jesus, and
other books showing the same spirit, brought a tempest upon him which
drove him from his professorship and brought great hardships upon him
for many years. But his genius carried the day, and, to the honour of
the French Republic, he was restored to the position from which the
Empire had driven him. From his pen finally appeared the Histoire du
Peuple Israel, in which scholarship broad, though at times inaccurate in
minor details, was supplemented by an exquisite acuteness and a poetic
insight which far more than made good any of those lesser errors which a
German student would have avoided. At his death, in October, 1892, this
monumental work had been finished. In clearness and beauty of style it
has never been approached by any other treatise on this or any kindred
subject: it is a work of genius; and its profound insight into all that
is of importance in the great subjects which he treated will doubtless
cause it to hold a permanent place in the literature not only of the
Latin nations but of the world.
An interesting light is thrown over the history of advancing thought at
the end of the nineteenth century by the fact that this most detested of
heresiarchs was summoned to receive the highest of academic honours
at the university which for ages had been regarded as a stronghold of
Presbyterian orthodoxy in Great Britain.
In France the anathemas lavished upon him by Church authorities during
his life, their denial to him of Christian burial, and their refusal
to allow him a grave in the place he most loved, only increased popular
affection for him during his last years and deepened the general
mourning at his death.(488)
(488) For a remarkably just summary of Renan's work, eminently judicial
and at the same time deeply appreciative, see the Rev. Dr. Pfleiderer,
professor at the University of Berlin, Development of Theology in
Germany, pp. 241, 242, note. The facts as to the early relations between
Renan and Jules Simon were told in 1878 by the latter to the present
writer at considerable length and with many interesting details not here
given. The writer was also present at the public funeral of the great
scholar, and can testify of his own knowledge to the deep and hearty
evidences of gratitude and respect then paid to Renan, not merely by
eminent orators and scholars, but by the people at large. As to the
refusal of the place of burial that Renan especially chose, see his own
Souvenirs, in which he laments the inevitable exclusion of his grave
from the site which he most loved. As to calumnies, one masterpiece,
very widely spread, through the zeal of clerical journals, was that
Renan received enormous sums from the Rothschilds for attacking
Christianity.
In spite of all resistance, the desire for more light upon the sacred
books penetrated the older Church from every side.
In Germany, toward the close of the eighteenth century, Jahn, Catholic
professor at Vienna, had ventured, in an Introduction to Old Testament
Study, to class Job, Jonah, and Tobit below other canonical books,
and had only escaped serious difficulties by ample amends in a second
edition.
Early in the nineteenth century, Herbst, Catholic professor at Tubingen,
had endeavoured in a similar Introduction to bring modern research to
bear on the older view; but the Church authorities took care to have all
passages really giving any new light skilfully and speedily edited out
of the book.
Later still, Movers, professor at Breslau, showed remarkable gifts
for Old Testament research, and much was expected of him; but his
ecclesiastical superiors quietly prevented his publishing any extended
work.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century much the same pressure
has continued in Catholic Germany. Strong scholars have very generally
been drawn into the position of "apologists" or "reconcilers," and, when
found intractable, they have been driven out of the Church.
The same general policy had been evident in France and Italy, but toward
the last decade of the century it was seen by the more clear-sighted
supporters of the older Church in those countries that the multifarious
"refutations" and explosive attacks upon Renan and his teachings had
accomplished nothing; that even special services of atonement for his
sin, like the famous "Triduo" at Florence, only drew a few women, and
provoked ridicule among the public at large; that throwing him out of
his professorship and calumniating him had but increased his influence;
and that his brilliant intuitions, added to the careful researches of
German and English scholars, had brought the thinking world beyond
the reach of the old methods of hiding troublesome truths and crushing
persistent truth-tellers.
Therefore it was that about 1890 a body of earnest Roman Catholic
scholars began very cautiously to examine and explain the biblical
text in the light of those results of the newer research which could no
longer be gainsaid.
Among these men were, in Italy, Canon Bartolo, Canon Berta, and Father
Savi, and in France Monseigneur d'Hulst, the Abbe Loisy, professor
at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most eminent of all,
Professor Lenormant, of the French Institute, whose researches
into biblical and other ancient history and literature had won him
distinction throughout the world. These men, while standing up manfully
for the Church, were obliged to allow that some of the conclusions of
modern biblical criticism were well founded. The result came rapidly.
The treatise of Bartolo and the great work of Lenormant were placed on
the Index; Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually
silenced; the Abbe Loisy was first deprived of his professorship, and
then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur d'Hulst was
summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.(489)
(489) For the frustration of attempts to admit light into scriptural
studies in Roman Catholic Germany, see Bleek, Old Testament, London,
1882, vol. i, pp. 19, 20. For the general statement regarding recent
suppression of modern biblical study in France and Italy, see an article
by a Roman Catholic author in the Contemporary Review, September, 1894,
p. 365. For the papal condemnations of Lenormant and Bartolo, see the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri, Leonis XIII,
P.M., etc., Rome, 1891; Appendices, July, 1890, and May, 1891. The
ghastly part of the record, as stated in this edition of the Index, is
that both these great scholars were forced to abjure their "errors" and
to acquiesce in the condemnation--Lenorment doing this on his deathbed.
The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of the
Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter by the
reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on The Study of Sacred Scripture.
Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last century,
there had sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually so competent
to discuss the whole subject. While, then, those devoted to the older
beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts would crush the whole brood
of biblical critics, votaries of the newer thought ventured to hope
that the encyclical might, in the language of one of them, prove "a
stupendous bridge spanning the broad abyss that now divides alleged
orthodoxy from established science."(490)
(490) For this statement, see an article in the Contemporary Review,
April, 1894, p. 576.
Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole, it is
a question whether the world at large may not congratulate itself upon
this papal utterance. The document, if not apostolic, won credit as
"statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist that there can be
no error of any sort in the sacred books; it even defended those parts
which Protestants count apocryphal as thoroughly as the remainder of
Scripture, and declared that the book of Tobit was not compiled of
man, but written by God. His Holiness naturally condemned the higher
criticism, but he dwelt at the same time on the necessity of the
most thorough study of the sacred Scriptures, and especially on the
importance of adjusting scriptural statements to scientific facts. This
utterance was admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation
by both sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of
view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope has
shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over the troubled
waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained from condemning any
of the greater results of modern critical study that the main English
defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father Clarke, did not hesitate
publicly to admit a multitude of such results--results, indeed, which
would shock not only Italian and Spanish Catholics, but many English
and American Protestants. According to this interpreter, the Pope had
no thought of denying the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the
plurality of sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship
of Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of St.
Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole encyclical, the
distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the power of the papacy at
any time to define out of existence any previous decisions which may
be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while
standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged
that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must be expected to be used
Orientally," and that "all these seventies and forties, as, for example,
when Absalom is said to have rebelled against David for forty years, can
not possibly be meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful
shock to some Protestant believers in plenary inspiration, he, while
advocating it as a dutiful Son of the Church, wove over it an exquisite
web with the declaration that "there is a human element in the Bible
pre-calculated for by the Divine."(491)
(491) For these admissions of Father Clarke, see his article The Papal
Encyclical on the Bible, in the Contemporary Review for July, 1894.
Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to be
grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances, which
perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the old and the
new than could have been framed by engineers more learned but less
astute. Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a Paul V nor an Urban VIII,
and is too wise to bring the Church into a position from which it can
only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges as those by which it
was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by such a tortuous policy as
that by which it writhed out of the old doctrine regarding the taking of
interest for money.
In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and Berta and
Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in which the Pope
issued this encyclical, there is every reason to hope that the path
has been paved over which the Church may gracefully recede from the old
system of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate the main
results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never had a better
opportunity to play at the game of "beggar my neighbour" and to drive
the older Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.
In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new went on.
In the middle years of the century the first adequate effort in behalf
of the newer conception of the sacred books was made by Theodore
Parker at Boston. A thinker brave and of the widest range,--a scholar
indefatigable and of the deepest sympathies with humanity,--a man called
by one of the most eminent scholars in the English Church "a religious
Titan," and by a distinguished French theologian "a prophet," he had
struggled on from the divinity school until at that time he was one
of the foremost biblical scholars, and preacher to the largest regular
congregation on the American continent. The great hall in Boston could
seat four thousand people, and at his regular discourses every part
of it was filled. In addition to his pastoral work he wielded a vast
influence as a platform speaker, especially in opposition to the
extension of slavery into the Territories of the United States, and as
a lecturer on a wide range of vital topics; and among those whom he most
profoundly influenced, both politically and religiously, was Abraham
Lincoln. During each year at that period he was heard discussing the
most important religious and political questions in all the greater
Northern cities; but his most lasting work was in throwing light upon
our sacred Scriptures, and in this he was one of the forerunners of
the movement now going on not only in the United States but throughout
Christendom. Even before he was fairly out of college his translation of
De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament made an impression on many
thoughtful men; his sermon in 1841 on The Transient and Permanent in
Christianity marked the beginning of his great individual career;
his speeches, his lectures, and especially his Discourse on Matters
pertaining to Religion, greatly extended his influence. His was a deeply
devotional nature, and his public prayers exercised by their touching
beauty a very strong religious influence upon his audiences. He had his
reward. Beautiful and noble as were his life and his life-work, he was
widely abhorred. On one occasion of public worship in one of the more
orthodox churches, news having been received that he was dangerously
ill, a prayer was openly made by one of the zealous brethren present
that this arch-enemy might be removed from earth. He was even driven out
from the Unitarian body. But he was none the less steadfast and bold,
and the great mass of men and women who thronged his audience room at
Boston and his lecture rooms in other cities spread his ideas. His fate
was pathetic. Full of faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his
labours, he retired to Italy, and died there at the darkest period in
the history of the United States--when slavery in the state and the
older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant.
The death of Moses within sight of the promised land seems the only
parallel to the death of Parker less than six months before the
publication of Essays and Reviews and the election of Abraham Lincoln to
the presidency, of the United States.(492)
(492) For the appellation "religious Titan" applied to Theodore Parker,
see a letter of Jowett, Master of Balliol, to Frances Power Cobbe, in
her Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 357, and for Reville's statement, ibid.,
p. 9. For a pathetic account of Parker's last hours at Florence, ibid.,
vol. i, pp. 10, 11. As to the influence of Theodore Parker on Lincoln,
see Rhodes's History of the United States, as above, vol. ii, p. 312.
For the statement regarding Parker's audiences and his power over them,
the present writer trusts to his own memory.
But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully aided by
the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost opponents. Nothing
during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean
religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of
Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery. Typical among examples
of this use were the arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man
whose noble character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence
in all branches of the American Protestant Church. While avowing his
personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible sanctioned
it. Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took the same ground;
and then came that tremendous rejoinder which echoed from heart to heart
throughout the Northern States: "The Bible sanctions slavery? So much
the worse for the Bible." Then was fulfilled that old saying of Bishop
Ulrich of Augsburg: "Press not the breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest
they yield blood rather than milk."(493)
(493) There is a curious reference to Bishop Hopkins's ideas on slavery
in Archbishop Tait's Life and Letters. For a succinct statement of the
biblical proslavery argument referred to, see Rhodes, as above, vol. i,
pp. 370 et seq.
Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting
Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was to
be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the foremost
scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the most conservative
of those whose opinions were entitled to weight had made concessions
showing the old ground to be untenable, there was fanatical opposition
to any change. The Syllabus of Errors put forth by Pius IX in 1864, as
well as certain other documents issued from the Vatican, had increased
the difficulties of this needed transition; and, while the more
able-minded Roman Catholic scholars skilfully explained away the
obstacles thus created, others published works insisting upon the most
extreme views as to the verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In
the Church of England various influential men took the same view. Dr.
Baylee, Principal of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture
"every scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its histories
and narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy. Its words
and phrases have a grammatical and philological accuracy, such as is
possessed by no human composition." In 1861 Dean Burgon preached in
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as follows: "No, sirs, the Bible is the
very utterance of the Eternal: as much God's own word as if high heaven
were open and we heard God speaking to us with human voice. Every
book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely. Inspiration is not a
difference of degree, but of kind. The Bible is filled to overflowing
with the Holy Spirit of God; the books of it and the words of it and the
very letters of it."
In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must either
receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny the
veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ as a
teacher of divine truth."
As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in the
Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral, used
in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that the authority of Christ
himself, and therefore of Christianity, must rest on the old view of
the Old Testament; that, since the founder of Christianity, in divinely
recorded utterances, alluded to the transformation of Lot's wife into a
pillar of salt, to Noah's ark and the Flood, and to the sojourn of
Jonah in the whale, the biblical account of these must be accepted as
historical, or that Christianity must be given up altogether.
In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the Chaldean
and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no argument could be
more fraught with peril to the interest which the gifted preacher sought
to serve.
In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to the
newer biblical studies were heard; and from America, especially from the
college at Princeton, came resounding echoes. As an example of many
may be quoted the statement by the eminent Dr. Hodge that the books
of Scripture "are, one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in
substance, and in form, wholly the work of God, conveying with absolute
accuracy and divine authority all that God meant to convey without human
additions and admixtures"; and that "infallibility and authority attach
as much to the verbal expression in which the revelation is made as to
the matter of the revelation itself."
But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant
Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took strong
hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as orthodox:
Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith, Moore, Haupt,
Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though most of them were
opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other authorities of
their respective churches, they were manfully supported by the more
intellectual clergy and laity. The greater universities of the country
ranged themselves on the side of these men; persecution but intrenched
them more firmly in the hearts of all intelligent well-wishers of
Christianity. The triumphs won by their opponents in assemblies, synods,
conventions, and conferences were really victories for the nominally
defeated, since they revealed to the world the fact that in each of
these bodies the strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought
which alone can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of
thinkers; no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have
been won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.
And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most powerful
aid to the new school of biblical research.
V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS.
While this struggle for the new truth was going on in various fields,
aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least expected.
The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in Assyria were supplemented
by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec,
Pinches, and others, and thus it was revealed more clearly than ever
before that as far back as the time assigned in Genesis to the creation
a great civilization was flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages,
probably two thousand years, before the scriptural date assigned to the
migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization
had bloomed forth in art, science, and literature; that the ancient
inscriptions recovered from the sites of this and kindred civilizations
presented the Hebrew sacred myths and legends in earlier forms--forms
long antedating those given in the Hebrew Scriptures; and that the
accounts of the Creation, the Tree of Life in Eden, the institution and
even the name of the Sabbath, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and much
else in the Pentateuch, were simply an evolution out of earlier Chaldean
myths and legends. So perfect was the proof of this that the most
eminent scholars in the foremost seats of Christian learning were
obliged to acknowledge it.(494)
(494) As to the revelations of the vast antiquity of Chaldean
civilization, and especially regarding the Nabonidos inscription, see
Records of the Past, vol. i, new series, first article, and especially
pp. 5, 6, where a translation of that inscription is given; also Hommel,
Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, introduction, in which, on page
12, an engraving of the Sargon cylinder is given; also, on the general
subject, especially pp. 116 et seq., 309 et seq.; also Meyer,
Geschichte des Alterthums, pp. 161-163; also Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of
Civilization, p. 555 and note.
For the earlier Chaldean forms of the Hebrew Creation accounts, Tree
of Life in Eden, Hebrew Sabbath, both the institution and the name, and
various other points of similar interest, see George Smith, Chaldean
Account of Genesis, throughout the work, especially p. 308 and chaps.
xvi, xvii; also Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier; also Schrader,
The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant,
Origines de l'Histoire; also Sayce, The Assyrian Story of Creation, in
Records of the Past, new series, vol. i. For a general statement as to
earlier sources of much in the Hebrew sacred origins, see Huxley, Essays
on Controverted Questions, English edition, p. 525.
The more general conclusions which were thus given to biblical criticism
were all the more impressive from the fact that they had been revealed
by various groups of earnest Christian scholars working on different
lines, by different methods, and in various parts of the world. Very
honourable was the full and frank testimony to these results given
in 1885 by the Rev. Francis Brown, a professor in the Presbyterian
Theological Seminary at New York. In his admirable though brief book on
Assyriology, starting with the declaration that "it is a great pity to
be afraid of facts," he showed how Assyrian research testifies in many
ways to the historical value of the Bible record; but at the same time
he freely allowed to Chaldean history an antiquity fatal to the sacred
chronology of the Hebrews. He also cast aside a mass of doubtful
apologetics, and dealt frankly with the fact that very many of the early
narratives in Genesis belong to the common stock of ancient tradition,
and, mentioning as an example the cuneiform inscriptions which record
a story of the Accadian king Sargon--how "he was born in retirement,
placed by his mother in a basket of rushes, launched on a river, rescued
and brought up by a stranger, after which he became king"--he did not
hesitate to remind his readers that Sargon lived a thousand years and
more before Moses; that this story was told of him several hundred years
before Moses was born; and that it was told of various other important
personages of antiquity. The professor dealt just as honestly with the
inscriptions which show sundry statements in the book of Daniel to be
unhistorical; candidly making admissions which but a short time before
would have filled orthodoxy with horror.
A few years later came another testimony even more striking. Early in
the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised abroad that
the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most eminent Assyriologist and
Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about to publish a work in which what
is known as the "higher criticism" was to be vigorously and probably
destructively dealt with in the light afforded by recent research among
the monuments of Assyria and Egypt. The book was looked for with eager
expectation by the supporters of the traditional view of Scripture; but,
when it appeared, the exultation of the traditionalists was speedily
changed to dismay. For Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity toward
sundry minor assumptions and assertions of biblical critics, confirmed
all their more important conclusions which properly fell within his
province. While his readers soon realized that these assumptions and
assertions of overzealous critics no more disproved the main results of
biblical criticism than the wild guesses of Kepler disproved the theory
of Copernicus, or the discoveries of Galileo, or even the great laws
which bear Kepler's own name, they found new mines sprung under some
of the most lofty fortresses of the old dogmatic theology. A few of the
statements of this champion of orthodoxy may be noted. He allowed that
the week of seven days and the Sabbath rest are of Babylonian origin;
indeed, that the very word "Sabbath" is Babylonian; that there are two
narratives of Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like
the two leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter were
undoubtedly drawn from the former; that the "garden of Eden" and its
mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldea in pre-Semitic
days; that the beliefs that woman was created out of man, and that
man by sin fell from a state of innocence, are drawn from very ancient
Chaldean-Babylonian texts; that Assyriology confirms the belief that the
book Genesis is a compilation; that portions of it are by no means so
old as the time of Moses; that the expression in our sacred book,
"The Lord smelled a sweet savour" at the sacrifice made by Noah, is
"identical with that of the Babylonian poet"; that "it is impossible to
believe that the language of the latter was not known to the biblical
writer" and that the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was drawn in
part from the old Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers. Finally, after a
multitude of other concessions, Prof. Sayce allowed that the book of
Jonah, so far from being the work of the prophet himself, can not have
been written until the Assyrian Empire was a thing of the past; that the
book of Daniel contains serious mistakes; that the so-called historical
chapters of that book so conflict with the monuments that the author
can not have been a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus; that
"the story of Belshazzar's fall is not historical"; that the Belshazzar
referred to in it as king, and as the son of Nehuchadnezzar, was not the
son of Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king; that "King Darius the Mede,"
who plays so great a part in the story, never existed; that the book
associates persons and events really many years apart, and that it must
have been written at a period far later than the time assigned in it for
its own origin.
As to the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted by a
chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity can explain
away. He also acknowledges that the book of Esther "contains many
exaggerations and improbabilities, and is simply founded upon one of
those same historical tales of which the Persian chronicles seem to have
been full." Great was the dissatisfaction of the traditionalists with
their expected champion; well might they repeat the words of Balak to
Balaam, "I called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast
altogether blessed them."(495)
(495) For Prof. Brown's discussion, see his Assyriology, its Use and
Abuse in Old Testament Study, New York, 1885, passim. For Prof. Sayce's
views, see The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, third edition,
London, 1894, and especially his own curious anticipation, in the first
lines of the preface, that he must fail to satisfy either side. For the
declaration that the "higher critic" with all his offences is no worse
than the orthodox "apologist," see p. 21. For the important admission
that the same criterion must be applied in researches into our own
sacred books as into others, and even into the mediaeval chronicles, see
p. 26. For justification of critical scepticism regarding the history
given in the book of Daniel, see pp. 27, 28, also chap. ix. For very
full and explicit statements, with proofs, that the "Sabbath," both in
name and nature, was derived by the Hebrews from the Chaldeans, see pp.
74 et seq. For a very full and fair acknowledgment of the "Babylonian
element in Genesis," see chap. iii, including the statement regarding
the statement in our sacred book, "The Lord smelled a sweet savour," at
the sacrifice made by Noah, etc., on p. 119. For an excellent summary of
the work, see Dr. Driver's article in the Contemporary Review for March,
1894. For a pungent but well-deserved rebuke of Prof. Sayce's recent
attempts to propitiate pious subscribers to his archaeological fund, see
Prof. A. A. Bevan, in the Contemporary Review for December, 1895. For
the inscription on the Assyrian tablets relating in detail the exposure
of King Sargon in a basket of rushes, his rescue and rule, see George
Smith, Chaldean account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, London, 1880, pp.
319, 320. For the frequent recurrence of the Sargon and Moses legend
in ancient folklore, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of History, p. 598 and
note. For various other points of similar interest, see ibid., passim,
especially chaps. xvi and xvii; also Jensen, Die Kosmologie der
Babylonier, and Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old
Testament; also Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire.
No less fruitful have been modern researches in Egypt. While, on one
hand, they have revealed a very considerable number of geographical and
archaeological facts proving the good faith of the narratives entering
into the books attributed to Moses, and have thus made our early sacred
literature all the more valuable, they have at the same time revealed
the limitations of the sacred authors and compilers. They have brought
to light facts utterly disproving the sacred Hebrew date of creation and
the main framework of the early biblical chronology; they have shown
the suggestive correspondence between the ten antediluvian patriarchs
in Genesis and the ten early dynasties of the Egyptian gods, and have
placed by the side of these the ten antediluvian kings of Chaldean
tradition, the ten heroes of Armenia, the ten primeval kings of Persian
sacred tradition, the ten "fathers" of Hindu sacred tradition, and
multitudes of other tens, throwing much light on the manner in which the
sacred chronicles of ancient nations were generally developed.
These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of Egypt
are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs every year; as,
for example, the changing of the water of the Nile into blood--evidently
suggested by the phenomena exhibited every summer, when, as various
eminent scholars, and, most recent of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us,
"about the middle of July, in eight or ten days the river turns from
grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look
like newly shed blood." These modern researches have also shown that
some of the most important features in the legends can not possibly
be reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that the
Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea. As
to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with Egypt, even
the most devoted apologists have become discreetly silent.
Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of The Two
Brothers, and have shown, as we have already seen, that one of the most
striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was drawn from it; they have
been obliged to admit that the story of the exposure of Moses in the
basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent greatness, had been
previously told, long before Moses's time, not only of King Sargon,
but of various other great personages of the ancient world; they have
published plans of Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon
their walls, revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking
features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been revealed
especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, and in various inscriptions of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier
sources of much in the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed
only to the chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten
commandments, and elsewhere; they have given to the world copies of the
Egyptian texts showing that the theology of the Nile was one of various
fruitful sources of later ideas, statements, and practices regarding
the brazen serpent, the golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions,
incarnations, resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian
sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Christian sacred
literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases regarding the Creation,
astronomy, geography, magic, medicine, diabolical influences, with a
multitude of other ideas, which we also find coming into early Judaism
in greater or less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources.
But Egyptology, while thus aiding to sweep away the former conception of
our sacred books, has aided biblical criticism in making them far more
precious; for it has shown them to be a part of that living growth of
sacred literature whose roots are in all the great civilizations of
the past, and through whose trunk and branches are flowing the currents
which are to infuse a higher religious and ethical life into the
civilizations of the future.(496)
(496) For general statements of agreements and disagreements between
biblical accounts and the revelations of the Egyptian monuments, see
Sayce, The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, especially chap. iv. For
discrepancies between the Hebrew sacred accounts of Jewish relations
with Egypt and the revelations of modern Egyptian research, see Sharpe,
History of Egypt; Flinders, Patrie, History of Egypt; and especially
Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization in Egypt and Chaldea,
London, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1894. For the statement regarding the Nile, that about the middle of
July "in eight or ten days it turns from grayish blue to dark red,
occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood,"
see Maspero and Sayce, as above, p. 23. For the relation of the Joseph
legend to the Tale of Two Brothers, see Sharpe and others cited. For
examples of exposure of various great personages of antiquity in their
childhood, see G. Smith, Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition,
p. 320. For the relation of the Book of the Dead, etc., to Hebrew
ethics, see a striking passage in Huxley's essay on The Evolution of
Theology, also others cited in this chapter. As to trinities in Egypt
and Chaldea, see Maspero and Sayce, especially pp. 104-106, 175, and
659-663. For miraculous conception and birth of sons of Ra, ibid., pp.
388, 389. For ascension of Ra into heaven, ibid., pp. 167, 168; for
resurrections, see ibid., p. 695, also representations in Lepsius,
Prisse d'Avennes, et al.; and for striking resemblance between Egyptian
and Hebrew ritual and worship, and especially the ark, cherubim, ephod,
Urim and Thummim, and wave offerings, see the same, passim. For a very
full exhibition of the whole subject, see Renan, Histoire du Peuple
Israel, vol. i, chap. xi. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas in astronomy,
out of which Hebrew ideas of "the firmament," "pillars of heaven," etc.,
were developed, see text and engravings in Maspero and Sayce, pp. 17
and 543. For creation of man out of clay by a divine being in Egypt, see
Maspero and Sayce, p. 154; for a similar idea in Chaldea, see ibid.,
p. 545; and for the creation of the universe by a word, ibid., pp. 146,
147. For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas on magic and medicine, dread of
evil spirits, etc., anticipating those of the Hebrew Scriptures, see
Maspero and Sayce, as above, pp. 212-214, 217, 636; and for extension
of these to neighboring nations, pp. 782, 783. For visions and use of
dreams as oracles, ibid., p. 641 and elsewhere. See also, on these and
other resemblances, Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, vol. i, passim;
see also George Smith and Sayce, as above, chaps. xvi and xvii, for
resemblances especially striking, combining to show how simple was the
evolution of many Hebrew sacred legends and ideas out of those earlier
civilizations. For an especially interesting presentation of the reasons
why Egyptian ideas of immortality were not seized upon by the Jews, see
the Rev. Barham Zincke's work upon Egypt. For the sacrificial vessels,
temple rites, etc., see the bas-reliefs, figured by Lepsius, Prisse
d'Avennes, Mariette, Maspero, et. al. For a striking summary by a
brilliant scholar and divine of the Anglican Church, see Mahaffy,
Prolegomena to Anc. Hist., cited in Sunderland, The Bible, New York,
1893, p. 21, note.
But while archaeologists thus influenced enlightened opinion, another
body of scholars rendered services of a different sort--the centre of
their enterprise being the University of Oxford. By their efforts was
presented to the English-speaking world a series of translations of the
sacred books of the East, which showed the relations of the more Eastern
sacred literature to our own, and proved that in the religions of the
world the ideas which have come as the greatest blessings to mankind
are not of sudden revelation or creation, but of slow evolution out of a
remote past.
The facts thus shown did not at first elicit much gratitude from
supporters of traditional theology, and perhaps few things brought more
obloquy on Renan, for a time, than his statement that "the influence of
Persia is the most powerful to which Israel was submitted." Whether this
was an overstatement or not, it was soon seen to contain much truth. Not
only was it made clear by study of the Zend Avesta that the Old and New
Testament ideas regarding Satanic and demoniacal modes of action were
largely due to Persian sources, but it was also shown that the idea of
immortality was mainly developed in the Hebrew mind during the close
relations of the Jews with the Persians. Nor was this all. In the
Zend Avesta were found in earlier form sundry myths and legends
which, judging from their frequent appearance in early religions, grow
naturally about the history of the adored teachers of our race. Typical
among these was the Temptation of Zoroaster.
It is a fact very significant and full of promise that the first large,
frank, and explicit revelation regarding this whole subject in
form available for the general thinking public was given to the
English-speaking world by an eminent Christian divine and scholar, the
Rev. Dr. Mills. Having already shown himself by his translations a most
competent authority on the subject, he in 1894 called attention, in a
review widely read, to "the now undoubted and long since suspected
fact that it pleased the Divine Power to reveal some of the important
articles of our Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through
their literature to the Jews and ourselves." Among these beliefs Dr.
Mills traced out very conclusively many Jewish doctrines regarding
the attributes of God, and all, virtually, regarding the attributes of
Satan.
There, too, he found accounts of the Miraculous Conception, Virgin
Birth, and Temptation of Zoroaster, As to the last, Dr. Mills presented
a series of striking coincidences with our own later account. As to
its main features, he showed that there had been developed among the
Persians, many centuries before the Christian era, the legend of a vain
effort of the arch-demon, one seat of whose power was the summit of
Mount Arezura, to tempt Zoroaster to worship him,--of an argument
between tempter and tempted,--and of Zoroaster's refusal; and the doctor
continued: "No Persian subject in the streets of Jerusalem, soon after
or long after the Return, could have failed to know this striking myth."
Dr. Mills then went on to show that, among the Jews, "the doctrine of
immortality was scarcely mooted before the later Isaiah--that is,
before the captivity--while the Zoroastrian scriptures are one mass of
spiritualism, referring all results to the heavenly or to the infernal
worlds." He concludes by saying that, as regards the Old and New
Testaments, "the humble, and to a certain extent prior, religion of the
Mazda worshippers was useful in giving point and beauty to many loose
conceptions among the Jewish religious teachers, and in introducing many
ideas which were entirely new, while as to the doctrines of immortality
and resurrection--the most important of all--it positively determined
belief."(498)
(498) For the passages in the Vendidad of special importance as regards
the Temptation myth, see Fargard, xix, 18, 20, 26, also 140, 147. Very
striking is the account of the Temptation in the Pelhavi version of the
Vendidad. The devil is represented as saying to Zaratusht (Zoroaster):
"I had the worship of thy ancestors; do thou also worship me." I am
indebted to Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan,
but now of Munich, for a translation of the original text from Spiegel's
edition. For a good account, see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred
Language, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, London, 1884, pp. 252
et seq.; see also Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred Books of the
East. For Dr. Mills's article referred to, see his Zoroaster and the
Bible, in The Nineteenth Century, January, 1894. For the citation from
Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple Israel, tome xiv, chap. iv; see also,
for Persian ideas of heaven, hell and resurrection, Haug, as above, p.
310 et seq. For an interesting resume of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, A
Modern Zoroastrian, chap. xii, London, eighth edition, 1893. For
the Buddhist version of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausboll,
Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880, vol. 1,
p. 14 and following. For very full statements regarding the influence of
Persian ideas upon the Jews during the captivity, see Kahut, Ueber
die judische Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihren Abhangigkeit vom
Parsismus, Leipzig, 1866.
Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific criticism
applied to the sacred literature of southern and eastern Asia. The
resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives and ideas in our own
sacred books with those of Buddhism were especially suggestive.
Here, too, had been a long preparatory history. The discoveries in
Sanscrit philology made in the latter half of the eighteenth century and
the first half of the nineteenth, by Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins,
Foster, Colebrooke, and others, had met at first with some opposition
from theologians. The declaration by Dugald Stewart that the discovery
of Sanscrit was fraudulent, and its vocabulary and grammar patched
together out of Greek and Latin, showed the feeling of the older race of
biblical students.
But researches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney, Max
Muller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth century.
More and more evident became the sources from which many ideas and
narratives in our own sacred books had been developed. Studies in the
sacred books of Brahmanism, and in the institutions of Buddhism, the
most widespread of all religions, its devotees outnumbering those of all
branches of the Christian Church together, proved especially fruitful in
facts relating to general sacred literature and early European religious
ideas.
Noteworthy in the progress of this knowledge was the work of Fathers Huc
and Gabet. In 1839 the former of these, a French Lazarist priest, set
out on a mission to China. Having prepared himself at Macao by eighteen
months of hard study, and having arrayed himself like a native, even to
the wearing of the queue and the staining of his skin, he visited Peking
and penetrated Mongolia. Five years later, taking Gabet with him, both
disguised as Lamas, he began his long and toilsome journey to the chief
seats of Buddhism in Thibet, and, after two years of fearful dangers
and sufferings, accomplished it. Driven out finally by the Chinese,
Huc returned to Europe in 1852, having made one of the most heroic,
self-denying, and, as it turned out, one of the most valuable efforts
in all the noble annals of Christian missions. His accounts of these
journevs, written in a style simple, clear, and interesting, at once
attracted attention throughout the world. But far more important than
any services he had rendered to the Church he served was the influence
of his book upon the general opinions of thinking men; for he completed
a series of revelations made by earlier, less gifted, and less
devoted travellers, and brought to the notice of the world the amazing
similarity of the ideas, institutions, observances, ceremonies, and
ritual, and even the ecclesiastical costumes of the Buddhists to those
of his own Church.
Buddhism was thus shown with its hierarchy, in which the Grand Lama, an
infallible representative of the Most High, is surrounded by its
minor Lamas, much like cardinals; with its bishops wearing mitres, its
celibate priests with shaven crown, cope, dalmatic, and censer; its
cathedrals with clergy gathered in the choir; its vast monasteries
filled with monks and nuns vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience;
its church arrangements, with shrines of saints and angels; its use of
images, pictures, and illuminated missals; its service, with a striking
general resemblance to the Mass; antiphonal choirs; intoning of prayers;
recital of creeds; repetition of litanies; processions; mystic rites and
incense; the offering and adoration of bread upon an altar lighted
by candles; the drinking from a chalice by the priest; prayers and
offerings for the dead; benediction with outstretched hands; fasts,
confessions, and doctrine of purgatory--all this and more was now
clearly revealed. The good father was evidently staggered by these
amazing facts; but his robust faith soon gave him an explanation: he
suggested that Satan, in anticipation of Christianity, had revealed
to Buddhism this divinely constituted order of things. This naive
explanation did not commend itself to his superiors in the Roman Church.
In the days of St. Augustine or of St. Thomas Aquinas it would doubtless
have been received much more kindly; but in the days of Cardinal
Antonelli this was hardly to be expected: the Roman authorities, seeing
the danger of such plain revelations in the nineteenth century, even
when coupled with such devout explanations, put the book under the ban,
though not before it had been spread throughout the world in various
translations. Father Huc was sent on no more missions.
Yet there came even more significant discoveries, especially bearing
upon the claims of that great branch of the Church which supposes itself
to possess a divine safeguard against error in belief. For now was
brought to light by literary research the irrefragable evidence that the
great Buddha--Sakya Muni himself--had been canonized and enrolled among
the Christian saints whose intercession may be invoked, and in whose
honour images, altars, and chapels may be erected; and this, not only
by the usage of the medieval Church, Greek and Roman, but by the special
and infallible sanction of a long series of popes, from the end of the
sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth--a sanction granted under
one of the most curious errors in human history. The story enables us to
understand the way in which many of the beliefs of Christendom have been
developed, especially how they have been influenced from the seats
of older religions; and it throws much light into the character and
exercise of papal infallibility.
Early in the seventh century there was composed, as is now believed, at
the Convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, a pious romance entitled
Barlaam and Josaphat--the latter personage, the hero of the story, being
represented as a Hindu prince converted to Christianity by the former.
This story, having been attributed to St. John of Damascus in the
following century became amazingly popular, and was soon accepted as
true: it was translated from the Greek original not only into Latin,
Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic, but into every important European
language, including even Polish, Bohemian, and Icelandic. Thence it came
into the pious historical encyclopaedia of Vincent of Beauvais, and,
most important of all, into the Lives of the Saints.
Hence the name of its pious hero found its way into the list of saints
whose intercession is to be prayed for, and it passed without challenge
until about 1590, when, the general subject of canonization having been
brought up at Rome, Pope Sixtus V, by virtue of his infallibility and
immunity against error in everything relating to faith and morals,
sanctioned a revised list of saints, authorizing and directing it to
be accepted by the Church; and among those on whom he thus forever
infallibly set the seal of Heaven was included "The Holy Saint Josaphat
of India, whose wonderful acts St. John of Damascus has related." The
27th of November was appointed as the day set apart in honour of this
saint, and the decree, having been enforced by successive popes for over
two hundred and fifty years, was again officially approved by Pius IX
in 1873. This decree was duly accepted as infallible, and in one of the
largest cities of Italy may to-day be seen a Christian church dedicated
to this saint. On its front are the initials of his Italianized name;
over its main entrance is the inscription "Divo Josafat"; and within it
is an altar dedicated to the saint--above this being a pedestal bearing
his name and supporting a large statue which represents him as a
youthful prince wearing a crown and contemplating a crucifix.
Moreover, relics of this saint were found; bones alleged to be parts
of his skeleton, having been presented by a Doge of Venice to a King of
Portugal, are now treasured at Antwerp.
But even as early as the sixteenth century a pregnant fact regarding
this whole legend was noted: for the Portuguese historian Diego Conto
showed that it was identical with the legend of Buddha. Fortunately for
the historian, his faith was so robust that he saw in this resemblance
only a trick of Satan; the life of Buddha being, in his opinion, merely
a diabolic counterfeit of the life of Josaphat centuries before the
latter was lived or written--just as good Abbe Huc saw in the ceremonies
of Buddhism a similar anticipatory counterfeit of Christian ritual.
There the whole matter virtually rested for about three hundred
years--various scholars calling attention to the legend as a curiosity,
but none really showing its true bearings--until, in 1859, Laboulaye in
France, Liebrecht in Germany, and others following them, demonstrated
that this Christian work was drawn almost literally from an early
biography of Buddha, being conformed to it in the most minute details,
not only of events but of phraseology; the only important changes being
that, at the end of the various experiences showing the wretchedness of
the world, identical with those ascribed in the original to the young
Prince Buddha, the hero, instead of becoming a hermit, becomes a
Christian, and that for the appellation of Buddha--"Bodisat"--is
substituted the more scriptural name Josaphat.
Thus it was that, by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to the
papacy in matters of faith and morals, Buddha became a Christian saint.
Yet these were by no means the most pregnant revelations. As the
Buddhist scriptures were more fully examined, there were disclosed
interesting anticipations of statements in later sacred books. The
miraculous conception of Buddha and his virgin birth, like that of
Horus in Egypt and of Krishna in India; the previous annunciation to his
mother Maja; his birth during a journey by her; the star appearing
in the east, and the angels chanting in the heavens at his birth; his
temptation--all these and a multitude of other statements were full
of suggestions to larger thought regarding the development of sacred
literature in general. Even the eminent Roman Catholic missionary Bishop
Bigandet was obliged to confess, in his scholarly life of Buddha, these
striking similarities between the Buddhist scriptures and those which
it was his mission to expound, though by this honest statement his own
further promotion was rendered impossible. Fausboll also found the story
of the judgment of Solomon imbedded in Buddhist folklore; and Sir Edwin
Arnold, by his poem, The Light of Asia, spread far and wide a knowledge
of the anticipation in Buddhism of some ideas which down to a recent
period were considered distinctively Christian. Imperfect as
the revelations thus made of an evolution of religious beliefs,
institutions, and literature still are, they have not been without an
important bearing upon the newer conception of our own sacred books:
more and more manifest has become the interdependence of all human
development; more and more clear the truth that Christianity, as a great
fact in man's history, is not dependent for its life upon any parasitic
growths of myth and legend, no matter how beautiful they may be.(498)
(498) For Huc and Gabet, see Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le
Thibet, et la Chine, English translation by Hazlitt, London, 1851; also
supplementary work by Huc. For Bishop Bigandet, see his Life of Buddha,
passim. As for authority for the fact that his book was condemned
at Rome and his own promotion prevented, the present writer has the
bishop's own statement. For notices of similarities between Buddhist
and Christian institutions, rituals, etc., see Rhys David's Buddhism,
London, 1894, passim; also Lillie, Buddhism and Christianity, especially
chaps. ii and xi. It is somewhat difficult to understand how a scholar
so eminent as Mr. Rhys Davids should have allowed the Society for the
Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which published his book, to eliminate
all the interesting details regarding the birth of Buddha, and to give
so fully everything that seemed to tell against the Roman Catholic
Church; cf. p. 27 with p. 246 et seq. For more thorough presentation of
the development of features in Buddhism and Brahmanism which anticipate
those of Christianity, see Schroeder, Indiens Literatur und Cultur,
Leipsic, 1887, especially Vorlesung XXVIII and following. For full
details of the canonization of Buddha under the name of St. Josaphat,
see Fausboll, Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London,
1880, pp. xxxvi and following; also Prof. Max Muller in the Contemporary
Review for July, 1890; also the article Barlaam and Josaphat, in the
ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For the more recent
and full accounts, correcting some minor details in the foregoing
authorities, see Kuhn, Barlaam und Joasaph, Munich, 1893, especially
pages 82, 83. For a very thorough discussion of the whole subject,
see Zotenberg, Notice sur le livre de Barlaam et Joasaph, Paris, 1886;
especially for arguments fixing date of the work, see parts i to
iii; also Gaston Paris in the Revue de Paris for June, 1895. For the
transliteration between the appellation of Buddha and the name of the
saint, see Fausboll and Sayce, as above, p. xxxvii, note; and for the
multitude of translations of the work ascribed to St. John of Damascus,
see Table III, on p. xcv. The reader who is curious to trace up a
multitude of the myths and legends of early Hebrew and Christian
mythology to their more eastern and southern sources can do so in Bible
Myths, New York, 1883. The present writer gladly avails himself of the
opportunity to thank the learned Director of the National Library at
Palermo, Monsignor Marzo, for his kindness in showing him the very
interesting church of San Giosafat in that city; and to the custodians
of the church for their readiness to allow photographs of the saint to
be taken. The writer's visit was made in April, 1895, and copies of the
photographs may be seen in the library of Cornell University. As to
the more rare editions of Barlaam and Josaphat, a copy of the Icelandic
translation is to be seen in the remarkable collection of Prof. Willard
Fiske, at Florence. As to the influence of these translations, it may
be noted that when young John Kuncewicz, afterward a Polish archbishop,
became a monk, he took the name of the sainted Prince Josafat; and,
having fallen a victim to one of the innumerable murderous affrays of
the seventeenth century between different sorts of fanatics--Greek,
Catholic, and Protestant--in Poland, he also was finally canonized under
that name, evidently as a means of annoying the Russian Government. (See
Contieri, Vita di S. Giosafat, Arcivesco e Martira Rutena, Roma, 1867.)
No less important was the closer research into the New Testament during
the latter part of the nineteenth century. To go into the subject in
detail would be beyond the scope of this work, but a few of the main
truths which it brought before the world may be here summarized.(499)
(499) For a brief but thorough statement of the work of Strauss,
Baur, and the earlier cruder efforts in New Testament exegesis, see
Pfleiderer, as already cited, book ii, chap. i; and for the later work
on Supernatural Religion and Lightfoot's answer, ibid., book iv. chap.
ii.
By the new race of Christian scholars it has been clearly shown that the
first three Gospels, which, down to the close of the last century, were
so constantly declared to be three independent testimonies agreeing as
to the events recorded, are neither independent of each other nor
in that sort of agreement which was formerly asserted. All biblical
scholars of any standing, even the most conservative, have come to admit
that all three took their rise in the same original sources, growing by
the accretions sure to come as time went on--accretions sometimes useful
and often beautiful, but in no inconsiderable degree ideas and even
narratives inherited from older religions: it is also fully acknowledged
that to this growth process are due certain contradictions which can not
otherwise be explained. As to the fourth Gospel, exquisitely beautiful
as large portions of it are, there has been growing steadily and
irresistibly the conviction, even among the most devout scholars, that
it has no right to the name, and does not really give the ideas of St.
John, but that it represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish
theology, and that its final form, which one of the most eminent among
recent Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical product
of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted representative or
representatives of the Alexandrian school. Bitter as the resistance
to this view has been, it has during the last years of the nineteenth
century won its way more and more to acknowledgment. A careful
examination made in 1893 by a competent Christian scholar showed facts
which are best given in his own words, as follows: "In the period of
thirty years ending in 1860, of the fifty great authorities in this
line, FOUR TO ONE were in favour of the Johannine authorship. Of
those who in that period had advocated this traditional position, one
quarter--and certainly the very greatest--finally changed their position
to the side of a late date and non-Johannine authorship."
Of those who have come into this field of scholarship since about 1860,
some forty men of the first class, two thirds reject the traditional
theory wholly or very largely. Of those who have contributed important
articles to the discussion from about 1880 to 1890, about TWO TO ONE
reject the Johannine authorship of the Gospel in its present shape--that
is to say, while forty years ago great scholars were FOUR TO ONE IN
FAVOUR OF, they are now TWO TO ONE AGAINST, the claim that the apostle
John wrote this Gospel as we have it. Again, one half of those on the
conservative side to-day--scholars like Weiss, Beyschlag, Sanday, and
Reynolds--admit the existence of a dogmatic intent and an ideal element
in this Gospel, so that we do not have Jesus's thought in his exact
words, but only in substance."(500)
(500) For the citations given regarding the development of thought in
relation to the fourth gospel, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses,
Boston, 1893, pp. 29, 30. For the characterization of St. John's Gospel
above referred to, see Robertson Smith in the Encyc. Brit., 9th edit.,
art. Bible, p. 642. For a very careful and candid summary of the reasons
which are gradually leading the more eminent among the newer scholars to
give up the Johannine authorship ot the fourth Gospel, see Schurer, in
the Contemporary Review for September, 1891. American readers, regarding
this and the whole series of subjects of which this forms a part, may
most profitably study the Rev. Dr. Cone's Gospel Criticism and Historic
Christianity, one of the most lucid and judicial of recent works in this
field.
In 1881 came an event of great importance as regards the development of
a more frank and open dealing with scriptural criticism. In that year
appeared the Revised Version of the New Testament. It was exceedingly
cautious and conservative; but it had the vast merit of being absolutely
conscientious. One thing showed, in a striking way, ethical progress
in theological methods. Although all but one of the English revisers
represented Trinitarian bodies, they rejected the two great proof texts
which had so long been accounted essential bulwarks of Trinitarian
doctrine. Thus disappeared at last from the Epistle of St. John the text
of the Three Witnesses, which had for centuries held its place in spite
of its absence from all the earlier important manuscripts, and of its
rejection in later times by Erasmus, Luther, Isaac Newton, Porson, and
a long line of the greatest biblical scholars. And with this was thrown
out the other like unto it in spurious origin and zealous intent, that
interpolation of the word "God" in the sixteenth verse of the third
chapter of the First Epistle to Timothy, which had for ages served as a
warrant for condemning some of the noblest of Christians, even such men
as Newton and Milton and Locke and Priestley and Channing.
Indeed, so honest were the revisers that they substituted the correct
reading of Luke ii, 33, in place of the time-honoured corruption in the
King James version which had been thought necessary to safeguard the
dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus came the true
reading, "His FATHER and his mother" instead of the old piously
fraudulent words "JOSEPH and his mother."
An even more important service to the new and better growth of
Christianity was the virtual setting aside of the last twelve verses of
the Gospel according to St. Mark; for among these stood that sentence
which has cost the world more innocent blood than any other--the words
"He that believeth not shall be damned." From this source had logically
grown the idea that the intellectual rejection of this or that dogma
which dominant theology had happened at any given time to pronounce
essential, since such rejection must bring punishment infinite in agony
and duration, is a crime to be prevented at any cost of finite cruelty.
Still another service rendered to humanity by the revisers was in
substituting a new and correct rendering for the old reading of the
famous text regarding the inspiration of Scripture, which had for ages
done so much to make our sacred books a fetich. By this more correct
reading the revisers gave a new charter to liberty in biblical
research.(501)
(501) The texts referred to as most beneficially changed by the revisers
are I John v, 7 and I Timothy iii, 16. Mention may also be made of
the fact that the American revision gave up the Trinitarian version of
Romans ix, 5, and that even their more conservative British brethren,
while leaving it in the text, discredited it in the margin.
Though revisers thought it better not to suppress altogether the last
twelve verses of St. Mark's Gospel, they softened the word "damned"
to "condemned," and separated them from the main Gospel, adding a
note stating that "the two oldest Greek manuscripts, and some other
authorities, omit from verse nine to the end"; and that "some other
authorities have a different ending to this Gospel."
The resistance of staunch high churchmen of the older type even to so
mild a reform as the first change above noted may be exemplified by
a story told of Philpotts, Bishop of Exeter, about the middle of the
nineteenth century. A kindly clergyman reading an invitation to the holy
communion, and thinking that so an affectionate a call was disfigured by
the harsh phrase "eateth and drinketh to his own damnation," ventured
timidly to substitute the word "condemnation." Thereupon the bishop, who
was kneeling with the rest of the congregation, threw up his head
and roared "DAMNATION!" The story is given in T. A. Trollope's What I
Remember, vol. i, p. 444. American churchmen may well rejoice that the
fathers of the American branch of the Anglican Church were wise enough
and Christian enough to omit from their Prayer Book this damnatory
clause, as well as the Commination Service and the Athanasian Creed.
Most valuable, too, have been studies during the latter part of the
nineteenth century upon the formation of the canon of Scripture. The
result of these has been to substitute something far better for that
conception of our biblical literature, as forming one book handed out
of the clouds by the Almighty, which had been so long practically
the accepted view among probably the majority of Christians. Reverent
scholars have demonstrated our sacred literature to be a growth in
obedience to simple laws natural and historical; they have shown how
some books of the Old Testament were accepted as sacred, centuries
before our era, and how others gradually gained sanctity, in some cases
only fully acquiring it long after the establishment of the Christian
Church. The same slow growth has also been shown in the New Testament
canon. It has been demonstrated that the selection of the books
composing it, and their separation from the vast mass of spurious
gospels, epistles, and apocalyptic literature was a gradual process, and,
indeed, that the rejection of some books and the acceptance of others
was accidental, if anything is accidental.
So, too, scientific biblical research has, as we have seen, been obliged
to admit the existence of much mythical and legendary matter, as a
setting for the great truths not only of the Old Testament but of the
New. It has also shown, by the comparative study of literatures, the
process by which some books were compiled and recompiled, adorned
with beautiful utterances, strengthened or weakened by alterations and
interpolations expressing the views of the possessors or transcribers,
and attributed to personages who could not possibly have written them.
The presentation of these things has greatly weakened that sway of mere
dogma which has so obscured the simple teachings of Christ himself; for
it has shown that the more we know of our sacred books, the less certain
we become as to the authenticity of "proof texts," and it has disengaged
more and more, as the only valuable residuum, like the mass of gold
at the bottom of the crucible, the personality, spirit, teaching, and
ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity. More and more, too, the
new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament as,
like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to law--a conception
which in al probability will give it its strongest hold on the coming
centuries. In making this revelation Christian scholarship has by no
means done work mainly destructive. It has, indeed, swept away a mass
of noxious growths, but it has at the same time cleared the ground for
a better growth of Christianity--a growth through which already pulsates
the current of a nobler life. It has forever destroyed the contention of
scholars like those of the eighteenth century who saw, in the multitude
of irreconcilable discrepancies between various biblical statements,
merely evidences of priestcraft and intentional fraud. The new
scholarship has shown that even such absolute contradictions as those
between the accounts of the early life of Jesus by Matthew and Luke, and
between the date of the crucifixion and details of the resurrection
in the first three Gospels and in the fourth, and other discrepancies
hardly less serious, do not destroy the historical character of the
narrative. Even the hopelessly conflicting genealogies of the Saviour
and the evidently mythical accretions about the simple facts of his
birth and life are thus full of interest when taken as a natural
literary development in obedience to the deepest religious feeling.(502)
(502) Among the newer English works of the canon of Scripture,
especially as regards the Old Testament, see Ryle in work cited. As to
the evidences of frequent mutilations of the New Testament text, as well
as of frequent charge of changing texts made against each other by early
Christian writers, see Reuss, History of the New Testament, vol. ii, S
362. For a reverent and honest treatment of some of the discrepancies
and contradictions which are absolutely irreconcilable, see Crooker, as
above, appendix; also Cone, Gospel Criticism and Historic Christianity,
especially chap. ii; also Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, and God
and the Bible, especially chap. vi; and for a brief but full showing of
them in a judicial and kindly spirit, see Laing, Problems of the Future,
chap. ix, on The Historical Element in the Gospels.
Among those who have wrought most effectively to bring the leaders
of thought in the English-speaking nations to this higher conception,
Matthew Arnold should not be forgotten. By poetic insight, broad
scholarship, pungent statement, pithy argument, and an exquisitely lucid
style, he aided effectually during the latter half of the nineteenth
century in bringing the work of specialists to bear upon the development
of a broader and deeper view. In the light of his genius a conception
of our sacred books at the same time more literary as well as more
scientific has grown widely and vigorously, while the older view which
made of them a fetich and a support for unchristian dogmas has been more
and more thrown into the background. The contributions to these results
by the most eminent professors at the great Christian universities of
the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge taking the lead, are
most hopeful signs of a new epoch.
Very significant also is a change in the style of argument against the
scientific view. Leading supporters of the older opinions see more and
more clearly the worthlessness of rhetoric against ascertained fact:
mere dogged resistance to cogent argument evidently avails less and
less; and the readiness of the more prominent representatives of the
older thought to consider opposing arguments, and to acknowledge any
force they may have, is certainly of good omen. The concessions made
in Lux Mundi regarding scriptural myths and legends have been already
mentioned.
Significant also has been the increasing reprobation in the Church
itself of the profound though doubtless unwitting immoralities of
RECONCILERS. The castigation which followed the exploits of the
greatest of these in our own time--Mr. Gladstone, at the hands of Prof.
Huxley--did much to complete a work in which such eminent churchmen as
Stanley, Farrar, Sanday, Cheyne, Driver, and Sayce had rendered good
service.
Typical among these evidences of a better spirit in controversy has been
the treatment of the question regarding mistaken quotations from the
Old Testament in the New, and especially regarding quotations by Christ
himself. For a time this was apparently the most difficult of all
matters dividing the two forces; but though here and there appear
champions of tradition, like the Bishop of Gloucester, effectual
resistance to the new view has virtually ceased; in one way or another
the most conservative authorities have accepted the undoubted truth
revealed by a simple scientific method. Their arguments have indeed
been varied. While some have fallen back upon Le Clerc's contention that
"Christ did not come to teach criticism to the Jews," and others upon
Paley's argument that the Master shaped his statements in accordance
with the ideas of his time, others have taken refuge in scholastic
statements--among them that of Irenaeus regarding "a quiescence of the
divine word," or the somewhat startling explanation by sundry recent
theologians that "our Lord emptied himself of his Godhead."(504)
(504) For Matthew Arnold, see, besides his Literature and Dogma, his St.
Paul and Protestantism. As to the quotations in the New Testament from
the Old, see Toy, Quotations in the New Testament, 1889, p. 72; also
Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel. For Le Clerc's method of
dealing with the argument regarding quotations from the Old Testament in
the New, see earlier parts of the present chapter. For Paley's mode,
see his Evidences, part iii, chapter iii. For the more scholastic
expressions from Irenaeus and others, see Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891,
especially note on p. 267. For a striking passage on the general subject
see B. W. Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, p. 33, ending with the words, "We
must decline to stake the authority of Jesus Christ on a question of
literary criticism."
Nor should there be omitted a tribute to the increasing courtesy shown
in late years by leading supporters of the older view. During the last
two decades of the present century there has been a most happy departure
from the older method of resistance, first by plausibilities, next by
epithets, and finally by persecution. To the bitterness of the attacks
upon Darwin, the Essayists and Reviewers, and Bishop Colenso, have
succeeded, among really eminent leaders, a far better method and
tone. While Matthew Arnold no doubt did much in commending "sweet
reasonableness" to theological controversialists, Mr. Gladstone, by
his perfect courtesy to his opponents, even when smarting under their
heaviest blows, has set a most valuable example. Nor should the spirit
shown by Bishop Ellicott, leading a forlorn hope for the traditional
view, pass without a tribute of respect. Truly pathetic is it to
see this venerable and learned prelate, one of the most eminent
representatives of the older biblical research, even when giving solemn
warnings against the newer criticisms, and under all the temptations
of ex cathedra utterance, remaining mild and gentle and just in the
treatment of adversaries whose ideas he evidently abhors. Happily, he
is comforted by the faith that Christianity will survive; and this faith
his opponents fully share.(505)
(505) As an example of courtesy between theologic opponents may be cited
the controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley, Principal Gore's
Bampton Lectures for 1891, and Bishop Ellicott's Charges, published in
1893.
To the fact that the suppression of personal convictions among "the
enlightened" did not cease with the Medicean popes there are many
testimonies. One especially curious was mentioned to the present writer
by a most honoured diplomatist and scholar at Rome. While this gentleman
was looking over the books of an eminent cardinal, recently deceased,
he noticed a series of octavos bearing on their backs the title "Acta
Apostolorum." Surprised at such an extension of the Acts of Apostles, he
opened a volume and found the series to be the works of Voltaire. As to
a similar condition of things in the Church of England may be cited
the following from Froude's Erasmus: "I knew various persons of high
reputation a few years ago who thought at the bottom very much as Bishop
Colenso thought, who nevertheless turned and rent him to clear their own
reputations--which they did not succeed in doing." See work cited, close
of Lecture XI.
VI. RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM.
For all this dissolving away of traditional opinions regarding our
sacred literature, there has been a cause far more general and powerful
than any which has been given, for it is a cause surrounding and
permeating all. This is simply the atmosphere of thought engendered by
the development of all sciences during the last three centuries.
Vast masses of myth, legend, marvel, and dogmatic assertion, coming into
this atmosphere, have been dissolved and are now dissolving quietly away
like icebergs drifted into the Gulf Stream. In earlier days, when some
critic in advance of his time insisted that Moses could not have
written an account embracing the circumstances of his own death, it was
sufficient to answer that Moses was a prophet; if attention was called
to the fact that the great early prophets, by all which they did and
did not do, showed that there could not have existed in their time
any "Levitical code," a sufficient answer was "mystery"; and if the
discrepancy was noted between the two accounts of creation in Genesis,
or between the genealogies or the dates of the crucifixion in the
Gospels, the cogent reply was "infidelity." But the thinking world has
at last been borne by the general development of a scientific atmosphere
beyond that kind of refutation.
If, in the atmosphere generated by the earlier developed sciences, the
older growths of biblical interpretation have drooped and withered and
are evidently perishing, new and better growths have arisen with roots
running down into the newer sciences. Comparative Anthropology in
general, by showing that various early stages of belief and observance,
once supposed to be derived from direct revelation from heaven to the
Hebrews, are still found as arrested developments among various savage
and barbarous tribes; Comparative Mythology and Folklore, by showing
that ideas and beliefs regarding the Supreme Power in the universe are
progressive, and not less in Judea than in other parts of the world;
Comparative Religion and Literature, by searching out and laying side by
side those main facts in the upward struggle of humanity which show that
the Israelites, like other gifted peoples, rose gradually, through ghost
worship, fetichism, and polytheism, to higher theological levels; and
that, as they thus rose, their conceptions and statements regarding the
God they worshipped became nobler and better--all these sciences are
giving a new solution to those problems which dogmatic theology has so
long laboured in vain to solve. While researches in these sciences
have established the fact that accounts formerly supposed to be special
revelations to Jews and Christians are but repetitions of widespread
legends dating from far earlier civilizations, and that beliefs formerly
thought fundamental to Judaism and Christianity are simply based on
ancient myths, they have also begun to impress upon the intellect and
conscience of the thinking world the fact that the religious and moral
truths thus disengaged from the old masses of myth and legend are
all the more venerable and authoritative, and that all individual or
national life of any value must be vitalized by them.(506)
(506) For plaintive lamentations over the influence of this atmosphere
of scientific thought upon the most eminent contemporary Christian
scholars, see the Christus Comprobator, by the Bishop of Gloucester and
Bristol, London, 1893, and the article in the Contemporary Review for
May, 1892, by the Bishop of Colchester, passim. For some less
known examples of sacred myths and legends inherited from ancient
civilizations, see Lenormant, Les Origines de l'Histoire, passim, but
especially chaps. ii, iv, v, vi; see also Goldziher.
If, then, modern science in general has acted powerfully to dissolve
away the theories and dogmas of the older theologic interpretation, it
has also been active in a reconstruction and recrystallization of
truth; and very powerful in this reconstruction have been the evolution
doctrines which have grown out of the thought and work of men like
Darwin and Spencer.
In the light thus obtained the sacred text has been transformed: out
of the old chaos has come order; out of the old welter of hopelessly
conflicting statements in religion and morals has come, in obedience
to this new conception of development, the idea of a sacred literature
which mirrors the most striking evolution of morals and religion in the
history of our race. Of all the sacred writings of the world, it shows
us our own as the most beautiful and the most precious; exhibiting to us
the most complete religious development to which humanity has attained,
and holding before us the loftiest ideals which our race has known.
Thus it is that, with the keys furnished by this new race of biblical
scholars, the way has been opened to treasures of thought which have
been inaccessible to theologians for two thousand years.
As to the Divine Power in the universe: these interpreters have shown
how, beginning with the tribal god of the Hebrews--one among many
jealous, fitful, unseen, local sovereigns of Asia Minor--the higher
races have been borne on to the idea of the just Ruler of the whole
earth, as revealed by the later and greater prophets of Israel, and
finally to the belief in the Universal Father, as best revealed in
the New Testament. As to man: beginning with men after Jehovah's own
heart--cruel, treacherous, revengeful--we are borne on to an ideal of
men who do right for right's sake; who search and speak the truth for
truth's sake; who love others as themselves. As to the world at large:
the races dominant in religion and morals have been lifted from the idea
of a "chosen people" stimulated and abetted by their tribal god in every
sort of cruelty and injustice, to the conception of a vast community in
which the fatherhood of God overarches all, and the brotherhood of man
permeates all.
Thus, at last, out of the old conception of our Bible as a collection
of oracles--a mass of entangling utterances, fruitful in wrangling
interpretations, which have given to the world long and weary ages of
"hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"; of fetichism, subtlety,
and pomp; of tyranny bloodshed, and solemnly constituted imposture; of
everything which the Lord Jesus Christ most abhorred--has been gradually
developed through the centuries, by the labours, sacrifices, and even
the martyrdom of a long succession of men of God, the conception of it
as a sacred literature--a growth only possible under that divine light
which the various orbs of science have done so much to bring into the
mind and heart and soul of man--a revelation, not of the Fall of Man,
but of the Ascent of Man--an exposition, not of temporary dogmas and
observances, but of the Eternal Law of Righteousness--the one upward
path for individuals and for nations. No longer an oracle, good for
the "lower orders" to accept, but to be quietly sneered at by "the
enlightened"--no longer a fetich, whose defenders must be persecutors,
or reconcilers, or "apologists"; but a most fruitful fact, which
religion and science may accept as a source of strength to both.