Dr. Farrar stumbles, on one occasion, against the true theory of the
Bible. Having to furnish an excuse, if not a justification, for the
outrageous crudity of a good deal of its language, he reminds us that
decorum changes with time and place. "The rigid external modesty and
propriety of modern and English literature," he observes, "is disgusted
and offended by statements which gave no such shock to ancient and
Eastern readers." And he adds that "The plain-spokenness of Orientals
involved no necessary offence against abstract morality." This is
true enough, but the argument should be developed. What is urged in
extenuation of the grossness of the Scripture is really applicable all
round--to its mythology, its legends, its religion, its philosophy,
its ethics, and its poetry. The Bible is an oriental book. And this
one statement, when properly understood, gives us the true key to
its interpretation, the real criterion of its character, and the just
measure of its value.
It has been well remarked that the ordinary Christian in this part of
the world appears to imagine that the Bible dropped down from heaven--in
English. Even the expounders of the Higher Criticism, in our own
country, read it first in their mother tongue; and although they
afterwards read it in the original Greek, and sometimes in the original
Hebrew, they are under the witchery of early impressions, and their
apologetics are almost entirely founded upon the vernacular Bible.
Thus they lose sight, and their readers never catch a glimpse, of the
predominant element, the governing factor, of the problem.
All the Bibles in the world, like all the religions in the world, came
from the East. "Not one of them," as Max Mueller remarks, "has been
conceived, composed, or written down in Europe."*
* Max Mueller, Natural Religion, p. 538.
He classes the _Pilgrim's Progress_ among the "many books which have
exercised a far greater influence on religious faith and moral conduct
than the Bibles of the world"; but Bunyan's originality was artistic and
not religious; he absorbed the Puritanism of his age, and reproduced it
in the form of a magnificent allegory. Religious originality does not
belong to the Western mind, which is too scientific and practical. Every
one of the fashionable crazes that spring up from time to time, and have
their day and give place to a successor, is merely a garment from the
old wardrobe of superstition. This is true of Theosophy, for instance;
all its doctrines, ideas, and jargon being borrowed from India.
"There are five countries only," Max Mueller says, "which have been
the birthplace of Sacred Books: (1) India, (2) Persia, (3) China, (4)
Palestine, (5) Arabia." All come from the East, and all have a generic
and historic resemblance. Not one of them was written by the founder of
its religion. Moses did not write the Pentateuch, Christ did not write
a line of the New Testament, Mohammed did not write the Koran, Zoroaster
did not write the Avesta, the Buddhist Scriptures were not written by
Buddha, and the Vedic hymns are far more ancient than writing in India.
All these Sacred Books embody the accepted beliefs of whole peoples; all
of them are canonical and authoritative; all contain very much the same
ethical groundwork, in the form of elementary moral prohibitions; all
of them are held to be of divine character; all of them become a kind of
fetish, which is worshipped and obeyed at the expense of the free spirit
of man, who is told not to be wise above what is written. Ecclesiastical
or kingly authority has generally given these books their final form and
character. Their establishment takes place in open daylight, but their
origin is more or less shrouded in mystery. "It is curious," Max Mueller
says, "that wherever we have sacred books, they represent to us the
oldest language of the country. It is so in India, it is the same
in Persia, in China, in Palestine, and very nearly so in Arabia."*
According to Max Mueller, the Veda was referred to in India fifteen
hundred years before Christ. Consequently it precedes by many centuries
even the earliest parts of the Bible:--
"The Vedic hymns come to us as a collection of sacred poetry, belonging
to certain ancient families, and afterwards united in one collection,
called the Rig-veda-sa_m_hita. The names of the poets, handed down by
tradition, are in most cases purely imaginary names. What is really
important is that in the hymns themselves the poets speak of their
thoughts and words as _God-given_--this we can understand--while at a
later time the theory came in that not the thoughts and words only, but
every syllable, every letter, every accent, had been communicated to
half-divine and half-human prophets by Brahma, so that the slightest
mistake in pronunciation, even to the pronunciation of an accent, would
destroy the charm and efficacy of these ancient prayers."**
* Natural Religion, p. 295.
** Max Mueller, ibid, p. 558.
With a slight variation of language, to suit the special circumstances,
nearly all this would apply to the Bible.
Christianity, like Brahmanism, like Buddhism, like Mohammedanism, is a
book religion. It is "God-given," or revealed, and its Bible has been
elevated to a position of infallibility, above the reach of human
reason, precisely like the Bibles of other oriental faiths. This
sanctification of every thought and word and letter is declared by
Max Mueller to have been "the death-blow given to the Vedic religion,"
destroying its power of growth and change. A similar observation is made
by Sir William Muir respecting the petrified gospel of the Koran:--
"From the stiff and rigid shroud in which it is thus swathed, the
religion of Mohammed cannot emerge. It has no plastic power beyond
that exercised in its earliest days. Hardened now and inelastic, it can
neither adapt itself nor yet shape its votaries, nor even suffer them
to shape themselves, to the varying circumstances, the wants and
developments of mankind."*
How curious it is, after reading this strong passage, to come across a
diametrically opposite one in the work of another eminent writer on
the same subject. Professor Arnold closes his important book on the
propagation of the Muslim faith with a reference to "the power of this
religion to adapt itself to the peculiar characteristics and the stage
of development of the people whose allegiance it seeks to win."**
Historically, it is perfectly certain that Mohammedanism _has_ been
found compatible with a high degree of civilisation. Many instances
might be given, but a single one is sufficient. The Mohammedan
civilisation in Spain was far superior to the Christian civilisation
which, after terrible bloodshed and enormous destruction, was
established upon its ruins. The truth is, that religions always change
when they must change, and never otherwise. When the necessity
arises, learned divines will always be found to make the requisite
accommodations. This, indeed, is the explanation of the labors of Dr.
Farrar and other exponents of the Higher Criticism. They are simply
accommodating Christianity, and the Bible with it, to the serious
changes that have taken place in educated opinion and sentiment, in
consequence of the development of physical science, the progress of
historical criticism, and the growth of moral culture. All the truth in
Sir William Muir's impeachment of Mohammedanism is no less applicable
to Christianity. The Bible, like the Koran, and like every other
revelation, stereotyped old ideas, and gave them a factitious longevity.
Dr. Farrar himself not only admits, but contends, that the Bible has
been invoked against every advance in science, politics, and sociology.
What more could be said of the Koran or any other sacred book?
* Sir William Muir, Rise and Decline of Islam, pp. 40, 41.
** T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam.
Bring any oriental religion into Europe, and it must change or perish.
Christianity is not true, as Mr. Gladstone and so many orthodox
apologists have argued, because the Christian nations are at the top
of civilisation. The Caucasian mind led the world before the advent of
Christianity, and it is doing the same now. Christians are apt to forget
that Greece and Italy are in Europe, and that Athens and Rome--two
imperishable names in the world's history--were far-shining cities
before a good deal of the Old Testament was written.
Keep any oriental religion in the East, however, and there is no
saying how long it will last unaltered. Do not travellers talk of
the unchanging East? The civilisation of China is almost what it was
thousands of years ago. Syrian life to-day is like a picture from the
Bible. And the old Orient, as Flaubert said, is the land of religions;
and where Asia looks upon Europe, and the communication between them
began of yore, you may sample all the faiths of antiquity. Flaubert
remarked that the assemblage of all the old religions in Syria was
something incredible; it was enough to study for centuries.*
* Flaubert, Correspondence, vol. i., p. 344.
Asia spawned forth all the great religions, and produced all the great
revelations. Arabia is in Africa, but the Arabs are not Africans; they
belong to the Semitic race, like the Jews, and the Koran embodies Jewish
and other Semitic traditions.
The Bible, then, is an oriental book, an Asiatic book, in spite of the
Greek elements which are incorporated in the New Testament, notably in
the fourth Gospel. It has never been in harmony with the real life of
the West. When it has dominated the life of a particular locality, for a
certain period, the result has been something typically non-European; as
in the case of Scotland under the despotism of the Kirk, whose spiritual
slaves prompted Heine's epigram that the Presbyterian Scotchman was a
Jew, born in the north, who ate pork. Modern civilisation is mainly a
return to the spirit of secular progress which inspired the immortal
achievements of Greece and Rome.
"The revival of learning and the Renaissance are memorable as the first
sturdy breasting by humanity of the hither slope of the great hollow
which lies between us and the ancient world. The modern man, reformed
and regenerated by knowledge, looks across it, and recognises on the
opposite ridge, in the far-shining cities and stately porticoes, in the
art, politics, and science of antiquity, many more ties of kinship and
sympathy than in the mighty concave between, wherein dwell his Christian
ancestry, in the dim light of scholasticism and theology."*
* James Cotter Morison, The Service of Man, p. 178.
Well, if we once fully recognise the Bible as an oriental book, we are
on the road to its complete comprehension. Its grossness of speech, its
gratuitous reference to animal functions, its designation of males
by their sexual attributes even on the most serious occasions, its
religious observances in connection with pregnancy and birth, its
very rite of circumcision; all this, and much more, becomes perfectly
intelligible. It is in keeping with all we know of the ideas, practices,
and language of the East. Moreover, we perceive why it is that
similarities to the theology, the poetry, and the ethics of the Bible
have been so liberally disclosed by the progress of oriental studies.
The Bible, being brought from the East, has to be carried back there to
be properly understood. It is true that Christian divines have offered
their own explanation of these similarities. At first they declared them
to be Satanic anticipations, devilish pre-mockeries, of God's own truth.
Then they declared them to be confused echoes of the oracles of Jehovah.
Finally, they declare them to be evidences of the fact that, although
God chose the Jewish race as the medium of his special revelation, he
also revealed himself partially to other nations. But these explanations
are alike fantastic. They rest upon no ground of history or evolution.
The real explanation is that the Bible is one of the many sacred books
of the East. Its differences from the rest are not of kind, but of
degree; and any superiority that may be claimed for it must henceforth
be argued upon this basis.
This oriental Bible is at utter variance with the vital beliefs, the
political and social tendencies, and the ethical aspirations, of the
present age. Science has destroyed its naive supernaturalism; reason
has placed its personal God--the magnified, non-natural man--in his own
niche in the world's Pantheon; philosophy has carried us far beyond its
primitive conceptions of human society; our morality has outgrown its
hardness and insularity, however we may still appreciate its finer
ejaculations; even the most pious Christians, with the exception of a
few "peculiar" people, only pay a hypocritical homage to its clearest
injunctions; and the higher development of decency and propriety makes
us turn from its crude expressions with a growing sense of disgust,
while the progress of humanity fills us more and more with a loathing
of its frightful wars and ruthless massacres, its tales of barbaric
cruelty, and its crowning infamy of an everlasting hell.