There are two remarkable characteristics of present-day apologies for
Christianity: one is extravagant laudation of Jesus as man and
teacher, the other is extravagant laudation of the Bible as ethics and
literature. Both these characteristics are really signs of the decadence
of positive faith. Anyone who sincerely believed in the deity of Jesus
would shrink from praising his human virtues. To such a person it would
savor strongly of impertinence. Nor would anyone who really believed the
Bible to be the Word of God make it the subject of meaner panegyrics.
It seems ridiculous to argue that God wrote with unusual power and
sublimity, and is actually the very first of known authors. But this
is what Dr. Farrar does, essentially, in the last six chapters of
his volume. No wonder, therefore, that all the vices of his style are
displayed in the accomplishment of this extraordinary task. He has to
make several quotations from great or distinguished writers, but he
catches no literary infection from them. One of these quotations is from
brave old George Fox. "I saw," the great Quaker wrote, "that there was
an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of Light and Love
flowed over the ocean of Darkness; and in that I saw the infinite
love of God." This is magnificent writing. It has vision, force, and
simplicity. In its way it could hardly be beaten. And how poor in
comparison is the turgid pulpit rhetoric of Dr. Farrar!
We are told by this wordy defender of the faith that the Christian
Scriptures are "the Supreme Bible of Humanity"--as though, if it be the
Word of God, it could be anything less. Our attention is called to
its "unique transcendence"--which is a penny-a-lining pleonasm. We
are informed that it has "triumphed with ease over the assaults of its
enemies"--which is a remarkably modest assertion, especially in view
of the fact that the "enemies" of the Bible were, for fifteen hundred
years, generally subdued by persecution, imprisonment, torture,
assassination, and the burning of their writings. We are further
informed that the Bible commands the reverence, guides the thoughts,
educates the souls, and kindles the moral aspirations of men "through
all the world"--which is an extremely sober statement in view of the
fact that all the _nominal_ Christians, not to be too precise about
the _real_ ones, do not amount to more than a fourth of the world's
inhabitants. So wonderful a book is the Bible that "the Lord Jesus
Christ himself did not disdain to quote from the Old Testament"--which
was his own word, in the sense that it was (professedly) written under
divine inspiration. This is absurd enough, but it is nothing to the
rapturous eulogy of the Bible which follows it. "All the best and
brightest English verse [not _some_, mark, but _all!_], from the poems of
Chaucer to the plays of Shakespeare in their noblest parts, are echoes
of its lessons; and from Cowper to Wordsworth," Dr. Farrar says, "from
Coleridge to Tennyson, the greatest of our poets have drawn from its
pages their loftiest wisdom." Really, one is tempted to ask whether such
stuff as this is possible in any other country than England, or perhaps
America; and whether, even in England or America, it is possible outside
churches, chapels, and Sunday-schools. Sixty pages later--Dr. Farrar
could not sober down in that long interval--he declares that "It was the
Bible which created the prose literature of England." Now if this were
true it would not serve Dr. Farrar's ostensible purpose. It would not
prove that the Bible is a divine revelation. It would only prove the
historical--that is to say, the largely accidental--importance of
the Authorised Version of the Bible in the development of English
literature. But this declaration of Dr. Farrar's is _not_ true. The
Authorised Version did not initiate, it rather closed, a period of our
literary history. The English of the translators in their Preface is
vastly different from the English of their translation. Indeed, they
were rather collators than translators. They took the older versions
as the basis of their work, they altered as little as possible, and the
alterations they did make were strictly in harmony with the time-honored
style of those older versions, a style which was even then very archaic.
Dr. Marsh, himself a devout Christian, contends that "the dialect of
this translation was not, at the time of the revision, or, indeed, at
any other period, the actual current book-language nor the colloquial
speech of the English people." He maintains that it was "a consecrated
diction" which had been "gradually built up" from the time of Wycliffe.*
Its language was not the language of Chaucer's prose, nor even of
Wycliffe's own prose, any more than it was the language of Bacon's
or Shakespeare's, or even that of divines like Hooker. The Authorised
Version is indeed a monument of English, but of special English. It has
always stood aside from the main development of English prose. Of course
it has exercised a considerable influence, but that influence has been
chiefly indirect. From the young naive prose of Malory to the mature and
calculated prose of Swift--not to come farther--there is a clear stream
of development, to which the language and style of the English Bible
have contributed infinitely less than is generally assumed. With the
single exception of Bunyan's masterpiece, which stands apart and alone,
it is difficult to name a first-class prose competition that was greatly
indebted to our Authorised Version. Even the divines disregarded it as
a literary model, and perhaps most conspicuously so in the seventeenth
century, immediately after its publication.
* George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language
(Murray), pp. 441, 445.
Dr. Farrar is entirely wrong in declaring that the Bible created the
prose literature of England. Even if he only means that English prose
was vastly profited by the religious literature which followed upon the
heels of the Reformation, it is easy to reply that this literature was
mainly controversial and never remarkable for the higher graces and
dexterities. For those virtues, prior to the time of Taylor and South,
we must turn to secular and even to "profane" compositions; a fact which
is well known to every real student of English literature.
The next device of Dr. Farrar's advocacy would be astounding if one
did not know the muddle-headed public for whom he writes. He devotes a
monstrous number of pages to the citing of a "cloud of witnesses to the
glory and supremacy of the Holy Scriptures," beginning with the
great John Henry Newman and winding up with the notorious Hall Caine.
Sandwiched between these dissimilar "witnesses" are Heine, Goethe,
Rousseau, Wesley, Emerson, Carlyle, Huxley, Arnold, Ruskin, and a host
of others. Most of them were Christians, and afford a partisan testimony
which is not very valuable. In any case, there is no real argument in
a list of names. When a man is being tried on a definite charge, it is
idle to recite a catalogue of his distinguished friends. Witnesses to
character are only heard in mitigation of sentence after the jury has
returned a verdict of Guilty. Perhaps this fact had its influence on Dr.
Farrar's mind; at any rate, he calls his "cloud of witnesses" when he
has ended all he had to say in the form of argument.
These witnesses, moreover, are jumbled together without the slightest
discrimination. Let us take a few illustrations to show the futility of
Dr. Farrar's method.
John Wesley cried "Give me the book of God! Here is knowledge enough
for me. Let me be a man of one book." Yes, and John Wesley believed in
witchcraft, and honestly declared that to throw over witchcraft was to
throw over the Bible. He had, also, his own way of proving "the divine
inspiration of the Holy Scriptures." He wrote a "Clear and Concise
Demonstration," from which we take the following extract:--
"I beg leave to propose a short, clear, and strong argument to prove the
divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.
"The Bible must be the invention either of good men or angels, bad men
or devils, or of God.
"(1) It could not be the invention of good men or angels; for they
neither would nor could make a book, and tell lies all the time they
were writing it, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord,' when it was their own
invention.
"(2) It could not be the invention of bad men or devils; for they would
not make a book which commands all duty, forbids all sin, and condemns
their souls to hell to all eternity.
"(3) Therefore, I draw this conclusion, that the Bible must be given by
divine inspiration."*
* John Wesley's Works (1865), vol. xi., pp. 464-465.
Could anything be more childish than this ridiculous play upon the word
"invention," and this absurd supposition that "good men" and "bad men"
are two sharp divisions of the human species? We know that all men
are mixtures, and that honest men may be mistaken, and tell falsehoods
without lying. We are therefore able to measure the value of John
Wesley's "demonstration" that the Bible is inspired.
John Ruskin thanks his mother for daily reading the Bible with him in
his childhood, and daily making him learn a part of it by heart. This is
seized upon by Dr. Farrar, who places it in his list of testimonies. But
it might have been wise--it would certainly have been honest--to tell
the reader how Ruskin views the Bible. This great writer has formulated
four theories of the Bible, the third of which he has declared to be
"for the last half-century the theory of the soundest scholars and
thinkers in Europe." And what is this theory? Here it is in Ruskin's own
words:--
"That the mass of religious Scripture contains merely the best efforts
which we hitherto know to have been made by any of the races of men
towards the discovery of some relations with the spiritual world; that
they are only trustworthy as expressions of the enthusiastic visions or
beliefs of earnest men oppressed by the world's darkness, and have no
more authoritative claim on our faith than the religious speculations
and histories of the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Indians; but are,
in common with all these, to be reverently studied, as containing
a portion, divinely appointed, of the best wisdom which the human
intellect, earnestly seeking for help from God, has hitherto been able
to gather between birth and death."*
* Time and Tide, pp. 48, 49. It should be noted that the
Letters in this pregnant little volume were written by
Ruskin as far back as 1867.
Surely this is a very different view of the Bible from the one which is
presented by Dr. Farrar. Setting aside a little religious phraseology,
a Freethinker might endorse Ruskin's theory of the Bible. Everything is
substantially granted to the Freethinker when it is admitted that the
Bible has "no authoritative claim on our faith." Whatever truth and
beauty it contains may then be thankfully accepted.
Professor Huxley's famous eulogy of the Bible, as a book to be read in
Board Schools, is made the most of by Dr. Farrar. He must have winced,
however, at Huxley's reference to what a sensible teacher would
"eliminate" as "not desirable for children to occupy themselves with."
He was not sensitive enough to wince at the statement that "even the
noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary
child"--which is virtually a testimonial in his favor for grown-up
men and women. Dr. Farrar crows lustily over what he calls "Professor
Huxley's testimony to the unique glory of the Scriptures." It is
perhaps well for him that Huxley is incapable of resenting this
misrepresentation. Still, it must be admitted that on this occasion, as
on one or two others, Huxley did gratuitously play into the hands of
the enemy. He might have known the kind of use they would make of his
"graceful concessions."
Dr. Farrar had not the honesty to tell his readers that Huxley had
the most sovereign contempt for _his_ theory of the Bible. The great
Agnostic held, for instance, that "belief in a demonic world" is
inculcated throughout the New Testament, and that this belief is
"totally devoid of foundation." He declared that Inspiration, in the
school of the Higher Criticism, is "deprived of its old intelligible
sense," and is "watered down into a mystification." He laughed at
the miracles of the Gospels, and made great fun of the story of the
bedevilled Gadarean swine. He held that religion and morality
have really no necessary connection, and sneered at the
"supernaturalists"--gentlemen like Dr. Farrar--who took to patronising
morality when they saw its importance, and "have ever since tried to
persuade mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of
supernaturalism."*
To accept a testimonial from such a writer is abject on the part of a
clergyman defending the inspiration of the Bible; and to parade it is
simply contemptible. More than fifty years ago, when this petty trick of
Christian apologetics was coming into vogue, it was rebuked by Newman,
who disdained as "unworthy" the practice of "boasting of the admissions
of infidels concerning the beauty or utility of the Christian system, as
though," he added with fine sarcasm, "it were a great thing for a divine
gift to obtain praise for human excellence."**
* Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition, pp. xv., 25, 54,
etc.
** John Henry Newman, University Sermons, p. 71.
Dr. Farrar's citation of Matthew Arnold is open to the same kind of
criticism. "He retained but little faith in the miraculous," we are
told, and "his creed was anything but orthodox." But is it fair to
suggest that Arnold had any creed at all? He rejected the idea of a
personal God, he regarded Jesus as a merely human teacher, and it is
evident from his books and his published correspondence that he had no
belief in personal immortality. As for his "faith in the miraculous," it
was not "little," with or without the "but"; it was a minus quantity.
He positively disbelieved in the miraculous. It was a part of his plain
message to the Churches that the reign of the Bible miracles was doomed,
that they were all fairy tales, and that, if the fate of the Bible was
bound up with theirs, the Bible was doomed too. Arnold said all this
when he was living, and it is useless for Dr. Farrar to disguise
the fact, or to minimise it by artful phrases. We commend to his
attention--would that we could commend it to the attention of his
readers!--the following passage from a letter of Arnold's to Sir
Mountstuart Grant Duff, dated July 22, 1882:--
"The central fact of the situation always remains to me this: that
whereas the basis of things amidst all chance and change has even in
Europe generally been for ever so long supernatural Christianity, and
far more so in England than in Europe generally, this basis is certainly
going--going amidst the full consciousness of the continentals that it
is going, and amidst the provincial unconsciousness of the English that
it is going."*
* Matthew Arnold, Letters, vol. ii., p. 201.
Considering what Arnold's views really were, is it of any use to make
the statement of rather doubtful accuracy that the Bible was his "chief
and constant study"? Is it not misleading to talk of his "intense
reverence and admiration for the Sacred Books"? He did not regard them
as _sacred_. He studied and valued the Bible as literature, not as
revelation; and it is monstrous to cite him as a witness in favor of the
Bible as it is represented in the school of Dr. Farrar.
We need not waste time over Dr. Farrar's _banal_ remark that
Livingstone, Stanley, and the Bible together have caused "the extension
of the British protectorate over 170,000 square miles" in a certain
part of Africa. We may treat with the same indifference his boast of the
millions of copies of the "Sacred Books" distributed by the British
and American Bible Societies. Such "evidences" are only fit for the
street-corner. Only a low-minded, commercial-sodden Christian could
imagine that the multiplication of copies of a book is any sort of
testimony to its intrinsic truth and value; and in this particular case
the demand is a forced one, depending on the incessant stimulus of the
supply.
Another argument of Dr. Farrar's for the "supremacy" of the Bible
is based upon the history of Christian martyrdoms. He gives several
instances of Christians, old and young, rich and poor, high-placed and
humble, who have died for their faith, and entered "the dark river and
its still waters with a smile upon their faces." He attributes their
fortitude to trust in the promises of the Bible. But he does not tell us
how it proves the truth of the Bible either as history or as revelation.
Millions of Jews have died at the hands of Christian bigots, and their
heroism amidst torture and massacre has never been exceeded in human
annals. Does this prove that the New Testament is not a revelation, and
that Jesus Christ was not God? Men of other faiths have faced death
with sublime courage. Does this prove that their beliefs were accurate?
Mohammedans are notoriously ready to die for their religion; the
Mohammedan dervishes in the Soudan never quailed before the most
murderous storm of shell and bullets; they fell in thousands at
Omdurman, and the Khalifa's standard-bearer, when all around him were
slain, stood upright under the holy flag, with a smile of defiance on
his face, which never left it until he sank shot-riddled upon the heap
of his dead comrades. Does this prove that the Koran is the Word of God?
The orthodox argument seems to be this: if a Christian dies for the
Bible, that proves it to be a divine book; if a devotee of any other
faith dies for his Sacred Scripture. That proves nothing--unless it be
the obstinacy of wrong opinions.
There is something intensely comical in the seriousness with which Dr.
Farrar relates the martyrdom of Christians who were put to death by
other Christians. He does not see that all he gains on one side is lost
on the other, that Christian persecution balances Christian fortitude,
and that nothing is left to the credit of his account. He devotes a
whole page to the murder of Margaret Lachlan and Margaret Wilson by
"brutal and tyrannous bigots" at Wigton in 1677. These two women
were Covenanting Christians, and their murderers were Episcopalian
Christians. They died singing psalms which their murderers believed
to be the word of God. It is difficult to see what advantage the Bible
derives from this incident.
One may be interested by the reminder that Oliver Cromwell quoted two
verses from the hundred and seventeenth Psalm after his victory at
Dunbar; but one may remember on one's own account that David Leslie, the
defeated Scots general, was as devout a Christian and Bible-reader as
Oliver Cromwell, and that his piety was stimulated by the presence in
his camp of a whole congregation of Presbyterian ministers. Altogether
it is a pity that Dr. Farrar picks his illustrations in this one-eyed
fashion. He forgets that other people may have two eyes, and see on both
sides of them. He almost invites the sarcasm that the one-eyed man is
only a leader amongst the blind.
The real secret of whatever supremacy belongs to the Bible is to be
sought in a different direction. It was long ago remarked by a French
Freethinker, in a work attributed to Boulanger, but really written by
D'Holbach, that education and authority were the two great pillars of
the Christian revelation.
"If a body of men in possession of power, and able to like advantage of
the credulity of mankind, were to find their interest concerned in doing
so, they would make men believe at the end of a few centuries that the
adventures of Don Quixote are perfectly true, and that the prophecies
of Nostrodamus have been inspired by God himself. By dint of glosses,
of commentaries, and of allegories, it is easy to discover and to prove
what one pleases; however glaring an imposture may be, it can be made at
last, by the aid of time, cunning, and power, to pass for truth which
no one must doubt. Deceivers who are obstinate, and who are supported
by public authority, can make ignorant people, who are always credulous,
believe anything, especially if they can persuade them that there is
merit in not noticing inconsistencies, contradictions, and palpable
absurdities, and that there is danger in making use of their reason."*
* Examen Critique de St. Paul, c. 3.
Abolish all the Churches that exist for the purpose of preaching up the
Bible as a divine revelation; destroy all the clerical corporations
that live and operate upon this basis; take away, at least, the
public revenues and special privileges they enjoy; deprive them of
the patronage of the legislature and the government; remove their Holy
Scriptures from the public schools, where they are retained in defiance
of the principles of civil and religious liberty; let little children
no longer be suborned in favor of the supernatural claims of this book
before they are able to judge for themselves; let the Bible take its own
chance with the rest of the world's literature; and then, and not till
then, can its natural supremacy be established. But the clergy know that
such an experiment would be absolutely fatal to their pretensions. They
dare not accept a fair field and no favor. They know in their heart
of hearts that they are serving a lie. Their dishonesty is apparent at
every turn. Dr. Farrar calls upon England to "cling to her open Bible."
Well, the Peculiar People do so. They read the open Bible, they follow
its teaching as closely as possible, they obey the commandments of Jesus
Christ. And what is the result? They are cast into prison like felons.
One of them is suffering that pain and indignity at the present moment.
A good husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a good citizen, he has
committed the crime of practically believing what Dr. Farrar and the
rest of the clergy facetiously preach--namely, that the Bible is the
Book of God, and the divine rule of faith and conduct. For this crime he
is imprisoned under the verdict of a Christian jury and the sentence of
a Christian judge; and not a single Christian minister raises his voice
against this infamous spectacle. Christianity is now only an organised
hypocrisy. It subsists upon an inherited fund of power, wealth, and
reputation. Even the clergy have no vital belief in the inspiration
of the Bible. It is merely the charter under which they trade. It is a
source of oracular texts for their ambiguous sermons. It is lauded
and adored, and neglected and defied. To bring it into disbelief and
contempt by argument and ridicule is a misdemeanor; to bring it into
disbelief and contempt by acting upon it is a felony. The only safe
course is that adopted by the clergy, who neither believe it nor
disbelieve it, but use it as it serves their occasions; and as long as
it answers their ends it will remain the Book of God.
Let us not be misunderstood. We are far from desiring to engage in a
crusade against the Bible as a collection of ancient literature. We are
neither called upon nor disposed to deny its real merits, however they
are exaggerated in religious circles. It undoubtedly contains some fine
poetry, occasional pathos, and more frequent sublimity. Its style has
nearly always the charm of simplicity. All this may be allowed without
playing into the hands of the super-naturalists. Further than this we
need not go. In our opinion, it is absurd to place the Bible at the
top of human compositions. More than sixty writers are alleged to have
contributed to its production, but the whole mass of them do not rival
the magnificent and fecund genius of Shakespeare. Above all, they have
no wit or humour, in which Shakespeare abounds; and wit and humor belong
to the higher development of intellect and emotion. No, the Bible is
not the unapproachable masterpiece which it is declared to be by its
fanatical devotees. But whatever its intrinsic merits may prove to be,
in the light of long and free appreciation, the Bible cannot be accepted
as a revelation from God without wilful self-delusion on the part of
educated men and women. If God had a message for his children, he would
at least make it clear; but this revelation needs another revelation
to explain it, and creeds and commentaries are the symbols of its
obscurity. God's message would tell us what we could not otherwise
learn, but there is no such information in the Bible. God would apprise
us of what he specially desired us to remember, and would not mix it
confusedly with a tremendous mass of alien matter. God would not puzzle
us; he would enlighten us. He would make his communication so clear that
a wayfaring man, though a fool, could understand it; whereas, if the
Bible be his communication, no wayfaring man, unless he _is_ a fool,
pretends to understand it. God would not clog his message with myths,
legends, mysteries, absurdities, falsehoods, and filth; and leave us to
extricate it with endless labor and perpetual uncertainty. The so-called
Higher Criticism is therefore as absurd as the old Orthodoxy in calling
the Bible a work of inspiration. Its exponents affirm that God has left
us to our own knowledge and reason in regard to every other subject but
religion and morality. They are Evolutionists in part. But the principle
of Evolution must be applied over the whole field. Everything is
natural, and happens under the universal law of causation. There are no
miracles, and there never were any except in ignorant imaginations.
But the death of miracles is the death of inspiration. The triumph of
science involves the ruin of every supernatural system. Revelation is
necessarily miraculous, and when the belief in miracles expires the
death-knell rings for every Book of God. We are then left to the
discipline of culture.
And what is culture? It is steeping our minds in the wisest and
loveliest thoughts of all the ages. And each of us may thus make his own
Bible for himself--a true Bible of Humanity.