_An Apologue_
There was once an Eastern prince who was much enamoured of the art of
gardening. He wished that all flowers delightful to the eye, and all
fruits pleasant to the taste and good for food, should grow in his
dominion, and that in growing the flowers should become more fair, the
fruits more savoury and nourishing. With this thought in his mind and
this desire in his heart, he found his way to the Ancient One, the Worker
of Wonders who dwells in a secret place, and made known his request.
“For the care of your gardens and your orchards,” said the Ancient One,
“I can do nothing, since that charge has been given to you and to your
people. Nor will I send blossoming plants and fruiting trees of every
kind to make your kingdom rich and beautiful as by magic, lest the honour
of labour should be diminished, and the slow reward of patience despised,
and even the living gifts bestowed upon you without toil should wither
and die away. But this will I do: a single tree shall be brought to you
from a far country by the hands of my servants, and you shall plant it in
the midst of your land. In the body of that tree is the sap of life that
was from the beginning; the leaves of it are full of healing; its flowers
never fail, and its fruitage is the joy of every season. The roots of
the tree shall go down to the springs of deep waters; and wherever its
pollen is drifted by the wind or borne by the bees, the gardens shall put
on new beauty; and wherever its seed is carried by the fowls of the air,
the orchards shall yield a richer harvest. But the tree itself you shall
guard and cherish and keep as I give it you, neither cutting anything
away from it, nor grafting anything upon it; for the life of the tree is
in all the branches, and the other trees shall be glad because of it.”
As the Ancient One had spoken, so it came to pass. The land of that
prince had great renown of fine flowers and delicious fruits, ever
unfolding in new colours and sweeter flavours the life that was shed
among them by the tree of trees.
I
Something like the marvel of this tale may be read in the history of
the Bible. No other book in the world has had such a strange vitality,
such an outgoing power of influence and inspiration. Not only has it
brought to the countries in whose heart it has been set new ideals of
civilization, new models of character, new conceptions of virtue and
hopes of happiness; but it has also given new impulse and form to the
shaping imagination of man, and begotten beauty in literature and the
other arts.
Suppose, for example, that it were possible to dissolve away all the
works of art which clearly owe their being to thoughts, emotions, or
visions derived from the Bible,—all sculpture like Donatello’s “David”
and Michelangelo’s “Moses”; all painting like Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna”
and Murillo’s “Holy Family”; all music like Bach’s “Passion” and Handel’s
“Messiah”; all poetry like Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Milton’s “Paradise
Lost,”—how it would impoverish the world!
The literary influence of the Bible appears the more wonderful when we
consider that it is the work of a race not otherwise potent or famous in
literature. We do not know, of course, what other books may have come
from the Jewish nation and vanished with whatever of power or beauty they
possessed; but in those that remain there is little of exceptional force
or charm for readers outside of the Hebrew race. They have no broad human
appeal, no universal significance, not even any signal excellence of form
and imagery. Josephus is a fairly good historian, sometimes entertaining,
but not comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon. The
Talmuds are vast storehouses of things new and old, where a careful
searcher may now and then find a legendary gem or a quaint fragment of
moral tapestry. In histories of mediæval literature, Ibn Ezra of Toledo
and Rashi of Lunel are spoken of with respect. In modern letters, works
as far apart as the philosophical treatises of Spinoza and the lyrics of
Heinrich Heine have distinction in their kind. No one thinks that the
Hebrews are lacking in great and varied talents; but how is it that in
world-literature their only contribution that counts is the Bible? And
how is it that it counts so immensely?
It is possible to answer by saying that in the Old Testament we have a
happily made collection of the best things in the ancient literature
of the Jews, and in the New Testament we have another anthology of the
finest of the narratives and letters which were produced by certain
writers of the same race under a new and exceedingly powerful spiritual
impulse. The Bible is excellent because it contains the cream of Hebrew
thought. But this answer explains nothing. It only restates the facts in
another form. How did the cream rise? How did such a collection come to
be made? What gives it unity and coherence underneath all its diversity?
How is it that, as a clear critic has well said, “These sixty books, with
all their varieties of age, authorship, literary form, are, when properly
arranged, felt to draw together with a unity like the connectedness of a
dramatic plot?”
There is an answer, which if it be accepted, carries with it a solution
of the problem.
Suppose a race chosen by some process of selection (which need not
now be discussed or defined) to develop in its strongest and most
absolute form that one of man’s faculties which is called the religious
sense, to receive most clearly and deeply the impression of the unity,
spirituality, and righteousness of a Supreme Being present in the world.
Imagine that race moving through a long and varied experience under this
powerful impression, now loyal to it, now rebelling against it, now
misinterpreting it, now led by the voice of some prophet to understand
it more fully and feel it more profoundly, but never wholly losing it
for a single generation. Imagine the history of that race, its poetry,
the biography of its famous men and women, the messages of its moral
reformers, conceived and written in constant relation to that strongest
factor of conscious life, the sense of the presence and power of the
Eternal.
Suppose, now, in a time of darkness and humiliation, that there rises
within that race a prophet who declares that a new era of spiritual light
has come, preaches a new revelation of the Eternal, and claims in his own
person to fulfil the ancient hopes and promises of a divine deliverer
and redeemer. Imagine his followers, few in number, accepting his
message slowly and dimly at first, guided by companionship with him into
a clearer understanding and a stronger belief, until at last they are
convinced that his claims are true, and that he is the saviour not only
of the chosen people, but also of the whole world, the revealer of the
Eternal to mankind. Imagine these disciples setting out with incredible
courage to carry this message to all nations, so deeply impressed with
its truth that they are supremely happy to suffer and die for it, so
filled with the passion of its meaning that they dare attempt to remodel
the life of the world with it. Suppose a human story like this underneath
the writing of the books which are gathered in the Bible, and you have
an explanation—it seems to me the only reasonable explanation—of their
surpassing quality and their strange unity.
This story is not a mere supposition: its general outline, stated in
these terms, belongs to the realm of facts which cannot reasonably be
questioned. What more is needed to account for the story itself, what
potent and irresistible reality is involved in this record of experience,
I do not now ask. This is not an estimate of the religious authority of
the Bible, nor of its inspiration in the theological sense of that word,
but only of something less important, though no less real—its literary
influence.