The fountain-head of the power of the Bible in literature lies in its
nearness to the very springs and sources of human life—life taken
seriously, earnestly, intensely; life in its broadest meaning, including
the inward as well as the outward; life interpreted in its relation
to universal laws and eternal values. It is this vital quality in the
narratives, the poems, the allegories, the meditations, the discourses,
the letters, gathered in this book, that gives it first place among the
books of the world not only for currency, but also for greatness.
For the currency of literature depends in the long run upon the breadth
and vividness of its human appeal. And the greatness of literature
depends upon the intensive significance of those portions of life which
it depicts and interprets. Now, there is no other book which reflects so
many sides and aspects of human experience as the Bible, and this fact
alone would suffice to give it a world-wide interest and make it popular.
But it mirrors them all, whether they belong to the chronicles of kings
and conquerors, or to the obscure records of the lowliest of labourers
and sufferers, in the light of a conviction that they are all related
to the will and purpose of the Eternal. This illuminates every figure
with a divine distinction, and raises every event to the _n_th power of
meaning. It is this fact that gives the Bible its extraordinary force as
literature and makes it great.
_Born in the East and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible
walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet and enters land after
land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds
of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the
monarch that he is a servant of the Most High, and into the cottage
to assure the peasant that he is a son of God. Children listen to its
stories with wonder and delight, and wise men ponder them as parables
of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, a word of comfort
for the day of calamity, a word of light for the hour of darkness. Its
oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels
whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wicked and the proud tremble
at its warning, but to the wounded and the penitent it has a mother’s
voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it,
and the fire on the hearth has lit the reading of its well-worn page. It
has woven itself into our deepest affections and coloured our dearest
dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and
hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of
frankincense and myrrh._
_Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us
uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the
beauty of them lingers on our ear long after the sermons which they
adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like
doves flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like
springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-trodden
path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart._
_No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the
landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the Valley named
of the Shadow, he is not afraid to enter: he takes the rod and staff of
Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, “Good-by; we shall
meet again”; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely
pass as one who walks through darkness into light._
It would be strange indeed if a book which has played such a part in
human life had not exercised an extraordinary influence upon literature.
As a matter of fact, the Bible has called into existence tens of
thousands of other books devoted to the exposition of its meaning,
the defense and illustration of its doctrine, the application of its
teaching, or the record of its history. The learned Fabricius, in the
early part of the eighteenth century, published a _catalogue raisonné_
of such books, filling seven hundred quarto pages.[1] Since that time
the length of the list has probably more than trebled. In addition, we
must reckon the many books of hostile criticism and contrary argument
which the Bible has evoked, and which are an evidence of revolt against
the might of its influence. All this tangle of Biblical literature has
grown up around it like a vast wood full of all manner of trees, great
and small, useful and worthless, fruit-trees, timber-trees, berry-bushes,
briers, and poison-vines. But all of them, even the most beautiful and
tall, look like undergrowth, when we compare them with the mighty oak of
Scripture, towering in perennial grandeur, the father of the forest.
Among the patristic writers there were some of great genius like Origen
and Chrysostom and Augustine. The mediæval schools of theology produced
men of philosophic power, like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas; of spiritual
insight, like the author of the _Imitatio Christi_. The eloquence of
France reached its height in the discourses of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and
Massillon. German became one of the potent tongues of literature when
Martin Luther used it in his tracts and sermons, and Herder’s _Geist der
hebräischen Poesie_ is one of the great books in criticism. In English,
to mention such names as Hooker and Fuller and Jeremy Taylor is to recall
the dignity, force, and splendour of prose at its best. Yet none of
these authors has produced anything to rival the book from which they
drew their common inspiration.
In the other camp, though there have been many brilliant assailants, not
one has surpassed, or even equalled, in the estimation of the world, the
literary excellence of the book which they attacked. The mordant wit
of Voltaire, the lucid and melancholy charm of Renan, have not availed
to drive or draw the world away from the Bible; and the effect of all
assaults has been to leave it more widely read, better understood, and
more intelligently admired than ever before.
Now it must be admitted that the same thing is true, at least in some
degree, of other books which are held to be sacred or quasi-sacred:
they are superior to the distinctively theological literature which has
grown up about them. I suppose nothing of the Mussulmans is as great as
the “Koran,” nothing of the Hindus as great as the “Vedas”; and though
the effect of the Confucian classics, from the literary point of view,
may not have been altogether good, their supremacy in the religious
library of the Chinese is unquestioned. But the singular and noteworthy
thing about the influence of the Bible is the extent to which it has
permeated general literature, the mark which it has made in all forms of
belles-lettres. To treat this subject adequately one would need to write
volumes. In this chapter I can touch but briefly on a few points of the
outline as they come out in English literature.