Dr. Clifford has declared that there is not a man who has
given a day's attention to the question who holds the complete
freedom of the Bible from inaccuracy. He has added that "it
is become more and more impossible to affirm the inerrancy
of the Bible." Dr. Lyman Abbott says that "an infallible book
is an impossible conception, and to-day no one really believes
that our present Bible is such a book."
Compare those opinions with the following extract from the first article
in _The Bible and the Child_:
The change of view respecting the Bible, which has marked the
advancing knowledge and more earnest studies of this generation
is only the culmination of the discovery that there were
different documents in the Book of Genesis--a discovery first
published by the physician, Jean Astruc, in 1753. There are
_three_ widely divergent ways of dealing with these results of
profound study, each of which is almost equally dangerous to
the faith of the rising generation.
1. Parents and teachers may go on inculcating dogmas about the
Bible and methods of dealing with it which have long become
impossible to those who have really tried to follow the manifold
discoveries of modern inquiry with perfectly open and unbiased
minds. There are a certain number of persons who, when their
minds have become stereotyped in foregone conclusions, are simply
_incapable_ of grasping new truths. They become obstructives,
and not infrequently bigoted obstructives. As convinced as the
Pope of their own personal infallibility, their attitude towards
those who see that the old views are no longer tenable is an
attitude of anger and alarm. This is the usual temper of the
_odium theologicum_. It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew
and the rack of mediaeval Inquisitors, and would, in the last
resource, hand over all opponents to the scaffold or the stake.
Those whose intellects have thus been petrified by custom and
advancing years are, of all others, the most hopeless to deal
with. They have made themselves incapable of fair and rational
examination of the truths which they impugn. They think that
they can, by mere assertion, overthrow results arrived at by the
lifelong inquiries of the ablest students, while they have not
given a day's serious or impartial study to them. They fancy
that even the ignorant, if only they be what is called "orthodox,"
are justified in strong denunciation of men quite as truthful,
and often incomparably more able, than themselves. Off-hand
dogmatists of this stamp, who usually abound among professional
religionists, think that they can refute any number of scholars,
however profound and however pious, if only they shout "Infidel"
with sufficient loudness.
Those are not the words of an "Infidel." They are the words of the late
Dean Farrar.
To quote again from Dr. Gladden:
Evidently neither the theory of verbal inspiration, nor the
theory of plenary inspiration, can be made to fit the facts
which a careful study of the writings themselves brings before
us. _These writings are not inspired in the sense which we
have commonly given to that word._ The verbal theory of
inspiration was only tenable while they were supposed to be
the work of a single author. _To such a composite literature
no such theory will apply._
The Bible is not inspired. The fact is that _no_ "sacred" book is
inspired. _All_ "sacred" books are the work of human minds. All ideas of
God are human ideas. All religions are made by man.
When the old-fashioned Christian said the Bible was an inspired book, he
meant that God put the words and the facts directly into the mind of
the prophet. That meant that God told Moses about the creation, Adam and
Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, and the Ten Commandments.
Many modern Christians, amongst whom I place the Rev. Ambrose Pope, of
Bakewell, believe that God gave Moses (and all the other prophets) a
special genius and a special desire to convey religious information to
other men.
And Mr. Pope suggests that man was so ignorant, so childlike, or so
weak in those days that it was necessary to disguise plain facts in
misleading symbols.
But the man, Moses or another, who wrote the Book of Genesis was a man
of literary genius. He was no child, no weakling. If God had said to
him: "I made the world out of the fiery nebula, and I made the sea
to bring forth the staple of life, and I caused all living things to
develop from that seed or staple of life, and I drew man out from the
brutes; and the time was six hundred millions of years"--if God had said
that to Moses, do you think Moses would not have understood?
Now, let me show you what the Christian asks us to believe. He asks us
to believe that the God who was the first cause of creation, and knew
everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with a fabulous
and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth, and that since
that day the same God has gradually changed or added to the inspiration,
until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Darwin to
contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He asks
us to believe that God muddled men's minds with a mysterious series
of revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them to
stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He
allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account
of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that
He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and antagonistic
religions fight each other to achieve the survival of the fittest. Is
that a reasonable theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable man can
accept? Is it consonant with common sense?
Contrast that with our theory. We say that early man, having no
knowledge of science, and more imagination than reason, would be alarmed
and puzzled by the phenomena of Nature. He would be afraid of the dark,
he would be afraid of the thunder, he would wonder at the moon, at the
stars, at fire, at the ocean. He would fear what he did not understand,
and he would bow down and pay homage to what he feared.
Then, by degrees, he would personify the stars, and the sun, and the
thunder, and the fire. He would make gods of these things. He would make
gods of the dead. He would make gods of heroes. He would do what all
savage races do, what all children do: he would make legends, or fables,
or fairy tales out of his hopes, his fears, and his guesses.
Does not that sound reasonable? Does not history teach us that it is
true? Do we not know that religion was so born and nursed?
There is no such thing known to men as an original religion. All
religions are made up of the fables and the imaginations of tribes long
since extinct. Religion is an evolution, not a revelation. It has been
invented, altered, and built up, and pulled down, and reconstructed time
after time. It is a conglomeration and an adaptation, as language is.
And the Christian religion is no more an original religion than English
is an original tongue. We have Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, French, Saxon,
Norman words in our language; and we have Aryan, Semitic, Egyptian,
Roman, Greek, and all manner of ancient foreign fables, myths, and rites
in our Christian religion.
We say that Genesis was a poetic presentation of a fabulous story pieced
together from many traditions of many tribes, and recording with great
literary power the ideas of a people whose scientific knowledge was very
incomplete.
Now, I ask you which of these theories is the most reasonable; which
is the most scientific; which agrees most closely with the facts of
philology and history of which we are in possession?
Why twist the self-evident fact that the Bible story of creation was the
work of unscientific men of strong imagination into a far-fetched and
unsatisfactory puzzle of symbol and allegory? It would be just as easy
and just as reasonable to take the _Morte d'Arthur_ and try to prove
that it contained a veiled revelation of God's relations to man.
And let me ask one or two questions as to this matter of the revelation
of the Holy Bible. Is God all-powerful or is he not? If he is
all-powerful, why did He make man so imperfect? Could He not have
created him at once a wise and good creature? Even when man was ignorant
and savage, could not an all-powerful God have devised some means of
revealing Himself so as to be understood? If God really wished to reveal
Himself to man, why did He reveal Himself only to one or two obscure
tribes, and leave the rest of mankind in darkness?
Those poor savages were full of credulity, full of terror, full of
wonder, full of the desire to worship. They worshipped the sun and the
moon; they worshipped ghosts and demons; they worshipped tyrants, and
pretenders, and heroes, dead and alive. Do you believe that if God
had come down on earth, with a cohort of shining angels, and had said,
"Behold, I am the only God," these savages would not have left all
baser gods and worshipped Him? Why, these men, and all the thousands
of generations of their children, have been looking for God since first
they learned to look at sea and sky. They are looking for Him now. They
have fought countless bloody wars and have committed countless horrible
atrocities in their zeal for Him. And you ask us to believe that His
grand revelation of Himself is bound up in a volume of fables and errors
collected thousands of years ago by superstitious priests and prophets
of Palestine, and Egypt, and Assyria.
We cannot believe such a statement. No man can believe it who tests it
by his reason in the same way in which he would test any modern problem.
If the leaders of religion brought the same vigour and subtlety of mind
to bear upon religion which they bring to bear upon any criticism of
religion, if they weighed the Bible as they have weighed astronomy and
evolution, the Christian religion would not last a year.
If my reader has not studied this matter, let him read the books I have
recommended, and then sit down and consider the Bible revelation and
story with the same fearless honesty and clear common sense with which
he would consider the Bibles of the Mohammedan, or Buddhist, or Hindoo,
and then ask himself the question: "Is the Bible a holy and inspired
book, and the word of God to man, or is it an incongruous and
contradictory collection of tribal traditions and ancient fables,
written by men of genius and imagination?"