The Old Testament is a Library of Jewish Letters. The germ of the
collection was planted by Nehemiah when "he, founding a library, gathered
together the acts of the kings, and the prophets, and of David, and the
epistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts."[17] This germ grew
gradually into its present shape. The Apocrypha belongs to it, and is
rightly bound up in our Bibles, for reading in our churches. These books
of the Canonical and Apocryphal writings do not cover the whole literature
of the Hebrew nation. Many writings have been lost inadvertently. Many
have been dropped as unworthy of preservation. We have the garnered grain
of Hebrew literature in our Bible--a winnowed national library. It
includes histories, juridical codifications, dramas of love and destiny,
patriotic songs and state anthems, the hymnal of a people's worship,
philosophic writings of the sages, collections of proverbial sayings,
works of religious fiction, orations of statesmen, and oracles of mystic
seers.
The New Testament is the literature of the Christian Church in its
creative epoch; the work still, in the main, of Jewish hands, as Judaism
was blossoming into a universal religion. It is thus the literature of the
most important religious movement civilization has experienced; a movement
whose unspent forces we are feeling still, in the flooding tides of
progress. It, too, forms a winnowed library; the siftings of Sayings of
Jesus, lives of Christ, apostolical and other letters, visions and
romances; and holds the choicest mental products of this fertile era. In
it are gathered memoirs of the Founder of Christianity, doctrinal and
ethical treatises from the hand of the man who, under Christ, was the
chief factor in the early Church; similar essays, in the form of letters,
from other more or less important leaders, representing the various phases
of original Christianity; a fragmentary and free sketch of the apostolic
labors, and the last great effort of apocalyptic genius, in the Revelation
of St. John, the Divine.
3. _This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is
intrinsically noble._
The Bible has lost much of its fresh charm for us, with whom its finest
sayings are household words.
We parsed Virgil and Homer in our boyhood until the aroma of poetry
exhaled from their hackneyed pages, and we can scarce think of them now
save as grammatical exercises. The Bible has thus palled upon our
imagination, through the uninspiring familiarity of early task-work. But
were it possible to read it in our manhood for the first time, how the
blood would beat and the nerves thrill over some of its pages. We should
then understand the sensations of a French _salon_ upon a certain
occasion. Our shrewd philosopher-minister Franklin, had previously heard
the _literati_ wont to gather there ridiculing the Bible, and had guessed
that they knew little of it. Upon this evening he observed that he would
much like to have the judgment of the assembly on a certain Eastern tale
he had lately come across, unknown probably to most of those there
present, though long ago translated into their own tongue. Whereupon,
drawing from his pocket a copy of the Bible, he had a Parisienne, let into
the secret, read in her sweet tones the book of Ruth. The company was
thrown into raptures over the charming tale, which lasted until they found
its name.
How fresh, with the crisp air of morning, are these tales of primitive
tradition! How _naif_ these simple stories of Hebrew heroes! What so fine
in religious poetry as some of the strains from the Jewish Hymnal? What a
noble drama is Job, the Hebrew Faust! How wise the proverbial sayings!
What pure passion and lofty imagination stir through the pages of the
greater prophets! Where are to be found letters like those of Paul? What
biographies have the artless simplicity of the Synoptic Gospels, or the
mystic spirituality of the Gospel according to St. John!
No critic of our age has finer literary feeling or more dispassionate
judgment than Matthew Arnold; and he has edited the second section of
Isaiah as a text book for the culture of the imagination in English
schools. In the introduction to this Primer he observes: "What a course of
eloquence and poetry is the Bible in our schools."
Goethe shared Arnold's love of the Bible, and was so constant a reader of
it that his friends reproached him for wasting his time over it. Burke
owned his indebtedness to the Bible for his unique eloquence. Webster
confessed that he owed to its habitual reading much of his power. Ruskin
looks back to the days when a pious aunt compelled him to learn by heart
whole chapters of the Bible, for his schooling in the craft of speech, in
which he stands unrivaled among living Englishmen.
Emerson writes:
"The most original book in the world is the Bible. This old collection
of the ejaculations of love and dread, of the supreme desires and
contritions of men, proceeding out of the region of the grand and
eternal seems ... the alphabet of the nations, and all posterior
writings, either the chronicles of facts under very inferior ideas, or
when it rises to sentiment, the combinations, analogies, or degradation
of this. The elevation of this book may be measured by observing how
certainly all observation of thought clothes itself in the words and
forms of speech of that book.... Whatever is majestically thought in a
great moral element, instantly approaches this old Sanscrit....
Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, the highest in whom
the moral is not the predominating element, leans on the Bible; his
poetry presupposes it. If we examine this brilliant
influence--Shakspeare--as it lies in our minds, we shall find it
reverent, not only of the letter of this book, but of the whole frame
of society which stood in Europe upon it, deeply indebted to the
traditional morality, in short, compared with the tone of the Prophets,
_secondary_.... People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in
the world, it owes to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it
came out of a profounder depth of thought than any other book."[18]
Even what seem to us valueless books turn out, when studied naturally,
most interesting and suggestive.
Jonah, that stone of stumbling and rock of offence to the modern youth,
becomes, when rightly read, a noble writing, full of the very spirit of
our age. Around the tradition of Jonah, the son of Amittai, a prophet of
whom we know nothing in other writings, some forgotten author has woven a
story, to point a lofty moral. Jonah feels himself called to go to Nineveh
and cry against it, because of its wickedness. Quite naturally he does not
relish such an errand.
The prospect of a poor Jew's reforming the gay and dissolute metropolis of
the earth, which sat as a queen among the nations, singing to herself, "I
will be a lady forever," was not brilliant enough to fascinate him; and
the prospect of the reward he would get from the luxurious people of
pleasure, whose well-opiated consciences he should rudely rouse by calling
their intrigues and carousals wickedness, was only too clear. Jonah fled
from his duty. In his flight occurs the marvelous experience with the big
fish, that has so troubled dear, pious people who have read as literal
history what is plainly legendary. After this fabulous episode, the story
takes up its ethical thread. Jonah finds that he cannot flee from the
presence of the Lord, that he cannot decline a mission imposed from on
high. He goes to Nineveh; cries out against its sins, as God had told him;
and, as God had not told him, predicts its overthrow in forty days, as a
judgment on its crimes. But, contrary to his expectations, the city is
stirred by his preaching; and King and court and people repent and amend
their ways. Whereupon the Divine forgiveness is extended at once to these
wicked Pagans, and the fate they had deserved is averted. But in this turn
of affairs Jonah's prediction failed, and so he was displeased and was
very angry, and took the Almighty to task quite roundly, for his lack of
vigour.
"Was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? Therefore, I fled
before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and
merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness and repentest thee of
the evil."
What was to become of preachers if, after they had threatened destruction
upon evil-doers, the Most High went back upon them thus? The later breed
of Jonahs may profitably study the after scene, in which God is made to
rebuke the frightful selfishness and hardness which, rather than have
one's theories belied, would have a city damned.
"Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored
... and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more
than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right
hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?"
The moral marvel of Nineveh's general repentance on the preaching of an
obscure Jew is as unnatural as the physical marvel of the fish story.
Recognizing that the whole tale is a parable, which takes upon it purely
legendary drapery, and ridding ourselves thus of all the questions which
puzzle Sunday-school scholars and theologians, we are ready to read the
meaning of the parable. God is not the God of any one race or religion. He
cares for Gentile as for Jew. He sends a prophet of Israel to bid a pagan
city repent, that He may forgive it freely. These Pagans understand the
message of the Jew. The commands of conscience are owned and honored by
the heathen, even more quickly than by the people of God; whose own
Jerusalem never thus quickly obeyed a prophet's message. The city whence
had come Israel's woes is held up as a pattern to the sacred city
herself. All men, then, are brothers, partakers of the same moral and
religious nature; children of One Father, whose voice they hear in
different tongues, speaking to their souls the same messages of holy love.
Thus read, Jonah becomes the protest of liberal Judaism against the
narrow, exclusive tendencies of popular piety in Israel. It is the writing
of some genuine Broad-Churchman of the olden time, proclaiming the high
truths of Human Brotherhood under a Divine Fatherhood, breathing that
spirit of which, long after, another Jew dared say--
"And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is
charity."
If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these
writings, we may well say, with Milton,
"I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and
dwell upon them."
4. _This literature has been very influential in the development of
progressive civilization._
When the writings of Greece and Rome had been buried in the ruins of the
Roman Empire, the literature of Israel was preserved by the pious care of
the Christian Church. The light of Athens went out, and the light of
Jerusalem alone illumined the dark ages. The only books known to the mass
of men through long centuries were these writings of the Hebrews and the
early Christians. Thought was kept alive by them, imagination was fed from
them, conscience was educated and vitalized through them. For a thousand
years there was practically but one book in Europe--the Bible. When the
long gestation of the middle ages was fulfilled, and the modern world was
born, while the educated classes read the exhumed classics of Greece, the
people still read the Bible. It gave, in the person of Luther, the impulse
that restored intellectual liberty and moral health to Europe. It has
continued the best read book of Western civilization; the only book much
read, until of late, by the mass of men; the one foreign and ancient
literature familiar alike to the plain people in Germany and France, in
England and America; the common well-spring of inspiration to thought and
imagination, to character and conduct.
It is the Magna Charta of our liberties; the revered companion and master
of the Pilgrims who sailed the wintry seas, and, on Plymouth Rock,
building wiser than they knew, founded a nation covenanting freedom of
conscience unto all men; a nation on whose Bell of Independence runs the
Bible legend, "Proclaim liberty to the inhabitants thereof."
Wherever society is found to-day in travail with a new and higher order,
the conception can be traced to the seminal words of the Bible. The
institutions and manners of progressive civilization are what they are
because in the heart of that civilization has lain the Bible.
My brothers, were these books nothing more to us than such ancient
writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically
fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral
influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness
of liberalism, falsely so called.
What if in these ancient writings there are ancient errors, the marvels
which a child age exaggerated into miracles, stories of savage cruelty and
brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful,
utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy
One? Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation's
growth from barbarism. Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of
Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and
superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the
obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested or
described, and then to fling these blemishes at the book in which the
children of Greece and England and America have read with tingling blood
the tales which stirred their souls, by what name would we call him? By
that name let him stand forth impaled upon the scorn of an age that has
not lost the grace of reverence, who, mindless of majestic age, the
dignity of letters, an influence unrivalled and benign, associations
tender and most holy, upon these venerable and sacred books spits his
shallow scepticism, spumes his spleenful sarcasm, and smuts them with his
own sensuality.
Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings,
and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible.