_It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept its utterances indiscriminately
as the words of God, to quote every saying of every speaker in its pages,
or every deed of every actor in its histories as expressing to us the mind
of God._
Such use of the Bible is thoughtlessly common. Some time ago before going
into a church in whose service I was asked to participate, I ventured to
show some slight hesitancy in using certain Psalms which were set down in
the Psalter for the day. When asked, why, I mildly answered that I could
not request a Christian congregation to join with me in singing, after the
embittered Jews in Babylon:
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom, in the day of Jerusalem. How
they said, "Down with It! down with it! even to the ground." Oh,
daughter of Babylon, who art to be wasted, Happy shall he be that
rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh
thy little ones and throweth them against the stones.
Nor could I ask the people to unite in praying:
Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, all their princes as Zeba
and Salmana.
I had in mind the fate of Oreb and Zeeb and of Zeba and Salmana,
splendidly brave fellows even in their death, as told in the seventh and
eighth chapters of Judges, where you can learn what sort of prayer was
this of those savage Jews. Naturally, as I thought, I objected to voicing
such heathen imprecations in the nineteenth century of the era of the
Prince of Peace. My good friend, with a look of amazement, replied, "Why,
these Psalms are in the Bible." That ended the question for him.
This incident is typical of a vast quantity of wrong uses of the Bible.
Thus our American slaveholder read that 'precious' word of the ancient
tradition, "Cursed be Ham," and smoothed his troubled conscience. He had
the sanction of the Bible for the curse plainly upon Africa. He was
fulfilling the Divine will in breeding black cattle for the auction block.
Piety and profit were one, and godliness had great gain, and some
contentment also. Thus the extermination of the Canaanites, for which the
Hebrews pleaded long after the Divine order, and for which they had
substantial warrant in Destiny's determination to rid the land of these
corrupting tribes and make room for the noble life Israel was to develop,
has been the stock argument of kings and soldiers for their bloody trade.
Thus poor human consciences have been sorely hurt and troubled as men have
read, in stories such as those of Jael and Sisera and Jacob and Esau, of
acts which their better nature instinctively condemned. They have felt
themselves arraigning the Bible and suspecting God.
If indeed the Bible is a book let down from the skies, of which God can be
called the 'author,' then all such uses of it may be correct enough, and
in those dark and savage words and deeds I may be obliged to find the
words of God and the deeds He holds up to our admiration and imitation;
though I do not see that such a use is a necessity, even on this theory.
Fancy a man quoting Shylock when he pleads for his bond, or Iago's
devilish innuendos against Desdemona's purity, as showing what Shakespeare
liked or what he would have us imitate! "These are the words of
Shakespeare!" Yes, but of Shakespeare's Shylock, Shakespeare's Iago.
If, however, the Old Testament is the national library of the Jews, I
must expect to find all sorts of early Jewish notions, in ethics and
religion, bodied in the words of the speakers they introduce, and the
deeds of the men of whom they tell the tales.
If the Bible is the record of a real revelation which came in the spirits
of ancient men, through the historic growth of conscience and reason; and
if these books are the literature embalming that growth of a people out of
ignorance and superstition into the light of pure ethics and spiritual
religion; then I must look to find all sorts of crudities and crassnesses
in the representation of God, and all phases of unmoral and immoral life,
as parts of the error and imperfection out of which they were educated.
These deeds and words are the milestones in the path of progress by which
Judaism reached Christianity. If the individual is to reproduce the story
of the race, as our wise men tell us, then these words and deeds are in
the Bible to carry us through the same course of education; to exercise
our consciences in discriminating right from wrong, and to lead us to grow
out of such conceptions and desires toward the spirit of Christ. In a
cruise last summer we dropped anchor in a lovely little out-of-the-way
harbor of Buzzard's Bay, which proved to be near Pocasset; where, not long
ago, a pious man, reading the Hebrew tradition of Abraham and Isaac, as a
real command of the Most High, and having this word of the Lord borne in
on his mind, as spoken to himself, murdered his child in sacrifice to
God--no angel interfering to stay his knife. He simply made a _reductio ad
absurdum_ of this use of the Bible.[27]