V.

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their

oracles, for divination of the future._

The pagan oracles were the shrines of a Power sought for the forecasting

of events. The inspiration of an oracle was proven by the success of its

predictions. In the same way men have turned to the Bible as a sort of

sacred weather bureau, a book which, if we could only interpret its mystic

utterances, would tell us what things were going to happen upon the earth.

I remember an eloquent Irish divine who came to this country on a great

mission a number of years ago. His first sermon was on Ezekiel's vision by

the Chebar. He said that this was the age of science, and that such a

marvel as science could not have escaped the vision of the prophets. This

mystic creature which the prophet saw, with wheels, whose appearance was

like burning coals of fire, which turned not as it went, and so on,

was--the locomotive! This folly was only more undisguised than the mass of

the lucubrations called Prophetic Studies.

Let any political crisis occur, and some sage will write a book showing

how Daniel had foretold this issue of diplomacy. I have not forgotten the

learned tracts and essays called forth by the fascination Louis Napoleon

exercised upon the imaginations of half-educated people; all proving

beyond a doubt that he was the mystic man of sin, the Anti-Christ in whom

history was to culminate.

America, the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, and the Church of Rome

especially inspire, at present, these crazy conjectures. They ought all to

issue from Bedlam.

This mad and maddening use of what, rightly read, are noble and

instructive books, grows out of a misunderstanding of what were the

functions of Hebrew prophecy.

Prophecy has been taken as a synonyme for prediction. There is not much

verbal difference between foretelling and forthtelling, but there is a

vast difference for the purposes of religion. Taking prophecy as the

synonyme of foretelling, the essential function of the prophets became

predicting. They were supposed to have been busy in forecasting the things

which should come to pass in the far future. The success of these

long-range predictions was the demonstration of their being charged with

miraculous powers. The prophecies constituted the chief evidence for the

supernatural character of the Bible. Of course, with this theory in the

mind of the church, a predictive character would be read into everything

capable of bearing it; and the history of the Hebrews, the eloquent

orations of their great statesmen, the pious longings of their hymn

writers, became mystic anticipations of everything in the heavens above

and the earth beneath.

But Hebrew prophecy never was the synonyme for prediction. It meant

forth-telling. The prophets were "men of the spirit," whose pure nature

mirrored the supreme laws of earth, the moral laws; whose intuitions made

application of those laws to the policies of statecraft, and enabled them

to divine the issues of the stirring events amid which they lived. Their

glory is that they saw above the brute force of great empires the might of

right, and dared to vision its triumph, and that history has verified

their moral insight. But they chiefly spake, as the author of The

Revelation declares of his prophecy, "of things which must shortly come to

pass" upon the earth. Their horizon bounded a very nigh future the

approach of Syrian, Assyrian, Egyptian invaders the overthrow of

Jerusalem, etc.

In these predictions they were often mistaken; nearly as often in error as

in the right. We seldom hear of these unfulfilled prophecies, but they are

in your Bibles. They should teach you, that which the prophets tried so

hard to teach their own cotemporaries, that the essential distinction of

the true prophet was not that he predicted the future, for this they

scornfully left to the false prophets the oracles of the pagan Jews, but

that they forthtold the inner mind and will of God, read the 'laws mighty

and brazen' which constitute the essential nature of the Most High and

hold the supreme felicity of man. I believe I know of no one passage of

the prophets which can be certainly said to point to any event beyond the

near future of the writer. Only in so far as they spoke of the ideal

forces, of ethical victories, did they launch out upon the far future.

But you say, Do not the Old Testament prophets surely point on to Christ?

I answer both No, and Yes. Of any mere literal prediction of the events of

His life I know none. The many passages that have been made to read like

predictions of His miraculous birth, His sale for thirty pieces of silver,

and so on, refer to personages and experiences in the time of the writers.

Isaiah expressly says this about the Virgin--that is, the young bride--who

was to conceive and bear a son. Before he should be able to distinguish

right from wrong the relief of Jehovah to Israel would appear. The

passages which seem to our eyes, looking through orthodox spectacles, to

have this predictive character, lose it in a more exact translation.

It is doubtless true that the Gospels make many such applications of Old

Testament words, adding to their record of minute incidents--"That it

might be fulfilled which was spoken by ... saying." But the Gospels, as we

now possess them, have been slowly fashioned by the labor of many hands,

working over the tradition which gradually shaped itself out of the

reminiscences of multitudes of men and women. Pious Jews, trained in this

Rabbinical use of their Sacred Scriptures, delighting to make application

of ancient mystic sayings to the life of their adorable Messiah, read into

the Gospel narrative these fulfillments of prediction.

This use of the Old Testament has been pushed to absurdity in learned

books over which I have patiently toiled. "The Gospel of Leviticus," gave

me the Hebrew civic and ecclesiastic legislation mystified into 'sound

evangelical' symbols. "Christ in the Psalms" twisted every heathenish

imprecation of the Hebrew hymns into language which could be put upon the

lips of the dear Lord, and turned the bitterest curses into sweet and

gracious benedictions.

The culmination of this moon-struck exegesis, as far as my knowledge

reaches, is in the ancient and fantastic reading of the tradition of the

escape of the spies from Jericho, which gave a young and eloquent Bishop

of our church a favorite sermon; wherein he showed conclusively that the

scarlet cord by which Rahab let down her visitors over the city wall was a

type of the atoning blood of Christ!

This Chinese puzzle-book of predictions exists nowhere save in the

imagination of its readers.

There was, however, a most real and substantial typifying of Christ

through the Old Testament; but it was natural, organic, ethical and

spiritual; in those books as first in the lives of the people. The growth

of the nation onward toward the true Image of God, the true Human Ideal;

the travail of the nation with the Divine-Human Character which at the

last came to the birth in Jesus the Christ; this was a mystery of natural,

organic evolution, which 'must give us pause' in every shallow denial of

a supernatural involution in human history. This makes true rationalism

reverent before 'that Holy Thing' born not alone of Mary but of Mary's

race, begotten plainly of the overshadowings of some Holy Ghost, of whom

our best judgment is, now as of old,--"He shall be called the Son of the

Highest."

The whole history of Israel is a growth of The Christ, and that is the

abiding wonder of it.

In such a mystic evolution it may well be, in history as in nature, that

the organic processes type the oncoming form of life; but to trace these

rightly there is needed a finer criticism than that which has given us the

orthodox typology.[29]

* * * * *

Let us pause here for to-day. And let us take home, as the heart-thought

of the morning, an assurance which may comfort us as we stand under the

shadow of Christmas. If the dear Christ's throne stood on any such flimsy

basis of prophecy as men have built up beneath it, then, when the

underpinnings came tumbling out, as to-day they are doing, we might fear

that His authority was dropping in with them; that no longer we were to

call Him Master and King; that criticism had pronounced His _decheance_.

But His throne really rests on a nation's growth of the human Ideal and

Divine Image. And, since this nation's growth was on the same general

lines as the religious and ethical progress of other races, His throne

rests on no less secure a foundation than humanity's evolution of the

human Ideal and Divine Image. Man's best and noblest life aspires after an

ideal which is the Christly character. Man's best and noblest thoughts of

God fashion a vision which is the God revealed in Christ. He is Humanity's

"Master of Life."