_It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it as an authority in any sphere
save the spheres of theology and of religion._
In the traditional view it was an infallible authority upon every subject
of which it treated.
The Divine Being had prepared a book which answered off-hand the questions
man's mind naturally starts concerning the problems of existence; a book
which taught officially how the earth came into its present form, how life
arose upon it, how man was made, how sin entered, how the world was
peopled, how mankind was to fare upon the earth, how the present order was
to come to an end, and many things beside. To answer authoritatively these
questions was the _raison d'être_ of the Bible. It laid a solid foundation
for a science of life. With the passing away of the unreal Bible all
reference to it for such information should cease. These books, as actual
human writings, the studies of men of long past centuries, of men having
no guarantees of infallibility, cannot be expected to have anticipated the
solution of the great problems of knowledge, towards which the human
intellect has been laboriously working through the generations since they
were written; towards which it is still toilsomely striving, content, even
now, with the cold, grey light as of the dawning day.
Our truer idea of revelation--the evolution of nature and the historic
growth of man--forbids such a notion of any book. It has plainly pleased
the Most High that knowledge of these mysteries should come to man through
his patient, persevering effort after truth. Such continued endeavour wins
gradually better knowledge, and with it better life. This process of human
discovery is yet more truly a process of the Divine self-revealing. In
each and every real knowledge man is learning to know--God. Each truth of
science is a manifestation of somewhat in the Infinite Power in whom we
live and move and have our being. Had it pleased God to have given,
centuries ago, a super-natural answer to these problems of earth, He would
simply have dismissed His children from school, with-held from them that
noble education which lies in the discipline of study, and, while giving
them truth, have robbed them of that keenest joy of life, that benediction
richer even than the possession of truth--the search for it.
How indeed, even in the resources of omnipotence, could an answer to the
earth-problems have been framed, which, while coming down to the plane of
the age of Moses, should have kept level with the rise of human knowledge
through the climbing centuries? No, the Bible was not prepared as an
Encyclopedia of Knowledge for the successive generations of men. Its
writers may anticipate the thought of ages by profound intuitions,
pregnant imaginations, visions of the seer, as Plato does. Genius often
outstrips the plodding feet of generations. But genius must not put on the
airs of omniscience. It must submit its claims to trial by jury. They are
to stand, if stand they shall, not because they are in Genesis or the
Republic, but because they prove true.
When (_e.g._) the Biblical writers speak of the Creation, the Garden of
Eden, the Fall of Man, etc., they give us their thoughts, the thoughts of
their age, the thoughts of earlier ages, of greatly gifted minds in many
ages gathering into an imposing tradition; which, as we now see, came down
through successive generations of Hebrews, from a remote antiquity in
which this race had not been thrown off from the common Semitic stock. On
the baked clay tablets of Babylonia we read to-day the same stories. The
Hebrews worked them over, under the plastic power of their religious
genius, into the lofty ethical and theistic forms in which they stand in
Genesis; forms which, rightly read, are parables fresh and inspiring now,
as when, twenty-five hundred years ago, Jewish children listened to them
with awe beneath the willows by the water courses of Babylonia. That most
exquisite story of our weird Hawthorne, the Marble Faun, is a version of
the legend of the Garden of Eden. Commingled with these lofty truths we
find crude notions of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology How
could it be otherwise, since these sciences were embryotic then, or even
unborn? We hearken, reverently, thankfully, to the philosophy and poetry
of Hebrew, Chaldean and Accadian sages and seers, in these profound and
subtle parables of the mysteries which still fascinate us. We dismiss the
knowledge of nature set forth in these legends and myths as the
child-sciences of Israel and Chaldea and Accadia.
We go to our savans for knowledge of physical nature. We make no attempt
to reconcile Genesis with the Origin of Species. Genesis is no authority
in science, and The Origin of Species is no authority in philosophy,
poetry, theology or religion.
The accounts of man in the dim distance of pre-historic times, given in
Genesis, belong to the departments of the antiquarian, and the
philologist; and we trust their story, no matter how it collides with the
Hebrew traditions. So through every sphere of knowledge upon which the
Biblical writers enter, outside of their own special spheres, we follow
them as venerable guides, but as entirely fallible authorities, expressing
the knowledge of their age and race.
Thus, to take one example from later times, St. Paul, in the first epistle
to the Corinthians, condemns woman's participation in the exercises of
worship and instruction in the Christian assemblies of Corinth. This
judgment is accepted, by those who hold to the unreal Bible, as forclosing
the case of woman versus man in the vocation of the ministry, in this land
and age as in all lands and ages. We saw lately the action of this theory
over in Brooklyn. Though she had the gifts and graces of a Lucretia Mott,
though her preaching were blessed as that of a Miss Smiley, though woman's
temperament seems peculiarly fitted for the inspirational influences of
the pulpit, yet Nature's ordination must be disowned because Saul of
Tarsus thought it unseemly for a woman to speak in meeting! He thought it
unseemly also, as he tells us in the same letter, that woman should appear
unveiled in public assemblies; in which you do not seem to consider him an
authority. Why should you defer to him in the one opinion and disregard
him in the other? Both opinions formed part of his education as a Jew of
the first century of our era; as which he frankly confessed that he
regarded woman as inferior to man. We do not consider the Jewish
physiology and psychology of that age binding on us; and St. Paul's
opinion on such a matter falls to the ground with it.