The Right Historical Use of the Bible.
"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His
Son."--Galatians, iv. 4.
St. Paul condensed the philosophy of Hebrew history into a metaphor.
Israel travailed in birth with Christianity. In the mind of the nation was
begotten, of the Most High, a conception of ethical religion, whose
gestation was a process of centuries. The period of parturition came, and
a universal religion was born into the world; bodied, as religion needs
must be, in a man, Jesus, the Christ.
"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."
The sacred literature of Israel is the record and embodiment of this
organic growth of her religion, through its various moods and tenses,
toward its ideal in the Christ. The sacred literature of the Christian
Church is the picture of this flower of the soul of Israel, and of the new
growth springing up from its seeding down of humanity. The whole Bible
presents us with the growth of the religion of the Christ, below ground
and above ground; its rootings and its flowerings. The right historical
use of the Bible is, through a critical knowledge of the sacred literature
of Israel, to reproduce before our minds this process of the growth of the
Christ in Israel and of His new growth in humanity; with a view to our
intelligent perception of His true place in history, and of the
significance thereof. The heart of the Bible is Christ. That which our
fathers saw we need to see, that in Him all things stand together, as the
arch is holden by the key-stone. Rightly to read the secret of His life is
to find the secret of earth's problems. Therefore our fathers insisted so
strenuously on the Old Testament preparation for Christ. A tree's rootings
are proportionate to its size. In the gradual prefiguring of Christ
through Israel's story, they read the historic attestation of His
revelation. The picture of Israel's history that yielded them their vision
is dissolving before our eyes, at the touch of the new criticism, and men
are fearing that the secret of the Bible is escaping from our age. I
desire to-day to draw for you, in outline, the story of Israel's
development, as traced by our new masters; that you may see the old vision
re-emergent in truer, nobler forms. The re-construction of Hebrew history
makes real and certain an organic, natural development of the religion of
the Christ; a travail of the nation with the Son it bore to God.
The best method of studying any history is in its great epochs and
periods. The eras of Hebrew history group themselves clearly, in orderly
progression.