The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.
"From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to
make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ
Jesus."--2 Timothy, iii. 15.
The right use of the Bible is admirably stated by St. Paul. These books do
not make one learned in any knowledge--they make one wise in life. The
Jewish tradition concerning Solomon's choice expressed a deep truth.
Wisdom is the supreme benediction to be sought in life. Invaluable as is
knowledge, it is as a means to an end. Knowledge provides for man the
material out of which Wisdom, using "the best means to attain the best
ends," builds a noble life. To have the mind clear, the judgment just, the
conscience true, the will strong, so that we may sight the goal of life,
may learn the laws by which it is to be won, and may firmly seek it,
steadfast amid all seductions--this is wisdom.
Would that for one single day, we may have lived in this world as we
ought.
Thus prays the author of the Imitation of Christ; and in so praying he is
sighing after wisdom.
This culture of wisdom is the aim of the books which together form the
Bible. They reveal to our vision the best ends in life, and point us to
the best means of winning those high aims. They clear the atmosphere of
mists, disclose to us our bearings, and fill our souls with the afflatus
which wafts us toward "the haven where we would be." These books are
rightly called by Paul, the "Holy Scriptures," the scriptures of holiness,
the writings whose genius is goodness. Their charm is "the beauty of
holiness," the graciousness of Goodness as she unveils herself therein.
And this genius of gracious Goodness which irradiates the inner court of
this temple, lays such a spell upon the souls of men inasmuch as she is
seen to be the very daughter of God; according to the soliloquy overheard
by mortal ears, wherein Wisdom sings:
The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
Before His work of old.
* * * * *
Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,
And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.
Religion becomes the worship of the God who is the source and standard of
goodness, the love of the Eternal who loveth righteousness, the child's
crying out into the dark--O righteous Father.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.
The Bible is the choicest extant literature of the people of religion,
the record and embodiment of the evolution of ethical worship, through its
varied moods and tenses, into its perfect type in Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Bible-books form, therefore, the classics of the soul, in which we are
to study the nature and secret of goodness; the manual which every earnest
man and woman, intent on building character, should use habitually for
ethical culture, and for the ethical worship which is its inspiration.
This is the truest use of the Bible.
* * * * *
The intellectual use of the Bible, in critical and historical studies, is
legitimate and needful. Reason should lay the bases for faith. Knowledge
must rear the altar on which worship is to be lighted. Theology shapes
religion. It is all important, therefore, that the books which the
intellect chiefly uses to found and form its thoughts of God should be
rightly used, so as to give man right conceptions of the Divine Being, and
to waken right feelings toward Him. This intellectual use of the Bible is
not for scholars alone. There is no longer any isolated class of scholars.
All educated people are now taken into the confidence of the learned, in
every sphere of knowledge. The average man will reason about the great
mysteries quite as much as the scholar; perhaps more than the true
scholar, and with more insistent dogmatism. To the issue of that simpler,
nobler Religion of Christ which is struggling to the birth within the
womb of Christianity, in the travail throes that are upon our age, it is
of vital moment that all intelligent people should learn to use their
Bibles intelligently in a knowledge of the nature of its writings, and in
reasonable reasonings therefrom. Therefore I have spoken concerning the
critical and the historical uses of these sacred writings.
But, when this knowledge is won and duly employed in our theologizings,
the truest use of the Bible remains for us to make, to our highest
pleasure and profit. It is the book of religion, not of theology; save as
it records the one authoritative Epistle of Theology, the Word of God, the
Christ. It is not a body of divinity, it is the soul of divinity. To use
the Bible critically and historically for our theologizings, is, after
all, to use it, however rightly, for its secondary and not its primary
purpose. Religion--as the awed sense of the Eternal Power and Order
revealed in nature, the Infinite Goodness and Righteousness revealed in
man--is the art of the soul; its finest feelings, its loftiest
imaginations, its noblest enthusiasms its profoundest tragedies thrown out
into the cry of the human after God.
There is a science in the sculptor's art. It is doubtless needful that
this art should be studied for the sake of its science. Artists, however,
may be glad that Winckelmann has analyzed the Apollo Belvedere, and has
given them the laws of proportion deduced from this human form divine;
leaving them free to feast upon its beauty. For in the scientific study of
art, art itself may be lost. Some great figure-painters have been
unwilling that their pupils should study anatomy; fearing that the bones
would stick through the flesh in their paintings.
This danger shows itself plainly in all critical and historical uses of
the Bible, in the old-fashioned as in the new-fashioned study of the
Bible.
The international series of Sunday-school lessons burden the brief hours
of the Lord's Day with a mass of matter, which may or may not be true
knowledge about the Bible, but which certainly is not the true religion of
the Bible. A child may learn the tables of the Israelitish Kings, the
geography of the Holy Land, and the architect's plans of the temple of
Jerusalem, and may be learning nothing whatever of the real religion which
is shrined within the Bible. That is very simple:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
mind, and with all thy strength: And thy neighbor as thyself.
The time spent on these more or less interesting matters may rob the child
of his one weekly opportunity of learning to use the Holy Scriptures so as
to become wise unto salvation. To use their words of wise men, and their
tales of holy men, to inspire the love of goodness as the love of God,
this and this alone is to teach religion from the Bible. Bread that
consists of two-thirds bran and one-third white flour is eminently
laxative; but it is generally supposed that this age is lax enough in its
hold of truth. A little more wheat and a little less bran, ye good
doctors, might strengthen the constitutions of our children.
The new study of the Bible is perhaps even more in danger of missing its
real secret. An interest in the literature and history of Israel may
divert the mind from that which is, after all, the heart of these
"letters," and the core of this history.
Fear God and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.
Of this danger I think that I see signs, in some of the great masters to
whom we owe our new criticism, in some of the manuals which are
popularizing it, and in some of the gifted preachers who are
reconstructing theology around it. The science of religion is absorbing
too much of the life that should go into the art of religion; and we have
fine forms of thought, mantled with flabby flesh of feeling, in which no
red blood of holy passion pulses.
To read Homer with a view of understanding the fables of superstition, and
of interpreting the mythology of the ancients, may have been needful for
the later Greeks, who would preserve religion from the death that was
stealing over it, in the divorce of the educated and the popular thought
of the Grecian Bible. Such a use of Homer, however, must have missed the
essential charm of Homer--the immortal poetry of these heroic legends; the
breath of fresh, simple, wholesome human life which animates them, and
which through them inspired men to brave and noble being. Socrates saw
this in his day.
"I beseech you to tell me, Socrates," said Phaedrus, "do you believe
this tale?" "The wise are doubtful," answered Socrates, "and I should
not be singular if, like them, I also doubted. I might have a rational
explanation.... Now I have certainly not time for such inquiries; shall
I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription
says. To be curious about that which is not my business while I am
still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."[54]
Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:
No one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to enjoy
the Bible; and he who takes legend for history, and who imagines Moses,
or Isaiah, or David, or Paul, or Peter, or John, to have written
Bible-books which they did not write, but who knows how to enjoy the
Bible deeply, is nearer the truth about the Bible than the man who can
pick it all to pieces but who cannot enjoy it.... His work is to learn
to enjoy and turn to his benefit the Bible, as the Word of the
Eternal,[55]
The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.
Coleridge said:
Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and the habits of
reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ours Ives and in
nature.[56]
The use of the Bible then is to ennoble our ideals, to quicken our
aspirations, to clear the illusions of the senses, to dissipate the glamor
of the world, to purify our passions, to bring our powers well in hand to
a firm will; and, through the mystic laws of nature and of conscience
which we thus endeavor to obey, to breathe within our souls a sacred sense
of the Presence of a Power, infinite and eternal and loving
righteousness--whom to know "is life eternal."
De Quincey classified all writings as belonging either to the literature
of knowledge, or the literature of power. There are books to which we go
for information. They give us facts and ideas. They constitute the
literature of knowledge. They teach us. There are books to which we go for
inspiration; to which we turn for joy and pleasure, for strength and
courage, for patience and endurance, for purity and peace. They constitute
the literature of power. They move us. Herbert Spencer's books belong to
the literature of knowledge The "Imitation of Christ" belongs to the
literature of power.
The literature of knowledge needs to be reissued every century or
generation or decade, corrected up to date. The literature of power is
immortal; fresh to-day though born milleniums ago. The problems of
character and conduct face us much as they faced the Romans and Greeks,
the Egyptians and Hindus. The invisible in nature and in man touches us
with the same feelings that it stirred in Persians, Chaldeans and
Akkadians Even though the Spirit's voice spake once in a language of the
intellect which has now become obsolete, its utterances are not therefore
obsolete. How archaic is much of the thought of the "Imitation of Christ;"
shot through and through as it is with the tissue of mediæval Catholicism!
But we forget these archaisms in the spell of a holy soul, in love with
wisdom, "intoxicated with God." No archaisms in Biblical thought destroy
its spiritual power over us. Nay, rather do they strengthen that power: as
in our devotions we naturally seek old and quaint forms, buildings unlike
other structures, music which sounds from out the past, words that are
mellow with the rich hues of age; as the archaisms of the language of our
English Bible hold a power that is lost in the raw correctness of the
revised version.
* * * * *
In the literature of power the Bible ranks first. Whatever in Christian
literature has most searching ethical and spiritual energy radiates the
reflected light of the Bible. Augustine's Confessions, The Imitation of
Christ, Fenelon's Spiritual Letters, The Saints' Rest, The Pilgrim's
Progress, in their most appealing tones echo the voices of the Bible. The
hymns that feed the inner life are aromatic with the rich thoughts and
feelings of this holy book. Our poets betray, in the passages which are
the favorites of earnest minds, the influence of these Scriptures. From
Paradise Lost to In Memoriam, from The Temple to the Christian Year, the
poems which the devout delight in are either Biblical paraphrases or
Biblical distillations. Our masters of fiction could not have written the
scenes which most rouse our moral nature, could not have conceived the
characters which most inspire our devotional nature, without the Bible.
Take the Bible out of Adam Bede and Dinah Morris, out of Robert Falconer
and M. Myriel the blessed Bishop of D., and what would be left of them?
The vibratory quality which most thrills our souls in the strains of
Christian literature is due to the Bible material in it. The Bible holds
stored the ethical electricity on which Christendom has drawn, through
centuries, exhaustless energy.
Outside of Christendom, while there are many books which we can thankfully
and reverently place by the side of the Bible, as ethical and spiritual
motors, there are none which any of us would think of substituting for it.
The Discourses and the Manual of Epictetus, the Thoughts of Marcus
Aurelius, the Dialogues of Plato, and the kindred words of wisdom of the
ancients, are indeed full of inspiration to earnest natures. To dip into
these writings for a few minutes, amid the duties of the day, is a soul
bath, most cleansing and invigorating. The Sacred Books of the East may
well be sacred to us Westerns. A sense of grateful awe steals over me as,
looking on these volumes, I think of the generations which they have fed
with spiritual sustenance and have guided in the way of life. The light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world shines through these
pages. The All-Father has drawn nigh to the souls of His children, through
the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It is an
inestimable privilege to have these Bibles of Humanity ranged along our
shelves, and to have their choicest words at hand upon our tables, in some
apt anthology. It would be well if their great sayings could be read in
our churches, in connection with our Old Testament lessons, as the voices
of the ethnic prophets of the Son of Man. But if we have allowed the
thought that any of these sacred books might become a substitute for our
fathers' Bible, we may correct our crude enthusiasms by the authority of
the greatest living master in Comparative Religion. In the preface to the
edition of the Sacred Books of the East that noble monument of our
generation's scholarship Max Müller, writes:
Readers who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient
Brahmans, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the
Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or the Koran of Mohammed are books
full of primeval wisdom and religious enthusiasm or at least of sound
and simple moral teaching, will be disappointed on consulting these
volumes.... I cannot help calling attention to the real mischief that
has been done, and is still being done, by the enthusiasm of those
pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering
forest of the sacred literature of the East. They have raised
expectations that cannot be fulfilled, fears also that, as will be
easily seen, are unfounded.... I confess it has been for many years a
problem to me, aye, and to a great extent is so still, how the Sacred
Books of the East should, by the side of so much that is fresh,
natural, simple, beautiful and true, contain so much that is not only
unmeaning, artificial and silly, but even hideous and repellant.[57]
Our own Bible, as I have frankly owned, holds the truth as the gold is
held in the ore. Truth nowhere exists "native" in human writings; but the
proportions of the "mineralizer" are vastly greater in all other Bibles
than in our own. There is no book known that can take its place on the
lecterns in our churches, or on the tables by which, in quiet hours, we
seat ourselves, a-hungered for the bread of life.
The pre-eminent excellence of Israel's writings in the literature of
power, is natural and necessary. Israel had little originality in any
science or art save the science and art of the soul, the knowledge and the
love of God. Nature is economic in her dowries. She does not shower all
the gifts of the fairies on any one race. She dowered Israel with the
highest of human powers, conscience, in an unequalled measure. Providence
nurtured and trained this faculty. This little nation became as
pre-eminently the people of ethical and spiritual religion as the states
of Greece became the people of art. Because of the natural aptitudes of
Israel, and of her providential education, we should turn to her
literature for our highest inspirations in ethical culture and religion.