Wherein lies this commanding rank of the Bible in the literature of
ethical and spiritual power?
Speaking generally, I should say that the superiority of the Bible lies in
the fact that it is at once a literature of ethical power and a literature
of spiritual power. We have books of high ethical power that are weak
religiously. We have books of high religious power that are weak ethically
The Bible is strong in both directions. Hence its power. Either ethical or
spiritual power alone is defective. Morality without spirituality is
principle without passion. Spirituality without morality is passion
without principle. Union supplements the defectiveness of each alone, and
develops its full forcefulness. The Bible marries morality and
spirituality, and these twain become one. The secularities become sacred,
and the sanctities become sound.
According to the Bible, he who keeps the Ten Words obeys God. The "merely
moral" man is a worshipper of God, though the worship may be silent. In
Kant's great saying, They are always in the service of God whose actions
are moral. Virtue becomes consciously religious, as she learns to
recognize what she is in love with in loving goodness. As the love of
goodness rises into a passion for the ideal forms of Justice, Purity and
Truth, it takes on a real religiousness. It may think to stop short in an
ethical culture, but it cannot. To feed its own aspirations it must
worship the Ideal Righteousness as a reality. Its desires become prayers,
its hopes become praises. Even though in mute longings, it pleads
O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall shew forth Thy praise.
Reversing the identification of religion with morality that is wrought by
the Bible, its influence is equally impressive. Religion is not the
emotion of man in the presence of the invisible in nature, unless that
invisible is felt to be essentially moral. Religion is not the finest of
feelings before the invisible in man, unless that unseen is also felt to
be ethical. The Natural Religion, however nobly stated, which accepts any
form of poetic ideals as religion, is very imperfect and not at all
Biblical. Shelley's feelings for the spirit of Beauty are exquisitely
fine, but under the light of the Bible they are seen to be only latently
religious. A more penetrating-vision will see in the Ideal Beauty a Moral
Form, and then æsthetics will translate itself into ethics. The unmoral
sentiment of a Shelley for Beauty may issue in another generation in the
immoral sentiment of a Swinburne. Even thus the vision of the Aphrodite
sank into the dream of a Venus. An Oscar Wilde's maunderings over an art
which has no reference to morality may possibly be poetry, but they
certainly are not religion according to the Bible, for all his blasphemous
apostrophes to Christ between his praises of licentious love. Hard as the
granitic core of earth is the core of religion in the Bible.
The "stern law-giver" of Israel was Duty. Her supreme authority, which
enjoined with absolute command the most unpleasant action, was--"I ought."
She saw that "laws mighty and brazen" bind man to a right, which he may
distort or deny, but cannot destroy--his Saviour or his Judge. Mystic in
its sacredness, Conscience sat shrined within the soul of the holy men who
spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost; her voice the very voice of
God. The Power in whom we live and move and have our being is revealed in
these books as the Eternal Righteousness. The moral law is seen to be the
throne of the Most High.
In Emerson's phrase:
Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the Universal Mind by the
individual will.
"What do I love when I love Thee?" sighed Augustine. Israel might have
answered that question in Augustine's own words:
Not the beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
brightness of the light so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and
spices, not manna and honey. None of these do I love when I love my
God; and yet I love a kind of light, a kind of melody, a kind of
fragrance, a kind of food, when I love my God,--the light, the melody,
the fragrance, the food of the inner man. This it is which I love when
I love my God.[58]
But the Bible answer would be much more simple and pungent:
O ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing which is evil....
If a man say I love God and hateth His brother he is a liar.
This is the fundamental secret of the power of the Bible. The love of
goodness and the love of God are one. Aspiration is unconscious worship,
and worship is aspiration conscious of its object.
Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
But this noble conception of the unity of ethical and spiritual life has
many aspects in the Bible. The Bible turns upon us every phase in which
Wisdom reveals herself to the sons of men, so that no ray of her light is
lost, and that every one, however he may stand related to her, receives
her heavenly beams.
1. _We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which
have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes._
The maxims of a Poor Richard are anticipated here, as quaint, as terse,
and as sagacious in the ancient Jew as in the modern American. Our
scientific teachers would replace eloquent declamation concerning vices,
such as drunkenness and debauchery, by illustrated lectures upon the
physiological effects of violations of nature's laws. They would teach men
that the laws of health are found in the laws of temperance and purity.
The Hebrew sages had this vision of Wisdom. Their proverbial sayings
abound with graphic pen-pictures of the folly of vice. No illustration of
the physical consequences of debauchery could be more impressive than the
vivid sketch of the foolish young man, going after the strange woman as an
"ox goeth to the slaughter," knowing not that
Her house is the way to hell,
Going down to the chambers of death.
The favorite name for sin in these proverbs is Folly. Wisdom crieth to the
sons of men, in that noblest writing of the sages:
Blessed is the man that heareth me,
Watching daily at my gates,
Waiting at the posts of my doors.
For whoso findeth me findeth life,
And shall obtain favor of the Lord.
But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul.
All they that hate me love death.
2. _These laws of life that work for our health and wealth loom, however,
into mystic and sacred forms, as of the laws heavenly and eternal, whose
"seat is the bosom of God."_
When Crito urges his beloved master to escape from the death that had been
unjustly decreed for him, Socrates replies in a noble personification of
the Laws, as rebuking him for the thought of such an attempt to evade
them; and he must be dim-sighted, indeed, who does not see in the forms of
the State Laws, the shadows of the Eternal Laws, august and awful, whose
constraint was round about his will. That is the vision which we catch
through every form of law, sanitary, social, or ecclesiastical, in the
Bible. In the earliest code of the Hebrew statutes known to us, a
collection of tribal "Judgments" or "dooms," this high and mystic sense of
obligation steals over us. Amid the quaint enactments recorded in the Book
of Covenants, whose language carries us back to times of extreme
simplicity, we hear the words