Our new critics may tell you that the late poet, who wrote that long-drawn
sigh of desire for the Law which is bodied in the One hundred and
nineteenth Psalm, was thinking of the "Thorah"--the ritual law of the
temple and the counsels of the priests. They are doubtless right, if so be
that they do not lead you to infer that this devout soul was thinking
_only_ of the ecclesiastical law. Through it, there was rising upon his
spirit the vision of the Law Eternal and Heavenly, the norm and pattern of
the law that on earth binds men to purity and righteousness.
Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way,
Who walk in the law of the Lord.
Make me to understand the way of thy commandments;
And so shall I talk of thy wondrous works.
Thy statutes have been my songs
In the house of my pilgrimage.
The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy:
O teach me thy statutes!
Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:
O give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.
Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.
They continue this day, according to thy ordinances.
Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness,
And thy law is the truth.
Shew the light of thy countenance upon thy servant,
And teach me thy statutes.
This is none other than that law of which a far later ecclesiastic,
writing also of ecclesiastical law, discoursed in this wise:
There can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of
God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth
do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as
not exempted from her power: both angels and men and creatures of what
condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all,
with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and
joy.[60]
This law is none other than that holy form which a modern poet thus
apostrophizes:
Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
3. _The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature
and the law of the human soul._
The Bible recognizes no duality of natural law and revealed law. All
divine law is natural, and, as such, is a revelation. Physical and moral
laws are but different forms of one and the same order. The same Power is
working in the world around man and in the world within man. The lower
forms of Its action are to be interpreted by Its higher forms. Nature is
to be resolved by Man. The Ten Words were given as the statutes of Jehovah
himself the personification of some form of nature's force. Out of this
simple germ grew, the noble thought which anticipated the knowledge of
our _savans_ and the intuitions of our seers; who unite in showing us one
order in the starry heavens and in the mysteries of mind. Thus it is that
the Bible feeds so richly, when read aright, that awe which steals upon us
as we face nature and see ourselves mirrored there in shadowy outline; and
realize the One in all things--God.
There is a beautiful illustration of this in a noble poem that our later
critics have handled with a strange lack of perceptiveness. The Nineteenth
Psalm opens with a lofty apostrophe to Nature, commencing:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
And the firmament sheweth His handywork.
At the seventh verse the Psalm abruptly passes to a eulogy of "The
Law"--the moral law shrined in the priestly Thorah:
The law of the Lord is an undefiled law,
Converting the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure,
And giveth wisdom unto the simple.
Here we have, say our learned critics, two psalms welded into one, a song
of nature and a song of the soul. As though nature and man did not form
one divine poem in two cantos! As though the system of the world around us
did not type the world within us! As though it were not always the most
instinctive action to pass from the sense of an Order in the starry
heavens, and the awe thus awakened, to the sense of an Order in the soul
of man, and the deeper awe thus roused!
We know that the Hindus and Egyptians made use, each, of one word to
express the law of nature and the law of conscience. The physical order
interpreted the sense of a moral order.
The Egyptian _maat_, derived like the Sanskrit _rita_, from merely
sensuous impressions, became the name for moral order and
righteousness.[61]
The Nineteenth Psalm is only the expression among the Hebrews of this
wide-spread instinct; an instinct which learned critics may lack, but
which the poet still inherits; as the Sphynx whispers to him of the double
life of nature and of man, that yet are
By one music enchanted,
One Deity stirred.
4. _The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this
"Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken._
Violations of physiological law Nature stamps as folly. Offences against
social laws the State brands as crime. Transgressions of Ideal and Eternal
Law become sin. It is not only foolish or disgraceful to break the moral
law, it is wrong. This is the sense of guilt in disobedience that is
roused in each of us by the Bible, as by no other book; that has been
quickened in Europe, historically, by these sacred Scriptures, as by no
other writings. The Bible has given to humanity a new and intense ethical
perception of evil.
The strenuous moral earnestness of the Puritan and the Methodist is
vitalized from these books. The very type of saintship in Christendom is
unique. It is no mere ceremonial correctness for which the priestly
Ezekiel pleads with tender pathos:
Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions whereby ye
have transgressed, and make you a clean heart and a new spirit; for why
will ye die, O house of Israel?
It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which
oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry:
O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death.
How vividly this sense of sin expresses itself in the Fifty-first Psalm!
There is here a plaint infinitely deeper than the chagrin and remorse of
the man who has committed an "indiscretion," or become entangled in an
"intrigue;" there is the cry of a soul that has betrayed its highest,
holiest fidelities, and lies low in the dust before the Heavenly purity:
Wash me throughly from my wickedness,
And cleanse me from my sin.
Cast me not away from Thy presence,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
To enter into the spirit of this sigh of penitence is a new knowledge of
the human heart. The Bible thus leads men to live as in the presence of an
awful Power of Holiness, which is searching through and through our
beings. We cannot understand the Biblical "salvation" unless we have
fathomed, at least, the shoaler experiences of these saintly souls of old,
and know some little of the depths of sin.
5. _The Bible wakens in the breast of man an ethical passion for the ideal
and eternal law, which, apart from early Buddhism, has no parallel in
history._
The prophets are aflame with the ardors of this sacred enthusiasm. The
ordinary passions of mankind are rivaled in intensity by the mystic
passion of their souls for the Heavenly Wisdom. They stand amid the wild
whirl of selfish strife in the society of their day, and lift on high the
holy forms of Justice and Brotherhood, as though expecting their
commonplace cotemporaries to turn aside from practical affairs, and seek
for them; and, so subtle and searching are the appeals of these heavenly
visions, men do actually turn from mammon to worship these impoverishing
divinities; and a great movement arises, looking to the bringing down of
these ideals upon the earth, as the ruling powers in the court and the
exchange. The regenerating force of Christendom has lain in the coming of
these prophets, generation after generation, to the children of men, to
lead them upon the mount where they should clearly see those lofty shapes,
commanding instant loyalty from honest souls. The ominous travail-throes
of society to-day await one stimulus to free the new order that is
struggling to the birth--the passion for ethical and social ideals, which
the Bible, rightly administered, would inspire.
The prophetic spirit is the vital force of the Bible. Its insistent power
reappears in Paul; a man consuming in the fires of this holy passion, and
kindling its ardors in the souls of untold myriads. His great letter to
the Romans, so strangely misread as a mere dogmatic treatise, breathes and
burns with this lofty enthusiasm. Its central thought, its threading
_motif_, heard anew in every critical movement of the argument,
is--Righteousness. The Master in whom the Bible centres, enriches earth
with a new benediction:
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
This highest passion of mankind is wakened by the Bible as by no other
book. Through it, the mystic Forerunners reveal themselves to the human
soul most alluringly; enthralling it with their pure charms, dispelling
the illusions of the senses and the glamor of the world, in the light of
their holy loveliness. The Eternal Wisdom calls from out these pages to
the sons of men:
Hearken unto me ye that follow after righteousness.
6. _The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions,
but as the substantial realities of being._
Men say to those who speak of these high conceptions--"They are the dreams
of sentimentalists, the will-'o-the-wisp lights that beguile men away from
the _terra firma_; to be trusted and followed by no practical man."
"Idealist" is a term of reproach. And justly, from any other point of view
than that which the Bible, true to the most penetrating discernment of
humanity, opens to us. These ideal forms are not the empty conceits of
man's brain, bred from the fumes of his boundless egotism. They are not
the clouds that gather and form and break into airy unreality in the
atmosphere of earth. They are the shadows falling upon the soul of man
from the unseen Realities, which alone have substantial and abiding being.
The laws of nature are surely not the baseless fabric of a dream. These
ideals are simply those laws, transfigured into their spiritual
substances. Whatever in our blindness we may persuade ourselves
elsewhere, over the Bible we recognize the true character of the visions
which so strangely stir us. This is the power of the Bible. Christian
seemed to Mr. Worldly Wiseman a fool. But he saw the heavenly city, and
trudged along, sure that time would prove him in the right. Christian
carried in his hand this Book. With this Book in our hands, we, too, are
sure that the visions of Purity and Justice, which we dimly see afar, are
substantial and real, and that man will win at the last to the land where
they are the light thereof.
Whereupon I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.
7. _The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the
fresh forces of all noble life._