Book is absolutely fair to humanity. It leaves out no line or wrinkle; but
it adds none. The men with whom it deals are typical men. The facts it
presents are typical facts. There are books which flatter men, make them
out all good, prattle on about the essential goodness of humanity, while
men who know themselves (and these are the only ones who do things) know
that the story is not true. On the other hand, there are books which are
depressing. Their pigments are all black. They move from the dignity of
Schopenhauer's pessimism to the bedlam of Nietzsche's contempt for life
and goodness. But here, also, the sane common sense of humanity comes to
the rescue. The picture is not true if it is all white or all black. The
Bible is absolutely fair to humanity. It moves within the circle of man's
experience; and, while it deals with men, it results in a treatment of
man.
That is how it comes about that the Bible inspires men, and puts them at
their best. No moral appeal can be successful if it fails to reach the
better part of a man, and lays hold on him there. Just what it did for the
English people. "No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than
passed over England during the years that parted the middle of the reign
of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the
people of a Book, and that Book was the Bible."[50]
Add to that personal appeal and that absolute fairness to humanity the
constant challenge of the Bible to the nobler elements of humanity. It
never trifles. It is in deadly earnest. And it makes earnest men. Probably
we cannot illustrate that earnestness more clearly than by a study of one
element in Puritan history, which is confused in many minds. It is the
matter of the three great antagonisms of Puritanism in England and
America. They can never be understood by moral triflers. They may not be
approved by all the morally serious, but they will be understood by them.
What are those three marked antagonisms? The antagonism to the stage, to
popular frivolity, and to the pleasure of Sabbath.
1. The early English stage had the approval of virtually all the people.
There were few voices raised against the dramas of Shakespeare. But the
cleavage between the Puritans and the stage grew greater as the years went
on. There were riotous excesses. The later comedy after Shakespeare was
incredibly gross. The tragedies were shallow, they turned not on grave
scenes of conscience, but on common and cheap intrigues of incest and
murder. In the mean time, "the hatred of the Puritans for the stage was
only the honest hatred of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity
presented in poetic and dramatic forms." The Bible was laying hold on the
imagination of the people, making them serious, thoughtful, preparing them
for the struggle for liberty which was soon to come. The plays of the time
seemed too trifling or else too foul. The Puritans and the English people
of the day were willing to be amused, if the stage would amuse them. They
were willing to be taught, if the stage would teach them. But they were
not willing to be amused by vice and foulness, and they were not willing
to be taught by lecherous actors who parroted beautiful sentiments of
virtue on the stage and lived filthy lives of incest and shame off the
stage. Life had to be whole to the Puritan, as indeed it has to be to
other thoughtful men. And the Bible taught him that. His concern was for
the higher elements of life; his appeal was to the worthier values in
men. The concern of the stage of his day was for the more volatile
elements in men. The test of a successful play was whether the crowds, any
crowds, came to it. And as always happens when a man wants to catch the
interest of a crowd, the stage catered to its lowest interests. You can
hardly read the story of the times without feeling that the Puritan made
no mistake in his day. He could not have been the thoughtful man who would
stand strong in the struggle for liberty on that side of the sea and the
struggle for life on this side of the sea without opposing trifling and
vice.
2. The antagonism of the early Puritan to popular frivolity needs to have
the times around it to be understood. No great movement carries everybody
with it, and while it is still struggling the majority will be on the
opposing side. While the real leadership of England was passing into the
stronger and more serious hands the artificial excesses of life grew
strong on the people. "Fortunes were being sunk and estates mortgaged in
order that men should wear jewels and dress in colored silks."[51] In the
pressure of grave national needs men persisted in frivolity. The two
reigning vices were drunkenness and swearing. In their cups men were
guilty of the grossest indecencies. Even their otherwise harmless sports
were endangered. The popular notion of the May-pole dances misses the real
point of the Puritan opposition to it in Old and New England. It was not
an innocent, jovial out-door event. Once it may have been that. Very often
it was only part of a day which brought immorality and vice in its train.
It was part of a rural paganism. Some of the customs involved such grave
perils, with their seclusion of young people from early dawn in the
forests, as to make it impossible to approve it. Over against all these
things the Puritans set themselves. Sometimes they carried this solemnity
to an absurd length, justifying it by Scripture verses misapplied. Against
the affected elegancies of speech they set the plain yea, yea and nay, nay
of Scripture. In their clothing, their homes, their churches, they, and in
even more marked degree, the Quakers, registered their solemn protest
against the frivolity of the times. If they went too far, it is certain
their protest was needed. Macaulay's epigram is familiar, that the Puritan
"hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it
gave pleasure to the spectators." In so far as that is true, it is to the
credit of the Puritan; for the bear can stand the pain of being baited
far better than human nature can stand the coarsening effects of baiting
him, and it is nobler to oppose such sport on human grounds than on animal
grounds. But, of course, the epigram is Macaulay's, and must be read with
qualification. The fact is, and he says it often enough without epigrams,
that the times had become trifling except as this grave, thoughtful group
influenced them.
3. The attitude of the Puritans toward the Sabbath came from their serious
thought of the Bible. Puritanism gave England the Sabbath again and
planted it in America as an institution. Of course, these men learned all
that they knew of it from the Bible. From that day, in spite of much
change in thought of it, English-speaking people have never been wilful
abusers of the Sabbath. But the condition in that day was very different.
Most of the games were on the day set apart as the Sabbath. There were
bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and football on Sunday. Calvin himself, though
not in England, bowled on Sunday, and poor Knox attended festivities then,
saying grimly that what little is right on week-days is not wrong on
Sundays. After the service on Sunday morning the people thronged to the
village green, where ale flowed freely and games were played until the
evening dance was called. It was a work-day. Elizabeth issued a special
injunction that people work after service on Sundays and holidays if they
wished to do so. Employers were sustained in their demand for Sunday work.
There are always people in every time who count that the ideal Sabbath.
The Puritans found it when they appeared. The English Reformation found it
when it came. And the Bible found it when at last it came out of obscurity
and laid hold on national conditions. Whatever is to be said of other
races, every period of English-speaking history assures us that our moral
power increases or weakens with the rise or fall of Sabbath reverence. The
Puritans saw that. They saw, as many other thoughtful people saw, that the
steady, repeated observance of the Sabbath gave certain national
influences a chance to work; reminded the nation of certain great
underlying and undying principles; in short, brought God into human
thought. The Sunday of pleasure or work could never accomplish that. Both
as religionists and as patriots, as lovers of God and lovers of men, they
opposed the pleasure-Sunday and held for the Sabbath.
But that comes around again to the saying that the persistent moral appeal
of the Bible gives it inevitable influence on history. It centers thought
on moral issues. It challenges men to moral combats.
Such a force persistently working in men's minds is irresistible. It
cannot be opposed; it can only fail by being neglected. And this is the
force which has been steadily at work everywhere in English-speaking
history since the King James version came to be.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] Rhodes. _History of the United States_, vol. i, pp. 185-303.
[42] MacPhail, _Essays on Puritanism_, p. 278.
[43] H. B. Smith, _Faith and Philosophy_, p. 54.
[44] White, in his _History of England_, says that Charles replied that
the explanation was easy: His discourses were his own, his actions were
his ministry's!
[45] David Gregg, _The Quakers in America_.
[46] _American Statesman Series, Abraham Lincoln_, i, 12, 13.
[47] _Short History of the English People_, chap. vii, sec. vii.
[48] _England under the Stuarts._
[49] Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_, p. 174.
[50] Green, _Short History of the English People_.
[51] Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_, p. 66.
LECTURE VI
THE BIBLE IN THE LIFE OF TO-DAY
This lecture must differ at two points from those which have preceded it.
In the first place, the other lectures have dealt entirely with facts.
This must deal also with judgments. In the earlier lectures we have
avoided any consideration of what ought to have been and have centered our
interest on what actually did occur. We especially avoided any argument
based on a theory of the literary characteristics or literary influence of
the Bible, but sought first to find the facts and then to discover what
explained them. It might be very difficult to determine what is the actual
place of the Bible in the life of to-day. Perhaps it would be impossible
to give a broad, fair judgment. It is quite certain that the people of
James's day did not realize the place it was taking. It is equally certain
that many of those whom it most influenced were entirely unconscious of
the fact. It is only when we look back upon the scene that we discover
the influence that was moving them. But, while it is difficult to say what
the place of the Bible actually is in our own times, the place it ought to
have is easier to point out. That will involve a study of the conditions
of our times, which suggest the need for its influence. While we must
consider the facts, therefore, we will be compelled to pass some judgments
also, and therein this lecture must differ from the others.
The second fact of difference is that while the earlier lectures have
dealt with the King James version, this must deal rather with the Bible.
For the King James version is not the Bible. There are many versions;
there is but one Bible. Whatever the translators put into the various
tongues, the Bible itself remains the same. There are values in the new
versions; but they are simply the old value of the Bible itself. It is a
familiar maxim that the newest version is the oldest Bible. We are not
making the Bible up to date when we make a new version; we are only
getting back to its date. A revision in our day is the effort to take out
of the original writings what men of King James's day may have put in, and
give them so much the better chance. There is no revised Bible; there is
only a revised version. Readers sometimes feel disturbed at what they
consider the changes made in the Bible. The fact is, the revision which
deserves the name is lessening the changes in the Bible; it is giving us
the Bible as it actually was and taking from us elements which were not
part of it. One can sympathize with the eloquent Dr. Storrs, who declared,
in an address in 1879, that he was against any new version because of the
history of the King James version, describing it as a great oak with roots
running deep and branches spreading wide. He declared we were not ready to
give it up for any modern tulip-tree. There is something in that, though
such figures are not always good argument. Yet the value to any book of a
worthy translation is beyond calculation. The outstanding literary
illustration of that fact is familiar. The _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám_ lay
in Persian literature and in different English translations long before
Fitzgerald made it a household classic for literary people. The translator
made the book for us in a more marked way than the original writer did. In
somewhat the same way the King James version gave to the English-speaking
people the Bible; and no other version has taken its place.
Yet that was not a mistaken move nearly forty years ago, when the revision
of the King James version was proposed and undertaken. Thirty years ago
(1881) it was completed in what we ordinarily call the Revised Version,
and ten years ago (1901) the American form of that Revised Version
appeared. Few things could more definitely prove the accepted place of the
King James version than the fact that we seem to hear less to-day of the
Revised Version than we used to hear, and that, while the American Revised
Version is incomparably the best in existence in its reproduction of the
original, even it makes way slowly. In less than forty years the King
James version crowded all its competitors off the field. The presence of
the Revised Version of 1881 has not appreciably affected the sales or the
demand for the King James version. In the minds of most people the English
and the American revisions stand as admirable commentaries on the King
James version. If one wishes to know wherein the King James version failed
of representing the original, he will learn it better from those versions
than from any number of commentaries; but the number of those to whom one
or other of the versions has supplanted the King James version is not so
large as might have been expected.
There were several reasons for a new English version of the Bible. It was,
of course, no indignity to the King James version. Those translators
frankly said that they had no hope to make a final version of the
Scriptures. It would be very strange if in three hundred years language
should not have grown by reason of the necessities of the race that used
it, so that at some points a book might be outgrown. In another lecture it
has been intimated that the English Bible, by reason of its constant use,
has tended to fix and confirm the English language. But no one book, nor
any set of books, could confine a living tongue. Some of the reasons for a
new version which give value to these two revisions may be mentioned.
1. Though the King James version was made just after the literary
renaissance, the classical learning of to-day is far in advance of that
day. The King James version is occasionally defective in its use of tenses
and verbs in the Greek and also in the Hebrew. We have Greek and Hebrew
scholars who are able more exactly to reproduce in English the meaning of
the original. It would be strange if that were not so.
2. Then there have been new and important discoveries of Biblical
literature which date earlier in Christian history than any our fathers
knew three hundred years ago. In some instances those earlier discoveries
have shown that a phrase here or there has been wrongly introduced into
the text. There has been no marked instance where a phrase was added by
the revisers; that is, a phrase dropped out of the original and now
replaced. One illustration of the omission of a phrase will be enough. In
the fifth chapter of I John the seventh verse reads: "For there are three
that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and
these three are one." In the revised versions it is omitted, because it
seems quite certain that it was not in the original writing. It does not
at all alter the meaning of Scripture. While it appears in most of the
best manuscripts which were available for the King James translators,
earlier manuscripts found since that time have shown that it was formerly
written at the side as a gloss, and was by some transcriber set over in
the text itself. The process of making the early manuscripts shows how
easily that could have occurred. Let us suppose that two or three
manuscripts were being made at once by different copyists. One was set to
read the original; as he read, the others wrote. It would be easy to
suppose that he might read this marginal reference as a suitable
commentary on the text, and that one or more of the writers could have
written it in the text. It could easily happen also that a copyist, even
seeing where it stood, might suppose it had been omitted by the earlier
copyist, and that he had completed his work by putting it on the margin.
So the next copyist would put it into his own text. Once in a manuscript,
it would readily become part of the accepted form. Discoveries that bring
that sort of thing to light are of value in giving us an accurate version
of the original Bible.
3. Then there are in our King James version a few archaic and obsolete
phrases. We have already spoken of them. Most of them have been avoided in
the revised versions. The neuter possessive pronoun, for example, has been
put in. Animal names have been clarified, obsolete expressions have been
replaced by more familiar ones, and so on.
4. Then there were certain inaccuracies in the King James version. The
fact is familiar that they transliterated certain words which they could
not well translate. In the revised versions that has been carried farther
still. The words which they translated "hell" have been put back into
their Hebrew and Greek equivalents, and appear as Sheol and Hades. Another
instance is that of an Old Testament word, Asherah, which was translated
always "grove," and was used to describe the object of worship of the
early enemies of Israel. The translation does not quite represent the
fact, and the revisers have therefore replaced the old Hebrew word
Asherah. The transliterations of the King James version have not been
changed into translations. Instead, the number of transliterations has
been increased in the interest of accuracy. At one point one might incline
to be adversely critical of the American revisers. They have
transliterated the Hebrew word Jehovah; so they have taken sides in a
controversy where scholars have room to differ. The version would have
gained in strength if it had retained the dignified and noble word "Lord,"
which comes as near representing the idea of the Hebrew word for God as
any word we could find. It must be added that the English of neither of
our new versions has the rhythm and movement of the old version. That is
partly because we are so accustomed to the old expressions and new ones
strike the ear unpleasantly. In any case, the versions differ plainly in
their English. It seems most unlikely that either of these versions shall
ever have the literary influence of the King James, though any man who
will prophesy about that affects a wisdom which he has not.
These, then, are the two differences between this lecture and the
preceding ones, that in this lecture we shall deal with judgments as well
as facts, and that we shall deal with the Bible of to-day rather than the
King James version.
Passing to the heart of the subject, the question appears at once whether
the Bible has or can have to-day the influence or the place which it seems
to have had in the past. Two things force that question: Has not the
critical study of the Bible itself robbed it of its place of authority,
and have not the changes of our times destroyed its possibilities of
influence? That is, on the one hand, has not the Bible been changed? On
the other hand, has it not come into such new conditions that it cannot do
its old work?
It is a natural but a most mistaken idea that the critical study of the
Bible is a new thing. From long before the childhood of any of us there
has been sharp controversy about the Bible. It is a controversy-provoking
Book. It cannot accept blind faith. It always has made men think, and it
makes them think in the line of their own times. The days when no
questions were raised about the Bible were the days when men had no access
to it.
There are some who take all the Bible for granted. They know that there is
indifference to it among friends and in their social circle; but how real
the dispute about the Bible is no one realizes until he comes where new
ideas, say ideas of socialism, are in the air. There, with the breaking of
other chains, is a mighty effort to break this bond also. In such circles
the Bible is little read. It is discussed, and time-worn objections are
bandied about, always growing as they pass. In these circles also every
supposedly adverse result of critical study is welcomed and remembered. If
it is said that there are unexplained contradictions in the Bible, that
fact is remembered. But if it is said further that those contradictions
bid fair to yield to further critical study, or to a wiser understanding
of the situations in which they are involved, that fact is overlooked. The
tendency in these circles is to keep alive rather the adverse phases of
critical study than its favorable phases. Some of those who speak most
fiercely about the study of the Bible, by what is known as higher
criticism, are least intelligent as to what higher criticism actually
means. Believers regret it, and unbelievers rejoice in it. As a matter of
fact, in developing any strong feeling about higher criticism one only
falls a prey to words; he mistakes the meaning of both the words involved.
Criticism does not mean finding fault with the Bible.[52] It is almost an
argument for total depravity that we have made the word gain an adverse
meaning, so that if the average man were told that he had been
"criticized" by another he would suppose that something had been said
against him. Of course, intelligent people know that that is not
necessarily involved. When Kant wrote _The Critique of Pure Reason_ he was
not finding fault with pure reason. He was only making careful analytical
study of it. Now, critical study of the Bible is only careful study of it.
It finds vastly more new beauties than unseen defects. In the same way the
adjective "higher" comes in for misunderstanding. It does not mean
superior; it means more difficult. Lower criticism is the study of the
text itself. What word ought to be here, and exactly what does that word
mean? What is the comparative value of this manuscript over against that
one? If this manuscript has a certain word and that other has a slightly
different one, which word ought to be used?
Take one illustration from the Old Testament and one from the New to show
what lower or textual criticism does. In the ninth chapter of Isaiah the
third verse reads: "Thou hast multiplied the nation and _not_ increased
the joy." That word "not" is troublesome. It disagrees with the rest of
the passage. Now it happens that there are two Hebrew words pronounced
"lo," just alike in sound, but spelled differently. One means "not," the
other means "to him" or "his." Put the second word in, and the sentence
reads: "Thou hast multiplied the nation and increased its joy." That fits
the context exactly. Lower criticism declares that it is therefore the
probable reading, and corrects the text in that way.