The opponents of the Higher Criticism have much to say in reply.

Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, holds that the early chapters

of Genesis were copied from Babylonian sources, but he insists

upon a Mosaic or pre-Mosaic date for the copying. Hilprecht

however declares that the monotheistic faith of Israel could never

have proceeded “from the Babylonian mountain of gods—that

charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.” Bissell,

Genesis Printed in Colors, Introd., iv—“It is improbable that so

many documentary histories existed so early, or if existing that

the compiler should have attempted to combine them. Strange that

the earlier should be J and should use the word ‘Jehovah,’ while

the later P should use the word ‘Elohim,’ when ‘Jehovah’ would

have far better suited the Priests’ Code.... xiii—The Babylonian

tablets contain in a continuous narrative the more prominent facts

of both the alleged Elohistic and Jehovistic sections of Genesis,

and present them mainly in the Biblical order. Several hundred

years before Moses what the critics call _two_ were already _one_.

It is absurd to say that the unity was due to a redactor at the

period of the exile, 444 B. C. He who believes that God revealed

himself to primitive man as one God, will see in the Akkadian

story a polytheistic corruption of the original monotheistic

account.” We must not estimate the antiquity of a pair of boots by

the last patch which the cobbler has added; nor must we estimate

the antiquity of a Scripture book by the glosses and explanations

added by later editors. As the London Spectator remarks on the

Homeric problem: “It is as impossible that a first-rate poem or

work of art should be produced without a great master-mind which

first conceives the whole, as that a fine living bull should be

developed out of beef-sausages.” As we shall proceed to show,

however, these utterances overestimate the unity of the Pentateuch

and ignore some striking evidences of its gradual growth and

composite structure.

_The Authorship of the Pentateuch in particular._ Recent critics,

especially Kuenen and Robertson Smith, have maintained that the

Pentateuch is Mosaic only in the sense of being a gradually

growing body of traditional law, which was codified as late as the

time of Ezekiel, and, as the development of the spirit and

teachings of the great law-giver, was called by a legal fiction

after the name of Moses and was attributed to him. The actual

order of composition is therefore: (1) Book of the Covenant

(_Exodus 20-23_); (2) Deuteronomy; (3) Leviticus. Among the

reasons assigned for this view are the facts (_a_) that

Deuteronomy ends with an account of Moses’ death, and therefore

could not have been written by Moses; (_b_) that in Leviticus

Levites are mere servants to the priests, while in Deuteronomy the

priests are officiating Levites, or, in other words, all the

Levites are priests; (_c_) that the books of Judges and of 1

Samuel, with their record of sacrifices offered in many places,

give no evidence that either Samuel or the nation of Israel had

any knowledge of a law confining worship to a local sanctuary. See

Kuenen, Prophets and Prophecy in Israel; Wellhausen, Geschichte

Israels, Band 1; and art.: Israel, in Encyc. Brit., 13:398, 399,

415; W. Robertson Smith, O. T. in Jewish Church, 306, 386, and

Prophets of Israel; Hastings, Bible Dict., arts.: Deuteronomy,

Hexateuch, and Canon of the O. T.

It has been urged in reply, (1) that Moses may have written, not

autographically, but through a scribe (perhaps Joshua), and that

this scribe may have completed the history in Deuteronomy with the

account of Moses’ death; (2) that Ezra or subsequent prophets may

have subjected the whole Pentateuch to recension, and may have

added explanatory notes; (3) that documents of previous ages may

have been incorporated, in course of its composition by Moses, or

subsequently by his successors; (4) that the apparent lack of

distinction between the different classes of Levites in

Deuteronomy may be explained by the fact that, while Leviticus was

written with exact detail for the priests, Deuteronomy is the

record of a brief general and oral summary of the law, addressed

to the people at large and therefore naturally mentioning the

clergy as a whole; (5) that the silence of the book of Judges as

to the Mosaic ritual may be explained by the design of the book to

describe only general history, and by the probability that at the

tabernacle a ritual was observed of which the people in general

were ignorant. Sacrifices in other places only accompanied special

divine manifestations which made the recipient temporarily a

priest. Even if it were proved that the law with regard to a

central sanctuary was not observed, it would not show that the law

did not exist, any more than violation of the second commandment

by Solomon proves his ignorance of the decalogue, or the mediæval

neglect of the N. T. by the Roman church proves that the N. T. did

not then exist. We cannot argue that “where there was

transgression, there was no law” (Watts, New Apologetic, 83, and

The Newer Criticism).

In the light of recent research, however, we cannot regard these

replies as satisfactory. Woods, in his article on the Hexateuch,

Hastings’ Dictionary, 2:365, presents a moderate statement of the

results of the higher criticism which commends itself to us as

more trustworthy. He calls it a theory of stratification, and

holds that “certain more or less independent documents, dealing

largely with the same series of events, were composed at different

periods, or, at any rate, under different auspices, and were

afterwards combined, so that our present Hexateuch, which means

our Pentateuch with the addition of Joshua, contains these several

different literary strata.... The main grounds for accepting this

hypothesis of stratification are (1) that the various literary

pieces, with very few exceptions, will be found on examination to

arrange themselves by common characteristics into comparatively

few groups; (2) that an original consecution of narrative may be

frequently traced between what in their present form are isolated

fragments.

“This will be better understood by the following illustration. Let

us suppose a problem of this kind: Given a patchwork quilt,

explain the character of the original pieces out of which the bits

of stuff composing the quilt were cut. First, we notice that,

however well the colors may blend, however nice and complete the

whole may look, many of the adjoining pieces do not agree in

material, texture, pattern, color, or the like. Ergo, they have

been made up out of very different pieces of stuff.... But suppose

we further discover that many of the bits, though now separated,

are like one another in material, texture, etc., we may conjecture

that these have been cut out of one piece. But we shall prove this

beyond reasonable doubt if we find that several bits when unpicked

fit together, so that the pattern of one is continued in the

other; and, moreover, that if all of like character are sorted

out, they form, say, four groups, each of which was evidently once

a single piece of stuff, though parts of each are found missing,

because, no doubt, they have not been required to make the whole.

But we make the analogy of the Hexateuch even closer, if we

further suppose that in certain parts of the quilt the bits

belonging to, say, two of these groups are so combined as to form

a subsidiary pattern within the larger pattern of the whole quilt,

and had evidently been sewed together before being connected with

other parts of the quilt; and we may make it even closer still, if

we suppose that, besides the more important bits of stuff, smaller

embellishments, borderings, and the like, had been added so as to

improve the general effect of the whole.”

The author of this article goes on to point out three main

portions of the Hexateuch which essentially differ from each

other. There are three distinct codes: the Covenant code (C—_Ex.

20:22_ to _23:33_, and _24:3-8_), the Deuteronomic code (D), and

the Priestly code (P). These codes have peculiar relations to the

narrative portions of the Hexateuch. In Genesis, for example, “the

greater part of the book is divided into groups of longer or

shorter pieces, generally paragraphs or chapters, distinguished

respectively by the almost exclusive use of Elohim or Jehovah as

the name of God.” Let us call these portions J and E. But we find

such close affinities between C and JE, that we may regard them as

substantially one. “We shall find that the larger part of the

narratives, as distinct from the laws, of Exodus and Numbers

belong to JE; whereas, with special exceptions, the legal portions

belong to P. In the last chapters of Deuteronomy and in the whole

of Joshua we find elements of JE. In the latter book we also find

elements which connect it with D.

“It should be observed that not only do we find here and there

_separate pieces_ in the Hexateuch, shown by their characters to

belong to these three sources, JE, D, and P, but the pieces will

often be found connected together by an obvious continuity of

subject when pieced together, like the bits of patchwork in the

illustration with which we started. For example, if we read

continuously _Gen. 11:27-33_; _12:4b, 5_; _13:6a, 11b, 12a_;

_16:1a, 3, 15, 16_; _17_; _19:29_; _21:1a, 2b-5_; _23_;

_25:7-11a_—passages mainly, on other grounds, attributed to P, we

get an almost continuous and complete, though very concise,

account of Abraham’s life.” We may concede the substantial

correctness of the view thus propounded. It simply shows God’s

actual method in making up the record of his revelation. We may

add that any scholar who grants that Moses did not himself write

the account of his own death and burial in the last chapter of

Deuteronomy, or who recognizes two differing accounts of creation

in _Genesis 1_ and _2_, has already begun an analysis of the

Pentateuch and has accepted the essential principles of the higher

criticism.

In addition to the literature already referred to mention may also

be made of Driver’s Introd. to O. T., 118-150, and Deuteronomy,

Introd.; W. R. Harper, in Hebraica, Oct.-Dec. 1888, and W. H.

Green’s reply in Hebraica. Jan.-Apr. 1889; also Green, The Unity

of the Book of Genesis, Moses and the Prophets, Hebrew Feasts, and

Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch; with articles by Green in

Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882 and Oct. 1886; Howard Osgood, in Essays on

Pentateuchal Criticism, and in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1888, and July,

1893; Watts, The Newer Criticism, and New Apologetic, 83; Presb.

Rev., arts. by H. P. Smith, April, 1882, and by F. L. Patton,

1883:341-410; Bib. Sac., April, 1882:291-344, and by G. F. Wright,

July, 1898:515-525; Brit. Quar., July, 1881:123; Jan.

1884:138-143; Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 373-385; Stebbins, A

Study in the Pentateuch; Bissell, Historic Origin of the Bible,

277-342, and The Pentateuch, its Authorship and Structure;

Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 180-216, and The

Veracity of the Hexateuch; Murray, Origin and Growth of the

Psalms, 58; Payne-Smith, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 15;

Edersheim, Prophecy and History; Kurtz, Hist. Old Covenant, 1:46;

Perowne, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. and Feb. 1888; Chambers, Moses and

his Recent Critics; Terry, Moses and the Prophets; Davis,

Dictionary of the Bible, art.: Pentateuch; Willis J. Beecher, The

Prophets and the Promise; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 326-329.

II. Credibility of the Writers of the Scriptures.

We shall attempt to prove this only of the writers of the gospels; for if

they are credible witnesses, the credibility of the Old Testament, to

which they bore testimony, follows as a matter of course.

1. _They are capable or competent witnesses_,—that is, they possessed

actual knowledge with regard to the facts they professed to relate. (_a_)

They had opportunities of observation and inquiry. (_b_) They were men of

sobriety and discernment, and could not have been themselves deceived.

(_c_) Their circumstances were such as to impress deeply upon their minds

the events of which they were witnesses.

2. _They are honest witnesses._ This is evident when we consider that:

(_a_) Their testimony imperiled all their worldly interests. (_b_) The

moral elevation of their writings, and their manifest reverence for truth

and constant inculcation of it, show that they were not wilful deceivers,

but good men. (_c_) There are minor indications of the honesty of these

writers in the circumstantiality of their story, in the absence of any

expectation that their narratives would be questioned, in their freedom

from all disposition to screen themselves or the apostles from censure.

Lessing says that Homer never calls Helen beautiful, but he gives

the reader an impression of her surpassing loveliness by

portraying the effect produced by her presence. So the evangelists

do not describe Jesus’ appearance or character, but lead us to

conceive the cause that could produce such effects. Gore,

Incarnation, 77—“Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod, Judas, are not

abused,—they are photographed. The sin of a Judas and a Peter is

told with equal simplicity. Such fairness, wherever you find it,

belongs to a trustworthy witness.”

3. _The writings of the evangelists mutually support each other._ We argue

their credibility upon the ground of their number and of the consistency

of their testimony. While there is enough of discrepancy to show that

there has been no collusion between them, there is concurrence enough to

make the falsehood of them all infinitely improbable. Four points under

this head deserve mention: (_a_) The evangelists are independent

witnesses. This is sufficiently shown by the futility of the attempts to

prove that any one of them has abridged or transcribed another. (_b_) The

discrepancies between them are none of them irreconcilable with the truth

of the recorded facts, but only present those facts in new lights or with

additional detail. (_c_) That these witnesses were friends of Christ does

not lessen the value of their united testimony, since they followed Christ

only because they were convinced that these facts were true. (_d_) While

one witness to the facts of Christianity might establish its truth, the

combined evidence of four witnesses gives us a warrant for faith in the

facts of the gospel such as we possess for no other facts in ancient

history whatsoever. The same rule which would refuse belief in the events

recorded in the gospels “would throw doubt on any event in history.”

No man does or can write his own signature twice precisely alike.

When two signatures, therefore, purporting to be written by the

same person, are precisely alike, it is safe to conclude that one

of them is a forgery. Compare the combined testimony of the

evangelists with the combined testimony of our five senses. “Let

us assume,” says Dr. C. E. Rider, “that the chances of deception

are as one to ten when we use our eyes alone, one to twenty when

we use our ears alone, and one to forty when we use our sense of

touch alone; what are the chances of mistake when we use all these

senses simultaneously? The true result is obtained by multiplying

these proportions together. This gives one to eight thousand.”

4. _The conformity of the gospel testimony with experience._ We have

already shown that, granting the fact of sin and the need of an attested

revelation from God, miracles can furnish no presumption against the

testimony of those who record such a revelation, but, as essentially

belonging to such a revelation, miracles may be proved by the same kind

and degree of evidence as is required in proof of any other extraordinary

facts. We may assert, then, that in the New Testament histories there is

no record of facts contrary to experience, but only a record of facts not

witnessed in ordinary experience—of facts, therefore, in which we may

believe, if the evidence in other respects is sufficient.

5. _Coincidence of this testimony with collateral facts and

circumstances._ Under this head we may refer to (_a_) the numberless

correspondences between the narratives of the evangelists and contemporary

history; (_b_) the failure of every attempt thus far to show that the

sacred history is contradicted by any single fact derived from other

trustworthy sources; (_c_) the infinite improbability that this minute and

complete harmony should ever have been secured in fictitious narratives.

6. _Conclusion from the argument for the credibility of the writers of the

gospels._ These writers having been proved to be credible witnesses, their

narratives, including the accounts of the miracles and prophecies of

Christ and his apostles, must be accepted as true. But God would not work

miracles or reveal the future to attest the claims of false teachers.

Christ and his apostles must, therefore, have been what they claimed to

be, teachers sent from God, and their doctrine must be what they claimed

it to be, a revelation from God to men.

On the whole subject, see Ebrard, Wissensch. Kritik der evang.

Geschichte; Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, 30, 31;

Starkie on Evidence, 734; Whately, Historic Doubts as to Napoleon

Buonaparte; Haley, Examination of Alleged Discrepancies; Smith’s

Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul; Paley, Horse Paulinæ; Birks, in

Strivings for the Faith, 37-72—“Discrepancies are like the slight

diversities of the different pictures of the stereoscope.” Renan

calls the land of Palestine a fifth gospel. Weiss contrasts the

Apocryphal Gospels, where there is no historical setting and all

is in the air, with the evangelists, where time and place are

always stated.

No modern apologist has stated the argument for the credibility of

the New Testament with greater clearness and force than

Paley,—Evidences, chapters 8 and 10—“No historical fact is more

certain than that the original propagators of the gospel

voluntarily subjected themselves to lives of fatigue, danger, and

suffering, in the prosecution of their undertaking. The nature of

the undertaking, the character of the persons employed in it, the

opposition of their tenets to the fixed expectations of the

country in which they at first advanced them, their undissembled

condemnation of the religion of all other countries, their total

want of power, authority, or force, render it in the highest

degree _probable_ that this must have been the case.

“The probability is increased by what we know of the fate of the

Founder of the institution, who was put to death for his attempt,

and by what we also know of the cruel treatment of the converts to

the institution within thirty years after its commencement—both

which points are attested by heathen writers, and, being once

admitted, leave it very incredible that the primitive emissaries

of the religion who exercised their ministry first amongst the

people who had destroyed their Master, and afterwards amongst

those who persecuted their converts, should themselves escape with

impunity or pursue their purpose in ease and safety.

“This probability, thus sustained by foreign testimony, is

advanced, I think, to historical certainty by the evidence of our

own books, by the accounts of a writer who was the companion of

the persons whose sufferings he relates, by the letters of the

persons themselves, by predictions of persecutions, ascribed to

the Founder of the religion, which predictions would not have been

inserted in this history, much less, studiously dwelt upon, if

they had not accorded with the event, and which, even if falsely

ascribed to him, could only have been so ascribed because the

event suggested them; lastly, by incessant exhortations to

fortitude and patience, and by an earnestness, repetition and

urgency upon the subject which were unlikely to have appeared, if

there had not been, at the time, some extraordinary call for the

exercise of such virtues. It is also made out, I think, with

sufficient evidence, that both the teachers and converts of the

religion, in consequence of their new profession, took up a new

course of life and conduct.

“The next great question is, what they did this _for_. It was for

a miraculous story of some kind, since for the proof that Jesus of

Nazareth ought to be received as the Messiah, or as a messenger

for God, they neither had nor could have anything but miracles to

stand upon.... If this be so, the religion must be true. These men

could not be deceivers. By only not bearing testimony, they might

have avoided all these sufferings and lived quietly. Would men in

such circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw,

assert facts which they had no knowledge of, go about lying to

teach virtue, and though not only convinced of Christ’s being an

impostor, but having seen the success of his imposture in his

crucifixion, yet persist in carrying it on, and so persist as to

bring upon themselves, for nothing, and with a full knowledge of

the consequences, enmity and hatred, danger and death?”

Those who maintain this, moreover, require us to believe that the

Scripture writers were “villains for no end but to teach honesty,

and martyrs without the least prospect of honor or advantage.”

Imposture must have a motive. The self-devotion of the apostles is

the strongest evidence of their truth, for even Hume declares that

“we cannot make use of a more convincing argument in proof of

honesty than to prove that the actions ascribed to any persons are

contrary to the course of nature, and that no human motives, in

such circumstances, could ever induce them to such conduct.”

III. The Supernatural Character of the Scripture Teaching.

1. Scripture teaching in general.

A. The Bible is the work of one mind.

(_a_) In spite of its variety of authorship and the vast separation of its

writers from one another in point of time, there is a unity of subject,

spirit, and aim throughout the whole.

We here begin a new department of Christian evidences. We have

thus far only adduced external evidence. We now turn our attention

to internal evidence. The relation of external to internal

evidence seems to be suggested in Christ’s two questions in _Mark

8:27, 29—_“Who do _men_ say that I am?... who say _ye_ that I am?”

The unity in variety displayed in Scripture is one of the chief

internal evidences. This unity is indicated in our word “Bible,”

in the singular number. Yet the original word was “Biblia,” a

plural number. The world has come to see a unity in what were once

scattered fragments: the many “Biblia” have become one “Bible.” In

one sense R. W. Emerson’s contention is true: “The Bible is not a

book,—it is a literature.” But we may also say, and with equal

truth: “The Bible is not simply a collection of books,—it is a

book.” The Bible is made up of sixty-six books, by forty writers,

of all ranks,—shepherds, fishermen, priests, warriors, statesmen,

kings,—composing their works at intervals through a period of

seventeen centuries. Evidently no collusion between them is

possible. Scepticism tends ever to ascribe to the Scriptures

greater variety of authorship and date, but all this only

increases the wonder of the Bible’s unity. If unity in a half

dozen writers is remarkable, in forty it is astounding. “The many

diverse instruments of this orchestra play one perfect tune: hence

we feel that they are led by one master and composer.” Yet it

takes the same Spirit who inspired the Bible to teach its unity.

The union is not an external or superficial one, but one that is

internal and spiritual.

(_b_) Not one moral or religious utterance of all these writers has been

contradicted or superseded by the utterances of those who have come later,

but all together constitute a consistent system.

Here we must distinguish between the external form and the moral

and religious substance. Jesus declares in _Mat. 5:21, 22, 27, 28,

33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, _“Ye have heard that it was said to them

of old time ... but I say unto you,” and then he seems at first

sight to abrogate certain original commands. But he also declares

in this connection, _Mat. 5:17, 18—_“Think not I am come to

destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to

fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass

away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the

law, till all things be accomplished.” Christ’s new commandments

only bring out the inner meaning of the old. He fulfils them not

in their literal form but in their essential spirit. So the New

Testament completes the revelation of the Old Testament and makes

the Bible a perfect unity. In this unity the Bible stands alone.

Hindu, Persian, and Chinese religious books contain no consistent

system of faith. There is progress in revelation from the earlier

to the later books of the Bible, but this is not progress through

successive steps of falsehood; it is rather progress from a less

to a more clear and full unfolding of the truth. The whole truth

lay germinally in the _protevangelium_ uttered to our first

parents (_Gen. 3:15_—the seed of the woman should bruise the

serpent’s head).

(_c_) Each of these writings, whether early or late, has represented moral

and religious ideas greatly in advance of the age in which it has

appeared, and these ideas still lead the world.

All our ideas of progress, with all the forward-looking spirit of

modern Christendom, are due to Scripture. The classic nations had

no such ideas and no such spirit, except as they caught them from

the Hebrews. Virgil’s prophecy, in his fourth Eclogue, of a coming

virgin and of the reign of Saturn and of the return of the golden

age, was only the echo of the Sibylline books and of the hope of a

Redeemer with which the Jews had leavened the whole Roman world;

see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 94-96.

(_d_) It is impossible to account for this unity without supposing such a

supernatural suggestion and control that the Bible, while in its various

parts written by human agents, is yet equally the work of a superhuman

intelligence.

We may contrast with the harmony between the different Scripture

writers the contradictions and refutations which follow merely

human philosophies—_e. g._, the Hegelian idealism and the

Spencerian materialism. Hegel is “a name to swear at, as well as

to swear by.” Dr. Stirling, in his Secret of Hegel, “kept all the

secret to himself, if he ever knew it.” A certain Frenchman once

asked Hegel if he could not gather up and express his philosophy

in one sentence for him. “No,” Hegel replied, “at least not in

French.” If Talleyrand’s maxim be true that whatever is not

intelligible is not French, Hegel’s answer was a correct one.

Hegel said of his disciples: “There is only one man living who

understands me, and he does not.”

Goeschel, Gabler, Daub, Marheinecke, Erdmann, are Hegel’s right

wing, or orthodox representatives and followers in theology; see

Sterrett, Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. Hegel is followed by

Alexander and Bradley in England, but is opposed by Seth and

Schiller. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 279-300, gives a valuable

estimate of his position and influence: Hegel is all thought and

no will. Prayer has no effect on God,—it is a purely psychological

phenomenon. There is no free-will, and man’s sin as much as man’s

holiness is a manifestation of the Eternal. Evolution is a fact,

but it is only fatalistic evolution. Hegel notwithstanding did

great service by substituting knowledge of reality for the

oppressive Kantian relativity, and by banishing the old notion of

matter as a mysterious substance wholly unlike and incompatible

with the properties of mind. He did great service also by showing

that the interactions of matter and mind are explicable only by

the presence of the Absolute Whole in every part, though he erred

greatly by carrying that idea of the unity of God and man beyond

its proper limits, and by denying that God has given to the will

of man any power to put itself into antagonism to His Will. Hegel

did great service by showing that we cannot know even the part

without knowing the whole, but he erred in teaching, as T. H.

Green did, that the _relations_ constitute the _reality_ of the

thing. He deprives both physical and psychical existences of that

degree of selfhood or independent reality which is essential to

both science and religion. We want real force, and not the mere

idea of force; real will, and not mere thought.

B. This one mind that made the Bible is the same mind that made the soul,

for the Bible is divinely adapted to the soul,

(_a_) It shows complete acquaintance with the soul.

The Bible addresses all parts of man’s nature. There are Law and

Epistles for man’s reason; Psalms and Gospels for his affections;

Prophets and Revelations for his imagination. Hence the popularity

of the Scriptures. Their variety holds men. The Bible has become

interwoven into modern life. Law, literature, art, all show its

moulding influence.

(_b_) It judges the soul—contradicting its passions, revealing its guilt,

and humbling its pride.

No product of mere human nature could thus look down upon human

nature and condemn it. The Bible speaks to us from a higher level.

The Samaritan woman’s words apply to the whole compass of divine

revelation; it tells us all things that ever we did (_John 4:29_).

The Brahmin declared that _Romans 1_, with its description of

heathen vices, must have been forged after the missionaries came

to India.

(_c_) It meets the deepest needs of the soul—by solutions of its problems,

disclosures of God’s character, presentations of the way of pardon,

consolations and promises for life and death.

Neither Socrates nor Seneca sets forth the nature, origin and

consequences of sin as committed against the holiness of God, nor

do they point out the way of pardon and renewal. The Bible teaches

us what nature cannot, viz.: God’s creatorship, the origin of

evil, the method of restoration, the certainty of a future state,

and the principle of rewards and punishments there.

(_d_) Yet it is silent upon many questions for which writings of merely

human origin seek first to provide solutions.

Compare the account of Christ’s infancy in the gospels with the

fables of the Apocryphal New Testament; compare the scant

utterances of Scripture with regard to the future state with

Mohammed’s and Swedenborg’s revelations of Paradise. See Alexander

McLaren’s sermon on The Silence of Scripture, in his book

entitled: Christ in the Heart, 131-141.

(_e_) There are infinite depths and inexhaustible reaches of meaning in

Scripture, which difference it from all other books, and which compel us

to believe that its author must be divine.

Sir Walter Scott, on his death bed: “Bring me the Book!” “What

book?” said Lockhart, his son-in-law. “There is but one book!”

said the dying man. Réville concludes an Essay in the Revue des

deux Mondes (1864): “One day the question was started, in an

assembly, what book a man condemned to lifelong imprisonment, and

to whom but one book would be permitted, had better take into his

cell with him. The company consisted of Catholics, Protestants,

philosophers and even materialists, but all agreed that their

choice would fall only on the Bible.”

On the whole subject, see Garbett, God’s Word Written, 3-56;

Luthardt, Saving Truths, 210; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of Bible,

155-181; W. L. Alexander, Connection and Harmony of O. T. and N.

T.; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O. T.; Bernard, Progress of

Doctrine in the N. T.; Rainy, Delivery and Development of

Doctrine; Titcomb, in Strivings for the Faith; Immer,

Hermeneutics, 91; Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 23; 5: no. 28; 6: no.

31; Lee on Inspiration, 26-32.

2. Moral System of the New Testament.

The perfection of this system is generally conceded. All will admit that

it greatly surpasses any other system known among men. Among its

distinguishing characteristics may be mentioned:

(_a_) Its comprehensiveness,—including all human duties in its code, even

the most generally misunderstood and neglected, while it permits no vice

whatsoever.

Buddhism regards family life as sinful. Suicide was commended by

many ancient philosophers. Among the Spartans to steal was

praiseworthy,—only to be caught stealing was criminal. Classic

times despised humility. Thomas Paine said that Christianity

cultivated “the spirit of a spaniel,” and John Stuart Mill

asserted that Christ ignored duty to the state. Yet Peter urges

Christians to add to their faith manliness, courage, heroism (_2

Pet. 1:5—_“in your faith supply virtue”), and Paul declares the

state to be God’s ordinance (_Rom. 13:1—_“Let every soul be in

subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God;

and the powers that be are ordained of God”). Patriotic defence of

a nation’s unity and freedom has always found its chief incitement

and ground in these injunctions of Scripture. E. G. Robinson:

“Christian ethics do not contain a particle of chaff,—all is pure

wheat.”

(_b_) Its spirituality,—accepting no merely external conformity to right

precepts, but judging all action by the thoughts and motives from which it

springs.

The superficiality of heathen morals is well illustrated by the

treatment of the corpse of a priest in Siam: the body is covered

with gold leaf, and then is left to rot and shine. Heathenism

divorces religion from ethics. External and ceremonial observances

take the place of purity of heart. The Sermon on the Mount on the

other hand pronounces blessing only upon inward states of the

soul. _Ps. 51:6—_“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts,

and in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”; _Micah

6:8—_“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to

love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

(_c_) Its simplicity,—inculcating principles rather than imposing rules;

reducing these principles to an organic system; and connecting this system

with religion by summing up all human duty in the one command of love to

God and man.

Christianity presents no extensive code of rules, like that of the

Pharisees or of the Jesuits. Such codes break down of their own

weight. The laws of the State of New York alone constitute a

library of themselves, which only the trained lawyer can master.

It is said that Mohammedanism has recorded sixty-five thousand

special instances in which the reader is directed to do right. It

is the merit of Jesus’ system that all its requisitions are

reduced to unity. _Mark 12:29-31—_“Hear, O Israel; The Lord our

God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with

all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and

with all thy strength. The second is this: Thou shalt love thy

neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than

these.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:384-814, calls attention to

the inner unity of Jesus’ teaching. The doctrine that God is a

loving Father is applied with unswerving consistency. Jesus

confirmed whatever was true in the O. T., and he set aside the

unworthy. He taught not so much about God, as about the kingdom of

God, and about the ideal fellowship between God and men. Morality

was the necessary and natural expression of religion. In Christ

teaching and life were perfectly blended. He was the

representative of the religion which he taught.

(_d_) Its practicality,—exemplifying its precepts in the life of Jesus

Christ; and, while it declares man’s depravity and inability in his own

strength to keep the law, furnishing motives to obedience, and the divine

aid of the Holy Spirit to make this obedience possible.

Revelation has two sides: Moral law, and provision for fulfilling

the moral law that has been broken. Heathen systems can incite to

temporary reformations, and they can terrify with fears of

retribution. But only God’s regenerating grace can make the tree

good, in such a way that its fruit will be good also (_Mat.

12:33_). There is a difference between touching the pendulum of

the clock and winding it up,—the former may set it temporarily

swinging, but only the latter secures its regular and permanent

motion. The moral system of the N. T. is not simply law,—it is

also grace: _John 1:17—_“the law was given through Moses; grace

and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Dr. William Ashmore’s tract

represents a Chinaman in a pit. Confucius looks into the pit and

says: “If you had done as I told you, you would never have gotten

in.” Buddha looks into the pit and says: “If you were up here I

would show you what to do.” So both Confucius and Buddha pass on.

But Jesus leaps down into the pit and helps the poor Chinaman out.

At the Parliament of Religions in Chicago there were many ideals

of life propounded, but no religion except Christianity attempted

to show that there was any power given to realize these ideals.

When Joseph Cook challenged the priests of the ancient religions

to answer Lady Macbeth’s question: “How cleanse this red right

hand?” the priests were dumb. But Christianity declares that “the

blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin”_ (1 John 1:7)_.

E. G. Robinson: Christianity differs from all other religions in

being (1) a historical religion; (2) in turning abstract law into

a person to be loved; (3) in furnishing a demonstration of God’s

love in Christ; (4) in providing atonement for sin and forgiveness

for the sinner; (5) in giving a power to fulfil the law and

sanctify the life. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 249—“Christianity, by

making the moral law the expression of a holy Will, brought that

law out of its impersonal abstraction, and assured its ultimate

triumph. Moral principles may be what they were before, but moral

practice is forever different. Even the earth itself has another

look, now that it has heaven above it.” Frances Power Cobbe, Life,

92—“The achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a

_new_, still less of a _systematic_, morality; but the

introduction of a new _spirit_ into morality; as Christ himself

said, a leaven into the lump.”

We may justly argue that a moral system so pure and perfect, since it

surpasses all human powers of invention and runs counter to men’s natural

tastes and passions, must have had a supernatural, and if a supernatural,

then a divine, origin.

Heathen systems of morality are in general defective, in that they

furnish for man’s moral action no sufficient example, rule,

motive, or end. They cannot do this, for the reason that they

practically identify God with nature, and know of no clear

revelation of his holy will. Man is left to the law of his own

being, and since he is not conceived of as wholly responsible and

free, the lower impulses are allowed sway as well as the higher,

and selfishness is not regarded as sin. As heathendom does not

recognize man’s depravity, so it does not recognize his dependence

upon divine grace, and its virtue is self-righteousness.

Heathenism is man’s vain effort to lift himself to God;

Christianity is God’s coming down to man to save him; see

Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 11, 12. Martineau, 1:15, 16, calls

attention to the difference between the physiological ethics of

heathendom and the psychological ethics of Christianity.

Physiological ethics begins with nature; and, finding in nature

the uniform rule of necessity and the operation of cause and

effect, it comes at last to man and applies the same rule to him,

thus extinguishing all faith in personality, freedom,

responsibility, sin and guilt. Psychological ethics, on the

contrary, wisely begins with what we know best, with man; and

finding in him free-will and a moral purpose, it proceeds outward

to nature and interprets nature as the manifestation of the mind

and will of God.

“Psychological ethics are altogether peculiar to Christendom....

Other systems begin outside and regard the soul as a homogeneous

part of the _universe_, applying to the soul the principle of

necessity that prevails outside of it.... In the Christian

religion, on the other hand, the interest, the mystery of the

world are concentrated in _human nature_.... The sense of sin—a

sentiment that left no trace in Athens—involves a consciousness of

personal alienation from the Supreme Goodness; the aspiration

after holiness directs itself to a union of affection and will

with the source of all Perfection; the agency for transforming men

from their old estrangement to new reconciliation is a Person, in

whom the divine and human historically blend; and the sanctifying

Spirit by which they are sustained at the height of their purer

life is a living link of communion between their minds and the

Soul of souls.... So Nature, to the Christian consciousness, sank

into the accidental and the neutral.” Measuring ourselves by human

standards, we nourish pride; measuring ourselves by divine

standards, we nourish humility. Heathen nations, identifying God

with nature or with man, are unprogressive. The flat architecture

of the Parthenon, with its lines parallel to the earth, is the

type of heathen religion; the aspiring arches of the Gothic

cathedral symbolize Christianity.

Sterrett, Studies in Hegel, 33, says that Hegel characterized the

Chinese religion as that of Measure, or temperate conduct;

Brahmanism as that of Phantasy, or inebriate dream-life; Buddhism

as that of Self-involvement; that of Egypt as the imbruted

religion of Enigma, symbolized by the Sphynx; that of Greece, as

the religion of Beauty; the Jewish as that of Sublimity; and

Christianity as the Absolute religion, the fully revealed religion

of truth and freedom. In all this Hegel entirely fails to grasp

the elements of Will, Holiness, Love, Life, which characterize

Judaism and Christianity, and distinguish them from all other

religions. R. H. Hutton: “Judaism taught us that Nature must be

interpreted by our knowledge of God, not God by our knowledge of

Nature.” Lyman Abbott: “Christianity is not a new _life_, but a

new _power_; not a _summons_ to a new life, but an _offer_ of new

life; not a reënactment of the old law, but a power of God unto

salvation; not love to God and man, but Christ’s message that God

loves us, and will help us to the life of love.”

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 5, 6—“Christianity postulates an

opening of the heart of the eternal God to the heart of man coming

to meet him. Heathendom shows us the heart of man blunderingly

grasping the hem of God’s garment, and mistaking Nature, his

majestic raiment, for himself. Only in the Bible does man press

beyond God’s external manifestations to God himself.” See Wuttke,

Christian Ethics, 1:37-173; Porter, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no.

19, pp. 33-64: Blackie, Four Phases of Morals; Faiths of the World

(St. Giles Lectures, second series); J. F. Clarke, Ten Great

Religions, 2:280-317; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith; Farrar, Witness of

History to Christ, 134, and Seekers after God, 181, 182, 320;

Curtis on Inspiration, 288. For denial of the all-comprehensive

character of Christian Morality, see John Stuart Mill, on Liberty;

_per contra_, see Review of Mill, in Theol. Eclectic, 6:508-512;

Row, in Strivings for the Faith, pub. by Christian Evidence

Society, 181-220; also, Bampton Lectures, 1877:130-176; Fisher,

Beginnings of Christianity, 28-38, 174.

In contrast with the Christian system of morality the defects of heathen

systems are so marked and fundamental, that they constitute a strong

corroborative evidence of the divine origin of the Scripture revelation.

We therefore append certain facts and references with regard to particular

heathen systems.

1. _Confucianism._ Confucius (_Kung-fu-tse_), B. C. 551-478,

contemporary with Pythagoras and Buddha. Socrates was born ten

years after Confucius died. Mencius (371-278) was a disciple of

Confucius. Matheson, in Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures),

73-108, claims that Confucianism was “an attempt to substitute a

morality for theology.” Legge, however, in Present Day Tracts, 3:

no. 18, shows that this is a mistake. Confucius simply left

religion where he found it. God, or Heaven, is worshiped in China,

but only by the Emperor. Chinese religion is apparently a survival

of the worship of the patriarchal family. The father of the family

was its only head and priest. In China, though the family widened

into the tribe, and the tribe into the nation, the father still

retained his sole authority, and, as the father of his people, the

Emperor alone officially offered sacrifice to God. Between God and

the people the gulf has so widened that the people may be said to

have no practical knowledge of God or communication with him. Dr.

W. A. P. Martin: “Confucianism has degenerated into a pantheistic

medley, and renders worship to an impersonal ‘anima mundi,’ under

the leading forms of visible nature.”

Dr. William Ashmore, private letter: “The common people of China

have: (1) Ancestor-worship, and the worship of deified heroes: (2)

Geomancy, or belief in the controlling power of the elements of

nature; but back of these, and antedating them, is (3) the worship

of Heaven and Earth, or Father and Mother, a very ancient dualism;

this belongs to the common people also, though once a year the

Emperor, as a sort of high-priest of his people, offers sacrifice

on the altar of Heaven; in this he acts alone. ‘Joss’ is not a

Chinese word at all. It is the corrupted form of the Portuguese

word ‘Deos.’ The word ‘pidgin’ is similarly an attempt to say

‘business’ (big-i-ness or bidgin). ‘Joss-pidgin’ therefore means

simply ‘divine service,’ or service offered to Heaven and Earth,

or to spirits of any kind, good or bad. There are many gods, a

Queen of Heaven, King of Hades, God of War, god of literature,

gods of the hills, valleys, streams, a goddess of small-pox, of

child-bearing, and all the various trades have their gods. The

most lofty expression the Chinese have is ‘Heaven,’ or ‘Supreme

Heaven,’ or ‘Azure Heaven.’ This is the surviving indication that

in the most remote times they had knowledge of one supreme,

intelligent and personal Power who ruled over all.” Mr. Yugoro

Chiba has shown that the Chinese classics permit sacrifice by all

the people. But it still remains true that sacrifice to “Supreme

Heaven” is practically confined to the Emperor, who like the

Jewish high-priest offers for his people once a year.

Confucius did nothing to put morality upon a religious basis. In

practice, the relations between man and man are the only relations

considered. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom,

sincerity, are enjoined, but not a word is said with regard to

man’s relations to God. Love to God is not only not commanded—it

is not thought of as possible. Though man’s being is theoretically

an ordinance of God, man is practically a law to himself. The

first commandment of Confucius is that of filial piety. But this

includes worship of dead ancestors, and is so exaggerated as to

bury from sight the related duties of husband to wife and of

parent to child. Confucius made it the duty of a son to slay his

father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly

retaliatory penalty for bloodshed; see J. A. Farrer, Primitive

Manners and Customs, 80. He treated invisible and superior beings

with respect, but held them at a distance. He recognized the

“Heaven” of tradition; but, instead of adding to our knowledge of

it, he stifled inquiry. Dr. Legge: “I have been reading Chinese

books for more than forty years, and any general requirement to

love God, or the mention of any one as actually loving him, has

yet to come for the first time under my eye.”

Ezra Abbot asserts that Confucius gave the golden rule in positive

as well as negative form; see Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism,

222. This however seems to be denied by Dr. Legge, Religions of

China, 1-58. Wu Ting Fang, former Chinese minister to Washington,

assents to the statement that Confucius gave the golden rule only

in its negative form, and he says this difference is the

difference between a passive and an aggressive civilization, which

last is therefore dominant. The golden rule, as Confucius gives

it, is: “Do not unto others that which you would not they should

do unto you.” Compare with this, Isocrates: “Be to your parents

what you would have your children be to you.... Do not to others

the things which make you angry when others do them to you”;

Herodotus: “What I punish in another man, I will myself, as far as

I can, refrain from”; Aristotle: “We should behave toward our

friends as we should wish them to behave toward us”; Tobit,

4:15—“What thou hatest, do to no one”; Philo: “What one hates to

endure, let him not do”; Seneca bids us “give as we wish to

receive”; Rabbi Hillel: “Whatsoever is hateful to you, do not to

another; this is the whole law, and all the rest is explanation.”

Broadus, in Am. Com. on Matthew, 161—“The sayings of Confucius,

Isocrates, and the three Jewish teachers, are merely negative;

that of Seneca is confined to giving, and that of Aristotle to the

treatment of friends. Christ lays down a rule for positive action,

and that toward all men.” He teaches that I am bound to do to

others all that they could rightly desire me to do to them. The

golden rule therefore requires a supplement, to show what others

can rightly desire, namely, God’s glory first, and their good as

second and incidental thereto. Christianity furnishes this divine

and perfect standard; Confucianism is defective in that it has no

standard higher than human convention. While Confucianism excludes

polytheism, idolatry, and deification of vice, it is a shallow and

tantalizing system, because it does not recognize the hereditary

corruption of human nature, or furnish any remedy for moral evil

except the “doctrines of the sages.” “The heart of man,” it says,

“is naturally perfectly upright and correct.” Sin is simply “a

disease, to be cured by self-discipline; a debt, to be canceled by

meritorious acts; an ignorance, to be removed by study and

contemplation.” See Bib. Sac., 1883:292, 293; N. Englander,

1883:565; Marcus Dods, in Erasmus and other Essays, 239.

2. THE INDIAN SYSTEMS. _Brahmanism_, as expressed in the Vedas,

dates back to 1000-1500 B. C. As Caird (in Faiths of the World,

St. Giles Lectures, lecture 1) has shown, it originated in the

contemplation of the power in nature apart from the moral

Personality that works in and through nature. Indeed we may say

that all heathenism is man’s choice of a non-moral in place of a

moral God. Brahmanism is a system of pantheism, “a false or

illegitimate consecration of the finite.” All things are a

manifestation of Brahma. Hence evil is deified as well as good.

And many thousand gods are worshiped as partial representations of

the living principle which moves through all. “How many gods have

the Hindus?” asked Dr. Duff of his class. Henry Drummond thought

there were about twenty-five. “Twenty-five?” responded the

indignant professor; “twenty-five millions of millions!” While the

early Vedas present a comparatively pure nature-worship, later

Brahmanism becomes a worship of the vicious and the vile, of the

unnatural and the cruel. Juggernaut and the suttee did not belong

to original Hindu religion.

Bruce, Apologetics, 15—“Pantheism in theory always means

polytheism in practice.” The early Vedas are hopeful in spirit;

later Brahmanism is a religion of disappointment. Caste is fixed

and consecrated as a manifestation of God. Originally intended to

express, in its four divisions of priest, soldier, agriculturist,

slave, the different degrees of unworldliness and divine

indwelling, it becomes an iron fetter to prevent all aspiration

and progress. Indian religion sought to exalt receptivity, the

unity of existence, and rest from self-determination and its

struggles. Hence it ascribed to its gods the same character as

nature-forces. God was the common source of good and of evil. Its

ethics is an ethics of moral indifference. Its charity is a

charity for sin, and the temperance it desires is a temperance

that will let the intemperate alone. Mozoomdar, for example, is

ready to welcome everything in Christianity but its reproof of sin

and its demand for righteousness. Brahmanism degrades woman, but

it deifies the cow.

_Buddhism_, beginning with Buddha, 600 B. C., “recalls the mind to

its elevation above the finite,” from which Brahmanism had fallen

away. Buddha was in certain respects a reformer. He protested

against caste, and proclaimed that truth and morality are for all.

Hence Buddhism, through its possession of this one grain of truth,

appealed to the human heart, and became, next to Christianity, the

greatest missionary religion. Notice then, first, its

_universalism_. But notice also that this is a false universalism,

for it ignores individualism and leads to universal stagnation and

slavery. While Christianity is a religion of history, of will, of

optimism, Buddhism is a religion of illusion, of quietism, of

pessimism; see Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 107-109. In

characterizing Buddhism as a missionary religion, we must notice,

secondly, its element of _altruism_. But this altruism is one

which destroys the self, instead of preserving it. The future

Buddha, out of compassion for a famished tiger, permits the tiger

to devour him. “Incarnated as a hare, he jumps into the fire to

cook himself for a meal for a beggar,—having previously shaken

himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should

perish with him”; see William James, Varieties of Religious

Experience, 283. Buddha would deliver man, not by philosophy, nor

by asceticism, but by self-renunciation. All isolation and

personality are sin, the guilt of which rests, however, not on

man, but on existence in general.

While Brahmanism is pantheistic, Buddhism is atheistic in its

spirit. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:285—“The Brahmanic

Akosmism, that had explained the world as mere seeming, led to the

Buddhistic Atheism.” Finiteness and separateness are evil, and the

only way to purity and rest is by ceasing to exist. This is

essential pessimism. The highest morality is to endure that which

must be, and to escape from reality and from personal existence as

soon as possible. Hence the doctrine of _Nirvana_. Rhys Davids, in

his Hibbert Lectures, claims that early Buddhism meant by

_Nirvana_, not annihilation, but the extinction of the self-life,

and that this was attainable during man’s present mortal

existence. But the term _Nirvana_ now means, to the great mass of

those who use it, the loss of all personality and consciousness,

and absorption into the general life of the universe. Originally

the term denoted only freedom from individual desire, and those

who had entered into _Nirvana_ might again come out of it; see

Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 238. But even in its original form,

_Nirvana_ was sought only from a selfish motive. Self-renunciation

and absorption in the whole was not the enthusiasm of

benevolence,—it was the refuge of despair. It is a religion

without god or sacrifice. Instead of communion with a personal

God, Buddhism has in prospect only an extinction of personality,

as reward for untold ages of lonely self-conquest, extending

through many transmigrations. Of Buddha it has been truly said

“That all the all he had for needy man Was nothing, and his best

of being was But not to be.” Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 296—“He by

his own act dying all the time, In ceaseless effort utterly to

cease, Will willing not to will, desire desiring To be desire no

more, until at last The fugitive go free, emancipate But by

becoming naught.” Of Christ Bruce well says: “What a contrast this

Healer of disease and Preacher of pardon to the worst, to Buddha,

with his religion of despair!”

Buddhism is also fatalistic. It inculcates submission and

compassion—merely negative virtues. But it knows nothing of manly

freedom, or of active love—the positive virtues of Christianity.

It leads men to spare others, but not to help them. Its morality

revolves around self, not around God. It has in it no organizing

principle, for it recognizes no God, no inspiration, no soul, no

salvation, no personal immortality. Buddhism would save men only

by inducing them to flee from existence. To the Hindu, family life

involves sin. The perfect man must forsake wife and children. All

gratification of natural appetites and passions is evil. Salvation

is not from sin, but from desire, and from this men can be saved

only by escaping from life itself. Christianity buries sin, but

saves the man; Buddha would save the man by killing him.

Christianity symbolizes the convert’s entrance upon a new life by

raising him from the baptismal waters; the baptism of Buddhism

should be immersion without emersion. The fundamental idea of

Brahmanism, extinction of personality, remains the same in

Buddhism; the only difference being that the result is secured by

active atonement in the former, by passive contemplation in the

latter. Virtue, and the knowledge that everything earthly is a

vanishing spark of the original light, delivers man from existence

and from misery.

Prof. G. H. Palmer, of Harvard, in The Outlook, June 19,

1897—“Buddhism is unlike Christianity in that it abolishes misery

by abolishing desire; denies personality instead of asserting it;

has many gods, but no one God who is living and conscious; makes a

shortening of existence rather than a lengthening of it to be the

reward of righteousness. Buddhism makes no provision for family,

church, state, science, or art. It gives us a religion that is

little, when we want one that is large.” Dr. E. Benjamin Andrews:

“Schopenhauer and Spencer are merely teachers of Buddhism. They

regard the central source of all as unknowable force, instead of

regarding it as a Spirit, living and holy. This takes away all

impulse to scientific investigation. We need to start from a

Person, and not from a thing.”

For comparison of the sage of India, Sakya Muni, more commonly

called Buddha (properly “the Buddha” = the enlightened; but who,

in spite of Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia,” is represented as not

pure from carnal pleasures before he began his work), with Jesus

Christ, see Bib. Sac., July, 1882:458-498; W. C. Wilkinson, Edwin

Arnold, Poetizer and Paganizer; Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the

Light of the World. Buddhism and Christianity are compared in

Presb. Rev., July, 1883:505-548; Wuttke, Christian Ethics,

1:47-54; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 33. See also

Oldenberg, Buddha; Lillie, Popular Life of Buddha; Beal, Catena of

Buddhist Scriptures, 153—“Buddhism declares itself ignorant of any

mode of personal existence compatible with the idea of spiritual

perfection, and so far it is ignorant of God”; 157—“The earliest

idea of _Nirvana_ seems to have included in it no more than the

enjoyment of a state of rest consequent on the extinction of all

causes of sorrow.” The impossibility of satisfying the human heart

with a system of atheism is shown by the fact that the Buddha

himself has been apotheosized to furnish an object of worship.

Thus Buddhism has reverted to Brahmanism.

Monier Williams: “Mohammed has as much claim to be ‘the Light of

Asia’ as Buddha has. What light from Buddha? Not about the heart’s

depravity, or the origin of sin, or the goodness, justice,

holiness, fatherhood of God, or the remedy for sin, but only the

ridding self from suffering by ridding self from life—a doctrine

of merit, of self-trust, of pessimism, and annihilation of

personality.” Christ, himself personal, loving and holy, shows

that God is a person of holiness and love. Robert Browning: “He

that created love, shall not he love?” Only because Jesus is God,

have we a gospel for the world. The claim that Buddha is “the

Light of Asia” reminds one of the man who declared the moon to be

of greater value than the sun, because it gives light in the

darkness when it is needed, while the sun gives light in the

daytime when it is not needed.

3. THE GREEK SYSTEMS. _Pythagoras_ (584-504) based morality upon

the principle of numbers. “Moral good was identified with unity;

evil with multiplicity; virtue was harmony of the soul and its

likeness to God. The aim of life was to make it represent the

beautiful order of the Universe. The whole practical tendency of

Pythagoreanism was ascetic, and included a strict self-control and

an earnest culture.” Here already we seem to see the defect of

Greek morality in confounding the good with the beautiful, and in

making morality a mere self-development. Matheson, Messages of the

Old Religions: Greece reveals the intensity of the hour, the value

of the present life, the beauty of the world that now is. Its

religion is the religion of beautiful humanity. It anticipates the

new heaven and the new earth. Rome on the other hand stood for

union, incorporation, a universal kingdom. But its religion

deified only the Emperor, not all humanity. It was the religion,

not of love, but of power, and it identified the church with the

state.

_Socrates_ (469-400) made knowledge to be virtue. Morality

consisted in subordinating irrational desires to rational

knowledge. Although here we rise above a subjectively determined

good as the goal of moral effort, we have no proper sense of sin.

Knowledge, and not love, is the motive. If men know the right,

they will do the right. This is a great overvaluing of knowledge.

With Socrates, teaching is a sort of midwifery—not depositing

information in the mind, but drawing out the contents of our own

inner consciousness. Lewis Morris describes it as the life-work of

Socrates to “doubt our doubts away.” Socrates holds it right to

injure one’s enemies. He shows proud self-praise in his dying

address. He warns against pederasty, yet compromises with it. He

does not insist upon the same purity of family life which Homer

describes in Ulysses and Penelope. Charles Kingsley, in Alton

Locke, remarks that the spirit of the Greek tragedy was ’man

mastered by circumstance’; that of modern tragedy is “man

mastering circumstance.” But the Greek tragedians, while showing

man thus mastered, do still represent him as inwardly free, as in

the case of Prometheus, and this sense of human freedom and

responsibility appears to some extent in Socrates.

_Plato_ (430-348) held that morality is pleasure in the good, as

the truly beautiful, and that knowledge produces virtue. The good

is likeness to God,—here we have glimpses of an extra-human goal

and model. The body, like all matter, being inherently evil, is a

hindrance to the soul,—here we have a glimpse of hereditary

depravity. But Plato “reduced moral evil to the category of

natural evil.” He failed to recognize God as creator and master of

matter; failed to recognize man’s depravity as due to his own

apostasy from God; failed to found morality on the divine will

rather than on man’s own consciousness. He knew nothing of a

common humanity, and regarded virtue as only for the few. As there

was no common sin, so there was no common redemption. Plato

thought to reach God by intellect alone, when only conscience and

heart could lead to him. He believed in a freedom of the soul in a

preëxistent state where a choice was made between good and evil,

but he believed that, after that antemundane decision had been

made, the fates determined men’s acts and lives irreversibly.

Reason drives two horses, appetite and emotion, but their course

has been predetermined.

Man acts as reason prompts. All sin is ignorance. There is nothing

in this life but determinism. Martineau, Types, 13, 48, 49, 78,

88—Plato in general has no proper notion of responsibility; he

reduces moral evil to the category of natural evil. His Ideas with

one exception are not causes. Cause is mind, and mind is the Good.

The Good is the apex and crown of Ideas. The Good is the highest

Idea, and this highest Idea is a Cause. Plato has a feeble

conception of personality, whether in God or in man. Yet God is a

person in whatever sense man is a person, and man’s personality is

reflective self-consciousness. Will in God or man is not so clear.

The Right is dissolved into the Good. Plato advocated infanticide

and the killing off of the old and the helpless.

_Aristotle_ (384-322) leaves out of view even the element of

God-likeness and antemundane evil which Plato so dimly recognized,

and makes morality the fruit of mere rational self-consciousness.

He grants evil proclivities, but he refuses to call them immoral.

He advocates a certain freedom of will, and he recognizes inborn

tendencies which war against this freedom, but how these

tendencies originated he cannot say, nor how men may be delivered

from them. Not all can be moral; the majority must be restrained

by fear. He finds in God no motive, and love to God is not so much

as mentioned as the source of moral action. A proud, composed,

self-centered, and self-contained man is his ideal character. See

Nicomachean Ethics, 7:6, and 10:10; Wuttke, Christian Ethics,

1:92-126. Alexander, Theories of Will, 39-54—Aristotle held that

desire and reason are the springs of action. Yet he did not hold

that knowledge of itself would make men virtuous. He was a

determinist. Actions are free only in the sense of being devoid of

external compulsion. He viewed slavery as both rational and right.

Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 76—“While Aristotle attributed

to the State a more complete personality than it really possessed,

he did not grasp the depth and meaning of the personality of the

individual.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 289—Aristotle had

no conception of the unity of humanity. His doctrine of unity did

not extend beyond the State. “He said that ‘the whole is before

the parts,’ but he meant by ‘the whole’ only the pan-Hellenic

world, the commonwealth of Greeks; he never thought of humanity,

and the word ‘mankind’ never fell from his lips. He could not

understand the unity of humanity, because he knew nothing of

Christ, its organizing principle.” On Aristotle’s conception of

God, see James Ten Broeke, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892—God is

recognized as personal, yet he is only the Greek Reason, and not

the living, loving, providential Father of the Hebrew revelation.

Aristotle substitutes the logical for the dynamical in his dealing

with the divine causality. God is thought, not power.

_Epicurus_ (342-270) regarded happiness, the subjective feeling of

pleasure, as the highest criterion of truth and good. A prudent

calculating for prolonged pleasure is the highest wisdom. He

regards only this life. Concern for retribution and for a future

existence is folly. If there are gods, they have no concern for

men. “Epicurus, on pretense of consulting for their ease,

complimented the gods, and bowed them out of existence.” Death is

the falling apart of material atoms and the eternal cessation of

consciousness. The miseries of this life are due to imperfection

in the fortuitously constructed universe. The more numerous these

undeserved miseries, the greater our right to seek pleasure.

Alexander, Theories of the Will, 55-75—The Epicureans held that

the soul is composed of atoms, yet that the will is free. The

atoms of the soul are excepted from the law of cause and effect.

An atom may decline or deviate in the universal descent, and this

is the Epicurean idea of freedom. This indeterminism was held by

all the Greek sceptics, materialists though they were.

_Zeno_, the founder of the Stoic philosophy (340-264), regarded

virtue as the only good. Thought is to subdue nature. The free

spirit is self-legislating, self-dependent, self-sufficient.

Thinking, not feeling, is the criterion of the true and the good.

Pleasure is the consequence, not the end of moral action. There is

an irreconcilable antagonism of existence. Man cannot reform the

world, but he can make himself perfect. Hence an unbounded pride

in virtue. The sage never repents. There is not the least

recognition of the moral corruption of mankind. There is no

objective divine ideal, or revealed divine will. The Stoic

discovers moral law only within, and never suspects his own moral

perversion. Hence he shows self-control and justice, but never

humility or love. He needs no compassion or forgiveness, and he

grants none to others. Virtue is not an actively outworking

character, but a passive resistance to irrational reality. Man may

retreat into himself. The Stoic is indifferent to pleasure and

pain, not because he believes in a divine government, or in a

divine love for mankind, but as a proud defiance of the irrational

world. He has no need of God or of redemption. As the Epicurean

gives himself to enjoyment of the world, the Stoic gives himself

to contempt of the world. In all afflictions, each can say, “The

door is open.” To the Epicurean, the refuge is intoxication; to

the Stoic, the refuge is suicide: “If the house smokes, quit it.”

Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:62-161, from whom much of this account

of the Greeks systems is condensed, describes Epicureanism and

Stoicism as alike making morality subjective, although

Epicureanism regarded spirit as determined by nature, while

Stoicism regarded nature as determined by spirit.

The Stoics were materialists and pantheists. Though they speak of

a personal God, this is a figure of speech. False opinion is at

the root of all vice. Chrysippus denied what we now call the

liberty of indifference, saying that there could not be an effect

without a cause. Man is enslaved to passion. The Stoics could not

explain how a vicious man could become virtuous. The result is

apathy. Men act only according to character, and this a doctrine

of fate. The Stoic indifference or apathy in misfortune is not a

bearing of it at all, but rather a cowardly retreat from it. It is

in the actual suffering of evil that Christianity finds “the soul

of good.” The office of misfortune is disciplinary and purifying;

see Seth, Ethical Principles, 417. “The shadow of the sage’s self,

projected on vacancy, was called God, and, as the sage had long

since abandoned interest in practical life, he expected his

Divinity to do the same.”

The Stoic reverenced God just because of his unapproachable

majesty. Christianity sees in God a Father, a Redeemer, a carer

for our minute wants, a deliverer from our sin. It teaches us to

see in Christ the humanity of the divine, affinity with God, God’s

supreme interest in his handiwork. For the least of his creatures

Christ died. Kinship with God gives dignity to man. The

individuality that Stoicism lost in the whole, Christianity makes

the end of the creation. The State exists to develop and promote

it. Paul took up and infused new meaning into certain phrases of

the Stoic philosophy about the freedom and royalty of the wise

man, just as John adopted and glorified certain phrases of

Alexandrian philosophy about the Word. Stoicism was lonely and

pessimistic. The Stoics said that the best thing was not to be

born; the next best thing was to die. Because Stoicism had no God

of helpfulness and sympathy, its virtue was mere conformity to

nature, majestic egoism and self-complacency. In the Roman

_Epictetus_ (89), _Seneca_ (65), and _Marcus Aurelius_ (121-180),

the religious element comes more into the foreground, and virtue

appears once more as God-likeness; but it is possible that this

later Stoicism was influenced by Christianity. On Marcus Aurelius,

see New Englander, July, 1881:415-431; Capes, Stoicism.

4. SYSTEMS OF WESTERN ASIA. _Zoroaster_ (1000 B. C. ?), the

founder of the Parsees, was a dualist, at least so far as to

explain the existence of evil and of good by the original presence

in the author of all things of two opposing principles. Here is

evidently a limit put upon the sovereignty and holiness of God.

Man is not perfectly dependent upon him, nor is God’s will an

unconditional law for his creatures. As opposed to the Indian

systems, Zoroaster’s insistence upon the divine personality

furnished a far better basis for a vigorous and manly morality.

Virtue was to be won by hard struggle of free beings against evil.

But then, on the other hand, this evil was conceived as originally

due, not to finite beings themselves, but either to an evil deity

who warred against the good, or to an evil principle in the one

deity himself. The burden of guilt is therefore shifted from man

to his maker. Morality becomes subjective and unsettled. Not love

to God or imitation of God, but rather self-love and

self-development, furnish the motive and aim of morality. No

fatherhood or love is recognized in the deity, and other things

besides God (_e. g._, fire) are worshiped. There can be no depth

to the consciousness of sin, and no hope of divine deliverance.

It is the one merit of Parseeism that it recognizes the moral

conflict of the world; its error is that it carries this moral

conflict into the very nature of God. We can apply to Parseeism

the words of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards to the

Buddhists of Japan: “All religions are expressions of man’s sense

of dependence, but only one provides fellowship with God. All

religions speak of a higher truth, but only one speaks of that

truth as found in a loving personal God, our Father. All religions

show man’s helplessness, but only one tells of a divine Savior,

who offers to man forgiveness of sin, and salvation through his

death, and who is now a living person, working in and with all who

believe in him, to make them holy and righteous and pure.”

Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism

recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself.

Moral evil is reality; but there is no reconciliation, nor is it

shown that all things work together for good. See Wuttke,

Christian Ethics, 1:47-54; Faiths of the World (St. Giles

Lectures), 109-144; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 25;

Whitney on the Avesta, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies.

_Mohammed_ (570-632 A. D.), the founder of Islam, gives us in the

Koran a system containing four dogmas of fundamental immorality,

namely, polygamy, slavery, persecution, and suppression of private

judgement. Mohammedanism is heathenism in monotheistic form. Its

good points are its conscientiousness and its relation to God. It

has prospered because it has preached the unity of God, and

because it is a book-religion. But both these it got from Judaism

and Christianity. It has appropriated the Old Testament saints and

even Jesus. But it denies the death of Christ and sees no need of

atonement. The power of sin is not recognized. The idea of sin, in

Moslems, is emptied of all positive content. Sin is simply a

falling short, accounted for by the weakness and shortsightedness

of man, inevitable in the fatalistic universe, or not remembered

in wrath by the indulgent and merciful Father. Forgiveness is

indulgence, and the conception of God is emptied of the quality of

justice. Evil belongs only to the individual, not to the race. Man

attains the favor of God by good works, based on prophetic

teaching. Morality is not a fruit of salvation, but a means. There

is no penitence or humility, but only self-righteousness; and this

self-righteousness is consistent with great sensuality, unlimited

divorce, and with absolute despotism in family, civil and

religious affairs. There is no knowledge of the fatherhood of God

or of the brotherhood of man. In all the Koran, there is no such

declaration as that “God so loved the world”_ (John 3:16)_.

The submission of Islam is submission to an arbitrary will, not to

a God of love. There is no basing of morality in love. The highest

good is the sensuous happiness of the individual. God and man are

external to one another. Mohammed is a teacher but not a priest.

Mozley, Miracles, 140, 141—“Mohammed had no faith in human nature.

There were two things which he thought men could do, and would do,

for the glory of God—transact religious _forms_, and _fight_, and

upon these two points he was severe; but within the sphere of

common practical life, where man’s great trial lies, his code

exhibits the disdainful laxity of a legislator who accomodates his

rule to the recipient, and shows his estimate of the recipient by

the accommodation which he adopts.... ‘Human nature is weak,’ said

he.” Lord Houghton: The Koran is all wisdom, all law, all

religion, for all time. Dead men bow before a dead God. “Though

the world rolls on from change to change, And realms of thought

expand, The letter stands without expanse or range, Stiff as a

dead man’s hand.” Wherever Mohammedanism has gone, it has either

found a desert or made one. Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Dec.

1882:866—“The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought; to obey is to

abandon progress.” Muir, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no.

14—“Mohammedanism reduces men to a dead level of social

depression, despotism, and semi-barbarism. Islam is the work of

man; Christianity of God.” See also Faiths of the World (St. Giles

Lectures, Second Series), 361-396; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great

Religions, 1:448-488; 280-317; Great Religions of the World,

published by the Harpers; Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.

3. The person and character of Christ.

A. The conception of Christ’s person as presenting deity and humanity

indissolubly united, and the conception of Christ’s character, with its

faultless and all-comprehending excellence, cannot be accounted for upon

any other hypothesis than that they were historical realities.

The stylobate of the Parthenon at Athens rises about three inches

in the middle of the 101 feet of the front, and four inches in the

middle of the 228 feet of the flanks. A nearly parallel line is

found in the entablature. The axes of the columns lean inward

nearly three inches in their height of 34 feet, thus giving a sort

of pyramidal character to the structure. Thus the architect

overcame the apparent sagging of horizontal lines, and at the same

time increased the apparent height of the edifice; see Murray,

Handbook of Greece, 5th ed., 1884, 1:308, 309; Ferguson, Handbook

of Architecture, 268-270. The neglect to counteract this optical

illusion has rendered the Madeleine in Paris a stiff and

ineffective copy of the Parthenon. The Galilean peasant who should

minutely describe these peculiarities of the Parthenon would

prove, not only that the edifice was a historical reality, but

that he had actually seen it. Bruce, Apologetics, 343—“In reading

the memoirs of the evangelists, you feel as one sometimes feels in

a picture-gallery. Your eye alights on the portrait of a person

whom you do not know. You look at it intently for a few moments

and then remark to a companion: ‘That must be like the

original,—it is so life-like.’ ” Theodore Parker: “It would take a

Jesus to forge a Jesus.” See Row, Bampton Lectures, 1877:178-219,

and in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 22; F. W. Farrar, Witness of

History to Christ; Barry, Boyle Lecture on Manifold Witness for

Christ.

(_a_) No source can be assigned from which the evangelists could have

derived such a conception. The Hindu avatars were only temporary unions of

deity with humanity. The Greeks had men half-deified, but no unions of God

and man. The monotheism of the Jews found the person of Christ a perpetual

stumbling-block. The Essenes were in principle more opposed to

Christianity than the Rabbinists.

Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, 279—“The coëxistence of a perfect

man and an imperfect society is impossible; and could the two

coëxist, the resulting conduct would not furnish the ethical

standard sought.” We must conclude that the perfect manhood of

Christ is a miracle, and the greatest of miracles. Bruce,

Apologetics, 346, 351—“When Jesus asks: ‘Why callest thou me

good?’ he means: ‘Learn first what goodness is, and call no man

good till you are sure that he deserves it.’ Jesus’ goodness was

entirely free from religious scrupulosity; it was distinguished by

humanity; it was full of modesty and lowliness.... Buddhism has

flourished 2000 years, though little is known of its founder.

Christianity might have been so perpetuated, but it is not so. I

want to be sure that the ideal has been embodied in an actual

life. Otherwise it is only poetry, and the obligation to conform

to it ceases.” For comparison of Christ’s incarnation with Hindu,

Greek, Jewish, and Essene ideas, see Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of

Christ, Introduction. On the Essenes, see Herzog, Encyclop., art,:

Essener; Pressensé, Jesus Christ, Life, Times and Work, 84-87;

Lightfoot on Colossians, 349-419; Godet, Lectures in Defence of

the Christian Faith.

(_b_) No mere human genius, and much less the genius of Jewish fishermen,

could have originated this conception. Bad men invent only such characters

as they sympathize with. But Christ’s character condemns badness. Such a

portrait could not have been drawn without supernatural aid. But such aid

would not have been given to fabrication. The conception can be explained

only by granting that Christ’s person and character were historical

realities.

Between Pilate and Titus 30,000 Jews are said to have been

crucified around the walls of Jerusalem. Many of these were young

men. What makes one of them stand out on the pages of history?

There are two answers: The character of Jesus was a perfect

character, and, He was God as well as man. Gore, Incarnation,

63—“The Christ of the gospels, if he be not true to history,

represents a combined effort of the creative imagination without

parallel in literature. But the literary characteristics of

Palestine in the first century make the hypothesis of such an

effort morally impossible.” The Apocryphal gospels show us what

mere imagination was capable of producing. That the portrait of

Christ is not puerile, inane, hysterical, selfishly assertive, and

self-contradictory, can be due only to the fact that it is the

photograph from real life.

For a remarkable exhibition of the argument from the character of

Jesus, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332.

Bushnell mentions the originality and vastness of Christ’s plan,

yet its simplicity and practical adaptation; his moral traits of

independence, compassion, meekness, wisdom, zeal, humility,

patience; the combination in him of seemingly opposite qualities.

With all his greatness, he was condescending and simple; he was

unworldly, yet not austere; he had strong feelings, yet was

self-possessed; he had indignation toward sin, yet compassion

toward the sinner; he showed devotion to his work, yet calmness

under opposition; universal philanthropy, yet susceptibility to

private attachments; the authority of a Savior and Judge, yet the

gratitude and the tenderness of a son; the most elevated devotion,

yet a life of activity and exertion. See chapter on The Moral

Miracle, in Bruce, Miraculous Element of the Gospels, 43-78.

B. The acceptance and belief in the New Testament descriptions of Jesus

Christ cannot be accounted for except upon the ground that the person and

character described had an actual existence.

(_a_) If these descriptions were false, there were witnesses still living

who had known Christ and who would have contradicted them. (_b_) There was

no motive to induce acceptance of such false accounts, but every motive to

the contrary. (_c_) The success of such falsehoods could be explained only

by supernatural aid, but God would never have thus aided falsehood. This

person and character, therefore, must have been not fictitious but real;

and if real, then Christ’s words are true, and the system of which his

person and character are a part is a revelation from God.

“The counterfeit may for a season Deceive the wide earth; But the

lie waxing great comes to labor, And truth has its birth.” Matthew

Arnold, The Better Part: “Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us

see, If we then too can be Such men as he!” When the blatant

sceptic declared: “I do not believe that such a man as Jesus

Christ ever lived,” George Warren merely replied: “I wish I were

like him!” Dwight L. Moody was called a hypocrite, but the

stalwart evangelist answered: “Well, suppose I am. How does that

make your case any better? I know some pretty mean things about

myself; but you cannot say anything against my Master.” Goethe:

“Let the culture of the spirit advance forever; let the human

spirit broaden itself as it will; yet it will never go beyond the

height and moral culture of Christianity, as it glitters and

shines in the gospels.”

Renan, Life of Jesus: “Jesus founded the absolute religion,

excluding nothing, determining nothing, save its essence.... The

foundation of the true religion is indeed his work. After him,

there is nothing left but to develop and fructify.” And a

Christian scholar has remarked: “It is an astonishing proof of the

divine guidance vouchsafed to the evangelists that no man, of

their time or since, has been able to touch the picture of Christ

without debasing it.” We may find an illustration of this in the

words of Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 207—“Jesus’ doctrine

of marriage was ascetic, his doctrine of property was communistic,

his doctrine of charity was sentimental, his doctrine of

non-resistance was such as commends itself to Tolstoi, but not to

many others of our time. With the example of Jesus, it is the same

as with his teachings. Followed unreservedly, would it not justify

those who say: ‘The hope of the race is in its extinction’; and

bring all our joys and sorrows to a sudden end?” To this we may

answer in the words of Huxley, who declares that Jesus Christ is

“the noblest ideal of humanity which mankind has yet worshiped.”

Gordon, Christ of To-Day, 179—“The question is not whether Christ

is good enough to represent the Supreme Being, but whether the

Supreme Being is good enough to have Christ for his

representative. John Stuart Mill looks upon the Christian religion

as the worship of Christ, rather than the worship of God, and in

this way he explains the beneficence of its influence.”

John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 254—“The most valuable part

of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced, by

holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model

for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and

can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than

God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of

perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the

God of the Jews or of nature, who, being idealized, has taken so

great and salutary hold on the modern mind. And whatever else may

be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left:

a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his

followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal

preaching.... Who among his disciples, or among their proselytes,

was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of

imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels?... About

the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal

originality combined with profundity of insight which, if we

abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where

something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of

Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in

his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime

genius of whom our species can boast. When this preëminent genius

is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral

reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth,

religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on

this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor

even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a

better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into

the concrete than the endeavor so to live that Christ would

approve our life. When to this we add that, to the conception of

the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ

actually was ... a man charged with a special, express and unique

commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we may

well conclude that the influences of religion on the character,

which will remain after rational criticism has done its utmost

against the evidences of religion, are well worth preserving, and

that what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a

firmer belief is more than compensated by the greater truth and

rectitude of the morality they sanction.” See also Ullmann,

Sinlessness of Jesus; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 129-157;

Schaff, Person of Christ; Young, The Christ in History; George

Dana Boardman, The Problem of Jesus.

4. The testimony of Christ to himself—as being a messenger from God and as

being one with God.

Only one personage in history has claimed to teach absolute truth, to be

one with God, and to attest his divine mission by works such as only God

could perform.

A. This testimony cannot be accounted for upon the hypothesis that Jesus

was an intentional deceiver: for (_a_) the perfectly consistent holiness

of his life; (_b_) the unwavering confidence with which he challenged

investigation of his claims and staked all upon the result; (_c_) the vast

improbability of a lifelong lie in the avowed interests of truth; and

(_d_) the impossibility that deception should have wrought such blessing

to the world,—all show that Jesus was no conscious impostor.

Fisher, Essays on the Supernat. Origin of Christianity,

515-538—Christ knew how vast his claims were, yet he staked all

upon them. Though others doubted, he never doubted himself. Though

persecuted unto death, he never ceased his consistent testimony.

Yet he lays claim to humility: _Mat. 11:29—_“I am meek and lowly

in heart.” How can we reconcile with humility his constant

self-assertion? We answer that Jesus’ self-assertion was

absolutely essential to his mission, for he and the truth were

one: he could not assert the truth without asserting himself, and

he could not assert himself without asserting the truth. Since he

was the truth, he needed to say so, for men’s sake and for the

truth’s sake, and he could be meek and lowly in heart in saying

so. Humility is not self-depreciation, but only the judging of

ourselves according to God’s perfect standard. “Humility” is

derived from “_humus_”. It is the coming down from airy and vain

self-exploitation to the solid ground, the hard-pan, of actual

fact.

God requires of us only so much humility as is consistent with

truth. The self-glorification of the egotist is nauseating,

because it indicates gross ignorance or misrepresentation of self.

But it is a duty to be self-asserting, just so far as we represent

the truth and righteousness of God. There is a noble

self-assertion which is perfectly consistent with humility. Job

must stand for his integrity. Paul’s humility was not of the Uriah

Heep variety. When occasion required, he could assert his manhood

and his rights, as at Philippi and at the Castle of Antonia. So

the Christian should frankly say out the truth that is in him.

Each Christian has an experience of his own, and should tell it to

others. In testifying to the truth he is only following the

example of “Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the

good confession”_ (1 Tim. 6:13)_.

B. Nor can Jesus’ testimony to himself be explained upon the hypothesis

that he was self-deceived: for this would argue (_a_) a weakness and folly

amounting to positive insanity. But his whole character and life exhibit a

calmness, dignity, equipoise, insight, self-mastery, utterly inconsistent

with such a theory. Or it would argue (_b_) a self-ignorance and

self-exaggeration which could spring only from the deepest moral

perversion. But the absolute purity of his conscience, the humility of his

spirit, the self-denying beneficence of his life, show this hypothesis to

be incredible.

Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 39—If he were man, then to

demand that all the world should bow down to him would be worthy

of scorn like that which we feel for some straw-crowned monarch of

Bedlam. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 22,

76—Christ never united with his disciples in prayer. He went up

into the mountain to pray, but not to pray _with them_: _Luke

9:18—_“as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him.” The

consciousness of preëxistence is the indispensable precondition of

the total demand which he makes in the Synoptics. Adamson, The

Mind in Christ, 81, 82—We value the testimony of Christians to

their communion with God. Much more should we value the testimony

of Christ. Only one who, first being divine, also knew that he was

divine, could reveal heavenly things with the clearness and

certainty that belong to the utterances of Jesus. In him we have

something very different from the momentary flashes of insight

which leave us in all the greater darkness.

Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 5—“Self-respect is bottomed upon the

ability to become what one desires to be; and, if the ability

steadily falls short of the task, the springs of self-respect dry

up; the motives of happy and heroic action wither. Science, art,

generous civic life, and especially religion, come to man’s

rescue,”—showing him his true greatness and breadth of being in

God. The State is the individual’s larger self. Humanity, and even

the universe, are parts of him. It is the duty of man to enable

all men to be men. It is possible for men not only truthfully but

also rationally to assert themselves, even in earthly affairs.

Chatham to the Duke of Devonshire: “My Lord, I believe I can save

this country, and that no one else can.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his

thirtieth year, to the Duke of Milan: “I can carry through every

kind of work in sculpture, in clay, marble, and bronze; also in

painting I can execute everything that can be demanded, as well as

any one whosoever.”

Horace: “Exegi monumentum ære perennius.” Savage, Life beyond

Death, 209—A famous old minister said once, when a young and

zealous enthusiast tried to get him to talk, and failing, burst

out with, “Have you no religion at all?” “None _to speak of_,” was

the reply. When Jesus perceived a tendency in his disciples to

self-glorification, he urged silence; but when he saw the tendency

to introspection and inertness, he bade them proclaim what he had

done for them (_Mat. 8:4_; _Mark 5:19_). It is never right for the

Christian to proclaim himself; but, if Christ had not proclaimed

himself, the world could never have been saved. Rush Rhees. Life

of Jesus of Nazareth, 235-237—“In the teaching of Jesus, two

topics have the leading place—the Kingdom of God, and himself. He

sought to be Lord, rather than Teacher only. Yet the Kingdom is

not one of power, national and external, but one of fatherly love

and of mutual brotherhood.”

Did Jesus do anything for effect, or as a mere example? Not so.

His baptism had meaning for him as a consecration of himself to

death for the sins of the world, and his washing of the disciples’

feet was the fit beginning of the paschal supper and the symbol of

his laying aside his heavenly glory to purify us for the marriage

supper of the Lamb. Thomas à Kempis: “Thou art none the holier

because thou art praised, and none the worse because thou art

censured. What thou art, that thou art, and it avails thee naught

to be called any better than thou art in the sight of God.” Jesus’

consciousness of his absolute sinlessness and of his perfect

communion with God is the strongest of testimonies to his divine

nature and mission. See Theological Eclectic, 4:137; Liddon, Our

Lord’s Divinity, 153; J. S. Mill, Essays on Religion, 253; Young,

Christ of History; Divinity of Jesus Christ, by Andover

Professors, 37-62.

If Jesus, then, cannot be charged with either mental or moral unsoundness,

his testimony must be true, and he himself must be one with God and the

revealer of God to men.

Neither Confucius nor Buddha claimed to be divine, or the organs

of divine revelation, though both were moral teachers and

reformers. Zoroaster and Pythagoras apparently believed themselves

charged with a divine mission, though their earliest biographers

wrote centuries after their death. Socrates claimed nothing for

himself which was beyond the power of others. Mohammed believed

his extraordinary states of body and soul to be due to the action

of celestial beings; he gave forth the Koran as “a warning to all

creatures,” and sent a summons to the King of Persia and the

Emperor of Constantinople, as well as to other potentates, to

accept the religion of Islam; yet he mourned when he died that he

could not have opportunity to correct the mistakes of the Koran

and of his own life. For Confucius or Buddha, Zoroaster or

Pythagoras, Socrates or Mohammed to claim all power in heaven and

earth, would show insanity or moral perversion. But this is

precisely what Jesus claimed. He was either mentally or morally

unsound, or his testimony is true. See Baldensperger,

Selbstbewusstsein Jesu; E. Ballentine, Christ his own Witness.

IV. The Historical Results of the Propagation of Scripture Doctrine.

1. _The rapid progress of the gospel in the first centuries of our era

shows its divine origin._

A. That Paganism should have been in three centuries supplanted by

Christianity, is an acknowledged wonder of history.

The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity was the most

astonishing revolution of faith and worship ever known. Fifty

years after the death of Christ, there were churches in all the

principal cities of the Roman Empire. Nero (37-68) found (as

Tacitus declares) an “ingens multitudo” of Christians to

persecute. Pliny writes to Trajan (52-117) that they “pervaded not

merely the cities but the villages and country places, so that the

temples were nearly deserted.” Tertullian (160-230) writes: “We

are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all your places, your

cities, your islands, your castles, your towns, your

council-houses, even your camps, your tribes, your senate, your

forum. We have left you nothing but your temples.” In the time of

the emperor Valerian (253-268), the Christians constituted half

the population of Rome. The conversion of the emperor Constantine

(272-337) brought the whole empire, only 300 years after Jesus’

death, under the acknowledged sway of the gospel. See McIlvaine

and Alexander, Evidences of Christianity.

B. The wonder is the greater when we consider the obstacles to the

progress of Christianity:

(_a_) The scepticism of the cultivated classes; (_b_) the prejudice and

hatred of the common people; and (_c_) the persecutions set on foot by

government.

(_a_) Missionaries even now find it difficult to get a hearing

among the cultivated classes of the heathen. But the gospel

appeared in the most enlightened age of antiquity—the Augustan age

of literature and historical inquiry. Tacitus called the religion

of Christ “exitiabilis superstitio”—“quos per flagitia invisos

vulgus Christianos appellabat.” Pliny: “Nihil aliud inveni quam

superstitionem pravam et immodicam.” If the gospel had been false,

its preachers would not have ventured into the centres of

civilization and refinement; or if they had, they would have been

detected. (_b)_ Consider the interweaving of heathen religions

with all the relations of life. Christians often had to meet the

furious zeal and blind rage of the mob,—as at Lystra and Ephesus.

(_c_) Rawlinson, in his Historical Evidences, claims that the

Catacombs of Rome comprised nine hundred miles of streets and

seven millions of graves within a period of four hundred years—a

far greater number than could have died a natural death—and that

vast multitudes of these must have been massacred for their faith.

The Encyclopædia Britannica, however, calls the estimate of De

Marchi, which Rawlinson appears to have taken as authority, a

great exaggeration. Instead of nine hundred miles of streets,

Northcote has three hundred fifty. The number of interments to

correspond would be less than three millions. The Catacombs began

to be deserted by the time of Jerome. The times when they were

universally used by Christians could have been hardly more than

two hundred years. They did not begin in sand-pits. There were

three sorts of tufa: (1) rocky, used for quarrying and too hard

for Christian purposes; (2) sandy, used for sand-pits, too soft to

permit construction of galleries and tombs; (3) granular, that

used by Christians. The existence of the Catacombs must have been

well known to the heathen. After Pope Damasus the exaggerated

reverence for them began. They were decorated and improved. Hence

many paintings are of later date than 400, and testify to papal

polity, not to that of early Christianity. The bottles contain,

not blood, but wine of the eucharist celebrated at the funeral.

Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 256-258, calls attention

to Matthew Arnold’s description of the needs of the heathen world,

yet his blindness to the true remedy: “On that hard pagan world

disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust

Made human life a hell. In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, The

Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the

Appian Way; He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned

his hair with flowers,—No easier nor no quicker passed The

impracticable hours.” Yet with mingled pride and sadness, Mr.

Arnold fastidiously rejects more heavenly nutriment. Of Christ he

says: “Now he is dead! Far hence he lies, In the lorn Syrian town,

And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.”

He sees that the millions “Have such need of joy, And joy whose

grounds are true, And joy that should all hearts employ As when

the past was new!” The want of the world is: “One mighty wave of

thought and joy, Lifting mankind amain.” But the poet sees no

ground of hope: “Fools! that so often here, Happiness mocked our

prayer, I think might make us fear A like event elsewhere,—Make us

not fly to dreams, But moderate desire.” He sings of the time when

Christianity was young: “Oh, had I lived in that great day, How

had its glory new Filled earth and heaven, and caught away My

ravished spirit too!” But desolation of spirit does not bring with

it any lowering of self-esteem, much less the humility which

deplores the presence and power of evil in the soul, and sighs for

deliverance. “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but

they that are sick”_ (Mat. 9:12)_. Rejecting Christ, Matthew

Arnold embodies in his verse “the sweetness, the gravity, the

strength, the beauty, and the languor of death” (Hutton, Essays,

302).

C. The wonder becomes yet greater when we consider the natural

insufficiency of the means used to secure this progress.

(_a_) The proclaimers of the gospel were in general unlearned men,

belonging to a despised nation. (_b_) The gospel which they proclaimed was

a gospel of salvation through faith in a Jew who had been put to an

ignominious death. (_c_) This gospel was one which excited natural

repugnance, by humbling men’s pride, striking at the root of their sins,

and demanding a life of labor and self-sacrifice. (_d_) The gospel,

moreover, was an exclusive one, suffering no rival and declaring itself to

be the universal and only religion.

(_a_) The early Christians were more unlikely to make converts

than modern Jews are to make proselytes, in vast numbers, in the

principal cities of Europe and America. Celsus called Christianity

“a religion of the rabble.” (_b_) The cross was the Roman

gallows—the punishment of slaves. Cicero calls it “servitutis

extremum summumque supplicium.” (_c_) There were many bad

religions: why should the mild Roman Empire have persecuted the

only good one? The answer is in part: Persecution did not

originate with the official classes; it proceeded really from the

people at large. Tacitus called Christians “haters of the human

race.” Men recognized in Christianity a foe to all their previous

motives, ideals, and aims. Altruism would break up the old

society, for every effort that centered in self or in the present

life was stigmatized by the gospel as unworthy. (_d_) Heathenism,

being without creed or principle, did not care to propagate

itself. “A man must be very weak,” said Celsus, “to imagine that

Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, and Libya, can ever unite

under the same system of religion.” So the Roman government would

allow no religion which did not participate in the worship of the

State. “Keep yourselves from idols,” “We worship no other God,”

was the Christian’s answer. Gibbon, Hist. Decline and Fall, 1:

chap. 15, mentions as secondary causes: (1) the zeal of the Jews;

(2) the doctrine of immortality; (3) miraculous powers; (4)

virtues of early Christians; (5) privilege of participation in

church government. But these causes were only secondary, and all

would have been insufficient without an invincible persuasion of

the truth of Christianity. For answer to Gibbon, see Perrone,

Prelectiones Theologicæ, 1:133.

Persecution destroys falsehood by leading its advocates to

investigate the grounds of their belief; but it strengthens and

multiplies truth by leading its advocates to see more clearly the

foundations of their faith. There have been many conscientious

persecutors: _John 16:2—_“They shall put you out of the

synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall

think that he offereth service unto God.” The Decretal of Pope

Urban II reads: “For we do not count them to be homicides, to whom

it may have happened, through their burning zeal against the

excommunicated, to put any of them to death.” St. Louis, King of

France, urged his officers “not to argue with the infidel, but to

subdue unbelievers by thrusting the sword into them as far as it

will go.” Of the use of the rack in England on a certain occasion,

it was said that it was used with all the tenderness which the

nature of the instrument would allow. This reminds us of Isaak

Walton’s instruction as to the use of the frog: “Put the hook

through his mouth and out at his gills; and, in so doing, use him

as though you loved him.”

Robert Browning, in his Easter Day, 275-288, gives us what

purports to be A Martyr’s Epitaph, inscribed upon a wall of the

Catacombs, which furnishes a valuable contrast to the sceptical

and pessimistic strain of Matthew Arnold: “I was born sickly, poor

and mean, A slave: no misery could screen The holders of the pearl

of price from Cæsar’s envy: therefore twice I fought with beasts,

and three times saw My children suffer by his law; At length my

own release was earned: I was some time in being burned, But at

the close a Hand came through The fire above my head, and drew My

soul to Christ, whom now I see. Sergius, a brother, writes for me

This testimony on the wall—For me, I have forgot it all.”

The progress of a religion so unprepossessing and uncompromising to

outward acceptance and dominion, within the space of three hundred years,

cannot be explained without supposing that divine power attended its

promulgation, and therefore that the gospel is a revelation from God.

Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:527—“In the Kremlin Cathedral,

whenever the Metropolitan advanced from the altar to give his

blessing, there was always thrown under his feet a carpet

embroidered with the eagle of old Pagan Rome, to indicate that the

Christian Church and Empire of Constantinople had succeeded and

triumphed over it.” On this whole section, see F. W. Farrar,

Witness of History to Christ, 91; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy

Scripture, 139.

2. _The beneficent influence of the Scripture doctrines and precepts,

wherever they have had sway, shows their divine origin._ Notice:

A. Their influence on civilization in general, securing a recognition of

principles which heathenism ignored, such as Garbett mentions: (_a_) the

importance of the individual; (_b_) the law of mutual love; (_c_) the

sacredness of human life; (_d_) the doctrine of internal holiness; (_e_)

the sanctity of home; (_f_) monogamy, and the religious equality of the

sexes; (_g_) identification of belief and practice.

The continued corruption of heathen lands shows that this change is not

due to any laws of merely natural progress. The confessions of ancient

writers show that it is not due to philosophy. Its only explanation is

that the gospel is the power of God.

Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 177-186; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History

to Christ, chap. on Christianity and the Individual; Brace, Gesta

Christi, preface, vi—“Practices and principles implanted,

stimulated or supported by Christianity, such as regard for the

personality of the weakest and poorest; respect for woman; duty of

each member of the fortunate classes to raise up the unfortunate;

humanity to the child, the prisoner, the stranger, the needy, and

even to the brute; unceasing opposition to all forms of cruelty,

oppression and slavery; the duty of personal purity, and the

sacredness of marriage; the necessity of temperance; obligation of

a more equitable division of the profits of labor, and of greater

coöperation between employers and employed; the right of every

human being to have the utmost opportunity of developing his

faculties, and of all persons to enjoy equal political and social

privileges; the principle that the injury of one nation is the

injury of all, and the expediency and duty of unrestricted trade

and intercourse between all countries; and finally, a profound

opposition to war, a determination to limit its evils when

existing, and to prevent its arising by means of international

arbitration.”

Max Müller: “The concept of humanity is the gift of Christ.”

Guizot, History of Civilization, 1: Introd., tells us that in

ancient times the individual existed for the sake of the State; in

modern times the State exists for the sake of the individual. “The

individual is a discovery of Christ.” On the relations between

Christianity and Political Economy, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy

and Religion, pages 443-460; on the cause of the changed view with

regard to the relation of the individual to the State, see page

207—“What has wrought the change? Nothing but the death of the Son

of God. When it was seen that the smallest child and the lowest

slave had a soul of such worth that Christ left his throne and

gave up his life to save it, the world’s estimate of values

changed, and modern history began.” Lucian, the Greek satirist and

humorist, 160 A. D., said of the Christians: “Their first

legislator [Jesus] has put it into their heads that they are all

brothers.”

It is this spirit of common brotherhood which has led in most

countries to the abolition of cannibalism, infanticide,

widow-burning, and slavery. Prince Bismarck: “For social

well-being I ask nothing more than Christianity without

phrases”—which means the religion of the deed rather than of the

creed. Yet it is only faith in the historic revelation of God in

Christ which has made Christian deeds possible. Shaler,

Interpretation of Nature, 232-278—Aristotle, if he could look over

society to-day, would think modern man a new species, in his going

out in sympathy to distant peoples. This cannot be the result of

natural selection, for self-sacrifice is not profitable to the

individual. Altruistic emotions owe their existence to God.

Worship of God has flowed back upon man’s emotions and has made

them more sympathetic. Self-consciousness and sympathy, coming

into conflict with brute emotions, originate the sense of sin.

Then begins the war of the natural and the spiritual. Love of

nature and absorption in others is the true _Nirvana_. Not

physical science, but the humanities, are most needed in

education.

H. E. Hersey, Introd. to Browning’s Christmas Eve, 19— “Sidney

Lanier tells us that the last twenty centuries have spent their

best power upon the development of personality. Literature,

education, government, and religion, have learned to recognize the

individual as the unit of force. Browning goes a step further. He

declares that so powerful is a complete personality that its very

touch gives life and courage and potency. He turns to history for

the inspiration of enduring virtue and the stimulus for sustained

effort, and he finds both in Jesus Christ.” J. P. Cooke,

Credentials of Science, 43—The change from the ancient philosopher

to the modern investigator is the change from self-assertion to

self-devotion, and the great revolution can be traced to the

influence of Christianity and to the spirit of humility exhibited

and inculcated by Christ. Lewes, Hist. Philos., 1:408—Greek

morality never embraced any conception of humanity; no Greek ever

attained to the sublimity of such a point of view.

Kidd, Social Evolution, 165, 287—It is not intellect that has

pushed forward the world of modern times: it is the altruistic

feeling that originated in the cross and sacrifice of Christ. The

French Revolution was made possible by the fact that humanitarian

ideas had undermined the upper classes themselves, and effective

resistance was impossible. Socialism would abolish the struggle

for existence on the part of individuals. What security would be

left for social progress? Removing all restrictions upon

population ensures progressive deterioration. A non-socialist

community would outstrip a socialist community where all the main

wants of life were secure. The real tendency of society is to

bring all the people into _rivalry_, not only on a footing of

political equality, but on conditions of equal social

opportunities. The State in future will interfere and control, in

order to preserve or secure free competition, rather than to

suspend it. The goal is not socialism or State management, but

competition in which all shall have equal advantages. The

evolution of human society is not primarily intellectual but

religious. The winning races are the religious races. The Greeks

had more intellect, but we have more civilization and progress.

The Athenians were as far above us as we are above the negro race.

Gladstone said that we are intellectually weaker than the men of

the middle ages. When the intellectual development of any section

of the race has for the time being outrun its ethical development,

natural selection has apparently weeded it out, like any other

unsuitable product. Evolution is developing _reverence_, with its

allied qualities, mental energy, resolution, enterprise, prolonged

and concentrated application, simple minded and single minded

devotion to duty. Only religion can overpower selfishness and

individualism and ensure social progress.

B. Their influence upon individual character and happiness, wherever they

have been tested in practice. This influence is seen (_a_) in the moral

transformations they have wrought—as in the case of Paul the apostle, and

of persons in every Christian community; (_b_) in the self-denying labors

for human welfare to which they have led—as in the case of Wilberforce and

Judson; (_c_) in the hopes they have inspired in times of sorrow and

death.

These beneficent fruits cannot have their source in merely natural causes,

apart from the truth and divinity of the Scriptures; for in that case the

contrary beliefs would be accompanied by the same blessings. But since we

find these blessings only in connection with Christian teaching, we may

justly consider this as their cause. This teaching, then, must be true,

and the Scriptures must be a divine revelation. Else God has made a lie to

be the greatest blessing to the race.

The first Moravian missionaries to the West Indies walked six

hundred miles to take ship, worked their passage, and then sold

themselves as slaves, in order to get the privilege of preaching

to the negroes.... The father of John G. Paton was a

stocking-weaver. The whole family, with the exception of the very

small children, worked from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m., with one hour for

dinner at noon and a half hour each for breakfast and supper. Yet

family prayer was regularly held twice a day. In these

breathing-spells for daily meals John G. Paton took part of his

time to study the Latin Grammar, that he might prepare himself for

missionary work. When told by an uncle that, if he went to the New

Hebrides, the cannibals would eat him, he replied: “You yourself

will soon be dead and buried, and I had as lief be eaten by

cannibals as by worms.” The Aneityumese raised arrow-root for

fifteen years and sold it to pay the £1200 required for printing

the Bible in their own language. Universal church-attendance and

Bible-study make those South Sea Islands the most heavenly place

on earth on the Sabbath-day.

In 1839, twenty thousand negroes in Jamaica gathered to begin a

life of freedom. Into a coffin were put the handcuffs and shackles

of slavery, relics of the whipping-post and the scourge. As the

clock struck twelve at night, a preacher cried with the first

stroke: “The monster is dying!” and so with every stroke until the

last, when he cried: “The monster is dead!” Then all rose from

their knees and sang: “Praise God from whom all blessings

flow!”... “What do you do that for?” said the sick Chinaman whom

the medical missionary was tucking up in bed with a care which the

patient had never received since he was a baby. The missionary

took the opportunity to tell him of the love of Christ.... The

aged Australian mother, when told that her two daughters,

missionaries in China, had both of them been murdered by a heathen

mob, only replied: “This decides me; I will go to China now

myself, and try to teach those poor creatures what the love of

Jesus means.”... Dr. William Ashmore: “Let one missionary die, and

ten come to his funeral.” A shoemaker, teaching neglected boys and

girls while he worked at his cobbler’s bench, gave the impulse to

Thomas Guthrie’s life of faith.

We must judge religions not by their ideals, but by their

performances. Omar Khayyam and Mozoomdar give us beautiful

thoughts, but the former is not Persia, nor is the latter India.

“When the microscopic search of scepticism, which has hunted the

heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a

Creator, has turned its attention to human society and has found

on this planet a place ten miles square where a decent man can

live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating

his children, unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is

reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood

honored, and human life held in due regard—when sceptics can find

such a place ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel of

Christ has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundations

and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order

for the sceptical literati to move thither and to ventilate their

views. But so long as these very men are dependent upon the very

religion they discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may

well hesitate before they rob the Christian of his hope and

humanity of its faith in that Savior who alone has given that hope

of eternal life which makes life tolerable and society possible,

and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom.” On the

beneficent influence of the gospel, see Schmidt, Social Results of

Early Christianity; D. J. Hill, The Social Influence of

Christianity.