The Real Bible.

“Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano’s tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,
The canticles of love and woe.

The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o’er him planned.

Himself from God he could not free.”

The Problem.

The most original book in the world is the Bible.... The elevation of this book may be measured by observing how certainly all observation of thought clothes itself in the words and forms of speech of that book.... Whatever is majestically thought in a great moral element instantly approaches this old Sanscrit.... People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in the world it owes to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it came out of a profounder depth of thought than any other book. Emerson, The Dial, October, 1840.

“Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” 2 Peter,
.

“Men of the Scriptures” was the title assumed by the Karaites, a sect of devout Jews, who, about the middle of the eighth century of our era, threw aside tradition, and accepted as their sole authority the canonical writings of the Old Testament. Seeing the good that the Bible has wrought for man in the past, we may well emulate the reverence of these Karaites; while, seeing the unreality of the traditional notion of the Bible that they held, and the mischiefs it has bred, we may well disown their superstitiousness. Can we gain a view of the Bible which, without stultifying our intellectual nature, may satisfy our spiritual nature, and leave us free to call ourselves men of the Scriptures? The only road to such an end must be that which our age is opening so successfully through every field of study; as, dismissing preconceptions, it builds with care and candor, upon solid facts, the causeway to a certain knowledge.

Let us take up the Bible as we would any other collection of books, and see if, without assuming anything concerning it, we cannot find our way to a rational reverence for it, as real as that which our fathers had. The lines of our inquiry have been projected by a hand you own as high authority. The results of the survey are in the text. Real men wrote real books; holy men wrote holy books; and, when we come to account for their holy, human power, we can only say The Divine Spirit stirred in them; “holy men of old spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost.”

The Bible is a collection of many writings, in many forms, by many hands, from many ages. Genuine letters these, whether they be belles-lettres or not; by every mark and sign most human writings, whether they be holy Scriptures or not; the product of honest toil of brain and hand. Whatever more they are, these are bona fide books, of men of like passions and infirmities with ourselves.

What is there in these books which has led Christendom to assign to them so high an honor?

I

1. These books have the venerableness which belongs to ancient writings.

With what interest and care we handle a very old book, and turn its well-worn pages, thumb-marked and dog-eared by men of Oxford or of Florence in the Middle Ages! Unless we are the baldest materialists, we will not reserve for the parchment body of some old book the respect called forth by its soul. The latest re-embodiment of an ancient writer, fresh from the presses of Putnam or of Appleton, merits the honor belonging to the book given to the world so many centuries ago, and fed upon by successive generations. Thus I look at the Plato on my shelves. How venerable these writings! Over their great words, on which I rest my eyes, my fathers bent, as their fathers had done before them; generation after generation finding inspiration where still it flows fresh and full for me. Thus every reverently minded man ought to feel concerning the Bible. The latest of these books is probably seventeen hundred years old, and the earliest has been written twenty-seven hundred years; while in the more ancient of these writings lie bedded some of the oldest fragments of literature known to us. These books have been the constant companions of men and women through two or three score of generations. The crawling centuries have carried these books along with them the solace and the strength of myriad millions of our kind. Forms, now turning into dust, holy in our memories, read these familiar pages. Men whose names carry us back through English history knew and prized these writings; Cromwell, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Great Alfred. When Rome was the seat of empire, Constantine heard them in his churches. Aurelius informed himself about them. In the lowly hamlet hidden away among the hills of Galilee, the boy Jesus listened to these tales of Hebrew heroism and holiness from His mother’s lips. Judas, the hammerer, fired his valiant soul from them; and, while wandering in the hill country of Judaea, David chanted, to his harp’s accompaniment these legends of the childhood of his race. The Bible is hallowed by the reverent use of ages.

2. These books form the literature of a noble race.

The Old Testament is a Library of Jewish Letters. The germ of the collection was planted by Nehemiah when “he, founding a library, gathered together the acts of the kings, and the prophets, and of David, and the epistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts." This germ grew gradually into its present shape. The Apocrypha belongs to it, and is rightly bound up in our Bibles, for reading in our churches. These books of the Canonical and Apocryphal writings do not cover the whole literature of the Hebrew nation. Many writings have been lost inadvertently. Many have been dropped as unworthy of preservation. We have the garnered grain of Hebrew literature in our Bible a winnowed national library. It includes histories, juridical codifications, dramas of love and destiny, patriotic songs and state anthems, the hymnal of a people’s worship, philosophic writings of the sages, collections of proverbial sayings, works of religious fiction, orations of statesmen, and oracles of mystic seers.

The New Testament is the literature of the Christian Church in its creative epoch; the work still, in the main, of Jewish hands, as Judaism was blossoming into a universal religion. It is thus the literature of the most important religious movement civilization has experienced; a movement whose unspent forces we are feeling still, in the flooding tides of progress. It, too, forms a winnowed library; the siftings of Sayings of Jesus, lives of Christ, apostolical and other letters, visions and romances; and holds the choicest mental products of this fertile era. In it are gathered memoirs of the Founder of Christianity, doctrinal and ethical treatises from the hand of the man who, under Christ, was the chief factor in the early Church; similar essays, in the form of letters, from other more or less important leaders, representing the various phases of original Christianity; a fragmentary and free sketch of the apostolic labors, and the last great effort of apocalyptic genius, in the Revelation of St. John, the Divine.

3. This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is intrinsically noble.

The Bible has lost much of its fresh charm for us, with whom its finest sayings are household words.

We parsed Virgil and Homer in our boyhood until the aroma of poetry exhaled from their hackneyed pages, and we can scarce think of them now save as grammatical exercises. The Bible has thus palled upon our imagination, through the uninspiring familiarity of early task-work. But were it possible to read it in our manhood for the first time, how the blood would beat and the nerves thrill over some of its pages. We should then understand the sensations of a French salon upon a certain occasion. Our shrewd philosopher-minister Franklin, had previously heard the literati wont to gather there ridiculing the Bible, and had guessed that they knew little of it. Upon this evening he observed that he would much like to have the judgment of the assembly on a certain Eastern tale he had lately come across, unknown probably to most of those there present, though long ago translated into their own tongue. Whereupon, drawing from his pocket a copy of the Bible, he had a Parisienne, let into the secret, read in her sweet tones the book of Ruth. The company was thrown into raptures over the charming tale, which lasted until they found its name.

How fresh, with the crisp air of morning, are these tales of primitive tradition! How naif these simple stories of Hebrew heroes! What so fine in religious poetry as some of the strains from the Jewish Hymnal? What a noble drama is Job, the Hebrew Faust! How wise the proverbial sayings! What pure passion and lofty imagination stir through the pages of the greater prophets! Where are to be found letters like those of Paul? What biographies have the artless simplicity of the Synoptic Gospels, or the mystic spirituality of the Gospel according to St. John!

No critic of our age has finer literary feeling or more dispassionate judgment than Matthew Arnold; and he has edited the second section of Isaiah as a text book for the culture of the imagination in English schools. In the introduction to this Primer he observes: “What a course of eloquence and poetry is the Bible in our schools.”

Goethe shared Arnold’s love of the Bible, and was so constant a reader of it that his friends reproached him for wasting his time over it. Burke owned his indebtedness to the Bible for his unique eloquence. Webster confessed that he owed to its habitual reading much of his power. Ruskin looks back to the days when a pious aunt compelled him to learn by heart whole chapters of the Bible, for his schooling in the craft of speech, in which he stands unrivaled among living Englishmen.

Emerson writes:

“The most original book in the world is the Bible. This old collection of the ejaculations of love and dread, of the supreme desires and contritions of men, proceeding out of the region of the grand and eternal seems ... the alphabet of the nations, and all posterior writings, either the chronicles of facts under very inferior ideas, or when it rises to sentiment, the combinations, analogies, or degradation of this. The elevation of this book may be measured by observing how certainly all observation of thought clothes itself in the words and forms of speech of that book.... Whatever is majestically thought in a great moral element, instantly approaches this old Sanscrit.... Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, the highest in whom the moral is not the predominating element, leans on the Bible; his poetry presupposes it. If we examine this brilliant influence Shakspeare as it lies in our minds, we shall find it reverent, not only of the letter of this book, but of the whole frame of society which stood in Europe upon it, deeply indebted to the traditional morality, in short, compared with the tone of the Prophets, secondary.... People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in the world, it owes to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it came out of a profounder depth of thought than any other book."

Even what seem to us valueless books turn out, when studied naturally, most interesting and suggestive.

Jonah, that stone of stumbling and rock of offence to the modern youth, becomes, when rightly read, a noble writing, full of the very spirit of our age. Around the tradition of Jonah, the son of Amittai, a prophet of whom we know nothing in other writings, some forgotten author has woven a story, to point a lofty moral. Jonah feels himself called to go to Nineveh and cry against it, because of its wickedness. Quite naturally he does not relish such an errand.

The prospect of a poor Jew’s reforming the gay and dissolute metropolis of the earth, which sat as a queen among the nations, singing to herself, “I will be a lady forever,” was not brilliant enough to fascinate him; and the prospect of the reward he would get from the luxurious people of pleasure, whose well-opiated consciences he should rudely rouse by calling their intrigues and carousals wickedness, was only too clear. Jonah fled from his duty. In his flight occurs the marvelous experience with the big fish, that has so troubled dear, pious people who have read as literal history what is plainly legendary. After this fabulous episode, the story takes up its ethical thread. Jonah finds that he cannot flee from the presence of the Lord, that he cannot decline a mission imposed from on high. He goes to Nineveh; cries out against its sins, as God had told him; and, as God had not told him, predicts its overthrow in forty days, as a judgment on its crimes. But, contrary to his expectations, the city is stirred by his preaching; and King and court and people repent and amend their ways. Whereupon the Divine forgiveness is extended at once to these wicked Pagans, and the fate they had deserved is averted. But in this turn of affairs Jonah’s prediction failed, and so he was displeased and was very angry, and took the Almighty to task quite roundly, for his lack of vigour.

“Was not this my saying when I was yet in my country? Therefore, I fled before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness and repentest thee of the evil.”

What was to become of preachers if, after they had threatened destruction upon evil-doers, the Most High went back upon them thus? The later breed of Jonahs may profitably study the after scene, in which God is made to rebuke the frightful selfishness and hardness which, rather than have one’s theories belied, would have a city damned.

“Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored ... and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?”

The moral marvel of Nineveh’s general repentance on the preaching of an obscure Jew is as unnatural as the physical marvel of the fish story.

Recognizing that the whole tale is a parable, which takes upon it purely legendary drapery, and ridding ourselves thus of all the questions which puzzle Sunday-school scholars and theologians, we are ready to read the meaning of the parable. God is not the God of any one race or religion. He cares for Gentile as for Jew. He sends a prophet of Israel to bid a pagan city repent, that He may forgive it freely. These Pagans understand the message of the Jew. The commands of conscience are owned and honored by the heathen, even more quickly than by the people of God; whose own Jerusalem never thus quickly obeyed a prophet’s message. The city whence had come Israel’s woes is held up as a pattern to the sacred city herself. All men, then, are brothers, partakers of the same moral and religious nature; children of One Father, whose voice they hear in different tongues, speaking to their souls the same messages of holy love.

Thus read, Jonah becomes the protest of liberal Judaism against the narrow, exclusive tendencies of popular piety in Israel. It is the writing of some genuine Broad-Churchman of the olden time, proclaiming the high truths of Human Brotherhood under a Divine Fatherhood, breathing that spirit of which, long after, another Jew dared say

“And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is
charity.”

If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these writings, we may well say, with Milton,

“I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and
dwell upon them.”

4. This literature has been very influential in the development of progressive civilization.

When the writings of Greece and Rome had been buried in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the literature of Israel was preserved by the pious care of the Christian Church. The light of Athens went out, and the light of Jerusalem alone illumined the dark ages. The only books known to the mass of men through long centuries were these writings of the Hebrews and the early Christians. Thought was kept alive by them, imagination was fed from them, conscience was educated and vitalized through them. For a thousand years there was practically but one book in Europe the Bible. When the long gestation of the middle ages was fulfilled, and the modern world was born, while the educated classes read the exhumed classics of Greece, the people still read the Bible. It gave, in the person of Luther, the impulse that restored intellectual liberty and moral health to Europe. It has continued the best read book of Western civilization; the only book much read, until of late, by the mass of men; the one foreign and ancient literature familiar alike to the plain people in Germany and France, in England and America; the common well-spring of inspiration to thought and imagination, to character and conduct.

It is the Magna Charta of our liberties; the revered companion and master of the Pilgrims who sailed the wintry seas, and, on Plymouth Rock, building wiser than they knew, founded a nation covenanting freedom of conscience unto all men; a nation on whose Bell of Independence runs the Bible legend, “Proclaim liberty to the inhabitants thereof.”

Wherever society is found to-day in travail with a new and higher order, the conception can be traced to the seminal words of the Bible. The institutions and manners of progressive civilization are what they are because in the heart of that civilization has lain the Bible.

My brothers, were these books nothing more to us than such ancient writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness of liberalism, falsely so called.

What if in these ancient writings there are ancient errors, the marvels which a child age exaggerated into miracles, stories of savage cruelty and brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful, utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy One? Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation’s growth from barbarism. Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested or described, and then to fling these blemishes at the book in which the children of Greece and England and America have read with tingling blood the tales which stirred their souls, by what name would we call him? By that name let him stand forth impaled upon the scorn of an age that has not lost the grace of reverence, who, mindless of majestic age, the dignity of letters, an influence unrivalled and benign, associations tender and most holy, upon these venerable and sacred books spits his shallow scepticism, spumes his spleenful sarcasm, and smuts them with his own sensuality.

Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings, and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible.

II

The Bible lays a yet deeper claim upon our reverence These books constitute the literature of a people whose genius was religion, whose mission was its evolution into universal forms, whose writings express the moods and tenses of that development; whose history is the organic growth which flowered in the life of Him who freed religion from every swathing band, and gave the world its pure essential spirit; after Whom all races are being drawn as one flock under one Shepherd.

1. Israel’s specialty in history was religion.

Every people finds laid upon it certain necessary activities, in most of which all peoples find their common tasks. Every nation must cultivate agriculture handicrafts, trade and commerce; must develop social, political and religious institutions. Each people will, however, do some one thing better than the rest of its tasks, better than it is done by other peoples. Each great race has some commanding inspiration; some ideal which masters every other aspiration and ambition, energizes its efforts and shapes its destiny. It creates a specialty among the nations. The real legacy of each great race lies in the works wrought in the line of its highest aptitudes. Thus Rome developed a genius for civil organization. She conquered the whole western world, united isolated nations under one empire, cleared the Mediterranean for safe and free communication, opened roads as arteries through the vast body politic, established post communications for travellers and the mails, carried law and order into every obscure hamlet, consolidated a polity which, by sheer massiveness, lasted for generations after the soul of Rome had fled, and left to posterity, in her institutes the basis for modern jurisprudence. Thus Greece evolved a genius for art, developed architecture and sculpture to the highest perfection the world has seen, made statues thicker than men in Athens, made men more beautiful than statues, sighed even after Virtue as the Becoming, the Perfect Beauty, left the world temples whose ruins are inspirations, and marbles whose discovery dates the epochs of culture. Israel essayed to do many things that other peoples achieved, and promised success in more than one direction. At a certain period she bade fair to develop into a martial empire, and to become a lesser Assyria or Rome. A little later she seemed about to rival the Phenicians in commerce. About the same time she

“advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an
independent science or philosophy."

But she found herself content with none of these roles. She had a higher part assigned her in the drama of history, to which her secret instincts resistlessly drew her. Her predominant characteristic was an intense religiousness. Everything in the life of her people took on a serious and devout tone. Patriotism was identified with piety. Her statesmen were reformers, idealists, whose orations were sermons, like the speeches of Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign, dealing with politics in the light of eternal principles. Legislation was developed through the “judgments” of priestly oracles. Poetry lighted her flames at the altar. Philosophy busied itself with ethics. The Muse of History was the Spirit of Holiness. The nation’s ambitions were aspirations. Her heroes grew to be saints. The divine became to her, not the true or the beautiful, but the good. She evidently had, as Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley, “a genius for godliness.”

2. Israel’s literature became thus a religious literature.

Her histories were written for edification. They present the past of the people in such light as to inculcate virtue and inspire piety. Her poems are songs of pure love, like Canticles; or dramas whose plot lies in the problem of evil, like Job; or hymns in which the soul seeks communion with God. The Psalter is the hymnal of the temple choir at Jerusalem. The prophets are preachers of righteousness, personal, social, political. Even the writings of her sages or philosophers are almost wholly ethical and religious. No other people’s literature is so intensely and pervasively religious. Other nations have religious writings as a part of their general literature. Israel’s whole literary life was sacred. There is scarcely a book left by her to which we may not go to feed religion.

3. Israel’s literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of her life, with the various phases of religion.

The glory of a truly National Church is that it takes up into itself every form of spiritual and ethical consciousness within the nation, and exhibits in each successive school of thought, in each movement for a nobler social life, a phase of true religion. This is the glory of Israel. Religion never separated itself into an institution apart from the State.

There was no Jewish Church, of which Dean Stanley wrote the history. Church and State were one. Sacred and secular history flowed in one common stream. The history of Israel was the history of Judaism. Its choicest literature formed its sacred writings. Religion was never narrowed to a theory, an institution, an “ism,” a sect, a school. It was as generous and as rich as the broad, free life of the nation. Every factor essential to a noble religion was thus supplied from the sound and healthy life of the people.

The inner life of the soul was voiced in the hymns of Israel, to which we still turn for the inspiration of personal piety in our private devotions; and which lift the public worship of the moderns as they swelled the souls of the hosts who waited in the temple courts at Jerusalem, two thousand years ago.

A cultus of character through ritual and discipline was elaborated by the priesthood in that wonderful system which, rebaptized, does duty still in the Catholic Church. The true outer sphere for personal religion, trained, if need be, by an ecclesiastical cultus, was fashioned by the great prophets, the men of the people; who poured their passion for righteousness into aspirations for a true commonwealth, in which Justice should be throned on law, and international relations be ruled, not by Policy, but by Principle. Natural religion was nobly set forth by the sages in Proverbs, The Wisdom of Jesus, and the other “Writings;” all of which were characterized by a calm and rational philosophy, that recognized the laws of life and fed the wisdom which obeys them. Even Agnosticism, in so far as it is the confession of the inadequacy of every interpretation of the universe, finds despondent yet still earnest expression in Ecclesiastes, and humble, hopeful expression in Job; and the silence of many of the noblest natures of our age, which the churches brand as irreligious, finds place among the phases of religion in their Sacred Book.

Almost every form of strenuous ethical life, almost every answer that earnest souls have found to the problem of life, is to be drawn from the writings of this many-sided people. Thus their literature feeds a rich, and rounded life of religion.

4. Israel’s literature presents us with the record of a continuous growth of religion upward through its normal stages.

Religion grows like every form of human life with the growth of man himself. It is coarse, crude and cruel while man is a savage, and as he becomes civilized by which I mean something more than wealthy it becomes intelligent, reasonable ethical and spiritual. The growth of Israel from barbarism carried with this progress the growth of Israel’s religion. In the earliest times which we can historically reach the Israelites were semi-nomadic tribes, slightly distinguishable from their kindred Sémites. The religion of the people appears to have been then a commingling of fetichism, the worship of things that impressed the imagination, great trees and huge boulders, with the worship of the various powers of nature, the orbs of heaven, the reproductive force of the earth, etc., under the usual savage and sensual symbolisms.

From such unpromising beginnings, through the successive stages of polytheistic idolâtries, religion was gradually led up, in the advance of the general life of the people and through the inspirations of a series of great men, to the recognition of One Eternal and infinite Being; the Lord of nature and of man, the Father of all mankind, Holy, Just and Gracious; whose truest worship is the aspirations of his children after goodness.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” writes the
Deuteronomist; “and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.”

Malachi, looking round upon the manifold forms of worship of the various nations, and discerning that through them all the soul of man was feeling after one and the same Divine Being, makes God say:

“From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered unto me and a pure offering; for my name is great among the heathen, saith the Lord of Hosts.”

Micah asks,

“What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy
and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.

5. Israel’s literature records the forcing forward of this growth of religion, as by some Power back of man, shaping its ends, rough-hew them as it might.

The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in the introduction to his great work.

“The manifold changes and even confusions and perversities, which
manifest themselves in the long course of the threads of its history,
ultimately tend to the solution of this great problem.” Ewald: Intro.

A singular succession of great men arise to save and revive and reform religion in every critical epoch. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, Judas Maccabeus come upon the stage, one after the other, perform their several parts with singular aptitude, and prepare the way for the next movement when it comes due. The history of the people rightly read becomes a mighty drama, in which the right man is never wanting at the right time, and the action moves on steadily toward a climax.

The experiences of the people, even those most perplexing to the faith of the nation at the time, fit singularly into this organic evolution of religion. The rending of the Kingdom of David, that blighted the fair prospect of a martial empire, turned the nation aside from the false career on which it was entering. The overthrow of the Northern and then of the Southern Kingdom, and the deportation of the people to Babylonia, seemingly the ruin of the sister countries, threw them in upon their inner life; and in the exile their religion found its highest reach of thought.

Even that hierarchical movement which so quickly followed upon this bloom of prophetism, and which to the superficial look seems only the arrest of life and the beginning of death, reveals a legitimate function in the organic processes of the national religion. In this priestly organization of institutional religion, all free prophetic inspiration did indeed die out for over four centuries. But even this was a necessity for the right flowering of religion. The age was not ready, politically or intellectually, for the ripening of the thoughts of the prophets. Had they ripened then, they would have fallen to the ground, as the untimely fruit of a too-early spring. Four centuries were to be tided over before the political and intellectual conditions were found for the blossoming of this flower. This holding back of the normal evolution of Hebraism was the function of the Priestly Reaction a curious parallel to the function of Catholicism in Mediaeval Christianity.

Like the Catholic Church, the Jewish priesthood held society together when, in the destruction of the political power, there was no other bond of unity. As in the Catholic Church, the High Priest became a temporal ruler, the Prince of Israel, as he was called; and kept the sacred city still the seat of government. As in Catholicism the institutionalizing of religion that followed the period of free prophetic life was an effort to embody that life, to incrust and thus preserve it; and, in the one case as in the other, though the crust of institutions choked the further growth of spiritual religion, it yet did keep it sluggishly alive within this hard bark, through times that else would have proved fatal to it. As in Catholicism, this priestly cultus really drilled deep into the natures of men the principles and laws and habitudes of ethical and spiritual religion; and stored the force which, when its rigid routine and fettering formalism became unbearable, burst through this crust and opened a new world of fresh, free life.

Of this singular shaping of the nation’s experiences to further the growth of true religion, the Old Testament is the impressive record.

6. Israel’s literature thus presents the picture of a nation’s patient, insistent pressing forward, through long centuries, toward the fruition of its ideal, the realization of true religion.

So continuous is Israel’s movement toward the ideal of religion, so straight the line of her advance that it seems as though the nation had a conscious aim, seen afar and steadfastly pursued by generation after generation, unwilling to stop short of attainment. It is the founder of scientific Biblical criticism who thus expresses his sense of the wonderfulness of this historic movement:

“This aim is Perfect Religion; a good which all aspiring nations of antiquity made an attempt to attain; which some, the Indians and Persians, for example, really labored to achieve with admirable devotion of noble energies, but which this people alone clearly discerned from the beginning, and then pursued for centuries through all difficulties, and with the utmost firmness and consistency, until they attained it, so far as among men and in ancient times attainment was possible."

7. The literature of Christian Israel records the realization of this long sought ideal, the fruition of this organic growth.

The nation found the times ripe at last for the final process of this historic evolution; the dead cerements of Judaism fell apart, and thereout bloomed that perfect flower of religion, the religion of the Christ, simple, free, ethical, spiritual. The extant literature of this last creative effort of Israel constitutes the New Testament. The Gospels tell the story of the life of the Founder of Christianity, clearly enough in the main outlines, and embalm many of the words and deeds of the Son of Man. The other writings of the New Testament illustrate the working of the thought and spirit of the Christ in the Church bodying around Him through the growth of a century. In them we see that the long cherished ideal of Israel, an Ethical and Universal Religion, had at last incarnated itself in The Master whose plans laid the foundation of this new Order; into which men were coming from the east and from the west, and from the north and from the south, and were sitting down in the Kingdom of God.

The high-water mark of religion in human history is recorded in these writings. To enter into the spirit of these writings is to feel the force of the free, full tides of ethical and spiritual life which rose, as never before nor since, in the dawning day of Christianity. The flow of such a force within the individual soul and through society has been the power of the New Testament in Christendom.

8. This organic growth of a national religion into a catholic ideal, not without parallels elsewhere, is, however unique in respect to the conditions for a truly Universal Religion.

The scene of this evolution is not the heart of the East, as in Buddhism, but the meeting point of East and West. Palestine is the race centre of the earth. Camels unload in Jerusalem the goods laden upon them in the seats of the most ancient empires; and on her pebbly beaches the Mediterranean rolls, bearing the commerce of Europe. Behind Judea lies the past, before it opens the future. Its Race-Man came at the epoch when, first in history, the East and West were brought together under one empire and opened to the free interchange of thought. And when we analyze the religion of the Christ, grown in this central land and coming to the birth in this central period, we find that it holds, alone on earth, the elements of each race-religion in well proportioned combination.

No eastern religion, Buddhism not excepted, appears to contain conceptions that satisfy the western mind. The religion of the Christ, however can be shown to hold whatever ideas and ideals make vital the great race-religions of the East. It is as many sided as humanity, and presents a family face to every people. It takes up the ideas and ideals of other religions, disengages and deposits whatever in them is temporal and circumstantial, preserves whatever is essential and eternal in them, combines these vital elements with the polar truths needful to their wholesomeness, and crystallizes ethical and spiritual religion into perfect forms, forms capable of translation into the idioms of every race of earth. This religion of the Christ is the one religion which to-day holds the promise and potency of further evolution, in the progressive civilization of mankind on which it is enthroned.

9. Of the literature of the people through whom came this organic evolution of the keystoning religion of earth what can we say but that it records a real revelation coming through genuine personal inspirations from on high!

Revelation is the opposite aspect of the mystery which we call discovery; the uncovering of that which was hidden; the unveiling of that which was not known; the coming on of truth into the light wherein man can see it. “Discovery” expresses the human effort by which truth is thus uncovered and found out. “Revelation” expresses the divine effort which lies back of all human aspirations and endeavors; as the Spirit within man stirs him up to seek for Truth, flashes in upon his mind strange hints of where and how she is to be found, allures him onward with the mystic whispers of her voice, until at length he stands upon the mount of vision whence her holy form is seen, and cries “I have found her!”

To him who believes in a Spirit of Truth, guiding men into all truth, the growth of ethical and spiritual religion into perfect form in Jesus Christ is a real revelation. It is the oncoming of the Light which lighteth every man that is in the world; the dawning of the day of earth on the hills of Judea, over which has risen the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings.

This revelation came not to the mystic “man writ large” we call society, direct from heaven in abstract form. It came to individual men, struggling for larger light and nobler life, and breathing their higher spirit on their fellows. Religion is always life, the experience of souls. We can name the individuals through whom each important advance was made. The greater souls who led the worship of the host welcoming the rising Light, thrilled with the vibrations of a voice deeper and holier than the voice of man. The lesser souls who formed the chorus of this anthem of The Dawn thrilled each alike with this mystic sense of God. That which we must aver of every truth discovered or revealed, of every knowledge needful to man and won by man; that which we must affirm as the only rational interpretation of the mysterious suggestions rising below the conscious thoughts of man, and prompting to noblest benedictions on the race; that we must, with deepened awe, say of the holiest truths shown to the human soul, Inspired!

With sincere and reverent confession we must say then in the words of Holy Writ:

“Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” “Every
Scripture profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness is God-inspired."

The consciousness and experience of Israel could not have found fitter expression than in the words of our great seer:

“I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men; and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought; he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still-taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears."

We have thus seen in the Bible an ancient and noble literature, the literature of a noble race, the literature supremely influencing and enriching Christian civilization; demanding, therefore, our rational reverence, as constituting a truly Sacred Book.

We have seen in the Old Testament the literature of the people of religion, commissioned with its normal evolution; writings charged with deep religiousness; the records of the various moods and tenses through which religion grew continuously and insistently toward perfection, in an organic process watched and directed by a Higher Power than man. We have seen in the New Testament the record of the realization of this long-sought aim of the people of religion; the story of the Divine Man, who breathed religion out into perfection, and the writings that depict the bodying around Him of the Universal Church, the Church in whose truth and life is growing the religion of the future, “the Christ that is to be.”

The fuller knowledge of our age, in evanishing the unreal Bible restores the real Bible. It is the record of the visioning and embodiment of the Human Ideal, the Divine Image The Christ. It is the Providentially prepared Hand Book of religion in whose rich and varied phases of ethical and spiritual thought all men may find the nourishment they need. It is the spiritual reality our fathers rightly felt, but wrongly expressed, when they called it as a whole The Word of God. It holds the words proceeding from out of the mouth of God on which man liveth. It bodies in “letters” The Word of God, embodied in the flesh in Jesus Christ the Lord. It records a real revelation. This revelation, however, denies no other revelation. It affirms the fact of the withdrawal of a veil in each new knowledge won; the fact that man has felt in calling the new knowledge a discovery; and it interprets this unveiling as Tennyson has learned of it to do:

“And out of darkness come the hands
That reach through nature, moulding man.”

These books are the products of a real inspiration. This inspiration, however, denies no other inspiration. It interprets the sense of a higher than human influence in the noblest searchers after truth, throughout the world, in every action of the intellect. It affirms the validity of that consciousness.

The revelation in the Bible is the Light of God which streams through it, making it a “lamp unto our feet.” The inspiration in the Bible is the life of God breathing through it into man, “and he becomes a living soul.” The book which, above all others, reveals God to man, he must call the supreme revelation of God. The book which, above all others, inspires the life of God in man, he must call the most inspired of God.

If, then, any one asks me how he may know that there is a revelation in the Bible, I tell him to walk in its light, and see what it reveals. If any one asks me how I know that the Bible is inspired I answer him in Mr. Moody’s words:

“I know that the Bible is inspired, because it ‘inspires me.’”