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Perereaheprorerns hitas grec: cat Sec aaehiashetrcoieenkatats piledie | | ~ ee bee baete-y . a ee nO 0 be ee Oe ee re Om On mn te . Pa heen tape nrg iets gy yte ys gt EET poste Beat te eq ek tates iret en yey ertyrepe peer eer eT: % ita brice eerste eeee setts seek eee eet Say Ene Pe eset er eereres sis snk = rae tii BR 125 .W54 1924 | Wilson, Philip Whitwell, Be) Soy hey | A layman's confession of faith fae (tenet a4 \ ‘ ait i 7 =n eee aR'S Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/laymansconfessioO0wils A LAYMAN’S CONFESSION OF FAITH P. Whitwell Wilson’s UNFORGETABLE BOOKS The Christ We Forget Student’s Pocket Edition, Thin Paper. ... Thirteenth Edition. 8vo Dr. F. Wilbur Chapman, shortly before his death, said; “One of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It ought to be in every minister’s hands, Is there not somé way to arrange it?” The Church We Forget Second Edition. 8vo. Homiletic Review : “ For themes, for illustrations, for accumulations of suggestion for talk or lecture— we have seen few books that promise more.” The Viston We Forget A Layman’s Reading of the Book of Revelation. Second Edition, 8vo “Employs the suggestive method of interpretation and develops it more fully than other writers have at- tempted. Here is a masterpiece of poetry, eloquence and inspiration.” — Boston Transcript, f ; . 4 eae 193] ‘ #s'p yy igh ~S he fa f A . A Layman’s Confess of Faith By y P. WHITWELL WILSON Author of ‘‘The Christ We Forget; ‘‘The Church We Forget; ‘The Vision We Forget,”’ Ete. New York CHICAGO Fleming H. Revell Company LoNDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, 1924, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY Printed in the United States of America New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street The Statement of the Case M ANY years ago, the late Sir Edward Creasy wrote a book, entitled Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. In these pages, I have dealt with fifteen decisive questions of the world. Of every chapter, the title is such a question, and taken as a whole, the answers are a confession of faith. | Every answer has meant a decisive battle in myself. Many a time have I been inclined to drop the subject, to live easily and cheaply amid a fading faith, in which the very twilight would mean a relief from temptation and repentance, and a sur- render to the usual cheap and shallow generalities. But I knew that it would be a surrender, that life would be poorer afterwards, and that however la- mentable my failure to be a Christian, I should have been a worse failure as a man, had I not tried to be what I might have been. Merely to be self-deceived, would have been no use to a writer for the press. If I was to have a faith at all, it must be a faith for which, Sunday and weekday, I could give a reasonable explanation. And, after years of delay, I have made time, amid the urgent claims of a busy and uncertain profes- sion, to put the case in brief and simple terms. 5 6 THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE If I am under a delusion, then prove it. If there is here no delusion, then I claim the verdict for Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. I know of no per- son with the Christ who is as unhappy as multi- tudes of persons who have not the Christ. They who reduce faith to negatives should read history. ‘Two hundred years ago, many Presby- terian Churches in England became frankly Uni- tarian and the Lord Shaftesbury of that day scoffed at the Scriptures as “ witty and humourous books.’ Politics were corrupt. The Prime Min- ister said that every man had his price. The mar- riage vow was ignored. And efforts to stop indulgence in liquor failed. Openly it was stated that the Christian Faith had become a thing of the past. What followed was the unparalleled revival, indeed explosion of faith, under the Wesleys and Whitefield. And the Negatives were positived by Methodism. One hundred years ago, Unitarianism swept over a New England. And again, the Negatives were positived by explosions of faith, some will say the imperfectly directed faiths of Christian Science and of Mormonism. Some belief—more definite than the Negatives—was essential. Today again, the Negatives seem to flow like a flood over a submerged faith. But again, the Posi- tives—call them what you like—are exploding. There is Fundamentalism. ‘There is also Spiritual- THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 7 ism. And, for the first time in England, there are British Moslems who prefer Mohammedanism with Mohammed to Christianity without Christ. And never has the Church of Rome issued a more triumphant challenge to a wavering Protestantism. In Britain, the two churches that gain ground are the Roman Church and the High Anglican Church. That there will be definite faiths among men, may be taken for granted. The battle of the Nega- tives is ever a losing battle. The real danger is not Scepticism but that Scepticism, by destroying a reasonable faith, will provoke Superstition and Sensation. What we need is a clear view of Christ Himself, of what He meant by the Church, the Bible, the Home, the Past and the Future. To see Him in the Scriptures, in events, in others, has been my struggling endeavour. To show Him, is once more my imperfect attempt. As a servant, I welcome Science; as a master— never. In 1870, there were declared two infalli- bilities—first, of the Pope, and secondly, of Charles Darwin. Both these infallible authorities were dogmatists. And no Pope was ever a more despotic dogmatist than the zealots of Darwin. For half a century, the Christian who withheld his assent from the proposition that species originated in and were differentiated by natural selection or the survival of the fittest was written down promptly and finally as an obscurantist. The Philosophy of such survival of the fittest made 8 THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE modern Germany and was the underlying delusion that provoked the war. Today, the infallibilities of Darwin are dismissed by Science herself as no more proven than the theories of Lucretius; and the origin of species is declared—again by Science—to be as mythical as the pedigree of Homer’s heroes. These are not the statements of the Church; they are the declarations of the highest authorities on what has been called Evolution. As long as hypothetical Science consists in the main of unlearning the hypothetical Science of the past generation, | am compelled to suspend my acceptance of theories which have often been no more than intellectual fashions. Revelation, intel- ligently received, has stood the test of thousands of years. After half a century, Evolution, as pro- mulgated by Science, is on its defence—is indeed confessedly reduced to an indeterminate. Amid it all, [ am glad that I can count on a Friend Who does know and can guide and will preserve to the end that frail and faltering soul which I have committed to His care. To His wis- dom, His love and His power, I can assign no limit. And in His teaching, happily, I can find nothing that anybody has ever had to unlearn. P. W. W. New York, N.Y. Contents . Wo Is Curist? . Wuat Is A CHURCH? . Wuy READ THE BIBLE? . Is THE BrpLuE INSPIRED? . . Dip MrracitEs Occur? . How Was Curist Born? . Can Curist SAVE? . Is Happiness WRONG? . CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A Livinc? . DoEs SCIENCE UPSET FarrH? . CAN THE Home BE PRESERVED? . Wit, Wars Ever CEASE? . Dip Curist Risk FROM THE DEAD? . WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? . . Is tas Trinrty A MytH? 11 22 31 43 57 68 83 97 5 BOY wy Let id abe LOO nba PLoS i by k t % | i ty Ky Ly) fas) aS ie en ie) ity inte I WHO IS CHRIST? HOSE of us who desire to follow the Christ Ap in His leadership of love for the human race are told by St. Peter that we should be ever ready to give an answer to any who ask us the reason for the hope that is in us. Even a layman must do his best to fulfil this command, living as he does in an era when the faith of many who profess and call themselves Christians is shaken. I am a plain man who has only one life to live and wants that life to be worth living; and it is for plain men and women that I offer this statement of what I believe. We cannot live our lives in perpetual chaos. We cannot feed our souls on mere argu- ment and controversy. The Gospel is not a theo- logical ball game but redemption. And the best defence of it is simply to know what it means. For it is not in Christendom alone that religion is challenged. The authority of Moses in the syna- gogue, of Buddha in the temple, of Mohammed in the mosque and of Confucius in the shrine is also menaced, and throughout the world, an increasing number of people appear to believe in anything or nothing. The question is thus not simply whether 11 12 WHO IS CHRIST? the Christian Faith is to disappear but whether all faith is to be shattered. Is mankind to progress without any appreciation of the Unseen? ‘That is the issue. At first glance, it seems deplorable that the Church whose “‘ one foundation is Jesus Christ the Lord” should be divided into sects, and that some of the sects should be rent by faction. Where the Holy Spirit should be present in the Church to guide the humble and contrite in heart unto all truth, we see the tenderest mysteries of Our Lord’s birth, life and death, debated like politics, one side claiming a victory over the other, as if this were the imitation of Christ. It is not science. It is not orthodoxy. It is not enlightenment. It is the in- evitable result of those cares of this world, that deceitfulness of riches which spring up and choke the Word of God. But, after all, as St. Paul real- ised in his day, the turmoil is not wholly a disaster. What if some do preach Christ of envy and strife? It only means that whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached. “I therein do rejoice,” wrote St. Paul, ‘ yea, and will rejoice.” The fact that, one hundred and fifty years after Voltaire, a discussion of the scenes at Bethlehem should occupy more space in the press of the United States than the most sensational of all prize fights shows that the progress of science and the development of railroads, machinery, telegraphs, radio, automobiles have changed in no way the WHO IS CHRIST? 18 inescapable fascination of the question, “ Whom do men say that lam?” Indeed, it seems as if He ‘were coming to us closer than ever before. Some have accepted Him on the authority of the Church and that was good; others accepted Him on the authority of the Bible and that, perhaps, was better; but best of all will it ever be to find Him ourselves, to see Him as He is, so that if all the Churches were bombed and if all the Bibles were burned, we would still have Him, “nearer than hands and feet.” Amid this crisis we are learning that churches and creeds and confessions and cate- chisms are not enough. To live the Christian life, if that life is to be worth living, must be Christ Himself. That other prophets than Christ have arisen— prophets widely advertised among intellectuals—I freely admit. Asa writer for the newspapers, I do not close my eyes to what is published day by day in this twentieth century. Nor need we be taken by surprise. It is the Bible that forewarned us of what we ought to expect. In the Sermon on the Mount, which we usually take for granted, Our Lord tells us to “ beware of false prophets,” and it is a hint repeated by His most trusted spokesmen, St. Peter and St. John. The present situation, however difficult it be, ought not to disturb us, therefore; our Master prepared us for it. Nor are we called upon to deny a full hearing to any prophet who tells us that he has something of truth 14 WHO IS CHRIST? to declare. ‘There was a moment, doubtless, when St. John as a young man, “a son of thunder,” was ready to call down fire from heaven on those who thought amiss, but in his old age he was wiser and wrote that, while we should not “believe every spirit,” we should “ try the spirits whether they are of God.” ‘The most mystical of the Apostles thus asserted not only the right but the duty of applying a private judgment to all the seething speculations of his own day. The Cause was to be defended, not by suppressing attacks upon it, but by examin- ing them. Each criticism of the Christ and each alternative to Him was to be put on trial before a calm and judicial mind and so weighed on its merits. Nothing in science was to be more utterly scientific than the progress and explanation of faith. The Spirit which should rule over such a confession was God; and God was defined as Light, in whom is no darkness at all; as Love, expressed in love for one’s neighbour; as Truth, in which can lurk no lie. If we are to see clearly what is given to the world in Christ, we must rid our minds at the outset of all prejudice, all resent- ment, all desire for a merely dialectical advantage over our neighbours. Even in our creeds, we must be like Him Who was content to be made of no reputation. Take the modern prophet. He may be Ibsen. He may be Wells. He may be Galsworthy. He may be Gorky or he may be Shaw. Does he, or WHO IS CHRIST? 15 does he not, rank with Christ? These prophets have had a publicity that Christ never sought. They have had at their disposal all the resources of the printing press, the theatre, the universities. And they have already failed and the decline of their vogue is evident. ‘The explanation of their failure is simple. All they have been able to do 1s to diagnose, advertise or ridicule human disease. The remedy is beyond them. Analyse Ibsen’s plays. Summed up, they are no more than the exclamation of the Psalmist that all men are liars, and of St. Paul’s statement to the Romans that there is none righteous, no, not one. Eliminate the Christ, and you are left with such pessimism, darkly illuminated by satire, by cynicism, and sometimes by the gross sensuality of a Leon Daudet. In this era of education, it is at least one point, now clear, that no other Saviour than Christ can be or has been suggested. It is still Jesus of Nazareth, or nihilism. Consider this illustration. ‘Two plays have been written on the troublous animosity which too often divides the Jew from the Gentile. The first of these plays is The Merchant of Venice, by Wil- liam Shakespeare. The second is Loyalties, by John Galsworthy. In the one case, it was shown that commerce provided no remedy for racial ani- mosity. In the other case, where the Jew was a rich young man introduced into English society, it was made equally evident that pleasure would not 16 WHO IS CHRIST? heal the wound. Both Galsworthy and Shakes- peare, therefore, left the problem unsolved, not realising any common ground where there would be neither Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. In Christ, such reconciliation is possible. And why? Because Christ is greater than commerce and pleasure; He is incarnate service. It is in serving mankind that the opposites in opinion and blood are drawn together. If Shy- lock and the Venetians had served together on the committee of a hospital where Jews and Catholics were treated by Catholic and Jewish doctors and nurses, the world would have heard nothing of that pound of flesh. The racial problem would have been solved. We have no reason, then, to fear the study of comparative religion. That study did not begin in theological colleges, however modern, but on the Mount of ‘Transfiguration where Jesus, with Moses and Elijah, together compared religion. By all means, let Buddha, let Mohammed, let Confucius, let Tolstoy, let Gandhi, join that com- pany and talk face to face with Christ. For the moment, the Godhead may seem to be enveloped in a cloud of a divine uncertainty, but in due course, we shall again see Jesus only; and matched with Him, the rest are nowhere. Suppose it be true that Christ is belittled—that He is a stone set at nought of the builders—the statesmen, the think- ers, the scientists, who construct the civilisation WHO IS CHRIST? 17 that is not wholly a success. The fact remains that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” It was said by Peter and John nineteen centuries ago. And it is still to be said today by anyone who reads the newspapers. If you are satisfied with cyni- cism, with pessimism, with sensation, with pleas- ure, you may obtain these from others than Christ, but if you are in pursuit of that something further which He called heaven and we call happiness, an inward peace which passeth understanding and a life more abundant than sophistication, it is to Christ alone that, after all experiment, you must resort. No one else even pretends to offer so great a salvation. At the outset, then, our enquiry is much simpli- fied. We need not consider anyone but Christ. With Him stands or falls the good in all others, and by Him, all others should be tested. “ Whom do men say that I am?” is thus the eternal ques- tion, and to this question He explained to us that different answers would be given. Some would see in Christ the prophet or teacher. Others would see in Him the righteous man or example. Their belief is that Christ as example may still be a man, a mere man, a good man, doubtless the best of men; indeed, the perfect man. This is the Christ of the man who cannot accept His “ full-orbed”’ Di- vinity. As He foresaw other things, so did He foresee the faith of a Martineau and an 18 WHO IS CHRIST? Emerson—of those “ Liberals’? who discover in Christ simply a Judaic Rabbi—and of Renan and numerous biographers of Jesus who belong to his school. And as He loved all men, so did He love such men. As He was fair to all men, so was He fair to the man who said that, despite His claims, He was only man. He did not send him to hell. He did not refuse to eat with him; from Simon the Pharisee who entertained Him merely as a man, He asked no more than the usual courtesies extended to a human guest, that His feet be washed and His head anointed with oil. Indeed, He ex- pressly stated that anyone receiving a prophet, in the name of a prophet, shall have the prophet’s reward,—no more, no less. And anyone receiving a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall have a righteous man’s reward—no more and no less.. To such an one, therefore, whatever he may call himself and in whatever church he may be found, Christ offers all that the believer will accept. But He also makes it plain that whoso- ever receives Him without such reservations will receive the God Who sent Him; in other words, that the riches of Christ are unsearchable. Ac- cording to your faith, then, will it be unto you. He does not force you to believe on Him, but He makes it clear that you cannot believe on Him too much. What He can do for you is a bank that you cannot break. And they who limit the Christ WHO IS CHRIST? 19 are thus writing down their own assets. They are impoverishing their higher life. For what is faith? It is not a theory. It is not a proof. It is defined in the Epistle to the Hebrews as “seeing the invisible.’ In other words, faith is eyesight. And sight is instan- taneous. You see a thing or you do not see it; that is the question. What I see of this sheet of paper is not a matter of argument. The paper is here and so am I and I see the paper. Similarly, Christ is here and so am I and I see the Christ. That is faith. Imagine a portrait on your wall. A man comes into your room and tells you that he cannot see it. You then know that he is blind. Another man comes in and says that it is a beautiful study in sepia. You then know that he is colour-blind. He can distinguish between the light and the shade but he cannot see the rainbow. A third man comes in and admires the blue of a feather and the red of a ruby and you know that he has normal eyesight. And a fourth man distinguishes the colours, even when they are intermingled, discovering exquisite trinities of radiance, and in him you have the artist. So with the knowledge of Christ. Some see Him not at all. Others only see Him in monochrome, a man, unadorned by divinity. Others again recognise the divinity but describe it in crude terms. And there are a few who can perceive the very strokes of the Supreme Artist 20 WHO IS CHRIST? and can define the Christ in His fullness, as did Paul, fathoming subtleties of significance of which the rest of us are unconscious. Such are the saints and the mystics who sometimes frame the creeds and sing us our hymns. | It is with Christ as with music. Some are deaf and hear it not at all. Others hear a noise only and cannot tell the tune. They are not deaf but only tone deaf. Others again can tell the tune but are unable to write it into notes. They are like the Christians who worship Christ but have no use for dogmas. And there are a few who can distinguish concurrent melodies and analyse harmonies, finding in them not music alone but language, and these again are the mystics and saints who can put the Christ into words. It is no use arguing with a man who is blind or deaf. It is absurd to perse- cute him. If he has neither sight nor hearing, there is surely a language that he will understand and that language is touch. When words fail, try deeds. In the medieval era, the deed was perse- cution. The heretic was tortured and burned. When Jesus was arrested and Peter with his sword smote off the ear of the High Priest’s servant, Malchus, Our Lord’s touch healed the ear and His saying as they bound Him, “ Suffer ye thus far,” was in its exquisite irony, perhaps the most unanswerable proof of the authentic miracle. For no one could have invented at once that human word and that divine deed, Our WHO IS CHRIST? 21 neighbours may seem to be unable to hear what, as we think, Christ is saying, or to see what, as we think, He is doing, but they can feel; they have sinned and need pardon; in sympathy, in service, in sacrifice, we can still show them the Christ. IT WHAT IS A CHURCH? F I am asked to what Church I belong, I hardly know what to reply. In one sense, I belong to no Church; in another sense, I belong to every — Church. ‘Terms like Catholic, Protestant, Method- ist, Baptist and so on, mean little to me for I find none of them in the New Testament. In the days of the Apostles, there was no Church except the Church of Christ, and how to find that Church was simple. ‘Where two or three are gathered to- gether in my name,” said Our Lord, “there am I in the midst.” Whenever and wherever we meet and think of Him, there is He with us, a present Friend. With the disciples thus awaiting Him at Jerusalem, the tomb itself could not shut Him in, and the closed door of the upper room could not shut Him out. Doubtless it was miracle, but the miracle was a higher law. Amid the forces of nature, His love was an omnipotent force. It was God Himself for God is Love. And this is the reason why St. Paul declares to us “that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be 22 WHAT IS A CHURCH? 28 able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Mankind is gregarious. We have our clubs and colleges and trade unions; and Christ also is hospi- table. He brings us into His banqueting house and His banner over us is love. His spiritual fellow- ship can never be shattered or shaken. While the shells of modern science burst over the ancient cathedrals of faith, the Church was discovered in the unconsecrated timbers of a “Y” hut. In no plainer characters could its charter be engrossed than these—that it is the presence of Christ among men. ‘To those who question His birth, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, He comes with the simple request that at least His presence be ad- mitted amongst us. He stands at the door and knocks. Hence one may find Him with equal certainty in a meeting of Quakers where is silence, or at a Roman Catholic altar where is ceremony, or in a Presbyterian Church where is a sermon. It is not the silence, it is not the ceremony, it is not the ser- mon that draws the Christ, but the congregation. What that congregation believes about baptism or the apostolic succession or even about the mystery of Christ’s own Person, does not alter His love. One might compare a church with a hospital, where are assembled all sorts and conditions of men and women who are drawn together, not by affection for one another, not by a common opinion, but by 24 WHAT IS A CHURCH? a common need of, and trust in, a great physician. Such a physician does not distinguish between His patients—saying to this one that he is too unsound of doctrine to be welcome and to that one that he has sinned too deeply in his life. No. ‘ Him that cometh unto me,” says He, “I will in no wise cast out.” ‘The mistake made by Roman Catholics does not consist in asserting too strongly the Real Pres- ence of Christ in their worship. He vs there present. Where the Catholic goes wrong is in denying Christ’s presence in other Churches than his own. It is not that the Roman Christ is too great; He is not as great as the Christ universal. Hence, to those who argue over the Christ of yesterday and to those who contend earnestly for the Christ of tomorrow, I suggest that, first of all, they should make sure of the Christ of today. In- evitably, the Christ of yesterday recedes into the distance of passing time. And over the Christ of tomorrow, there are also differences, for the Christ of tomorrow has not yet appeared. Over history and over prophecy, therefore, we argue and some- times go so far as to quarrel, but over worship and duty, we are able to agree; for in worship and duty we meet no distant Christ who was once, or will be sometime, but the Christ Who is, here and now. In the New Testament, therefore, the presence of Christ dissolved at once all doubts and all distinc- tions. Simon Zelotes became more than a religious zealot, and Peter, the fisherman, became a fisher of WHAT IS A CHURCH? 25 men. We should therefore avoid these labels— modernist, fundamentalist, premillenialist—each of which emphasises one, and only one, aspect of truth. Doubtless we should be up-to-date. Doubt- less our foundations should be sure. And doubtless we have a living hope of His return amongst us. But Christ is all these things and more than all. And in the New Testament, I can find—within the Early Church—a mention of only one label—the Nicolaitines, who flourished in the congregation of Pergamos. St. John tells us that the Nicolaitines had a doctrine, and it is, perhaps, strange that no one has discovered what that doctrine was. It may have been conservative; it may have been liberal; it may have been orthodox, it may have been latitu- dinarian; but in any event, God hated it. And why? Because it was Nicolaitine. It was of Nicolas and not of Christ. Whatever of truth there was in it and whatever of falsity, it obscured the Redeemer. Nicolas? Who was Nicolas? Was Nicolas crucified for Pergamos? Even Paul pro- tests that he, the Apostle to the Gentiles, was not so crucified for Corinth. Here was the majesty of the Saviour, thrown, as it were, on the screen by the light of God’s Spirit, and suddenly Nicolas pokes his head into the field of illumination and casts his own black shadow on to the Countenance Divine. Nicolas is the eternal symbol of contro- versial egotism—the big “I” instead of the Great Himself. 26 WHAT IS A CHURCH? It is indeed worth remembering that the follow- ers of Christ themselves were not called Christians until, years after the Ascension, they reached Anti- och. At the Jordan, where Christ was baptised, on the Mount where He was transfigured, in the Garden where He was tempted, near the Cross where He died and before the Tomb where He rose from the dead, His friends were content to be His “ disciples ’’—people taught by Him—and His “apostles ’’—people sent by Him. It was the world that insisted on their assuming the name of a sect, like the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Ag- nostics. And it is the mistake that the world has always made. Where Christ says “all ye are brethren,” the world replies that some must be rich and others poor; some are French and others Ger- man; some are black and others white; some are sound in faith and others unsound, all of which means that the goodwill of Christ is frustrated by human frontiers, that will have to be broken down. For we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own, And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own. In Turkey—to give one instance—it is remark- able that while Armenian Christians are massacred and Greek Christians deported, American Chris- tians are welcomed. And why? Because the Greeks and the Armenians fought their battle for WHAT IS A CHURCH? 27 Christ with creeds and with labels and with cere- monies—fought it heroically and to the death— whereas Americans fought the same battle for Christ with colleges and hospitals and schools, let- ting their service fall, like the rain from heaven, on Moslem and Christian alike. And the result is that we are beginning to see a new idea of conver- sion to Christ. Our missionaries are less inclined than they were to compass sea and land to make one proselyte who shall be labelled a Christian, and aim rather at offering Christ to the Moslem, as a Moslem, to the Buddhist, as a Buddhist, to the Jew, as a Jew. Christ did not destroy the religion of His own people but fulfilled it. And as He ful- filled the Hebrew faith, so does He fulfil all faiths, purging them of the wrong and perfecting them in the right. The Christian whose background is Moses, or Buddha, or Confucius, or Mohammed, will not be the same as we whose background was Wodin and Thor. Then the manner of worship in church makes no difference? I do not say so. Everything that is different from anything else makes a difference. There was once a brilliant architect who designed a beautiful church which had but one fault, namely, that you could not hear what was said from the pulpit. That was doubtless merely a detail, but it was an important detail, for a congregation cannot receive a Gospel which they do not hear. Simi- larly, | entered a church the other day because I 28 WHAT IS A CHURCH? wanted to find a place where I might read a few verses from the Bible. It was a beautiful church, like the other, and again, it had but one fault, namely, that you could not see to read in it. It was all that it ought to be, except that it was devoid of light. In order to read the Bible, I found that I had to keep outside that church. The ceremonies, the organisation, the creeds, the music, the sacraments, the sermons, the Sunday Schools, the religious orders—everything about a church —should be subjected to this one test, namely, whether thereby the Christ is revealed or obscured. That, and that alone, is what matters. In every act of worship, of teaching, of social service, the aim should be to set forth the Redeemer to those who have yet to know Him more perfectly. We are too ready to suppose that the cause of Christ is to be advanced by the scrutiny of manu- scripts and by learned discourses and abstruse metaphysics. There are preachers who think that when they use the word “ Christocentric,” they have said a bigger and newer thing than St. John said when he told us of Christ being in our midst. Words like Christology and “ Christocentric”’ are mere pedantic paraphrases for the splendid sim- plicity of a Bible, expressed for the most part in vivid Saxon. “ Are you a premillenialist?’? I am asked, and I answer, “‘I cannot understand such long words. I am merely a one-syllable Chris- tian.”’ I remember well that, at the outbreak of WHAT IS A CHURCH? 29 the war, there arose in the British Parliament the question what would be the best design for the new paper money. And some people suggested a design so complicated that nobody would be able to forge a counterfeit. Mr. Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, then stated that according to the experience of the Bank of Eng- land, the simplest signature on a note was the hardest to imitate. It is the simple Christ Who must be genuine. The presence of Christ is thus what makes the difference between the Christian Church and either the Mosque or the Synagogue. It may be true that their windows are open to the plain light of a dis- tant Deity, whose truth and justice and power shine cold upon the worshippers. The windows of a Christian Church are, however, illuminated for- ever with the Supreme Figure of the Founder, accompanied by His saints, apostles, and martyrs. In the morning, as the sun shines into the church, the faithful see Him, and are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. In the evening, as the inner light of the Church shines forth into the darkness, the world sees Him and that same great cloud of witnesses. "The Christ that the Church sees and worships, is the Christ that the Church shows. If the pattern of the window be unduly elaborated, if it be overloaded with ornament, if it be crowded with detail, then, the Christ may be lost in the design, or His Being may be cramped 30 WHAT IS A CHURCH? into angular and impotent attitudes. To clear away whatever complicates His simple love and His simple power, is thus the frequently recurring task of those who wish to be His witnesses. The artist painting a portrait does not study optics. He looks earnestly at the face. Til WHY READ THE BIBLE? BOUT the Bible, there is this advantage, that whether we go to church or not, we can carry it with us everywhere and make it our constant companion. If, then, we neglect the Bible, the responsibility for so doing is entirely our own. That the Bible is so neglected, cannot be denied. Most of us are too busy with other mat- ters to find time to read the Bible and we are con- tent, therefore, with the verses which the minister still includes in “the preliminaries,’ as they are called, of public worship. What has alienated us from the Bible is not an intellectual difficulty over its contents but the paramount claim of the auto- mobile, the country club, and the making of money to pay for these things. We are content, therefore, with an easier litera- ture and are much relieved in our minds when learned or pretentious persons tell us that the Bible has ceased to be trustworthy; is full of errors; and may now be discarded. That comforting theory sets us free for golf on Sunday; and, as we tramp around the links, we thoroughly approve of the latest scholarship. We need not learn the Bible 31 82 WHY READ THE BIBLE? any longer for ourselves, and we need not teach the Bible any longer to others. It is a most happy release from reverence to God and service to man. And the sequel for society—for the nation—for mankind? One wonders! It is possible that, in this mood, we under- estimate the Bible. Far be it from me to deal hastily with anyone who is troubled with doubts, — but life is really too short for time to be wasted on what the Psalmist calls “the fool’ who cannot or will not admit that the Bible is unique. ‘That the Bible stands alone among books, is common ground with everybody who is anybody, and it is merely in passing, therefore, that one mentions one or two illustrative facts. A hundred and fifty years ago, there was the French Revolution and an outburst of Rationalism. Immediately there arose, for the first time, the Bible Societies which translated this obsolete vol- ume into every language, whether written or un- written, on the face of the earth; and momentous have been the results. In India and the East, the Bible is more read than any other book ever has been or ever will be; China alone has absorbed ninety million copies. Gandhi, the mystic, and Sun- Yat-Sen, the statesman, are both of them read- ers of the Bible. In earlier days, there may have been a time when, in English-speaking countries, a ruler could afford to be ignorant of the Bible, but with the progress of enlightenment, the Bible has WHY READ THE BIBLE? 33 become an essential, at any rate, in the English- speaking world. All recent Prime Ministers in Britain—Gladstone, Rosebery, Salisbury, Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Baldwin have been men of the Bible, and every recent American President—McKinley, Taft, Roosevelt, Wilson, Harding and Coolidge—has taken good care to be acquainted with the volume on which he swears his loyalty to the United States. When H. G. Wells proposes to compile a new Bible, a popu- lar magazine manages to market the idea for pre- cisely one month, but during that very month, the circulation of the old Bible exceeds that of the popular magazine. Then we have Conan Doyle suggesting a Bible without the Old Testament, which idea also lasts for one month, only to be followed by De Mille’s. great film, The Ten Com- mandments. And when someone organises a de- bate on the Inspiration of the Bible, the newspapers report it and the radio broadcasts it as fully as the most sensational of international prize fights. In every generation, there are similar evidences to the ineradicable fascination of the Bible. Schol- ars slay the Book but it rises from the dead. And from all this it follows that the question to be answered on the Bible is essentially the same ques- tion that we must answer on Christ. Beyond dis- pute, He was the best Man, and beyond dispute, this is the best Book. ‘Then was the best Man, and is the best Book merely human or also divine? Is 34 WHY READ THE BIBLE? the Bible and is the Christ to be accepted as the Word of God? Was the Man God incarnate? Was the Book divinely inspired? ‘That, in plain terms, is the issue. To this question on the Bible, three answers have been given. First: there are those who value the Bible as a supreme literature, inspired by genius as other great literature is inspired ; and that is so far, so good. Secondly: there are those who find the Bible to be more than other literature, however noble it be, and declare that the Bible contains the Word of God. And that goes further and is better. Thirdly, and my own belief is: that the Bible, con- sisting of sixty-six books written during fifteen centuries or more, and moulded and selected by the inspired piety of fifty generations of worshipful people, is now to be trusted, for life here and here- after, as wholly and in all its parts, the revelation of God to man, of man to himself and of the uni- verse to us who dwell within it. It was in that belief that they to whom I owe my being lived and died, leaving an example of faith and duty which I find to be indeed rare, and I have proved that belief myself by seeking in vain for any passage in the Bible which fails to yield an abundant harvest, in mental stimulus, moral encouragement or spirit- ual satisfaction, for whatever time and thought I may have devoted to it. The difficulties in the Bible, as they are called, fall under three heads, first : the miracles; secondly : WHY READ THE BIBLE? 35 the mistakes; thirdly: the lapses in ethics. For the man ,who regards the Bible merely as literature, none of these offer any perplexity because he takes the Bible no more seriously than he takes his Homer or his Shakespeare. For the man who says that the Bible contains the Word of God, the diff- culties are, again, simplified because whenever he encounters one, he can say that the passage in ques- tion is not part of God’s Word to him. If, then, you wish to skim the surface of life instead of soaring to its heights and peering into its depths, you can adopt a theory of the Bible which will enable you to enjoy much of the Scripture without troubling about the rest. Indeed, it is an abundant banquet that this Book provides, and no one, living or dead, has yet exhausted that illimitable and varied “ bread of life.” Even for him who wishes to run as he reads, there is offered a choice of food. The fact that somebody announces a mistake in ethics in Exodus does not affect the Twenty-third Psalm. And the fate of the Gadarene swine need not cancel the Sermon on the Mount. The Bible is like a tree which grew with the centuries, reaching forth its branches to greet God’s sun. Pick the fruit, then, which is nearest to hand. And, for the moment, do not worry about that which seems to be beyond your reach. When you have made that part of the Bible which you can understand and enjoy your own, then it will be time enough to consider the rest. 36 WHY READ THE BIBLE? If, however, I am not myself content with se- lected passages from the Bible, the reason is, first and foremost, that in this matter, I must give due weight to the example of Jesus who accepted His Bible as a whole. Our Lord lived in an era when the best in Greek and Roman literature was avail- able. And yet His perfect character was nourished entirely on the Old Testament which was His only library. In the prophecies of Isaiah, He heard the call to His public career. In the law of Moses, He found His defence against the Tempter. In the Book of Jonah, and indeed in Jonah’s whale itself, He discovered the sign of His resurrection. And in the Sermon on the Mount, there is not an idea which you may not trace to those ancient Hebrew Scriptures. When Our Lord talked with His friends, He did not enter into bitter argument over the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible. What He said was, “ Search the Scriptures.” ‘“‘ Have ye never read,’ He would ask, ‘‘ what David did?” Did they not remember that in the beginning God created them male and female? If only they had known what was read to them on the Sabbath day, they would have understood the Christ. It was not their opinions of the Bible that He condemned but their ignorance of its pages. And this is the ignorance that confronts us today. At the University of Cambridge when I was an undergraduate, a number of us met every week to read the Bible itself. All forms of faith and of WHY READ THE BIBLE? 37 doubt and of denial, then current, were to be found in this little company, but whether we accepted or criticised or rejected the Gospel of St. John, we did at least know what it contained. We concealed neither our dogmas nor our heresies. And an open Bible, openly discussed, was thus a part of what has been called a liberal education. At Toynbee Hall, in East London, I have spent many an evening around the fireside, talking over the prob- lems of life with men drawn from Eastern Europe _and elsewhere, whose knowledge of English was imperfect and, in every such discussion, it made all the difference that I was able to quote the Bible. For twenty years in England, my Sundays were devoted to teaching or addressing audiences of working men—for the most part, actual trade unionists—and, again, what I gave them was simply the Bible. Anyone who masters any part of the Bible for himself has something of value to share with others. What Our Lord said to the lawyer was not “how does your rabbi or clergyman read the Bible?” but “ how readest thou?” He asks us to give Him our own first-hand opinion of Scripture and not what somebody else has told us to believe. Indeed, He bade us “ take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.” The Pharisees were the fundamentalists of that day who wore phylacteries in which every syllable of the Scriptures was held to be sacred; who yet con- 38 WHY READ THE BIBLE? fined their attention to such favourite texts, so ignoring the social and industrial message of Scrip- ture and overlooking that command to love one an- other which Paul put before prophecy and even before faith and hope. On the other hand, the Sadducees were modernists who taught that, ac- cording to the latest results of Greek philosophy, there was “no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit.” To both these groups Christ declared that, by their tradition, they made the law of God to be of none effect. In obedience to Christ, therefore, I read the Bible with my own eyes, refusing to wear either the spectacles or the blinkers offered by scholars, critics and popular novelists. For consider the fundamentalist attitude. Not long ago, I read for myself the Book of Revelation. I was amazed by what seemed to me to be its mod- ern significance. There was not a verse that I did not find in the newspapers. And I wrote a book to this effect. A friend told me that I must not ex- pect any wide circulation for this volume. “ The Premillenialists,”’ said he, ‘‘ will not read it because your phrases are not theirs, and others will not read it because they are afraid of the controversies of the Premillenialists.” In other words, the Chris- tian Church leaves the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to Ibafiez who uses the image for what has been the most widely distributed novel and the most widely attended motion picture of our time. The Pharisees, on the one ‘hand, and the Sadducees, WHY READ THE BIBLE? 39 on the other, have closed a book of vision which inspired Dante, the greatest poet of Italy, Milton, the greatest poet of England, Isaac Newton, the greatest of England’s scientists, and Michael Angelo, who was among the greatest of artists. It is, indeed, lamentable that in a highly civilised land where there is supposed to be the latest improve- ment in schools and colleges, generations should enter mature life without any appreciation of the most radiant symbolism which has ever illuminated the genius of our race. At school and the university, I studied mathe- matics and only mathematics, for seven years. It was a narrow and an intensive curriculum which, however, did at least impress on the mind what is meant by a proof. After that stern discipline, I confess that I have been amazed by some at least of the flimsy deductions of the more pretentious scholarship. Because some German says a thing, it is supposed to be so. But there is no mind less reliable on such deduction than the German mind. I well remember meeting Professor Masaryk, as he then was, who is now President of Czecho- Slovakia. He advanced the belief that Britain is a Protectionist country and I asked him how he could have arrived at any such conclusion? His answer was that he had made a close study of British finance, as set forth by the most authori- tative German economists. Now here was a man of genuine learning who 40 WHY READ THE BIBLE? had been taught by German professors the precise reverse of the plain facts. During the war, what was essentially the same dossier of diplomatic docu- ments—everyone of them admittedly genuine—was examined by theological experts, first in Germany, then in Britain. And on those documents, the experts delivered diametrically opposite judgments. There is a scholarship that adds definitely to ascer- tained knowledge. Such scholarship should be wel- comed, and there is nothing to be feared from it. But when the scholar theorises, he has no more authority than the layman who theorises. And as a science, the theories of scholarship vary with every decade and could not well be less exactly ascertained. ‘There is nothing for the layman to do but take the Bible afresh, forget the critics and the critics of the critics, and read the Book for himself. The other day, I talked with a Sunday school teacher who had perused The Outline of History, by H. G. Wells, and—so he explained—had de- rived from it one great thought, namely, that Paul made it his task to reduce Christ to a system of theology. I asked him whether he or Wells had seriously read St. Paul’s Epistles? He confessed that he had not, and that he could give no guaran- tee for Wells. I then told him that the impression which I had derived from those Epistles was that Paul was anxious to do the exact opposite of what he said that Wells suggested; that he set himself WHY READ THE BIBLE? 41 not to bind Christ by dogmas but to liberate Him from dogmas; that this was the reason of His con- troversies with the Jewish Christians and of the more passionate quarrel with the Jews who were not Christians; and that for this reason He was arrested and ultimately lost his life. I do not ask others to agree wtih my view, as thus stated, or to disagree with the other view, but it is obvious that what I have found in St. Paul is not what my friend found in H. G. Wells. The Outline of History was widely circulated. It was bold and it was interesting, and it shook the faith of many. But already there are hints that it is far from reliable. I did, however, refresh my memory of the few pages which Wells is able to spare for what he considers to be that compara- tively trifling phenomenon called Christianity. He advances the view that our faith was developed from the cult of Serapis-Isis-Horus on the Nile, and that the redemption of the world originated, not on the Cross of Calvary, but in the Temple of Karnak. When Isaac Watts wrote his hymn about “the fountain filled with blood,’ he was. sub- consciously perpetuating the rites of Mithraism. About this thesis, thus advanced with an immense show of spectacular erudition, what I would say is, that everyone knows that between all religions, there are certain correspondences. E;veryone is influenced by everything, and everything is in- fluenced by everything and everybody else. In that 42 WHY READ THE BIBLE? general sense, I am writing these words under the subtle telepathy of the Grand Llama of Tibet. But when we leave hypotheses behind and come down to facts, we find that Paul was not a Greek or a Hellene, born or bred at Alexandria, but a Jew of the Jews, born at Tarsus and educated at Jerusa- lem in the strictest sect of the Pharisees; that so far as we have any record, he never visited Egypt at all, and that in 0 reported writing or saying of his does he once mention Egypt; that after his con- version, he retired alone not to Egypt but to Arabia; and that while he met Apollos from Alex- andria, it was only after his views had been ma- tured; and what happened was that he had to explain to Apollos, who only knew the Baptism of John, the very fulness of Christ’s gospel, including the gift of the Holy Spirit, which, apparently, Apollos ought to have learned at Karnak. When therefore I am offered as “ history ” the substitution of Karnak for Calvary or the addition of Karnak to Calvary, I take the precaution to verify the other man’s quotations. What he tells me about the Bible is not a sufficient substitute for the Bible itself, IV IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? N a previous chapter, I have admitted frankly that there are hard places in the Bible. I said that these difficulties might be divided into three classes, first: the miracles; secondly: the al- leged mistakes; thirdly: the alleged lapses from ethics and morality. On the miracles, I will say a word at a later stage. Here it is enough to remark that if they occurred, the Scriptures would not have been a witness of truth, had they omitted the facts merely because the facts were unusual. The report of a miracle is only an error if the miracle did not happen. If the miracle did happen, to report it is a duty to science as science dawns from day to day. As to the “errors’”’ of fact and morals, let us realise at the outset that there are two kinds of Bible. First, we have sacred volumes like the Maxims of Confucius, the Koran and the Book of Mormon which were offered to the faithful as they stand—every colon exact and unalterable as the Constitution of the United States of America. These bibles have had great influence, but the trouble with them is that we must accept them without question or reservation. They do not per- 43 A IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? suade or convince; they command; and the religion or life, sustained on such diet, is static. It lacks initiative. The reason is suspended and atrophied. In the words of St. Paul, “‘ the letter killeth.”’ The Jewish Bible was not written, therefore, all at once or once for all. In it, we have a nation, thinking aloud. And no nation, thus thinking aloud, thinks only of God or of good or of truth or of right. The very inspiration of the Bible con- sists in the ruthless candour with which man is there able to hold the mirror of truth to his own face. A king and Oriental autocrat like David sins with Bathsheba, and in the Bible we can read per- haps the only Court Circular, ever issued, which states the scandal as it happened, that informs the world that the next king, Solomon, is the son of an adulteress. If then a society which sustains one divorce for every ten marriages turns shy at such plain speaking, the reason may not be wholly dis- creditable to the Bible. When a poet, carried cap- tive into exile, is moved to hatred of his Baby- lonian oppressor, no censor stays his imprecatory pen as he prays that the babes be dashed against the stones. He is the Maeterlinck who refuses to assist the German intellectuals, or the Belgian dip- lomat who declines to accompany a German into the President’s dining room, or the French Prime Minister who cannot bring himself to discuss reparations. The landscape enervates which is all green pastures and still waters. In the Bible, he IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? AB who has the courage is invited “ o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone.” He is confronted by a scenery of wild and impressive grandeur. Life is not easy and the Bible would not be the Book of Life if it were free from obstacles. It is thus the peculiar merit of the Bible that it challenges enquiry, it provokes doubt, it disturbs a too placid faith, it forces us to face the riddle of our existence. We criticise; we question; we re- pudiate; but we are gripped. The Bible is like some inescapable drama. We cannot explain Ham- let but we cannot avoid seeing him. It is the Bible, therefore, beyond all other litera- tures that has moved the archzologist to unveil the past. It is in the holy lands, as they are called, that the origins of history have been first uncovered. Inspiration is thus two-fold. The Scriptures are inspired and the Scriptures also inspire. You can- not enter a museum, you cannot walk through a gallery of pictures, you cannot collect tapestries or admire carvings, you cannot study architecture, history, or poetry, and you cannot stroll by moun- tain, stream or forest without losing some measure of appreciation unless the Bible be the background of the brain. The Bible is a book, therefore, that demands and evokes from the reader the highest intelligence. It is intended, not to dispense with the mind but to be a gymnastic for the mind. So exacting is the standard of common sense required by Scripture 46 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? that in the opinion of the Roman Catholic Church, the individual cannot be trusted, of himself, to in- terpret the Bible. Among Protestants, the reading of the Bible is or ought to be assisted by an humble dependence on God’s Holy Spirit. The proud man, whose will has never been surrendered to what is higher than himself, will stumble and com- plain as he treads this hard and upward path. But the reverent man, as he climbs, will breathe an in- vigorating air and his eye will be satisfied by an ever extending prospect. Some of the difficulties found in the Bible are the fault of the reader. Many of such “hard places” have been long familiar to students. But I am writing also for laymen to whom these alleged discrepancies are offered constantly as arguments against the Bible, and a few illustrations may be useful as showing how one reader of the Scriptures, at any rate, ap- proaches these passages. It is, perhaps, only by definite examples that the general argument can be made clear. We are told that the four Evangelists give four versions of what Pilate wrote over the crucified Christ, namely : Matthew—“ This is Jesus the King of the Jews.” Mark—*“ The King of the Jews.” Luke—‘* This is the King of the Jews.” John—“ Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Apparently, it is forgotten that the inscription IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? A? was written in three languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, which circumstance, in itself, disposes of the point raised. But that is not all. The very fact that the inscription is thus quoted with slight and immaterial variation is enough to indicate to any judge in acourt of law that there were four witnesses of the crucifixion who reported inde- pendently and without collusion, and not only one witness. And this means that there was a four- fold witness of the resurrection. It is thus unsafe to assume that an apparent discrepancy weakens the evidences of Scripture. It may multiply its reliability many times. similarly, with the varying accounts of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Here also was an event involving the deepest and most sudden emotions. And Paul described it under conditions of severe oratorical stress. The fact that he and his friends told what they saw and what they heard, without premeditation and con- spiracy to deceive, would be far more convincing to a lawyer trained in the validity of evidence than a cooked up story in which, as Lord Melbourne said to his cabinet, the rule was, “ Gentlemen, it does not matter what we say, provided that we all say the same thing.” One account states that the bystanders heard the voice. Another account states that they “ heard not the voice that spake.’ It is a fair assumption that the bystanders heard the voice but could not distinguish the words, And a single 48 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? question from a cross-examining attorney would have elicited, probably, that solution from the witnesses. Take another case. In II Samuel vi: 23, we are told that “ Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of her death”; whereas, in II Samuel xxi: 8, we read that Michal, the daughter of Saul, had five sons. An “error” and a most instructive error. How is it explained? In the second passage, a certain Adriel is mentioned as the father of those five sons. Now Adriel was husband, not of Michal, but of her sister, Merab. And it is plain that in this case the pen of a copyist slipped, from which apparent mishap we learn this astonishing fact that the Bible is the only book in which a remote and trifling error by some weary scribe of thousands of years ago assumes an im- portance that in the twentieth century, requires its public discussion in the greatest and richest city ever built, a discussion broadcast for millions by radio—printed for millions in the secular press— and calculated to mark an epoch in the spiritual evolution of the race. If you had sought an argument for literal in- spiration, you could not have found one more pow- erful and dramatic. For here we see the eternal significance of what our Lord called each jot and each tittle. And what has been the result of such “errors’’? They have drawn the finest brains to the task of textual compilation of the Bible and — a IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 49 today there is no book, ancient or modern, in which the original versions have been examined with a care approaching that which has been devoted to the Scriptures. In the present instance, we can almost certainly restore the original and true script by correcting “ Michal ” to ‘“ Merab.”’ Another “mistake” in the Bible is only men- tioned here because it has been seriously insisted upon by “scholars.”” We are told that in Genesis a serpent is said to eat dust whereas serpents don’t eat dust! As a matter of fact, there is a much worse “‘ mistake”’ than that, for Isaiah talks about kings and queens licking the dust, which is not a habit of queens and kings. Indeed, few of us re- porters describe a prize fight without saying that one or other combatant bites the dust. And this again is not a custom of prize fighters. There is not a literature, anywhere, that does not employ metaphor, and the metaphors of the Bible are supreme. This of the serpent eating dust is one of them. It means that evil feeds on that which dies—the passions, the lies, the lusts, which are carnal—the dust and not the soul. That the Jews exceeded their contemporaries in an accurate observation and love of nature, is ad- mitted by all whose opinion counts. The Bible has been the inspiration of Natural History and only in lands where it is read, have we great collections of such objects and animals. But it is, none the less, objected that in Leviticus xi:6, the hare is 50 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? said to chew the cud, whereas the hare does not chew the cud but only makes motions with his lips that might indicate this habit. Here, again, is a perplexity that instructs. The Jews decided to live on a selected diet. And there is not a doctor, today, who will deny that they were right. Leav- ing Egypt, they saw the hare. It seemed to fall into the class of unclean animals. And they took no risks. In the words of St. Paul, they “ ab- stained from all appearance of evil.” They were careful to err, if at all, on the right side—an example not wholly without value in days when Prohibition is under enforcement. So with the statement in Leviticus that grass- hoppers, crickets and locusts have four feet. If anyone seriously believes that the writer did not know of insects having six feet, he is entitled to that impression. The point of the passage is obvi- ously that these insects were to be distinguished from birds which “go” on two feet! No one reading the verses could be under any doubt as to what flying things he might or might not eat. So much has been said of Scriptural inaccuracy and the impossibility of an exact inspiration that, at the risk of wearying myself and the reader, I will add one or two other illustrations of “ errors ” in the Bible on which critics—even scholarly crit- ics—rely. In Romans ii: 11, we are told that “‘ there is no respect of persons with God.” But in Romans IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 51 ix: 13, we read “ Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’ And this is held to be proof that St. Paul was not in the Spirit when he wrote his Epistle. ‘The answer here is, of course, that a judge on the bench should have no respect of persons, but that he should certainly distinguish between an innocent man anda guilty man. If God had less respect for Esau than He had for Jacob, it is because Jacob had more respect than Esau for God. Another is this: In Genesis xxii: 1, we are told that God did tempt Abraham. But in James 1: 13, we read that God tempts nobody. The answer is here, again, to be found in the experience of every day.