THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 OF THE BIBLE 
 
 GEORGE P. ECKMAN 
 
fr 
 
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 STUDIES IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 
 
 FIRST SERIES, CHAPTERS I-XII 
 
 SAME, SECOND SERIES, CHAPTERS XIII-XXI 
 
 Crown 8vo, each, net, $1.00 
 
1Lecture, 
 Jieltbereb at Be$auto 
 
 THE 
 
 LITERARY PRIMACY 
 OF THE BIBLE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE P. ECKMAN 
 
 THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 

 / 
 
 c. 
 
 Copyright, 1915, by 
 GEORGE P. ECKMAN 
 
 The Bible text printed in italics in this volume is taken from 
 the American Standard Edition of the Revised Bible, Copyright, 
 1901, by Thomas Nelson & Sons, and is used by permission. 
 

 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 MY FATHER 
 
 WHO TAUGHT ME TO VEN- 
 ERATE THE SCRIPTURES 
 AND ENCOURAGED ME TO 
 "PREACH THE WORD" 
 
 359894 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 FOREWORD . . . 9 
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 11 
 
 I. THE LITERARY PRIMACY OF THE BIBLE . 13 
 
 II. THE POETRY AND ORATORY OF THE BIBLE 48 
 
 III. THE FICTION AND HUMOR OF THE BIBLE . 86 
 
 IV. THE BIBLE THE MOST PERSISTENT FORCE 
 
 IN LITERATURE 122 
 
 V. THE BIBLE AS ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL 
 
 LITERATURE 153 
 
 VI. THE BIBLE AS INSPIRED LITERATURE 181 
 
FOEEWORD 
 
 THE late Reverend Marmaduke H. Menden- 
 hall, D.D., of the North Indiana Conference 
 of the Methodist Episcopal Church, donated 
 to DePauw University the sum of ten thou- 
 sand dollars, the purpose and conditions of 
 which gift are set forth in his bequest as 
 follows : 
 
 The object of this gift is "to found a per- 
 petual lectureship on the evidences of the 
 Divine Origin of Christianity, to be known as 
 the Mendenhall Foundation. The income from 
 this fund shall be used for the support of an 
 Annual Lectureship, the design of which 
 shall be the exhibition of the proofs, from all 
 sources, of the Divine Origin, Inspiration, and 
 Authority of the Holy Scriptures. The course 
 of lectures shall be delivered annually before 
 the University and the public without any 
 charge for admission. 
 
 "The lecturers shall be chosen by an elect- 
 ing body consisting of the President of the 
 University, the five senior members of the 
 Faculty of the College of Liberal Arts, and 
 the President of the Board of Trustees, sub- 
 ject to the approval of the Board of Bishops 
 
 9 
 
10 FOREWORD 
 
 of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The lec- 
 turers must be persons of high and wide re- 
 pute, of broad and varied scholarship, who 
 firmly adhere to the evangelical system of 
 Christian faith. The selection of lecturers 
 may be made from the world of Christian 
 scholarship without regard to denominational 
 divisions. Each course of lectures is to be 
 published in book form by an eminent publish- 
 ing house and sold at cost to the Faculty and 
 students of the University." 
 
 GEORGE R. GROSE, 
 President of DePauw University. 
 
INTEODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 WITHIN the limits of a half dozen addresses 
 it was impossible to treat with any fullness 
 the theme of these lectures. They were merely 
 intended to be suggestive of the vast and fruit- 
 ful field which lies open to every student of 
 literature. 
 
 The citations from the Scriptures which are 
 used as examples are chiefly from the Ameri- 
 can Standard Version. 
 
 The discussion on "The Humor of the Bible" 
 is largely a reprint of an article from the pen of 
 the lecturer which appeared several years ago 
 in the Methodist Review, and is used by per- 
 mission of the publishers. 
 
 11 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE LITERARY PRIMACY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 "SURELY in vain the net is spread in the 
 sight of any bird." Nevertheless, the purpose 
 of these lectures must be frankly avowed. At 
 the risk of committing a strategic blunder, it 
 must be confessed at the outset that their in- 
 tention is to lure those who receive them into 
 reading the Bible in precisely the same way 
 they would peruse any other literature which 
 they desired to understand and enjoy. 
 
 This is something which the present genera- 
 tion of Americans is not extensively doing. 
 The Bible is still assigned the supreme place 
 in the literature of the world by those who 
 are most competent to judge. When men of 
 letters are asked to name the books which have 
 powerfully affected their intellectual develop- 
 ment they almost invariably mention the Bible. 
 The larger number of our colleges and uni- 
 versities insist on placing it among the indis- 
 pensable text-books of their curricula. Its 
 general and particular excellences as litera- 
 ture, its historical significance, its influence 
 upon civilization, the reproductive energy it 
 
 13 
 
14 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 has displayed in the literatures of many lands, 
 its supremacy in the realm of ethics and reli- 
 gion, make it requisite to any sound scheme of 
 culture. The conviction of Dr. Eliphalet Nott 
 has never been discredited "Men cannot be 
 well educated without the Bible." Perhaps 
 there was never a period in modern times when 
 the Scriptures were so intensively studied by 
 numerous small groups of learners, or when in 
 our own country there existed so great a 
 quantity of classes or companies organized 
 specifically for the examination of biblical 
 teaching as the present. Yet something has 
 happened to the Bible in the last few decades 
 which has retired it from that position as a 
 book for popular reading which it formerly 
 held, and which it is sure to occupy again when 
 a clearer apprehension of its worth reaches 
 the masses of mankind. Although the Bible 
 is the "best seller" in the book market, it is 
 probably the least read of any book in the 
 world in proportion to the number of copies 
 produced and owned. What Spurgeon said 
 of England may be as appropriately uttered 
 with respect to America: "The Bible is in 
 every house, but in many the dust on it is so 
 thick that you might write on it: Damna- 
 tion." Among the contemptuous designations 
 applied to the Oxford Methodists constituting 
 the Holy Club was that of "Bible Moths." 
 
OF THE BIBLE 15 
 
 Comparatively few persons in any sect deserve 
 such an epithet now. 
 
 The elder Disraeli, in his Curiosities of 
 Literature, referring to the hostility of the 
 Roman Catholic authorities toward granting 
 the laity freedom to scan the Scriptures, 
 speaks of a Spanish author as affirming that 
 "if a person should come to his bishop to ask 
 for leave to read the Bible, with the best inten- 
 tion, the bishop should answer him from Matt. 
 20. 22, 'You know not what you ask. 7 " In 
 our day, on the other hand, it is required that 
 we should constantly admonish the people to 
 whom the Bible is an unfamiliar book, "You 
 do not know what you are losing." 
 
 "I may not," says Father Eustace in Scott's 
 The Monastery, concerning a copy of the Scrip- 
 tures, "so far forget the living in my cares for 
 the dead, as to leave behind me that book, 
 which is to the ignorant what, to our first 
 parents, the tree of knowledge of good and evil 
 unhappily proved excellent indeed in itself, 
 but fatal because used by those to whom it is 
 prohibited." 
 
 At the end of the twelfth century Pope 
 Innocent III, when denying the privilege of 
 Bible reading to the laity, uses the unap- 
 proachable sanctity of Mount Sinai as a figure 
 representing the holiness of the Scriptures 
 which must not be profaned by the touch of 
 
16 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 a secular finger, quoting for his purpose from 
 Exod. 19. 12, 13: "Take heed to yourselves, 
 that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the 
 border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount 
 shall be surely put to death; no hand shall 
 touch him, but he shall surely be stoned, or 
 shot through; whether it be beast or man, he 
 shall not live." A life punishment should 
 await the layman guilty of a sacrilegious 
 appropriation of the Scriptures. 
 
 The spirit of our age is such, at least in 
 America, that if the Bible were a prohibited 
 book, the demand for it would be enormous, 
 and the clandestine searching of its contents 
 would be one of the most frequent diversions 
 of the young. But as even the Roman Church 
 has loosened its restrictions regarding Bible 
 reading by its communicants in many coun- 
 tries, going so far as to provide in some in- 
 stances translations in the vernacular of the 
 people for their convenience, and as there are 
 no other civil or ecclesiastical sovereignties in 
 civilized lands forbidding the use of the Scrip- 
 tures to the unlearned or uninitiated, this 
 provocative to acquaintance with the Bible is 
 lacking. Some different appeal to the inquisi- 
 tiveness of the human mind is required, and 
 among persons of refined taste an adequate 
 one should be found in the literary primacy of 
 the book itself. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 17 
 
 The very ease with which the Bible may 
 now be obtained betrays many people into the 
 mistake of neglecting a literature w r hich they 
 would take great pains to know, if it were 
 difficult to acquire; just as certain wonders 
 in nature are disregarded by those living 
 nearest them, while travelers come thousands 
 of miles for the privilege of beholding them. 
 In the days of primitive Christianity, as 
 Chrysostom relates, women and children often 
 carried the Gospels or other parts of the New 
 Testament hung around their necks, and these 
 they frequently consulted. The rich treasured 
 in their libraries fine transcripts of the sacred 
 writings on vellum. Complete copies of the 
 Scriptures were exceedingly rare until the art 
 of printing became known. Children were, 
 therefore, encouraged to commit to memory 
 extended passages, and Christians were con- 
 tinually engaged in copying portions of the 
 Bible and transmitting them to others. Even 
 after the printing press had multiplied the 
 possibility of widely diffusing the knowledge 
 of the Scriptures, and translations had been 
 made into various tongues of Europe, the 
 circulation of the Bible was limited not only 
 by the cost of securing copies, but also by 
 ecclesiastical interdicts. When William Tyn- 
 dale was still a youth and a tutor in a country 
 family, one day during a warm discussion with 
 
18 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 some priests at his employer's table, lie ex- 
 claimed that if God spared his life, ere many 
 years he would cause a plowboy to know more 
 of the Scriptures than did the Pope. This 
 promise he kept, but much time elapsed before 
 his prediction was fulfilled. Then the book 
 came as a novelty and was read with avidity. 
 Now it is a commonplace in every collection 
 of books, and is in consequence neglected. 
 
 Many persons who in childhood received 
 some fragmentary instruction in the Bible 
 retain certain vague reminiscences of their 
 former partial acquaintance with its contents, 
 and these they venture to substitute for an 
 actual familiarity with the volume. The result 
 is a bewildering mass of ludicrous blunders 
 whenever they are rash enough to allude to 
 events and persons recorded in the Scriptures, 
 and the disclosure of pathetic ignorance of the 
 teachings of the Bible whenever they under- 
 take to support their opinions by citations 
 from its pages. Clever Benjamin Franklin 
 foisted the book of Ruth upon some cultivated 
 gentlemen at the court of France as a fine 
 bit of Oriental literature he had unearthed, 
 and then confounded his auditors by pointing 
 to its place in the Bible, a work which they 
 affected to despise. He practiced a like artifice 
 with the prayer of Habakkuk, and deceived 
 certain persons with an alleged fifty-first chap- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 19 
 
 ter of Genesis, which was Ms own invention. 
 A Harvard undergraduate wrote on an inquiry 
 slip in the library, "Where can I find the story 
 of Sisera and Jael?" The librarian wrote 
 underneath, "In the Bible, you heathen." But 
 the number of pagans in Christian America is 
 very considerable if people are to be measured 
 by that judgment. It is said that a bright 
 young Cambridge man was asked what connec- 
 tion he could remember between the Old Testa- 
 ment and the New Testament. He answered 
 that he could recall but one, namely, the fact 
 that "Peter cut off the ear of the prophet 
 Malachi." A Boston alderman boasted that 
 he had read the whole Bible through, "from 
 Genesis to Deuteronomy," a feat which, if he 
 had actually performed it, probably placed 
 him on an eminence among his fellows. It 
 would be possible to fill many pages with such 
 illustrations of the preposterous misinforma- 
 tion about the Scriptures which even intelli- 
 gent and, in other respects, scholarly indi- 
 viduals carry around in their heads. The sad 
 truth is that if a long array of these examples 
 were presented to the average audience, a large 
 proportion of them would not be recognized as 
 absurd because their deviation from the text 
 would not be detected. 
 
 In partial explanation of this sorry un- 
 familiarity with the Bible it must be remem- 
 
20 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 bered that there is less serious reading of 
 any kind among people in general than was 
 formerly the case. The astonishing quantity 
 of fictitious literature and of newspapers and 
 other periodicals devoured by the public has 
 crowded out those classic books of devotion, 
 religious biography, and church history in 
 which our forefathers used to delight them- 
 selves. Even those works which have been 
 produced in modern times with a view to meet- 
 ing the current spiritual needs of the people, 
 and which are seductively framed to suit the 
 popular taste, have but a temporary vogue and 
 soon lumber the shelves of second-hand book- 
 stores. Religious journalism is making an 
 increasingly difficult fight to maintain an ex- 
 tensive influence. In this decline of serious 
 reading the Bible inevitably shares. It is 
 recognized as essentially a product of religion, 
 and in our time it has gradually come to be 
 regarded as a book of the Church, and there- 
 fore to be cherished chiefly by those who are 
 intrusted with the custody of religious institu- 
 tions or who are aspirants for sainthood. This 
 is a fundamental error, but it must have its 
 reckoning among the causes which have made 
 the Bible a neglected book. A volume which 
 contains essays, epigrams, sonnets, stories, 
 philosophical treatises, histories, sermons, 
 legal documents, dramas, love songs, national 
 
OF THE BIBLE 21 
 
 anthems, war ballads, letters, orations, hymns 
 for defeat and triumph, pilgrim songs, chants 
 with which parties of kinsmen have lightened 
 the weariness of journeys to great feasts, 
 riddles, fanciful acrostics, and indeed every 
 form of literary expression save that which 
 may be designated as technically scientific 
 and critical, surely does not deserve to be 
 ignored by persons in quest of sound literature 
 solely because it is suffused with the atmos- 
 phere of religion. 
 
 There is an old story told by St. Jerome of 
 himself which will bear repeating in this con- 
 nection. Though he was an ardent defender 
 of simple Christianity, he was also greatly 
 enamored of classical eloquence. He had pored 
 over Vergil and Cicero and other pagan 
 writers with rare gratification. One night he 
 dreamed that he had been hastily summoned 
 before the bar of Heaven. "Who are vou?" 
 
 i 
 
 he was asked. "I am a Christian," he an- 
 swered. "Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian," 
 sternly observed the Judge, and at once the 
 saint was turned over to servitors who beat 
 him unmercifully until he agreed never to 
 browse in a pagan book again. A similar 
 vision might not be without salutary effect if 
 it were sent to some of the religious leaders 
 of our own day who, if they are to be estimated 
 by their writings and public discourses, have 
 
22 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 a deeper interest in other literature than that 
 which distinguishes the Bible. It cannot be 
 denied that a part of the people's indifference 
 to the Scriptures is attributable to the paucity 
 of biblical quotation they hear from the pulpit, 
 and the infrequency with which preachers laud 
 the beauty and vigor of the sacred writings. 
 
 But whatever may be the reasons which 
 account for the obvious decline in popular 
 attachment to the Bible and there are many 
 which need not now engage our attention the 
 case stands to-day practically as Professor 
 Richard G. Moulton has described it : 
 
 We have done almost everything that is possible with 
 these Hebrew and Greek writings. We have overlaid 
 them, clause by clause, with exhaustive commentaries; 
 we have translated them, revised the translations, and 
 quarreled over the revisions; we have discussed authen- 
 ticity and inspiration, and suggested textual history with 
 colored type; we have mechanically divided the whole 
 into chapters and verses, and sought texts to memorize 
 and quote; we have epitomized into handbooks and 
 extracted school lessons; we have recast from the 
 feminine point of view, and even from the standpoint of 
 the next century. There is yet one thing left to do with 
 the Bible: simply to read it. 
 
 The reasons which should induce us to read 
 the Bible are many and various. For the pres- 
 ent we may confine ourselves to those which lie 
 in the plane of our common literary interest. 
 
OP THE BIBLE 23 
 
 For the moment we may put aside all con- 
 sideration of the moral and spiritual values 
 inseparable from this literature, and examine 
 it in the same spirit and with the same inten- 
 tion that would mark our investigation of the 
 masterpieces of any other great people. Let 
 us begin on a lower level of approach than our 
 pious ancestors would have thought compatible 
 with the inherent dignity of the Holy Scrip- 
 tures. Aiming to attract the least spiritual 
 minds possessed of a taste for literature to the 
 noblest books ever written, we need not hesi- 
 tate to avail ourselves of any legitimate point 
 of contact which will serve that purpose. 
 
 The late Professor Harris of Yale used to 
 give an account of a German student whom a 
 young American met in one of the great Euro- 
 pean universities. He was deeply engrossed 
 in archaeological studies, but he was an agnos- 
 tic in religion, and could not be induced to 
 read the Bible because, he asserted, there was 
 nothing of interest to him in its pages. The 
 American finally called his attention to the 
 description of the building of the Tabernacle. 
 It immediately captivated his imagination, 
 and he sat up late many nights studying it 
 with consuming interest. It is possible that 
 among those to whom these lectures are 
 brought there are some who have thrust the 
 Bible away from their tables as heavy or 
 
24 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 archaic literature, possessing no interest for 
 any but theologians, antiquarians and a few 
 devout persons who still hold to it as the 
 source of highest inspiration because of 
 the hallowed traditions which attach to it. 
 For the sake of such we may properly abandon 
 temporarily the old injunction to search the 
 Scriptures for the spiritual profit to be derived 
 therefrom, and persuade them to turn back to 
 the Bible for its literary treasures, with the 
 assurance that, having begun with its surface 
 values, they will proceed to a fuller acquaint- 
 ance with its marvelous contents, and ulti- 
 mately to a discernment of their profound 
 significance for life. 
 
 That there should be any reluctance to 
 pursue such a policy is evidence of the abnor- 
 mal position in literature which has been 
 assigned to the Bible, and reveals one of the 
 most influential reasons for the decline of its 
 popularity as a volume to be read for its own 
 sake. Too great veneration cannot be given 
 to the Scriptures, but to envelop them with an 
 artificial sanctity is to lessen their appeal to 
 the intellectual appetencies of humanity. The 
 effect is akin to that which results from plac- 
 ing religion in a category by itself, occupying 
 a mere department of life, quite apart from 
 other areas of man's thought and activity, 
 though it ought to be conceived as vital to the 
 
OF THE BIBLE 25 
 
 whole of human experience. In a similar 
 fashion, because it is primarily a body of reli- 
 gious literature, the Bible is often assumed 
 to fill a comparatively narrow function, where- 
 as for those who are familiar with its writings 
 it holds an interest which touches every phase 
 of man's labor and love. As a corrective to 
 such misapprehensions the words of Emerson 
 are worthy of reflection : "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." 
 
 The scientist Faraday was accustomed to 
 say that highly cultivated audiences might be 
 regarded as knowing nothing about the subject 
 which the lecturer was discussing. It ought 
 not to be esteemed an unwarranted act of 
 effrontery, therefore, to announce that, apart 
 from all its moral and religious qualities, the 
 Bible is a deeply interesting volume, and to 
 proceed to give the proofs of that fact, as 
 though it had never before been declared in 
 the hearing of men. 
 
 Those Avho imagine the Bible is a dull book 
 are simply unacquainted with the wonderful 
 variety of its contents. It is true that its 
 genealogical tables, the Levitical and priestly 
 system of ceremonies and services which it 
 describes, and other racial, statistical, and 
 
26 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 didactic matter characteristic of the Old Testa- 
 ment, have no elements of popular interest. 
 Yet even these arid stretches of biblical terri- 
 tory, when properly interpreted in relation to 
 the history of a great people, are not destitute 
 of refreshment for minds qualified by natural 
 inclination or scholarly equipment to appre- 
 ciate them. Mere lists of names and tables of 
 figures may be fascinating when their true 
 bearings are understood. We are told that 
 Richard Lynch Cotton, Provost of Worcester 
 College, Oxford, would insist on scrutinizing 
 with fidelity even such a dry production as 
 Leviticus, on the ground "that there is always 
 something in every chapter which no one can 
 afford to let go unread." Taken as a whole, 
 after making the few deductions intimated, 
 the Bible is of perennial interest to all classes 
 of persons who have a first-hand knowledge of 
 what it contains. Its stories take a strong 
 hold upon childhood and there is no better 
 test of the vitality of literature than that. The 
 biographical tales, of the Old Testament, in- 
 cluding the portraitures of Joseph, Moses, 
 Samson, David, Elijah, Daniel, Jonah and the 
 rest, are unsurpassed as to living interest in 
 any ancient or modern literature. The wars 
 of Israel and Judah make as stirring narra- 
 tives as any lover of military annals could 
 wish. So full of the militant spirit are they 
 
OF THE BIBLE 27 
 
 that good Bishop Ulfilas, who translated the 
 Bible for the Goths in the middle of the fourth 
 century, omitted the books of the Kings and 
 Samuel because he feared they would unduly 
 stimulate the warlike ardor of his people. 
 President Bartlett, of Dartmouth College, in 
 one of his baccalaureate addresses said : 
 
 The migration of Abram from Ur of the Chaldees was 
 a more momentous event than the fabled voyage of 
 yEneas or the colonizing of Carthage. In comparison 
 with the Exodus, the Anabasis was a trivial incident. 
 Joshua's subjugation of Canaan was a great military 
 movement, fraught with more far-reaching consequences 
 than the Norman conquest. Jerusalem, the city of 
 twenty-seven sieges, has as weird a history as any other 
 city on the globe, and the Jewish race a vitality unparal- 
 leled and unique. The Galilean Sea, but thirteen miles 
 in length, has witnessed events more marvelous than 
 the great and classic Mediterranean. What are the 
 laws of Solon or Lycurgus beside that decalogue and 
 the laws of Moses a lawgiver, says Milman, "who has 
 exercised a more extensive and permanent influence 
 over the destinies of mankind than any other individual 
 in the history of the world." 
 
 "The principal books of the Old Testament," 
 said Matthew Arnold, "are things to be deeply 
 enjoyed." The truth of this declaration will 
 be increasingly evident as the reader acquaints 
 himself with these noble memorials of departed 
 genius. 
 
 No one can question the charm of the New 
 Testament narratives. The storv of Jesus of 
 
 V 
 
 Nazareth never abates its fascination for the 
 
28 THE LITERAEY PRIMACY 
 
 human mind and heart. His miracles and 
 parables render the Gospels a library of won- 
 ders. The performances of his disciples are 
 fraught with deathless interest. The first 
 weeks and months of the infant church are 
 replete with romance. The lives of the apostles 
 are brimful of stirring adventure and achieve- 
 ment. The travels and public services of Paul, 
 the Roman citizen and Christian missioner, are 
 big with surprise and rich in incident. Taken 
 in conjunction with the historic occasions 
 which incited them, the epistles are of engross- 
 ing interest. The Bible as a whole, from the 
 drama of creation, with which it opens, to the 
 mysterious apocalypse on Patmos, with which 
 it closes, is the most enthralling, to him who 
 knows how to read it, of all the literatures that 
 have issued from the spirit of the human race. 
 It was the dictum of Voltaire that in writing 
 all styles are good that are not tiresome. The 
 marked characteristic of the Bible writers is 
 their naturalness and simplicity. They betray 
 no artificiality. They were not voluntarily or 
 consciously following any canons of literary 
 art. They were not, with the possible excep- 
 tion of the poets, trying to conform rigidly to 
 principles of literary construction which had 
 been set for them by their predecessors, or in- 
 vented by themselves for their guidance. There 
 are no writers in the world more naive than 
 
OF THE BIBLE 29 
 
 they. The most casual reader will be impressed 
 that these authors were not straining after 
 effects. This alone is a quality which inevita- 
 bly endears them to humanity. John Bur- 
 roughs has pertinently said, "The literary 
 value of the Bible doubtless arises largely from 
 its elemental character." As men of strength 
 who are untrammeled by the adornments of a 
 formal culture will arrest attention and evoke 
 affection by the native solidity of their charac- 
 ters, as was preeminently the fact with Abra- 
 ham Lincoln, so literature which embodies 
 without an artificial garniture the great ideas 
 that have haunted the souls of men in all ages 
 will surely seize and retain human interest. 
 The simplicity of the Bible writers is not 
 marred by childishness, otherwise it would fall 
 short of that grasp upon the imagination 
 which belongs to elemental literature. A com- 
 parison of the first chapter of Genesis with the 
 absurd cosmogonies devised by pagan minds 
 will suffice to illustrate the superiority of the 
 primitive literature of the Hebrews, in both 
 style and matter, over that produced in the 
 antiquity of any other race. It is only our 
 inveterate habit of approaching the Bible with 
 the prepossession that it is not literature, but 
 a treasury of divine oracles, which prevents 
 us from deriving that intellectual pleasure 
 from its perusal which it is calculated to in- 
 
30 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 spire when freed from the bondage of tradition. 
 Of the Gospel of Matthew Robert Louis 
 Stevenson said, "I believe it would startle and 
 move anyone, if he could make a certain effort 
 of imagination, and read it freshly like a book, 
 not droningly and dully like a portion of the 
 Bible." There can be no doubt that whoever 
 goes to the business of reading almost any 
 portion of the Scriptures with the zest which 
 he feels necessary for the study of any other 
 literature will find the Bible an unending 
 source of satisfaction. 
 
 "My experience," said Horace Bushnell, "is 
 that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When 
 I am really alive, and set in upon the text with 
 a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it 
 multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even 
 faster than I can note them." Nevertheless, 
 it must be admitted that the Bible is not in 
 all its parts easy reading, even when an alert 
 mind is concentrated upon its pages. Its docu- 
 ments were not composed primarily for enter- 
 tainment, though many of them are replete 
 with an interest independent of their religious 
 quality. In answer to the charge that his 
 writings were obscure, Robert Browning once 
 said, "I never designedly tried to puzzle people, 
 as some of my critics have supposed. On the 
 other hand, I never pretended to offer such 
 literature as should be a substitute for a cigar 
 
OF THE BIBLE 31 
 
 or a game of dominoes for an idle man." So 
 it must be apparent to the most casual reader 
 that the Apostle Paul, to use one illustration 
 out of several which might be adduced, was 
 not writing to beguile the tedium of the audi- 
 ences who were to listen to certain of his pro- 
 found epistles. In some instances he w r as deal- 
 ing with vast themes in a subtle philosophic 
 fashion unquestionably difficult for persons of 
 humble intelligence to fathom, and which have 
 provoked an imposing quantity of interpreta- 
 tive literature, such as commentaries and theo- 
 logical treatises. Several of the sacred writ- 
 ings in both collections of the Bible must be 
 allowed to fall under this differentiation. Yet 
 these are books which will exercise a powerful 
 spell over certain minds. M. de Saci of Port 
 Royal, for example, took special delight in the 
 Epistles of St. Paul, had them bound sepa- 
 ratelv, and alwavs carried them with him. 
 
 t/ 7 i/ 
 
 "Let them do what they like with me," he said, 
 anticipating imprisonment in the Bastille, "let 
 them put me where they please ; I fear nothing 
 if only I can have my St. Paul with me." 
 
 Interest in the Bible as literature is deep- 
 ened by recognizing that it is a unique collec- 
 tion of writings which it is an inaccuracy to 
 call a book. It acquired this designation 
 through the fact that its several parts were 
 brought together into a single volume, though 
 
32 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 it is an accumulation of sixty-six separate 
 books. This compilation was not referred to 
 as a book until a comparatively late period, 
 though the name Bible arose in the fourth 
 century, when Chrysostom called the collection 
 Biblia, a neuter plural which in the thirteenth 
 century in the Western Church was mistaken 
 for a feminine singular, and thus gave us the 
 name Bible. St. Jerome, who died in 420 A. D., 
 called the Scriptures a Divine Library; and 
 Edmund Burke said they were "An infinite 
 collection of the most varied and most vener- 
 able literature." We are told that by a legal 
 enactment in England in 1516 the Bible re- 
 ceived the designation of Bibliotheca, which 
 signifies a library. The story of the bringing 
 together of these documents into one authorita- 
 tive repository is most interesting, but need 
 not be rehearsed in this connection. 
 
 It is of the utmost importance, however, that 
 we should realize that the Bible consists of 
 what has survived out of a much wider litera- 
 ture. The writers who have found their way 
 into the Scriptures refer to a variety of lost 
 books. Many of these were used by the com- 
 pilers of the Pentateuch and the chroniclers 
 of the historical books. Among them are The 
 Acts of Solomon, The Book of the Chronicles 
 of King David, The Books of the Chronicles 
 of the Kings of Judah, The Books of Nathan 
 
OP THE BIBLE 33 
 
 the Prophet and of Gad the Seer, The Prophecy 
 of Ahijah the Shilonite, The Visions of Iddo 
 the Seer, The Book of the Wars of Jehovah, 
 The Book of Jasher, The Histories of She- 
 maiah the Prophet, and The Acts of Uzziah. 
 The apocryphal books form a distinct collec- 
 tion which were not admitted to the canon of 
 Scripture because of their alleged inferiority, 
 though several of them reveal remarkable ex- 
 cellence. But beyond the perished books, the 
 names of which have been preserved, and 
 quotations from which occur in our Bible, 
 existed still more ancient and simpler forms 
 of literature, to some of which references are 
 detected by scholars, and from all of which, as 
 long as they were extant, later writers might 
 take what they required or thought useful. 
 These included old Semitic legends, many of 
 which had not been reduced to writing, ballads 
 and folk-songs, camp stories, historical notes, 
 codes of ancient laws, collections of proverbs, 
 oral tales of the patriarchs, inscriptions and 
 other memorabilia. Much of this could not be 
 accurately classified as literature, but it pro- 
 vided the substance out of which literature 
 was evolved. A striking illustration of the 
 disappearance of literary materials which 
 formerly existed among the Hebrews is found 
 in 1 Kings 4. 32, where it is recorded that 
 Solomon wrote a thousand and five songs, 
 
34 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 though there are but two remaining which are 
 credited to him. We can scarcely doubt that 
 in the survivals of Hebrew literature which 
 have descended to us in the Bible we have the 
 noblest intellectual products of an ancient and 
 wonderful people, and devout minds are confi- 
 dent that their preservation has been due to 
 the supervision exercised over them by Divine 
 Providence. Nor can we fail to discern that, 
 in the main, the determination of the books 
 deserving a place in the Holy Scriptures was 
 by an elective process which united a refined 
 literary judgment to deep spiritual intuition. 
 
 In these survivals of a more extensive litera- 
 ture we have an unexampled array of beauty 
 and strength. A careful study of these writ- 
 ings will convince the lover of humane letters 
 that William Watson was not far from sheer 
 fact when he said that "every kind of literary 
 magnificence is supremely exemplified in the 
 Bible," and that Sir Thomas Browne was not 
 extravagant when he declared that, even if the 
 Scriptures had been the work of man alone, 
 they would have been "the most singular and 
 superlative piece that hath been extant since 
 the creation." In a similar strain of exalted 
 praise writes Froude : "The Bible, thoroughly 
 known, is a literature of itself, the rarest and 
 the richest in all departments of thought or 
 imagination which exists." 
 
OF THE BIBLE 35 
 
 "Its light," said John Henry Newman, 
 speaking of the Bible, "is like the body of 
 heaven in its clearness; its vastness like the 
 bosom of the sea ; its variety like the scenes of 
 nature." 
 
 "It is the grandest group of writings in the 
 world," said Ruskin, "put into the grandest 
 languages of the world, translated afterward 
 into every language in the Christian world, 
 and is the guide of all the arts and acts of that 
 world which have been noble, fortunate, and 
 happy." 
 
 "What a book!" exclaimed Heinrich Heine. 
 After a Sunday of intolerable dullness at 
 Heligoland he took up the Bible in despera- 
 tion, as he records, and after reading it for 
 hours to his edification as well as his entertain- 
 ment, he breaks forth into eulogy : "Vast and 
 wide as the world, rooted in the abvsses of 
 
 i/ 
 
 creation, and towering up beyond the blue 
 secrets of heaven! Sunrise and sunset, birth 
 and death, promise and fulfillment, the whole 
 drama of humanity, are all in this book." 
 
 II 
 
 That the Bible is indispensable in any educa- 
 tional process which involves the higher cul- 
 ture of the human mind must be conceded, if 
 it possesses the values ascribed to it by the 
 
36 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 men of genius whose laudations have just been 
 quoted. This is indeed a function which the 
 Bible is claimed to exercise by some of the 
 most reliable exponents of literary judgment. 
 Goethe's experience is noteworthy : 
 
 When, in my youth, my imagination, ever active, bore 
 me away, now hither, now thither, and when all this 
 blending of history and fable, of mythology and reli- 
 gion, threatened to unsettle my mind, gladly then did 
 I flee toward those Eastern countries. I buried myself 
 in the first books of Moses, and there, amidst those wan- 
 dering tribes, I found myself at once in the grandest 
 solitudes and in the grandest societies. 
 
 In addressing a company of students, 
 Charles A. Dana, one of America's greatest 
 journalists, said : 
 
 Of all books, the most indispensable and the most use- 
 ful, the one whose knowledge is the most effective, is 
 the Bible. ... I am considering it now not as a religious 
 book, but as a manual of utility, of professional prepara- 
 tion and professional use for a journalist. There is per- 
 haps no book whose style is more suggestive and more 
 instructive, from which you learn more directly that 
 sublime simplicity which never exaggerates, which 
 recounts the greatest events with solemnity, of course, 
 but without sentimentality or affectation, none which 
 you open with such confidence and lay down with such 
 reverence. 
 
 As a child John Buskin was drilled everv 
 
 tt 
 
 day in reading or reciting the Scriptures, and 
 this process was continued until he went to 
 Oxford. He prints the list of chapters which 
 
OF THE BIBLE 37 
 
 his mother required him to commit to memory, 
 and "with which/ 7 he says, "thus learned, she 
 established my soul in life/" adding the follow- 
 ing: 
 
 And truly, though I have picked up the elements of a 
 little further knowledge in mathematics, meteorology, 
 and the like, in after life and owe not a little to 
 the teaching of many people, this maternal installation 
 of my mind in the property of chapters I count very 
 confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the 
 one essential part of all my education. 
 
 Xot less impressive are the words of Charles 
 Dudley Warner: 
 
 - 
 
 Wholly apart from its religious or from its ethical 
 value, the Bible is the one book that no intelligent 
 person who wishes to come into contact with the world 
 of thought and to share the ideas of the great minds 
 of the Christian era can afford to be ignorant of. All 
 modern literature and all art are permeated with it. 
 There is scarcely a great work in the language that can 
 be fully understood and enjoyed without this knowledge, 
 so full is it of allusions and illustrations from the Bible. 
 This is true of fiction, of poetry, of economic and philo- 
 sophic works, and also of the scientific and even agnostic 
 treatises. ... It is in itself almost a liberal education, 
 as many great masters in literature have testified. 
 
 What this author savs is amply confirmed 
 
 t JT , 
 
 by an examination of English literature, to go 
 no farther. We are not aware how extensive 
 is the influence of the Bible upon our foremost 
 writers until we have carefully pondered the 
 works of such poets as Spenser, Shakespeare, 
 Milton, Pope, Scott, Cowper, Wordsworth, 
 
38 THE LITEEAEY PRIMACY 
 
 Tennyson, Young, the Brownings, Longfellow 
 and others, and of such prose writers as Bacon, 
 Addison, Johnson, Macaulay, Carlyle, Irving, 
 Buskin, Lowell, and many more. Spenser, we 
 are told, studied the prophetic writings before 
 he wrote his Faerie Queene. Lord Bacon has 
 seventy allusions to the Scriptures in twenty- 
 four of his essays. In Bishop Charles Words- 
 worth's book on Shakespeare's Knowledge and 
 Use of the Bible allusions or quotations in 
 thirty-seven plays are indicated, a fact of great 
 significance when it is remembered that Shake- 
 speare died only four years after the King 
 James Version was published in full. There 
 are more than one hundred allusions to the 
 Bible in Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. A 
 careful student of Tennyson has asserted that 
 there are nearly three hundred direct refer- 
 ences to the Bible in his poems. By actual 
 count upward of three hundred and thirty 
 references to the Bible have been found in 
 works of Longfellow. An industrious man has 
 reckoned that about five thousand Scripture 
 quotations and allusions are to be found in the 
 writings of Ruskin, who says that to the disci- 
 pline of his early years in the Bible he owes 
 "the best part of my taste in literature, and, 
 once knowing the Bible it was not possible for 
 me to write superficial and formal English." 
 Sir Walter Scott had the Bible, especially the 
 
OF THE BIBLE 39 
 
 Old Testament, almost by heart. One of his 
 novels, The Monastery, is a perfect storehouse 
 of Scripture. He is said generally in his writ- 
 ings to have quoted the Bible from memory. 
 These instances, and they could be indefinitely 
 extended, give force to the saying of Samuel 
 Taylor Coleridge that "intense study of the 
 Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar 
 in point of style." Numerous writers who 
 seldom quote or make direct allusions to the 
 Scriptures obviously have been greatly affected 
 by them. Of such is Thomas Carlyle, who in 
 many passages writes like a Hebrew prophet, 
 showing unmistakable evidences of deep study 
 of the Bible. 
 
 It is almost impossible to exaggerate the 
 influence of the English Bible upon our lan- 
 guage. Of the Authorized Version Huxley 
 says : "It is written in the noblest and purest 
 English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of 
 a merely literary form." Macaulay, referring 
 to the same translation, calls it "that stupen- 
 dous work, a book, which, if everything else in 
 our language should perish, would alone suffice 
 to show the whole extent of its beauty and 
 power. . . . Whoever would acquire a knowl- 
 edge of pure English must study King James' 
 Version of the Scriptures." To this we may 
 join the testimony of Green, the historian of 
 the English people: 
 
40 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 As a mere literary monument, the English version of 
 the Bible remains the noblest example of the English 
 tongue. Its perpetual use made it from the instant of 
 its appearance the standard of our language. 
 
 It formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which 
 was practically accessible to ordinary Englishmen; and 
 when we recall the number of common phrases which 
 we owe to great authors, the bits of Shakespeare, or 
 Milton, or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously 
 weave themselves into our ordinary talk, we shall better 
 understand the strange mosaic of biblical words and 
 phrases which colored English talk two hundred years 
 ago. The wealth of picturesque allusion and illustration 
 which we borrow from a thousand books, our fathers 
 were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was 
 the easier and the more natural that the range of 
 Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression of every 
 phase of feeling. 
 
 George Saintsbury, in his History of the 
 Elizabethan Period of English Literature, 
 says : "The plays of Shakespeare and the Eng- 
 lish Bible are and ever will be the twin monu- 
 ments, not merely of their own period, but of 
 the perfection of English, the complete ex- 
 pressions of the literary capacities of the 
 language." The Roman Catholic Bishop 
 Faber, speaking of the Authorized Version of 
 our English Bible, says : 
 
 It lives on the ear like a music that can never be 
 forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the 
 convert scarcely knows how he can forego. Its felicities 
 often seem to be things rather than words. . . . The 
 memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions 
 of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. It is the 
 representative of a man's best moments; all that there 
 
OF THE BIBLE 41 
 
 has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and 
 penitent and good, speaks to him forever out of his 
 English Bible. 
 
 The influence of the Bible upon our litera- 
 ture descends to the very minutiae of composi- 
 tion. In his Handbook of the English Tongue 
 Dr. Joseph Angus says: "The Bible is the 
 richest specimen we have of the beauty and 
 force of the old Anglo-Saxon speech." It has 
 been computed that more than nine tenths of 
 the words in the Authorized Version of the 
 English Bible are Anglo-Saxon, which, as we 
 know, furnishes the great bulk of words in 
 ordinary use to-day. The translations which 
 preceded that of 1611 were put into speech 
 which the people could understand, and the 
 Authorized Version is largely built on this 
 foundation. In a book on The Bible in Modern 
 Life, recently published, Joseph S. Auerbach 
 gives a chapter of Bible words and phrases, 
 taken almost at random from his reading of 
 the Scriptures, which are current in modern 
 speech and literature. To run them through 
 is to meet many surprises. This author very 
 truthfully says that, while the reasoning 
 processes of the biblical writers "were often 
 far below those of the authors of the classics 
 of the world," yet these men were preeminent 
 in "illuminating word and phrase, of such 
 power that they have passed not only into the 
 
42 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 books of our literature, but become part of the 
 daily speech of men." 
 
 It would not be just, however, to say that 
 the pervasive influence of the biblical litera- 
 ture is due chiefly to the skill of the scholarly 
 translators who gave us the English Version. 
 This power seems rather to reside in the litera- 
 ture itself, and to be an inseparable element of 
 its structure. Hebrew and Hellenic Greek, as 
 Green says, "lent themselves with curious 
 felicity to purposes of translation." The late 
 Milton S. Terry, in characterizing the lan- 
 guages in which the Bible was produced, said : 
 
 But if the Greek may be likened to the Parthenon, 
 and the Aramaean to the broken relics of fallen mon- 
 archies, the Hebrew tongue is like the temple of Solomon 
 a wonder of the world. It is half hieroglyphic. Its 
 letters are a picture-gallery. Its emotional expressive- 
 ness adds infinite charm to its sacred literature. It 
 appears in full development in its most ancient records, 
 as if it had been crystallized into imperishable form 
 by the marvels of the Exodus and the fires of Sinai. 
 
 When men began to translate the Scriptures 
 into the languages of modern Europe, a potent 
 spell seemed to be exercised over their toil ; a 
 beneficent influence seemed to be imparted to 
 the very style in which they employed their 
 gifts. It was an occasion of wonder to those 
 familiar with Tyndale's other writings, which 
 had no qualities lifting them above the ordi- 
 nary level of his times, that he produced an 
 
OF THE BIBLE 43 
 
 English version of the Scriptures of the highest 
 literary excellence. To this day it excites the 
 unstinted admiration of the critics. A similar 
 benignancy appears to have favored other 
 translators. 
 
 But it is the substance of the Scriptures, 
 rather than their form, to which we must 
 attribute their most enduring influence upon 
 other literatures, as has already been sug- 
 gested. Very significant are the words of 
 Robert Louis Stevenson concerning the Bible 
 biographies : 
 
 Written in the East, these characters live forever in 
 the West; written in one province, they pervade the 
 world; penned in rude times, they are prized more and 
 more as civilization advances; product of antiquity, 
 they come home to the business and bosoms of men, 
 women, and children in modern days. 
 
 It is interesting to note the confession made 
 by Hall Caine the novelist respecting the 
 source whence he drew his inspiration : 
 
 Whatever strong situations I have in my books are 
 not of my creation, but are taken from the Bible. The 
 Deemster is the story of The Prodigal Son. The Bond- 
 man is the story of Esau and Jacob. The Scapegoat 
 is the story of Eli and his sons; and The Manxman 
 is the story of David and Uriah. 
 
 "I would not now exchange for any amount 
 of money," said Eugene Field, "the acquaint- 
 ance with the Bible that was drummed into 
 me when a boy." 
 
44 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 It is needless to multiply illustrations of 
 this character. The dramatic element which 
 runs through all the narrative portions of the 
 Bible has projected itself into many of the 
 finest specimens of fiction that our language 
 holds, just as in painting, sculpture, music and 
 other fine arts the themes of the Scriptures 
 have found ample expression. In our day the 
 dramatists are busy with the matchless stories 
 of the Bible, and find in their naked delinea- 
 tions of human passion the surest models of 
 character-portraiture. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Let this hurried and fragmentary survey of 
 the power which the Bible has exerted over our 
 English literature be concluded by noting the 
 affection shown by a few famous individuals 
 for particular portions of the Scriptures. 
 Tennyson expressed boundless admiration for 
 the Sermon on the Mount and for the Parables 
 of Jesus. "Perfection beyond compare," he 
 called them, with which judgment Browning 
 agreed, according to the testimony of his son. 
 Gladstone lovingly referred to "that sublime 
 and precious production, the first chapter of 
 Genesis." Renan called the Gospel of Luke 
 "the most beautiful book in existence." Peter 
 the Great is said to have known the Epistles 
 of Paul bv heart. Herder declared of John's 
 
OP THE BIBLE 45 
 
 Gospel, "That little book is a still deeper sea, 
 in which the sun and stars are mirrored, and 
 if there are eternal truths (and such there 
 are) for the human race, they are found in the 
 Gospel of John." Coleridge said, "I think St. 
 Paul's Epistle to the Romans is the most pro- 
 found work in existence," and also, "The most 
 gentlemanly letter ever written by the most 
 perfect gentleman is in my opinion St. Paul's 
 Epistle to Philemon." Macaulay gave great 
 praise to that passage in the eighth chapter of 
 Romans, beginning, "Who shall separate us 
 from the love of Christ?" Napoleon Bonaparte 
 expressed deep appreciation of the Pentateuch 
 in certain parts and at St. Helena proposed to 
 write a history of the campaigns of Moses. 
 About five minutes before his death Dean Bur- 
 gon said, "Give me a pencil, and now St. 
 Mark." The book was laid before him, that he 
 might be able to find the passage he desired, 
 and in a moment he was gone. Bishop Ken's 
 Bible fell open at the fifteenth chapter of First 
 Corinthians, and J. M. Barrie says that his 
 mother's Bible seemed to open of itself at the 
 fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel. When 
 Johnson visited Collins in his illness, and 
 asked him what had been his companion in 
 trouble, the poet held out a little copy of the 
 New Testament, and said, "I have but one 
 book, but that book is the best of all." William 
 
46 THE LITEKAEY PRIMACY 
 
 Watson the poet eulogizes Isaiah, but also 
 declares that David's lament over Jonathan is 
 "the most perfect elegy in all literature," and 
 the song of Deborah and Barak "the most 
 superb expression of the intoxication of 
 triumph." Andrew D. White, diplomat and 
 statesman, the first president of Cornell Uni- 
 versity, who places the Bible at the top of his 
 list of the books which have given him the 
 greatest profit and pleasure, has a special fond- 
 ness for the Psalms, the nobler portions of 
 Isaiah, and the sixth chapter of Micah. In the 
 N)ew Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, 
 St. James's definition of pure and undefiled 
 religion, and St. Paul's description of charity 
 are singled out for laudation. He says that 
 in perfection of English diction there is in the 
 whole range of literature nothing to surpass 
 the story of Joseph and his brethren. A serv- 
 ant of Alfred de Musset showed a New Testa- 
 ment to a friend who came to inquire about 
 the author : and said, "I know not what Alfred 
 found in that book, but he always latterly had 
 it under his pillow, that he might read it when 
 he would." Charles Dickens wrote to his 
 youngest son, who was about to leave home : 
 
 I put a New Testament among your books for the 
 very same reasons, and with the same hopes, that made 
 me write an easy account of it for you when you were a 
 little child. Because it is the best book that ever was, 
 or will be, known in the world; and because it teaches 
 
OF THE BIBLE 47 
 
 you the best lessons by which any human creature who 
 tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be 
 guided. 
 
 Said Sydney Dobell : 
 
 I once learned the New Testament by rote, and I can- 
 not unlearn the beauty of those sweet old Saxon phrases 
 in which I have thought so long. Full of the light that 
 never was on sea or shore the light of the holiest, 
 happiest and best recollections I seem in using them 
 to mingle a new element with earthly speech, and relieve, 
 in some sort, with their glory the dreary lifelessness of 
 words. 
 
 Thus wrote Erasmus in a famous passage : 
 
 I wish that even the weakest woman should read the 
 Gospel should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish 
 that these were translated into all languages, so that 
 they might be read and understood not only by Scots 
 and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. ... I 
 long that the husbandman should sing portions of them 
 to himself as he follows the plow, that the weaver should 
 hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveler 
 should beguile with these stories the tedium of his 
 journey. 
 
 Said Dr. Adolf Deissmann: 
 
 The New Testament is the people's book. When 
 Luther, therefore, took the New Testament from the 
 learned and gave it to the people, we can only regard 
 him as restoring what was the people's own. . . . Time 
 has transformed the book of the people into the book 
 of humanity. 
 
 It is to introduce to the deeper riches of this 
 great library those who are not sufficiently 
 aware of their inexhaustible w r orth that these 
 lectures are given. 
 
48 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE POETRY AND ORATORY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 "LITERATURE," says Lord Morley, "consists 
 of all the books and there are not so many 
 where moral 5 truth and human passion are 
 touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and 
 attraction of form." He might have had the 
 Bible before him as he framed this definition, 
 so admirably does it fit the sacred writings 
 of that massive library. As we proceed to 
 investigate this literature, we are almost im- 
 mediately impressed with its astonishing diver- 
 sity, and a further examination convinces the 
 student that, by reason of this quality, it is 
 calculated to find acceptance with all classes 
 of minds. Its books were composed by a great 
 variety of persons, living under many different 
 conditions, and impelled by numerous distinc- 
 tive considerations. Its range of subjects is 
 very wide. As Dr. Arthur S. Peake, of Eng- 
 land, has said: 
 
 It has a universality like that of Shakespeare, appeal- 
 ing to every emotion, reflecting every situation. It has 
 a message for all our moods, an answer to our deepest 
 perplexities, a response to our sorest needs. It meets 
 us at levels of our being which other literature cannot 
 
OP THE BIBLE 49 
 
 touch, it lends our spirits wings that we may soar to 
 heights which would otherwise be unreached. And when 
 we are neither mounting upwards on flights of ecstasy, 
 nor in the gloomy valley of depression, but moving on 
 the somewhat weary path of life, it is our intimate 
 companion, relieving the tedious monotony of the way, 
 cheering and strengthening us when we faint beneath 
 the burden we are called to bear. 
 
 These words describe one of the sublimest 
 functions of literature in general, without the 
 fulfilling of which nothing written deserves to 
 be called literature in the higher signification 
 of the term. But the Bible overtops all other 
 literatures in the w r orld in the suitability of its 
 messages to every conceivable need of the 
 human spirit. It w r as produced by all sorts 
 and conditions of men, and cannot therefore 
 fail to make its appeal to an equal diversity of 
 individual cravings. Dean Farrar has well 
 said: 
 
 Touched by one of these many fingers, our hearts 
 cannot but respond. At the turning of a page we may 
 listen to Solomon the magnificent, or Amos the herds- 
 man; to Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian conqueror, or 
 Matthew the Galilean publican. If St. Paul be too 
 difficult for us, we have the practical plainness of St. 
 Peter; if St. John soars too high for us on the eagle 
 wings of his mysticism, we can rejoice in the simple 
 sweetness of St. Luke; if we find the Apocalypse too 
 passionate and enigmatic, we can rest in the homely 
 counsels of St. James. The Scriptures . . . have poetry 
 for the student, history for the statesman, psalms for 
 the temple, proverbs for the mart. They have appeals, 
 denunciations, arguments, stories of battle, songs of love. 
 
50 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 They have mountains and valleys, shadow and sunshine, 
 calm and tempest, stormy waves and still waters, lilies 
 of the green pasture and the shadow of a great rock in 
 weary lands. 
 
 For minds that are attuned to high reason- 
 ings there are philosophical meditations and 
 theological disquisitions, but for the humbler 
 intelligence there is that which satisfies the 
 
 CJ 
 
 commonest need. Diligent scholars are in- 
 creasingly amazed at the vast wealth of 
 thought in the Bible as they multiply their 
 endeavors to mine it; while untutored intel- 
 lects, coming freshly to the privilege of reading 
 it, are rejoiced at the naturalness and simple 
 homeliness of many of its parts. 
 
 Two days before his death Martin Luther 
 wrote: "No one can understand VergiPs 
 Bucolics unless he has been for five years a 
 herdsman. No one can understand Vergil's 
 Georgics unless he has been for five years a 
 husbandman. No one can fully understand 
 Cicero's Letters unless he has been actively 
 engaged for twenty-five years in a great com- 
 monwealth. Let no one think he has fully 
 appreciated the Holy Scriptures unless he has 
 governed congregations for a hundred years 
 with prophets like Elijah and Elisha, John the 
 Baptist, Christ and the Apostles." 
 
 This is not intemperate language, consider- 
 ing the measureless depths of biblical thought ; 
 
OF THE BIBLE 51 
 
 yet the marvel of the Bible lies in its trans- 
 parency, notwithstanding its profundity. 
 Ministers of religion are repeatedly astonished 
 at the facility with which unlearned persons 
 absorb many of its sublimest teachings. It is 
 as a French writer has declared : "The waters 
 of Holy Scripture have this peculiar property, 
 that they are proportioned and suited to the 
 needs of everv soul. A lamb can walk therein. 
 
 V 
 
 and at the same time they are so deep that an 
 elephant can swim in them." Said Novalis, 
 "The Bible begins nobly with Paradise, the 
 symbol of youth, and concludes with the 
 eternal kingdom, the Holy City." Between 
 these points stretch vast areas of diversified 
 literature, unparalleled in the written records 
 of the world, and providing nourishment for 
 all grades of intellectual and spiritual being. 
 
 "The Scriptures," said Sir William Jones, 
 "contain more sublimity, more exquisite beauty, 
 and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than 
 could be collected from all other books that 
 were ever composed in any age or in any 
 idiom." "There are," said John Milton, "no 
 songs to be compared with the songs of Zion, 
 no orations equal to those of the prophets, and 
 no politics equal to those the Scriptures can 
 teach us." Yet it must be kept in mind, as a 
 modern scholar has reminded us, that "neither 
 of the two collections of books that make up 
 
52 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 the Bible is arranged from the point of view 
 of art, but from that of religious value; they 
 are collections not of belles lettres but of 
 sacred writings." That is merely to say that 
 they are not artificially constructed master- 
 pieces of literary craftsmanship, but free, spon- 
 taneous, exuberant expressions of life, in which 
 religion is the dominant tone. 
 
 It is in the realm of poetry that we shall 
 first test the encomiums which have been pro- 
 nounced upon the Bible as literature. When 
 Victor Hugo was asked, "Is it not difficult to 
 write epic poetry?" he responded, "No, easy- 
 or impossible." The assertion is probably true 
 of any great poetry, whatever its form. What 
 one early observes with respect to the poetic 
 effusions which abound in the Bible is that 
 the writers of these inspired verses evidently 
 did their work with the utmost freedom and 
 facility, if indeed it would not be proper to 
 say that they accomplished it almost without 
 the consciousness that they were producing 
 anything of large consequence. 
 
 "What poets those old Hebrews were!" ex- 
 claimed John Bright, who was all his lifetime 
 a devout student of the Bible ; and Dr. George 
 Adam Smith says of this element in Hebrew 
 
OP THE BIBLE 53 
 
 literature: "In one aspect it is the nearest 
 poetry of all, the first which we learned; 
 through the open windows of which we had 
 our earliest visions of time, of space, of 
 eternity, and of God. Its rhythms haunt our 
 noblest prose; its lyrics are our most virile 
 and enduring hymns." 
 
 In speaking of the Bible as poetry, Walt 
 Whitman refers to what he calls "the cumulus 
 of associations of the Bible as a poetic entity, 
 and of every portion of it. Not the old edifice 
 only," he says, "the congeries also of events, 
 and struggles, and surroundings, of which it 
 has been the scene and motive even the 
 horrors, dreads, deaths. How many ages and 
 generations have brooded and wept and 
 agonized over this book! What untellable 
 joys and ecstasies, what support to martyrs at 
 the stake from it ! ... Of its thousands there 
 is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded 
 with human emotion." 
 
 Joseph Addison may be safely quoted as a 
 reliable judge of the worth of Hebrew poetry. 
 "Homer has innumerable flights that Vergil 
 was not able to reach," he declares, "and in 
 the Old Testament we find several passages 
 more elevated and sublime than any in Homer" 
 . . . "After perusing the Book of Psalms, let 
 a judge of the beauties of poetry read a literal 
 translation of Homer or Pindar, and he will 
 
54 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 find in these last two such an absurdity and 
 confusion of style, with such a comparative 
 poverty of imagination, as will make him 
 sensible of the vast superiority of the Scripture 
 style." 
 
 It is one of the requisites for effective poetry 
 that it shall be musical. The Bible is singu- 
 larly happy in meeting this test. Many per- 
 sons will sympathize with the rabbi who said, 
 "I should like to have some anthems com- 
 posed to suit certain passages in the Minor 
 Prophets." We know how copiously this has 
 been done for the Psalms and other more 
 detached passages of the Bible, including a 
 few from the New Testament. Many of these, 
 especially from the Old Testament, retain their 
 sonorousness after they have been rendered 
 into English, so that it is almost impossible 
 to recite them in that tongue without falling 
 into musical cadences. Numerous passages 
 when read understandingly, as Tennyson used 
 to interpret them by his voice, are melodious 
 to a remarkable degree. 
 
 It enhances the literary importance of the 
 Bible to remember that all we have of the 
 poetry of ancient Israel, and all that we know 
 of the poetic art among that people, we have 
 derived from the Old Testament Scriptures. 
 The Bible, including the Apocrypha, as already 
 explained, contains the entire extant literature 
 
OF THE BIBLE 55 
 
 of the Hebrews of the olden time. It is also 
 to be remembered that in the case of any primi- 
 tive people, so scholars versed in antiquities 
 affirm, all discourse intended for publicity or 
 for memorial purposes will be found clothed 
 in poetical forms. Poetry is older than prose. 
 It has been called "the mother tongue of the 
 human race." This will account for the fact 
 that, in addition to those books which are dis- 
 tinctly poetical, we have large quantities of 
 poetry scattered through other sections of the 
 Bible, particularly in the historical and pro- 
 phetical writings. "We think," wrote Macau- 
 lay, "that as civilization advances, poetry 
 almost necessarily declines." Though ably 
 supported by its brilliant author, that proposi- 
 tion may not be convincing to every mind, 
 without important qualifications ; yet it is un- 
 deniable that much of the grandest poetry of 
 every nation is sung in its infancy. In the 
 Bible we are dealing with the ancient litera- 
 ture of the Hebrews, and it is natural to 
 find here exalted utterances of their primal 
 speech. 
 
 It does not fall within the scope of these 
 lectures to deal with matters of technique in 
 literary composition, but it may be useful to 
 us in attempting to acquire a deeper apprecia- 
 tion of Hebrew poetry to pause long enough 
 to consider superficially its general principles 
 

 56 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 of construction. Poetic forms among the He- 
 brews were comparatively simple, the true 
 poetical value being found in the striking 
 imagery and f ullnesg of . e^o^^on^ expressed 
 therein. There is a mechanical structure, how- 
 ever, to which their poems ordinarily conform. 
 The laws of Hebrew meter are deduced entirely 
 from the poetry itself, and not from any tradi- 
 tion which has descended from earliest times. 
 The discovery of these laws is regarded as an 
 achievement of modern scholarship. The 
 poetic line a limited word-group is the first 
 poetical unit, a line easily and comfortably 
 pronounced in a single breath. Such lines 
 detach themselves with clearness in all poetical 
 parts of the Old Testament. In Hebrew poetry 
 "the end of the line uniformly coincides with 
 a break in the sense." The second poetical 
 unit is the verse, formed in the majority of 
 cases by two lines regularly combined. The 
 underlying principle of poetic construction 
 may be called parallelism, the balancing of 
 verses in such a way as to present the ideas 
 contained therein as synonymous, antithetic 
 and synthetic. An example of the first is 
 herewith taken from Psalm 78: 
 
 Give ear, my people, to my law: ^ 
 Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. 
 
 I will open my mouth in a parable; 
 I will utter dark sayings of old, 
 
OF THE BIBLE 57 
 
 Which we have heard and known, 
 And our fathers have told us. 
 
 We will not hide them from their children, 
 Telling to the generation to come the praises of Jehovah, 
 And his strength, and his wondrous works that he hath 
 done. 
 
 From the tenth chapter of Proverbs we may 
 take an illustration of the second, or anti- 
 thetic, classification : 
 
 A wise son maketh a glad father; 
 
 But a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother. 
 
 Treasures of wickedness profit nothing; 
 But righteousness delivereth from death. 
 
 Jehovah will not suffer the soul of the righteous to 
 
 famish; 
 But he thrusteth away the desire of the wicked. 
 
 For the synthetic arrangement, which natu- 
 rally lends itself to variety of formation, let 
 us read two familiar verses from Psalm 37 : 
 
 / have been young, and now am old; 
 
 Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, 
 
 Nor his seed begging bread. 
 
 All the day long he dealeth graciously, and lendeth; 
 And his seed is blessed. 
 
 To this we may add the beautiful description 
 of a worthy woman found in the thirty-first 
 chapter of Proverbs, beginning as follows : 
 
 A worthy woman who can find? 
 For her price is far above rubies. 
 
 The heart of her husband trusteth in her, 
 And he shall have no lack of gain. 
 
58 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 She doeth him good and not evil 
 All the days of her life. 
 
 She seeketh wool and flax, 
 
 And worketh willingly with he?' hands. 
 
 She is like the merchant-ships; 
 She bringeth her bread from afar. 
 
 The principles thus briefly illustrated the 
 scholars tell us hold good in the poetry of the 
 ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, and per- 
 haps in a less developed form among the early 
 Egyptians. It must be kept in mind, however, 
 that these are only general rules, to which 
 there are numerous exceptions. Rhyme, when 
 it occurs in Hebrew poetry, seems to be acci- 
 dental rather than studied, though some critics 
 believe that the writers who used it were con- 
 scious of the performance and relished it. 
 
 The genius of Hebrew poetry is other than 
 that of the poetry with which English-speaking 
 people are familiar in particulars more essen- 
 tial than metrical arrangement. By virtue of 
 the narrower civilization and the more meager 
 accompaniments of his life, the Hebrew poet 
 had less to quicken his imagination or develop 
 his creative gifts than falls to the lot of men 
 living under the favor of a more opulent life. 
 Alluding to the fact that our word poet 
 signifies a maker, George Adam Smith says : 
 
 Those who among the Hebrews correspond to the 
 Aryan poets call themselves singers, minstrels, shepherds 
 of words, comparers, bewailers, and the like anything 
 
OF THE BIBLE 59 
 
 but makers. The verbs which describe their functions 
 express not the power of creation but the capacity for 
 impression; not the art of building or of ornament so 
 much as the process of outpouring and the spirit of 
 urgency. The singers rose from and were inspired by 
 less coherent forms of life than our own, and this social 
 looseness, along with their people's ignorance of archi- 
 tecture and other constructive arts, has had its effect 
 on their poetry. 
 
 What is here called "the capacity for im- 
 pression" is exemplified in the representations 
 of the phenomena of nature which the Hebrew 
 poet made from the somewhat restricted fields 
 of observation which were open to him. Alex- 
 ander von Humboldt expressed his astonish- 
 ment to find a single psalm the 104th por- 
 traying "with a few bold touches the heavens 
 and the earth the whole image of the Cos- 
 mos." It has been said that "the thunder 
 storms of Thomson, of Vergil, and of Homer, 
 are inferior to that of David Psalm 18 both 
 in graphic power and in sublimity of use." 
 Professor Francis Bowen declares: "Indeed I 
 know not anything in all Greek, Latin, or Eng- 
 lish poetry, that matches in sublimity and 
 grandeur the magnificent sweep of this descrip- 
 tion of the providence of God as manifested in 
 the phenomena of nature." Let us rehearse 
 the lines: 
 
 Then the earth shook and trembled; 
 
 The foundations also of the mountains quaked 
 
 And were shaken because he was wroth. 
 
60 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, 
 
 And fire out of his mouth devoured: 
 
 Coals were kindled by it. 
 
 He bowed the heavens also, and came down; 
 
 And thick darkness was under his feet. 
 
 And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly; 
 
 Yea, he soared upon the wings of the wind. 
 
 He made darkness his hiding place, his pavilion round 
 
 about him, 
 
 Darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies. 
 At the brightness before him his thick clouds passed, 
 Hailstones and coals of fire. 
 Jehovah also thundered in the heavens, 
 And the Most High uttered his voice, 
 Hailstones and coals of fire. 
 And he sent out his arrows and scattered them; 
 Yea, lightnings manifold, and discomfited them. 
 Then the channels of waters appeared, 
 And the foundations of the world were laid bare 
 At thy rebuke, O Jehovah, 
 At the blast of the breath of thy nostrils. 
 He sent from on high, he took me; 
 He drew me out of many waters. 
 
 Another description of the appearance of God 
 in a thunder storm, scarcely less majestic, is 
 found in the twenty-ninth Psalm. It portrays 
 "the progress of the storm from the peaks of 
 Lebanon down the mountain flanks and out 
 upon the desert." 
 
 Poetry implies pictures. A poem without 
 pageantry is ordinary prose strung to a metri- 
 cal arrangement. Imagery must abound. 
 Metaphors and similes, emblems and symbols, 
 flags and banners, heralds and trumpeters of 
 speech must be marshaled before the mind's 
 
OF THE BIBLE 61 
 
 vision; otherwise there is no poetry, and 
 Byron's contemptuous, though not altogether 
 just, criticism of Wordsworth will be pertinent 
 to the versifier he will be one 
 
 Who both by precept and example shows 
 That prose is verse and verse is merely prose. 
 
 Jn what is known as The Song of Moses 
 Deut. 32 a plenitude of imagery is employed, 
 as we have seen to be the case with the poems 
 already considered, and as we shall find to be 
 true of all that are yet to be observed. Note 
 with what freedom, what absence of effort, this 
 poem begins: 
 
 Give ear, ye heavens, and I will speak; 
 
 And let the earth hear the words of my mouth. 
 
 My doctrine shall drop as the rain, 
 My speech shall distill as the dew; 
 As the small rain upon the tender grass, 
 And as the showers upon the herb. 
 
 Then follows a figure for God which was 
 used by the chronicler in the books of Samuel, 
 David, and the later psalmists, Isaiah, Habak- 
 kuk, and other orator-poets : 
 
 For I will proclaim the name of Jehovah: 
 Ascribe ye greatness unto our God. 
 
 The Rock, his work is perfect; 
 
 For all his ways are justice: 
 
 A God of faithfullness and without iniquity, 
 
 Just and right is he. 
 
 Kepeatedly the poet returns to this figure, 
 
62 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 with what effect one can easily discern when 
 he remembers what rocks and mountain sum- 
 mits must have meant to the Israelites during 
 their nomad life. The providential care for 
 Israel which Jehovah exercised is then de- 
 scribed in immortal stanzas : 
 
 Remember the days of old, 
 Consider the years of many generations: 
 Ask thy father, and he will show thee; 
 Thine elders, and they will tell thee. 
 
 When the Most High gave to the nations their inherit- 
 ance, 
 
 When he separated the children of men, 
 He set the bounds of the peoples 
 According to the number of the children of Israel. 
 
 For Jehovah's portion is his people; 
 Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. 
 
 He found him in a desert land, 
 
 And in the waste howling wilderness; 
 
 He compassed him about, he cared for him, 
 
 He kept him as the apple of his eye. 
 
 As an eagle that stirreth up her nest, 
 That fluttereth over her young, 
 He spread abroad his wings, he took them, 
 He bare them on his pinions. 
 
 Jehovah alone did lead him, 
 
 And there was no foreign god with him. 
 
 He made him to ride on the high places of the earth, 
 And he did eat the increase of the field; 
 And he made him to suck honey out of the rock, 
 And oil out of the flinty rock; 
 
OF THE BIBLE 63 
 
 Butter of the herd, and milk of the flock, 
 
 With fat of lambs, 
 
 And rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, 
 
 With the finest of the wheat; 
 
 And of the blood of the grape thou drankest wine. 
 
 The entire poem is worthy of -deep study, 
 and discloses extraordinary power of vivid 
 description and lofty emotion. But we must 
 turn to another type of poetry in which the 
 Bible excels. Our example is the Song of the 
 Bow, which the chronicler in 2 Samuel has 
 taken from the Book of Jashar, David's Dirge 
 for Saul and Jonathan: 
 
 Thy glory, Israel, is slain upon thy high places! 
 How are the mighty fallen! 
 
 Tell it not in Gath, 
 
 Publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon; 
 Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, 
 Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. 
 
 Ye mountains of Gilboa, 
 
 Let there be no dew nor rain upon you, neither fields of 
 
 offerings : 
 
 For there the shield of the mighty was vilely cast away, 
 The shield of Saul, not anointed with oil. 
 
 From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, 
 The bow of Jonathan turned not back, 
 And the sword of Saul returned not empty. 
 
 Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their 
 
 lives, 
 
 And in their death they were not divided: 
 They were swifter than eagles, 
 They were stronger than lions. 
 
64 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, 
 Who clothed you in scarlet delicately, 
 Who put ornaments of gold upon your apparel, 
 
 How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battlel 
 Jonathan is slain upon thy high places. 
 
 I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: 
 Very pleasant hast thou been unto me: 
 Thy love to me was wonderful, 
 Passing the love of women. 
 
 How are the mighty fallen, 
 
 And the weapons of war perished! 
 
 The Ode of Deborah in Judg. 5, which has 
 been described by a modern critic as "a song 
 that for force and fire is worthy to be placed 
 alongside the noblest battle-odes in any lan- 
 guage," is too long for complete recital here, 
 but we cannot forbear to insert "the thrilling 
 section of the song which tells of the slaying 
 of Sisera by Jael, the wife of a Kenite, or the 
 dramatic delineation of the longing of the 
 mother of Sisera for the home-coming of her 
 son." 
 
 Blessed above women shall Jael be, 
 
 The wife of Heber the Kenite; 
 
 Blessed shall she be above women in the tent. 
 
 He asked water, and she gave him milk; 
 She brought him butter in a lordly dish. 
 
 She put her hand to the tent-pin, 
 
 And her right hand to the workmen's hammer; 
 
OF THE BIBLE 65 
 
 And with the Hammer she smote Sisera, she smote 
 
 through his head; 
 Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples. 
 
 At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay; 
 
 At her -feet he bowed, he fell: 
 
 Where he bowed, there he fell down dead. 
 
 Through the window she looked forth, and cried, 
 The mother of Sisera cried through the lattice, 
 Why is his chariot so long in coming ? 
 Why tarry the wheels of his chariots? 
 
 Her wise ladies answered her, 
 
 Yea, she returned answer to herself, 
 
 Have they not found, have they not divided the spoil? 
 A damsel, two damsels to every man; 
 To Sisera a spoil of dyed garments, 
 A spoil of dyed garments embroidered, 
 Of dyed garments embroidered on both sides, on the 
 necks of the spoil? 
 
 So let all thine enemies perish, Jehovah: 
 But let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth 
 forth in his might. 
 
 Though they are all deserving of studious 
 attention, we can do no more than mention the 
 titles of other poems imbedded in the historical 
 records of the ancient Hebrews, such as : The 
 Oracles of Balaam, in Num. 23 and 24; The 
 Song of Moses and Miriam, in Exod. 15; 
 Jacob's Prophecy concerning his Sons, in Gen. 
 49; The Blessing of Moses, in Deut. 33; 
 Hannah's Song of Thanksgiving, in 1 Sam. 2; 
 David's Song of Praise, in 2 Sam. 22 ; another 
 
66 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 edition of which is Psalm 18 ; David's reputed 
 Swan Song in the next chapter of the same 
 book ; The Psalm of Thanksgiving, in 1 Chron. 
 16; to which must be added those fragments 
 and lesser poems The Revenge of Lamech, in 
 Gen. 4. 23, 24; The Curse of Canaan, in Gen. 
 9. 25-27 ; The Oracle to Hagar, in Gen. 16. 11, 
 12; Isaac's Blessings on Jacob and Esau, in 
 Gen. 27. 27-29, 39, 40 ; The Song of the Well, 
 in Num. 21. 17, 18; Joshua's Address to the 
 Sun and Moon, in Josh. 10. 12, 13; and The 
 Priestly Blessing recorded in Num. 6. 24-26 : 
 
 Jehovah "bless thee, and keep thee: 
 
 Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and oe 
 
 gracious unto thee: 
 Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give 
 
 thee peace. 
 
 Lyric poetry naturally predominates in 
 Hebrew literature, and the Hebrews lead the 
 world in this kind of poetry, as even critics 
 without religious prepossessions in their favor 
 have been forced to admit. "Hebrew poetry," 
 says Bishop Jebb, "is universal poetry, the 
 poetry of all languages and of all peoples." In 
 no biblical poetry is this truth more impres- 
 sively exhibited than in the Psalms. The uni- 
 versality of the adaptation of the Hebrew 
 Hymn Book to the spiritual needs of men is 
 nothing short of marvelous. Gladstone de- 
 clares : 
 
OF THE BIBLE 67 
 
 In the Psalms is the whole music of the human heart, 
 when touched by the hand of its maker, in all its tones 
 that whisper or swell: for every hope and fear, for 
 every sigh and every pang, for every form of strength 
 and languor, of disquietude and rest. 
 
 Charles Kingsley, in describing the func- 
 tions of the poet, says : 
 
 What a man wants, what art wants, perhaps what 
 the maker of them both wants, is a poet who shall begin 
 by confessing that he is as other men are, and shall 
 sing about things which concern all men, in language 
 which all men can understand. 
 
 These requirements the Psalms fulfill in a 
 magnificent way. 
 Said John Calvin: 
 
 I am in the habit of calling this book (The Psalms) 
 not inappropriately The Anatomy of All Parts of the 
 Soul, for not an affection will anyone find in himself, an 
 image of which is not reflected in this mirror. 
 
 Said Athanasius: 
 
 He who uses the Psalms is as one who speaks his own 
 words, and each one sings them as if they had been 
 written for his own case, and not as if they had been 
 spoken by some one else, or meant to apply to some one 
 else. 
 
 Said Bishop Wordsworth : 
 
 The universality of the Psalter is evident from this 
 consideration: every other book of the Old Testament 
 has its counterpart in the New. The books of Moses 
 and other historical books have their correspondence 
 in the Gospels and the Acts; the didactic books have 
 theirs in the Epistles; the prophets have theirs in the 
 Apocalypse; but the Psalter has no echo in the New 
 
68 THE LITEEAKY PRIMACY 
 
 Testament. It is its own echo; it belongs to both Testa- 
 ments. It speaks of Christ, and Christ speaks in it. It 
 is the hymn book of the universal church. 
 
 "When the philosophies of Aristotle and 
 Plato are no longer read," said Rabbi Levy, 
 "the Psalms of David will still be joyously 
 sung." The popularity of these lyrics is un- 
 matched, as their literary and devotional excel- 
 lence is unsurpassed. There is no book in the 
 Bible perhaps with which more persons are 
 familiar, and no poetry from which we need 
 less to bring illustrated excerpts for our pres- 
 ent purpose than the Psalms. It is sufficient 
 to point to this superb collection of sacred 
 songs, and bid everyone satisfy himself with 
 their celestial melody. It has been appropri- 
 ated by all kinds of men, in every walk of life, 
 and for innumerable occasions. The fitness of 
 a psalm for a specific experience has frequently 
 been startlingly shown in historic events. Let 
 us take a single example from the early records 
 of our own country : 
 
 The scene is the first Colonial Congress in 
 1774. To the proposal that the session be 
 opened with prayer Mr. Jay of New York 
 and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina objected 
 on the ground that there existed such a diver- 
 sity of religious sentiments among the mem- 
 bers as made it impracticable for them to join 
 in the same act of worship. Then glorious old 
 
OF THE BIBLE 69 
 
 Sam Adams arose, and avowing that lie was 
 no bigot, said : "I can hear a prayer from any 
 man of piety who is at the same time a friend 
 to his country." A clergyman was thereupon 
 invited to perform the sacred office. He read 
 the psalm for the day [second] in the order 
 of his church. Bancroft says that "it seemed 
 as if Heaven itself was uttering its oracle." 
 Intelligence had just been received of the ter- 
 rible bombardment of Boston. The New Eng- 
 landers present believed that the lives of their 
 friends were being taken by their foes at that 
 very moment. They were profoundly moved 
 as they listened to the ringing sentences of the 
 thirty-fifth psalm, beginning: 
 
 Strive thou, Jehovah, with them that strive with me: 
 Fight thou against them that fight against me. 
 
 Take hold of shield and buckler, 
 And stand up for my help. 
 
 Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them 
 
 that pursue me; 
 Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. 
 
 Let them be put to shame and brought to dishonor that 
 
 seek after my soul: 
 Let them be turned back and confounded that devise 
 
 my hurt. 
 
 Let them be as chaff before the wind, 
 
 And the angel of Jehovah driving them on. 
 
 Several volumes containing hundreds of 
 
70 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 impressive stories of the uses eminent men 
 have made of the Psalms in critical events 
 of their lives have been issued. One of these 
 has recently appeared in its fourth edition 
 after many reprints. It is called The Psalms 
 in Human Life. Its author, Rowland E. 
 Prothero, says : 
 
 No fragment of the glorious temples at Jerusalem; 
 but the imperishable hymns of the Jewish worship rule 
 the hearts of men with more than their pristine power, 
 and still continue to inspire and elevate the conduct 
 and devotions of successive generations of mankind. 
 Fathers of the early Church, like Origen, Athanasius 
 and Jerome, Basil, Ambrose and Augustine; apostles of 
 British Christianity, such as Columba, Cuthbert, Wil- 
 frid, Dunstan, and Bede; mediaeval saints, like Bernard, 
 Francis of Assisi, or Thomas of Villanova; statesmen, 
 like Ximenes, Burghley, and Gladstone have testified 
 to the universal truth and beauty of the Psalms. With 
 a psalm upon their lips died Wiclif, Huss and Jerome 
 of Prague, Luther and Melanchthon. Philosophers, such 
 as Bacon and Locke and Hamilton; men of science, like 
 Humboldt and Romanes; among missionaries, Xavier, 
 Martyn, Duff, Livingstone, Mackay, and Hannington; 
 explorers, like Columbus; scholars, like Casaubon and 
 Salmasius; earthly potentates, like Charlemagne, Vladi- 
 mir, Monomachus, Hildebrand, Louis IX, Henry V, Cathe- 
 rine de Medici, Charles V, Henry of Navarre, and Mary 
 Queen of Scots have found in the Psalms their inspira- 
 tion in life, their strength in peril, or their support in 
 death. 
 
 Oliver Cromwell's mind was fairly saturated 
 with the Psalms, and on many a hard fought 
 field his soldiers joined in singing the swelling 
 stanzas of some martial exhortation or of some 
 
OF THE BIBLE 71 
 
 triumphant paean from the Hebrew Psalter. 
 The armies of more than one great commander 
 have been heartened by the stirring measures 
 of the Psalms, and from the same source, re- 
 formers, confessors, martyrs and heroes of 
 liberty have derived inspiration and courage 
 for their tasks and trials. 
 
 The influence of the Psalms in literature has 
 been monumental. Sir Philip Sidney, Lord 
 Bacon, Robert Burns, William Cowper, John 
 Milton, George Herbert, John Keble, Joseph 
 Addison, Charles Wesley, and Isaac Watts are 
 a few among the many who have rendered the 
 Psalms into English verse ; and still more im- 
 posing is the list of poets and men of letters 
 in various lands who have yielded to the spell 
 of these deathless lyrics. 
 
 We cannot attempt even a superficial ex- 
 amination of all the poetic literature of the 
 Bible, but no one who hopes to obtain a fair 
 appreciation of its variety and extent should 
 fail to apply his literary judgment to such 
 masterpieces as the Proverbs, which Matthew 
 Arnold calls "a delicious book,' 5 the Song of 
 Solomon "a whole collection of fine specimens 
 of wedding songs," and the Lamentations of 
 Jeremiah. 
 
 The dramatic poem which bears the name of 
 Job, its central figure, is best described by 
 means of the tributes paid to it by two dis- 
 
72 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 tinguished men of letters. Thomas Carlyle 
 says : 
 
 I call the Book of Job, apart from all theories about 
 it, one of the grandest things ever written with a pen. 
 One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble 
 universality, different from noble patriotism or sectarian- 
 ism, reigns in it. A noble book; all men's book. It 
 is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem 
 man's destiny and God's way with him here in this 
 earth. And all in such free, flowing outlines; grand in 
 its sincerity, in its simplicity, in its epic melody and 
 repose of reconcilement. . . . Such living likenesses 
 were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime recon- 
 ciliation; oldest choral melody as of the heart of man- 
 kind; so soft and great; as the summer midnight, as 
 the world with its seas and stars. There is nothing 
 written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal 
 literary merit. 
 
 The judgment of James Anthony Froude is 
 of the same nature : 
 
 An extraordinary book, a book of which it is to say 
 little to call it unequaled of its kind, and which will 
 one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own 
 merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all 
 the poetry of the world. 
 
 Only repeated and continuous reading of 
 Job will enable the mind to discover the justifi- 
 cation for this superlative praise, nor can the 
 sublime moralities of the poem be understood 
 adequately by any man till he has reached 
 middle life, and been confronted with the 
 problems which form the substance of its pro- 
 found inquiries. Yet it needs but an elemen- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 73 
 
 tary literary culture to discern the rhetorical 
 grandeur of such passages as that which por- 
 trays Job's yearning to find God, in chapter 
 23; or that which describes the benefits of 
 chastisements, in chapter 5; or that which 
 delineates the creation and constitution of the 
 earth, in chapter 38 ; or that which pictures the 
 war-horse, in chapter 39; or that w r hich de- 
 scribes leviathan, in chapter 41. 
 
 There is in this book such a blending of epic, 
 lyric, and dramatic elements, and such an 
 intermingling of ethical, moral, and social 
 questions, as cannot be found in the master- 
 pieces of any other literature. When this 
 wondrous work is compared with Homer, 
 Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and 
 Goethe, its preeminence is at once apparent. 
 
 When we turn to the New Testament for 
 illustrations of biblical poetry, we are met 
 chiefly by quotations from the Old Testament, 
 both in the narrative portions of the Gospels 
 and in the discourses of Jesus, whose mind was 
 filled with a knowledge of the ancient writings 
 of his people. The same is true of the Acts of 
 the Apostles and of the speeches of Peter and 
 Paul. The Epistles contain frequent citations 
 from the prophetical books and the Psalms. 
 Of original poetry we have but few examples 
 in the New Testament, but these are of the 
 
74 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 highest quality. In the Gospel of Luke appear 
 what have been called the first Christian 
 hymns. In addition to the Ave Maria of the 
 Roman Church, the annunciation to Mary 
 (1. 28-33), and the Gloria in Excelsis of all 
 Christendom, the angelic salutation which 
 heralded the advent of Jesus (2. 14), we have 
 the Benedictus, or song of Zacharias (1. 68- 
 79 ) ; the Magnificat, or the song of the Virgin 
 Mary (1. 46-55), and the Nunc Dimittis, or the 
 song of Simeon (2. 29-32). Allusions to the 
 old writings or direct quotations from them 
 occur in these songs. They are especially 
 plentiful in the Magnificat; but of this song 
 it has been well said that "it surpasses the 
 Old Testament in spiritual elevation, and the 
 unity of feeling that pervades it makes it an 
 original composition." In the broader signifi- 
 cance of poetry, which subordinates form to 
 spirit or altogether disregards mechanical con- 
 struction, Jesus may be classed among the 
 poets, and surely Paul's Ode to Love in 1 Cor. 
 13, and much of his discussion of the resurrec- 
 tion in the fifteenth chapter of the same epistle 
 must be regarded as poetry in essence, though 
 not in form. 
 
 II 
 
 It is an easy and natural transition from the 
 poetry to the oratory of the Bible. There is 
 
OF THE BIBLE 75 
 
 an obvious kinship between these two forms 
 of expression. Many of the orations in the 
 Old Testament are not only poetical in spirit, 
 but they are phrased in language which can 
 be rightly estimated only by using the same 
 canons of literary judgment which are applied 
 to poetry. Yet the essential motive of oratory 
 is broadly distinguished from that of most 
 poetry. Definitions of oratory, as framed by 
 men who were masters of public discourse, will 
 both aid us in determining the end which 
 oratory seeks, and enable us to perceive the 
 grounds on which the oratory of the Bible is 
 assigned so lofty a place. 
 
 "An orator," said Cicero, "is one who can 
 use words agreeable to hear and thoughts 
 adapted to prove." Aristotle described oratory 
 as "the power of saying on every subject what 
 can be found to persuade." Macaulay de- 
 clared, "The object of oratory alone is not 
 truth, but persuasion." Emerson affirmed, 
 "The end of eloquence is is it not? to alter 
 in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half hour's 
 discourse, the convictions and habits of years." 
 Fenelon defines it more elaborately thus : 
 
 The whole art of oratory may be reduced to proving, 
 painting and raising the passions. Now all those pretty 
 sparkling, quaint thoughts that do not tend to one of 
 these ends are only witty conceits. The whole art of 
 eloquence consists in enforcing the clearest proofs of 
 any truth with such powerful motives as may affect 
 
76 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 the hearers, and employ their passions to just and 
 worthy ends; to raise their indignation at ingratitude, 
 their horror against cruelty, their compassion for the 
 miserable, their love of virtue, and to direct every other 
 passion to its proper objects. 
 
 According to these definitions, which we 
 may accept as expert testimony on the subject, 
 oratory is not boisterous declamation, or per- 
 fervid rhetoric, or bombastic fury of voice or 
 manner, but reasonableness, put forward in 
 an impressive fashion. Poetic beauty may 
 characterize it, deep feeling will undoubtedly 
 pervade it, but whatever springs of emotion 
 are touched, the motive will be persuasion, 
 proof, conviction. 
 
 Within these terms we shall find oratory in 
 abundance in the literature of the Bible. 
 Though it will be impracticable to make cita- 
 tions such as were gathered from the poets, 
 for reason that will be apparent to the judi- 
 cious, yet a sufficient indication of oratorical 
 passages in the Bible may be given. It has 
 been said that no collection of speeches in 
 secular literature has the interest which 
 attaches to the orations of Moses because of 
 their setting, as displayed in the book of Deu- 
 teronomy. These will be read with much relish 
 if their historical perspective is clearly before 
 our minds. One of the finest specimens of 
 eloquence in any language is Judah's plea 
 
OF THE BIBLE 77 
 
 before Joseph ( Gen. 44. 18-34 ) , and no person 
 of feeling can read it without being deeply 
 moved. Joshua's exhortation to Israel (Josh. 
 23. 3-16) at the close of his public career is 
 an exalted discourse which produced a pro- 
 found impression, and was attended by results 
 that place it well within the range of the 
 definitions of oratory already quoted. Ezra's 
 sermon (Neh. 8) must be reckoned as a noble 
 piece of horniletical exposition, though but 
 little of his actual speech is recorded. 
 
 It is among the prophets, however, that we 
 must look for the most copious illustrations 
 of the oratory which has been preserved in the 
 Old Testament. It is customary for many to 
 think of these seers as writers rather than as 
 speakers. In truth, however, their deliver- 
 ances were not, in most instances, originally 
 written, but were speeches subsequently set 
 down in form for consultation and reference; 
 just as the speeches of Webster and other 
 American statesmen were first given in extem- 
 poraneous form, and afterward prepared for 
 publication; or as many of the sermons of 
 Wesley were arranged with strict attention to 
 logical propriety and were sustained by exten- 
 sive notes, but w r ere not reduced to writing 
 
 . 
 
 until they were needed for the press. 
 
 Many of the orations of the prophets were 
 distinctly poetic both in form and substance. 
 
78 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 Indeed, it would be quite impossible to assign 
 to them their true value as literature without 
 keeping this fact in mind. What Dr. Arthur 
 S. Peake says about the Bible in general is 
 particularly apposite for the prophetical writ- 
 ings: "There are many passages of Scripture 
 whose spell over us would be completely 
 broken were they to be so written that, while 
 the ideas remained the same, the expression 
 was changed into pedestrian prose." Illus- 
 trations of this fact will occur to everyone 
 familiar with the Old Testament. 
 
 Some of the prophets were not educated in 
 the formal sense. Amos was a herdsman. A 
 modern critic has suggested that the reason 
 Jeremiah dictated his prophecy to Baruch was 
 that he could not write. The ignominy of such 
 a disability is diminished in the mind of this 
 author by recalling that "Wolfram von 
 Eschenbach, the great German poet of the 
 middle ages, could neither read nor write ; yet 
 he produced works of great length, and, in 
 accordance with the practice of the time, he 
 no doubt recited them on different occasions. 7 ' 
 Isaiah flourished in the court of Hezekiah, and 
 represents an entirely different type of proph- 
 et. Each of the great seers whose addresses 
 have been preserved possessed characteristics 
 which distinguish him from the others. The 
 earliest of them, as well as some of the later 
 
OP THE BIBLE 79 
 
 ones, have given us what has been called the 
 national poetry of their times, charged as it 
 is with the public and community issues of 
 the several periods in which it was produced. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that the element 
 of prediction entered but subordinately into 
 their work. They were seers who spoke in 
 behalf of Jehovah, agitators who attempted to 
 rouse the nation to a consciousness of the need 
 for reform. They undertook to interpret to 
 the people the latter's civic, national, and reli- 
 gious duties. They felt it to be their first 
 obligation to make clear these responsibilities 
 and the account which must be rendered to 
 God for their proper discharge. Dean Stanley, 
 in his History of the Jewish Church, has given 
 parallel instances of the exercise of the pro- 
 phetic office in later history. He says : 
 
 When Ambrose closed the doors of the church of Milan 
 against the blood-stained hands of the devout Theo- 
 dosius, he acted in the spirit of a prophet. When Ken, 
 in spite of his doctrine of the divine right of kings, 
 rebuked Charles II on his deathbed for his long un- 
 repented vices, those who stood by were justly reminded 
 of the ancient prophets. When Savonarola, at Florence, 
 threw the energy of his religious zeal into burning indig- 
 nation against the sins of the city, high and low, his 
 sermons read more like Hebrew prophecies than modern 
 homilies. 
 
 To these we may add, as equally pertinent 
 illustrations, the work of Whitefield and the 
 Wesley s, of Asbury and Edwards, of many reli- 
 
80 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 gious and social reformers of modern times, 
 who in a sense are as much to be designated 
 prophets as were Amos and Malachi. 
 
 In recent years the political functions of the 
 biblical prophets have come to be better un- 
 derstood than in former times. The matter 
 has been put felicitously by Dr. Hodges, as 
 quoted by Dr. Washington Gladden : 
 
 The Jewish Church was the Jewish nation. The 
 prophets were patriot orators, who preached politics 
 with vehemence, and entered might and main into public 
 life. It is impossible to think of Isaiah as a quiet parish 
 priest, living in the center of a narrow circle, letting 
 the great world outside go on uninterrupted in its own 
 mistaken way. In New York, in Boston, Isaiah would 
 have been the heart and soul of a great, outspoken, 
 radical independent, righteous newspaper. Amos and 
 Hosea would have put themselves in peril of the police 
 by inflammatory speeches on the street corners and in 
 the parks. All these men were interested in public 
 questions profoundly and supremely. . . . There was no 
 difference [to them] between a parliament and a prayer 
 meeting. Any political question was also a religious 
 question. 
 
 Space is denied us for citations from the 
 prophetic orators, but examples abound. The 
 reader who has a susceptibility for eloquence, 
 and whose imagination is vivid enough to 
 enable him to realize the situations out of 
 which these messages w r ere uttered, will find 
 no difficulty in selecting for himself speech 
 after speech of unusual oratorical and dra- 
 matic power from the prophetical writings. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 81 
 
 Attention is herewith directed to the prophecy 
 of Isaiah, chapters 1. 2-20 ; 3. 9-26 ; 35 ; 55 and 
 60, as containing noble illustrations of 
 oratory. They also exhibit the strong poetic 
 quality of this orator-prophet, and go far to 
 explain the words of Matthew Arnold : "I rate 
 the value of the operation of poetry and litera- 
 ture upon men's minds extremely high; and 
 from no poetry and literature, not even from 
 our own Shakespeare and Milton, great as they 
 are, and our own as they are, have I for my 
 own part received so much delight and stimu- 
 lus as from Homer and Isaiah." Other 
 prophets will make a like impression on other 
 minds, and a thorough acquaintance with their 
 literature will dispose us to express with re- 
 spect to many of them the sentiment uttered 
 by Ruskin with regard to one of them : "I 
 should have liked excessively to have known 
 Habakkuk." 
 
 When we enter the domain of the New 
 Testament we are obviously where oratory 
 plays a most conspicuous part. It is un- 
 deniable that John the Baptist was a man of 
 remarkable oratorical gifts. The mere read- 
 ing of Matt. 3. 7-12, compared with Luke 3. 
 3-17, will indicate this, and the immense influ- 
 ence he exerted over the crowds which were 
 drawn to him from every part of Palestine will 
 confirm the impression. The question is some- 
 
82 THE LITEKARY PRIMACY 
 
 times mooted whether Jesus can be with 
 propriety denominated an orator. So universal 
 were his intellectual resources, as revealed in 
 his parables and other discourses, that, though 
 not a fragment of writing from his hand exists, 
 one sees that there is no form of literature in 
 which he might not have excelled. Reference 
 has already been made to the poetic character- 
 istics of his speech, and as a maker of stories 
 he has remained unsurpassed to this day. He 
 surely possessed the prime requisites for an 
 orator. He had a flawless physical constitu- 
 tion; the lack of it would have been used 
 against him by his enemies and would have 
 made it impossible for him to endure the strain 
 and exposure of his public ministry. He must 
 have had a magnificent voice, or he could not 
 have made himself heard by the vast throngs 
 which gathered on the hillsides to listen to his 
 words. He had the oratorical temperament, 
 and could run the whole gamut of emotional 
 expression, from the mildest pathos to the 
 most withering sarcasm. With the glance of 
 his eye he could quell the hostile mob, or send 
 the recreant disciple away weeping bitterly. 
 In rhetorical purity and splendor he was 
 matchless. His parables are marvels of sim- 
 plicity and directness; their literary beauty 
 has never been equaled. While the Sermon on 
 the Mount is didactic, epigrammatic, pictorial, 
 
OF THE BIBLE 83 
 
 it embodies the spirit of that eloquence, .the 
 purpose of which is to persuade or convince, 
 and the peroration, as recorded in Matt. 7. 
 21-27, is truly sublime. In Christ's indictment 
 of the Scribes and Pharisees, preserved in the 
 twenty-third chapter of the same Gospel, we 
 have an equally impressive example of his 
 power of invective. 
 
 Of apostolic oratory we have numerous and 
 striking illustrations. A perusal of the 
 Pauline epistles will disclose how winged were 
 the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles. From 
 these writings we are able to get a conception 
 of what Paul would do in public speech. As 
 his epistles were, with few exceptions, intended 
 to be read to the churches, we may discern 
 the reason for their resemblance to addresses, 
 though in some instances, as in the Epistle to 
 the Romans and the Epistle to the Colossians, 
 we have discourses more seriously reasoned 
 than would be natural to public speech. 
 
 Readers of the Acts of the Apostles will 
 recall more than one address of Peter's which 
 exhibits the fervor and persuasiveness of 
 genuine oratory. In Stephen's speech before 
 the Sanhedrim we have an oratorical example 
 of high significance ; while Paul's addresses on 
 Mars' Hill (Acts 17), to the Ephesian elders 
 ( Acts 20 ) , on the staircase at Jerusalem ( Acts 
 22), before Felix (Acts 24), and before 
 
84 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 Agrippa (Acts 26), reveal the forensic ability 
 which he possessed. 
 
 From this hurried survey of the oratorical 
 elements in the literature of the Bible we are 
 not surprised at the influence wrought by it 
 upon the oratory of those men in public life 
 who have been wise enough to pore over its 
 contents. Every student of literature is aware 
 that Lincoln's celebrated Gettysburg speech 
 is full of biblical ideas and phraseology, as 
 were most of his public addresses and state 
 papers. Both Edmund Burke and John Bright 
 enriched their speeches in Parliament and on 
 the hustings by many extracts from the Scrip- 
 tures. Said Daniel Webster, "If there is any- 
 thing in my style or thoughts to be com- 
 mended, the credit is due to my kind parents 
 for instilling into my mind an early love of 
 the Scriptures." When Kossuth, the Hun- 
 garian patriot-orator, was asked how he came 
 to know and speak the English language so 
 well, he replied, "By studying the English 
 Bible." The great power of Chrysostom's 
 sermons lay not merely in his extraordinary 
 rhetorical ability, but also and mainly in his 
 thorough acquaintance with the Bible, of 
 which he made abundant use. The biographer 
 of Ruf us Choate says of him : 
 
 You can hardly find speech, argument, or lecture of 
 his, from first to last, that is not sprinkled and studded 
 
OF THE BIBLE 85 
 
 with biblical ideas and pictures, and biblical words and 
 phrases. To him the book of Job was a sublime poem. 
 He knew the Psalms by heart, and dearly loved the 
 prophets, and above all Isaiah, upon whose gorgeous 
 imagery he made copious drafts. He pondered every 
 word, read with most subtle keenness, and applied with 
 happiest effect. 
 
 The man who wishes to perfect himself in 
 the art of public speech, as respects both the 
 matter and manner of effective discourse, must 
 consult not merely those classic examples of 
 Greece and Rome which are so frequently held 
 up for his emulation, but also those rugged 
 orators whose sentences resound through the 
 Scriptures, and especially the utterances of 
 Him who spoke as "never man spake." 
 
86 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FICTION AND HUMOR OF THE BIBLE 
 
 HEINRICH HEINE said, "The Bible is the 
 drama of the human race." This is a truer 
 description than many realize who quote it 
 with approval. If they concede its correctness 
 they ought to acknowledge the truth of its 
 implications, and expect the Bible to reflect 
 all the moods of mankind. This they virtually 
 deny. Their reverence for the sublime motif 
 of redemption which pervades the Bible has 
 led them to obscure the human element which 
 exists in its various documents. They forget 
 that it is the ancient literature of a great 
 people, a manifold expression of their life, the 
 ripest intellectual fruitage of a race with a 
 genius for religion ; and that no tenable theory 
 of its divine inspiration can ignore the histori- 
 cal process by which it was produced. 
 
 It has been observed more than once, and 
 expressed in various terms, that while the 
 ideal of the Greeks was knowledge, and that 
 of the Romans was social order, the ideal of 
 the Hebrews was religion. The Bible is the 
 record of the religious and national develop- 
 ment of the Hebrew people. In a theocracy, 
 
OF THE BIBLE 87 
 
 such as that out of which Jewish nationality 
 was evolved, religious experience and racial 
 history are inseparable. When a people living 
 under such conditions begin to write, it is 
 natural that wliat they produce should have 
 a religious cast. In accord with this principle 
 some of the books of the Bible have an exclu- 
 sively religious aim, which the dullest mind 
 cannot ignore. Others are dominated by reli- 
 gious sentiments, though they are not written 
 primarily with a religious purpose. Still 
 others, on a close scrutiny, fail to disclose more 
 than moral or religious implications. They 
 were not devised as religious literature. Eeli- 
 gion is simply the atmosphere in which they 
 were composed. The Song of Solomon and the 
 book of Esther may be assigned to this last 
 class. To such an extent has the feeling pre- 
 vailed that only those books should be regarded 
 sacred which are emphatically religious that 
 great hesitation has been shown by certain 
 devout scholars to acknowledge the right of 
 any others to a place in the Canon of Scrip- 
 ture. But insistence upon a definite religious 
 teaching in every work for which inspiration 
 is claimed has wrought mischief for religion, 
 and has made it difficult, if not impossible, to 
 form a correct estimate of the Bible. What 
 Phillips Brooks said about the second collec- 
 tion of books in the Bible applies to the entire 
 
88 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 volume : "The New Testament is a biography. 
 Make it a mere book of dogmas, and its vitality 
 is gone. Make it a book of laws, and it grows 
 hard and untimely. Make it a biography, and 
 it is a true book of life. Make it the history 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, and the whole world 
 holds it in its heart forever." If in the same 
 spirit we persist in the opinion that the Old 
 Testament is to be read from beginning to 
 end with a strictly theological interpretation 
 always in mind, we shall inevitably lose many 
 of the most wholesome virtues which are in- 
 herent in its literature. But if we constantly 
 remind ourselves of the actual character of 
 this literature, and remember how it was pro- 
 duced, we shall be prepared for an almost 
 unlimited variety of art forms, and shall not 
 be surprised to find, in addition to history, 
 adventure, biography, poetry and oratory, 
 illustrations of romance, the drama, fiction 
 and humor. Indeed, on the supposition that 
 the ancient Hebrews were a normal people, 
 whose intellectual life developed naturally, we 
 should be puzzled if we did not discover such 
 types in their literature. 
 
 The reluctance of devout admirers of the 
 Bible to admit that fiction is displayed within 
 
OF THE BIBLE 89 
 
 its pages is probably due in large part to their 
 inability to distinguish between the truth 
 which is indissoluble from fact and the truth 
 which is independent of fact, which in a narra- 
 tive, for example, is defiant of historicity. 
 They forget that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress 
 may be true as an exposition of the spiritual 
 conflicts which are incident to a finally tri- 
 umphant Christian life, while at the same time 
 it is wholly untrue as a description of the 
 actual occurrences in the career of a real indi- 
 vidual and of those other persons who are 
 represented as having been in association with 
 him. Gradually the parables of Jesus have 
 come to be recognized by the majority of Bible 
 readers as fiction of the noblest species, their 
 strength lying in the obvious possibility of the 
 events narrated, and in their similarity to the 
 commonly observed happenings of the world. 
 When it is once realized that Jesus was a most 
 skillful inventor of stories, the substance of 
 which was plucked out of the experiences of 
 mankind, but the shaping of which was due 
 to the matchless genius of his mind, it is easy 
 to accommodate one's thought to the affirma- 
 tion that various other portions of the Bible 
 can only satisfactorily be explained as fiction. 
 
 A simple and rudimentary form of fictitious 
 writing is the fable. This literary contrivance 
 is sharply differentiated from other forms of 
 
90 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 fiction by the fact that it employs inanimate 
 nature, and more frequently the lower animals 
 of creation for its dramatis personce. A story 
 is made the vehicle of truth to be imparted, 
 but is always an impossible story. The mo- 
 tive is usually the inculcation of what has been 
 termed "prudential morality." Industry, fru- 
 gality, foresight, caution, common sense, and 
 other sterling virtues of a well-regulated life 
 are illustrated, but no such strict regard for 
 the semblance of fact is shown as one expects 
 in the higher forms of fiction. So far as the 
 records indicate neither Jesus nor his apostles 
 ever used the fable, but we have several ex- 
 amples of it in the Old Testament, the most 
 impressive being that which Jothani spoke to 
 the men of Shechem from the top of Mount 
 Gerizirn ( Judg. 9. 8-15 ) . It reads as follows : 
 
 The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over 
 them; and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over 
 us. But the olive-tree said unto them, Should I leave 
 my fatness, wherewith ~by me they honor God and man, 
 and go to wave to and fro over the trees f And the trees 
 said to the fig-tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But 
 the fig-tree said unto them, Should I leave my sweetness, 
 and my good fruit, and go to wave to and fro over the 
 trees? And the trees said unto the vine, Come thou, and 
 reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I 
 leave my new wine, which cheereth God and man, and 
 go to wave to and fro over the trees f Then said all the 
 trees unto the oramole, Come thou, and reign over us. 
 And the 'bram'ble said unto the trees, If in truth ye 
 anoint me king over you, then come and take refuge in 
 
OF THE BIBLE 91 
 
 my shade; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, 
 and devour the cedars of Lebanon. 
 
 There is a briefer fable in 2 Kings 14. 9, 
 written by King Jehoash to Amaziah, king of 
 Judah, in these words : 
 
 The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that 
 was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son 
 to wife: and there passed by a wild beast that was in 
 Lebanon, and trod doivn the thistle. 
 
 To one who has been reared in the belief 
 that the only approach to fiction in the Bible 
 is the parable it is naturally somewhat dis- 
 concerting to be told that the myth has any 
 place in its literature. Yet, if we had not 
 been taught an artificial view of the Scrip- 
 tures, we could not hesitate to call mythical 
 this passage from the Epistle of Jude: 
 
 But Michael the archangel, when contending with the 
 devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not 
 bring against him a railing judgment, but said, The 
 Lord rebuke thee. 
 
 One scarcely knows what to call Micaiah's 
 Vision in 1 Kings 22. 19-22. It is not a fable 
 or a parable, and it is surely not history. 
 
 I saw Jehovah sitting on his throne, and all the host 
 of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on 
 his left. And Jehovah said, Who shall entice Ahab, that 
 he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gileadf And one said 
 on this manner; and another said on that manner. And 
 there came forth a spirit, and stood before Jehovah, 
 and said, I will entice him. And Jehovah said unto him, 
 Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and will be a 
 
92 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he 
 said, Thou shalt entice him, and shalt prevail also: go 
 forth, and do so. 
 
 That is a flight of the imagination, one is 
 forced to admit on moral grounds, if there 
 were no others. 
 
 It is on physical grounds that the story of 
 Joshua's command over the sun and the moon, 
 as recorded in Josh. 10. 12-14, is pronounced 
 a myth: 
 
 Then spake Joshua to Jehovah in the day when 
 Jehovah delivered up the Amorites before the children 
 of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, 
 
 Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; 
 
 And thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon. 
 
 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, 
 
 Until the nation had avenged themselves of their 
 
 enemies. 
 
 Is not this written in the book of Jasharf And the sun 
 stayed in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down 
 about a whole day. And there was no day like that 
 before it or after it, that Jehovah hearkened unto the 
 voice of a man: for Jehovah fought for Israel. 
 
 The sublimity of the poetic conception in 
 this passage must not blind us to its irration- 
 ality when literally interpreted. 
 
 When we pass to the allegory we are on 
 territory that no one will dispute; for the 
 Bible has the finest examples of this figure to 
 be found in literature. The distinction of the 
 allegory is that it carries its own interpreta- 
 tion. In the eightieth psalm we have a pic- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 93 
 
 ture of Israel as a vine transplanted from a 
 foreign clime: 
 
 Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt; 
 
 Thou didst drive out the nations, and plantedst it. 
 
 Thou preparedst room- before it, 
 
 And it took deep root, and filled the land. 
 
 The mountains were covered with the shadow of it, 
 And the boughs thereof were like cedars of God. 
 
 It sent out its branches unto the sea, 
 And its shoots unto the River. 
 
 Why hast thou broken down its walls, 
 
 So that all they that pass by the way do pluck it? 
 
 The boar out of the wood doth ravage it, 
 And the wild beasts of the field feed on it. 
 
 Turn again, we beseech thee, God of hosts: 
 
 Look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine, 
 
 And the stock which thy right hand planted, 
 
 And the branch that thou madest strong for thyself. 
 
 It is burned with fire, it is cut down: 
 
 They perish at the rebuke of thy countenance. 
 
 In the first seven verses of Isa. 5 we have 
 the same figure wrought out more elaborately : 
 
 Let me sing -for my well-beloved a song of my beloved 
 touching his vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard 
 in a very fruitful hill: and he digged it, and gathered 
 out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest 
 vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also 
 hewed out a winepress therein: and he looked that it 
 should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild 
 grapes. 
 
 And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of 
 
94 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. 
 What could have been done more to my vineyard, that 
 I have not done in it? Where-fore, when I looked that 
 it should bring -forth grapes, brought it -forth wild 
 grapes? And noiv I will tell you what I will do to my 
 vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it 
 shall be eaten up; I will break down the wall thereof, 
 and it shall be trodden down: and I will lay it waste; 
 it shall not be pruned nor hoed; but there shall come 
 up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds 
 that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of 
 Jehovah of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of 
 Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for justice, but, 
 behold, oppression; for righteousness, but, behold, a cry. 
 
 In John 15, beginning, "I am the true vine, 
 and my Father is the husbandman," the same 
 figure with a different application, and for 
 another purpose, is employed by Jesus. 
 
 The vine also appears in a very effective 
 allegory by Ezekiel (17. 3-10) known as the 
 parable of Two Eagles and a Vine, which is 
 referred to in the text as a riddle, which is no 
 sooner delivered, however, than it is explained 
 as showing God's judgment on Jerusalem. 
 Ezekiel is prolific in allegorical pictures. The 
 Lion's Whelps (19. 2-9), and The Boiling Pot 
 (24. 3-5) are worthy of special attention. 
 
 In the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes (2-6) 
 there occurs an allegorical characterization of 
 the sorrows and limitations of old age which 
 is peerless in literature. When Tennyson was 
 told that his poem, The Ancient Sage, was like 
 
OF THE BIBLE 95 
 
 this, he replied, "I only wish it were; I could 
 never equal that description." The passage 
 is so famous that it need not be cited here, 
 but no reader who is acquainted with the fea- 
 tures of advanced age can fail to perceive how 
 faithfully, yet with what poetic beauty, the 
 author of this gem has delineated them. The 
 tribute of H. Rider Haggard to the whole of 
 Ecclesiastes may be appropriately quoted in 
 this connection : 
 
 There is one immortal work that moves me still more 
 a work that utters all the world's yearning anguish 
 and disillusionment in one sorrow-laden and bitter cry, 
 and whose stately music thrills like the voice of pines 
 heard in the darkness of a midnight gale, and that is the 
 Book of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 It seems hardly necessary to remark that 
 the allegory of The Good Shepherd ( John 10 ) , 
 in which Jesus so beautifully describes himself 
 and his divine mission, is one of the finest and 
 tenderest pieces of figurative literature in the 
 world. 
 
 Nathan's dramatic rebuke of David (2 Sam. 
 12. 1-7) contains an allegory which will fit- 
 tingly introduce us to the parables of Jesus, as 
 it is more distinctly parabolic in its construc- 
 tion than the other allegories to which atten- 
 tion has just been directed : 
 
 There were two men in one city; the one rich, and 
 the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks 
 and herds; but the poor man had nothing, save one little 
 
96 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and 
 it grew up together with him, and with his children; it 
 did eat of his own morsel, and drank of his own cup, 
 and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. 
 And there came a traveler unto the rich man, and he 
 spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to 
 dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him, 
 but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the 
 man that was come to him. 
 
 And David's anger was greatly kindled against the 
 man; and he said to Nathan, As Jehovah liveth, the man 
 that hath done this is worthy to die: and he shall 
 restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and 
 because he had no pity. 
 
 And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. 
 
 A voluminous literature has grown up 
 around the parables of Jesus, many of which 
 have so entered the common fund of the 
 world's knowledge that any allusion to them 
 is immediately understood. The Prodigal Son 
 is recognized as a story which is reproduced 
 in some of its features innumerable times 
 wherever humanity sins and suffers on the 
 earth, but the compassionate items of which 
 are not too frequently illustrated in the con- 
 duct of mankind. The parables which set 
 forth the Kingdom of God and these are 
 many and various embody principles of 
 social adjustment, in addition to their spirit- 
 ual teachings, which are only now coming to 
 their legitimate fruition, the Christian world 
 having been slow to perceive their profound 
 philosophy for organized society, or unwilling 
 
OF THE BIBLE 97 
 
 to apply them to the problems of the State. 
 The Good Samaritan has captivated humanity, 
 even those who fail to emulate the example 
 of that noble heretic feeling the highest admi- 
 ration for his virtues. The Rich Fool has his 
 counterpart in modern society, and is con- 
 stantly stimulating the drift to Socialism, the 
 average man not having yet taken into his 
 mind the aphorism with which the parable is 
 illuminated, "A man's life consisteth not in 
 the abundance of the things which he possess- 
 eth." The Pharisee and the Publican have 
 passed into the proverbial speech of the people. 
 The Unrighteous Steward is still a puzzle for 
 all who cannot realize the devotion of Jesus 
 to the paradox as a means of arresting atten- 
 tion, or who cannot see that religion will not 
 prosper as it should without common sense. 
 Dives and Lazarus carry us into the invisible 
 world, and thus take us out of the range of 
 things conformable to our experience or obser- 
 vation. This is one of the parables which form 
 an exception to the terms in which they have 
 previously been described. Only in a profound 
 spiritual sense can possibility or probability 
 be predicated of its scenery. But why continue 
 to specify in respect to riches which are open 
 to all, and which can be readily apprehended 
 by all? They lie before us in the New Testa- 
 ment, a glittering array, unexcelled in the 
 
98 THE LITEEAEY PRIMACY 
 
 literature of the world for the glories which 
 distinguish their class. 
 
 Before passing to the consideration of works 
 in the Bible more closely resembling the fiction 
 of modern times, and standing apart by them- 
 selves as the highest and most extended ex- 
 amples of this species of writing to be found 
 in the sacred Scriptures, it is well to pause 
 for brief mention of two stories which, while 
 they have an historical foundation, are doubt- 
 less embellished with fictitious investiture. 
 The first is the book of Ruth, which Goethe 
 called "the loveliest specimen of epic and 
 idyllic poetry which we possess," and of which 
 Humboldt said, "The little book of the gleaner 
 Ruth presents us with a charming and ex- 
 quisitely simple picture of nature." 
 
 The Hebrews were accustomed to put the 
 book of Ruth and the Psalms together, the 
 former being prefixed to the Psalter in order 
 to glorify David, who was sprung from the 
 line of Ruth. That was at a time when a 
 larger number of the psalms were attributed 
 to David than are now ascribed to his author- 
 ship. There is an unquestioned historical 
 background to this fascinating romance, but 
 its charm consists in the delicate sweetness 
 which breathes through its whole extent, in 
 its restrained treatment of episodes which an 
 awkward writer would have ruined with vul- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 99 
 
 garity, and in its refinement of feeling. Ruth's 
 loving protest to Naomi is immortal : 
 
 Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return from 
 following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; 
 and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall 
 be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, 
 will I die, and there will I be buried. 
 
 Of the book of Esther Professor E. G. Moul- 
 ton says that it is "saved from being an excit- 
 ing novel with a double plot only by the acci- 
 dent of its being true." That it is certainly 
 history not all critics are agreed. Though it 
 may have a definite basis of fact, its power 
 as literature consists in the deft way in which 
 its materials are used. Its admission to the 
 Canon of Scripture has been a scandal to some 
 because it nowhere contains the name of God. 
 Luther, who was plagued by the same artificial 
 view of the imperative requirement for pro- 
 nouncedly theological teachings in any work 
 recognized as biblical that has caused trouble 
 to so many other people, expressed the devout 
 wish that neither Esther nor her book had ever 
 existed. No student of literature will sympa- 
 thize with this desire. Though the spirit of 
 revenge is exhibited in the book, it is an ac- 
 companiment of a not unworthy patriotism, 
 while the doctrine of Divine Providence is as 
 thoroughly illustrated in this story as in any 
 of the events of history which Americans 
 
100 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 fondly regard as evidence that the Lord of 
 hosts has been with their people. 
 
 In the book of Jonah we finally come upon 
 a work of fiction in which the cunning of the 
 true artist is most felicitously displayed. It 
 has been the object of ridicule by those whose 
 shallow minds seek even the most superficial 
 occasions of pointing the finger of scorn at 
 the Bible, and it has been victimized by those 
 whose unwise zeal for the defense of the Bible 
 has betrayed them into false views of the mode 
 of interpreting it. Ten thousand cheap wits 
 have made merry over these words: "And 
 Jehovah prepared a great fish to swallow up 
 Jonah ; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish 
 three days and three nights. Then Jonah 
 prayed unto Jehovah his God out of the fish's 
 belly . . . And Jehovah spake unto the fish, 
 and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." 
 While the mockers are making sport of this 
 alleged historical absurdity, they overlook, 
 after the manner of their ilk, the lofty spirit- 
 ual teachings of the story as developed, and, 
 of course, have no time, and in most instances, 
 no ability, to observe the admirable literary 
 workmanship of this production. 
 
 The reasons for regarding the book of Jonah 
 a work of fiction lie much deeper than those 
 physical difficulties on which the scorners 
 
OF THE BIBLE 101 
 
 ., 
 
 - 
 dilate with such humorous zest. The prayer 
 
 which Jonah is represented as offering within 
 the belly of the fish is a poetical mosaic of 
 phrases from the Psalms, and is evidently the 
 product of patient care such as no man would 
 exercise in the doleful and tragic circum- 
 stances which terrified Jonah. Furthermore, 
 it is rather an offering of thanksgiving for 
 deliverance after the event than a prayer for 
 rescue during the depressing experience. It 
 shows the undeniable marks of having been 
 inserted in the narrative for the sake of its 
 own admirable qualities, and not because of 
 any element of naturalness to the situation 
 which it possessed. Moreover, the churlish 
 traits which Jonah is made to exhibit as the 
 story proceeds compel us to hope that the 
 historic person whose name bears the shame 
 of their ugliness w r as not actually guilty of 
 such ignominious tempers. 
 
 After having attempted to flee from his duty, 
 for which he received a merited punishment, 
 and having been delivered from a loathsome 
 predicament, he is commissioned anew r to go 
 to Nineveh and declare that in forty days that 
 great and wicked city is to be destroyed. In 
 response to his strident warnings, the inhabit- 
 ants repent like sensible persons, on hearing 
 the doom that will overtake them if they per- 
 sist in their iniquities. They had a good 
 
102 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 
 
 opinion of Jehovah, and believed that if they 
 turned from their sins he would spare them. 
 A great and notable fast was proclaimed, and 
 their expectation concerning Jehovah's clem- 
 ency was justified. He did not destroy them. 
 
 That was a beautiful and characteristic 
 thing in Jehovah, but it did not gratify Jonah. 
 It displeased him exceedingly. He said in 
 effect: "This is the very thing I feared. I 
 knew what sort of person Jehovah is, gracious, 
 merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness ; 
 and this is why I fled toward Tarshish in the 
 first place. I felt certain that Jehovah would 
 be considerate of these Ninevites. It has 
 turned out precisely so. Now let Jehovah take 
 away my life ; it is better that I should die ; I 
 am a discredited prophet." 
 
 Then Jonah sulks outside the city to see 
 what will happen. It is exceedingly hot. A 
 rapidly growing gourd springs up to refresh 
 him with its shade, and he is appropriately 
 grateful. Let the rest of the story be told in 
 the words of the text: 
 
 But God prepared a worm when the morning rose 
 the next day, and it smote the gourd, that it withered. 
 And it came to pass, when the sun arose, that God pre- 
 pared a sultry east wind; and the sun beat upon the 
 head of Jonah, that he fainted, and requested for him- 
 self that he might die, and said, It is better for me to 
 die than to live. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou 
 well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well 
 
OF THE BIBLE 103 
 
 to be angry, even unto death. And Jehovah said, Thou 
 hast had regard for the gourd, for which thou hast not 
 labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a 
 night, and perished in a night: and should not I have 
 regard for Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more 
 than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern be- 
 tween their right hand and their left hand; and also 
 much cattle f 
 
 What a noble rebuke to intolerance and 
 pride and selfishness! How fraught with 
 knowledge of certain ignoble features of 
 human nature is the entire story, and what a 
 sublime conception of God's mercy it conveys ! 
 In the face of the nobility of this book, how 
 puerile it is to quibble over the incredibility 
 of the tale, as though it were of larger impor- 
 tance to establish its historicity than to absorb 
 its teachings. 
 
 As a piece of literature it justifies the aston- 
 ishment which Charles Reade the novelist con- 
 fessed with regard to the amazing effects 
 produced by the biblical writers by means of 
 a few slight touches. He observed that in 
 many instances they made a more lasting im- 
 pression with their scanty lines than other 
 famous waiters have achieved through an 
 abundance of description. One reading of the 
 book of Jonah with this contrast in mind will 
 be sufficient to demonstrate the truthfulness 
 of it in this example at least. 
 
 The literary wonders of the book of Job have 
 
104 THE LITEKAKY PRIMACY 
 
 already been touched upon. A hasty con- 
 sideration of it as a dramatic composition 
 must conclude this imperfect outline of the 
 fiction of the Bible. The critics are uncertain 
 of the date which should be affixed to this 
 work, though they insist on assigning it to a 
 much later period than it was formerly sup- 
 posed to indicate. Still the probability is 
 strong that before ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and 
 Euripides had charmed the Greeks with their 
 immortal dramas, and certainly long before 
 their Koman imitators had sought to beguile 
 the Latin peoples with their productions, this 
 great dramatic masterpiece had fallen from 
 the deft fingers of an unknown writer. 
 
 Unlike the compositions of the dramatists 
 of the classic world, this work was probably 
 never produced on a stage. Many of the finest 
 dramas in other languages have undergone the 
 same experience. Nor is it indispensable that 
 a work of such a character should have objec- 
 tive representation in order that its values 
 should be appreciated. It has been held that 
 even Shakespeare may be better understood, 
 his marvelous studies of human nature, his 
 deep insight into the spirit of man, his wise 
 philosophy, may be more profitably studied, 
 and his characters be more keenly relished by 
 the thoughtful student of his lines without 
 the interference of the mimic art than by 
 
OF THE BIBLE 105 
 
 watching the actor trying to interpret figures, 
 which, as Charles Lamb said about King Lear, 
 are incapable of being intelligently and ade- 
 quately expressed on the stage. 
 
 But dramatic literature affords such an 
 opportunity for vivid recital as cannot be 
 found in any other form. Its movement is 
 quick, its portrayal sharp, and its exhibition 
 of passion intense. The author of Job has 
 availed himself of these advantages, and in 
 the daring colloquies of Jehovah and Satan, 
 in the dialogues of Job and his three com- 
 panions, and in the final challenge of Jehovah 
 to Job followed by Job's admission of his fault, 
 he has magnificently displayed the art of the 
 dramatist. It is only by permitting this fact 
 to be always existent in one's thought as this 
 work is being read that the truest view of 
 its greatness as literature will be obtained. 
 
 II 
 
 If the literature of any other people than 
 the Hebrews were discovered to be totally 
 devoid of humor, we should consider it a strik- 
 ing anomaly, and if we were told that this 
 deficiency was the inevitable result of the 
 sanctity attaching to the literature itself, we 
 should be tempted to guess that some redactor, 
 jealous of its reputation, had purged it of what 
 
106 THE LITEEARY PEIMACY 
 
 lie conceived to be its incongruities. Nothing 
 of this sort has occurred with the Bible, though 
 so celebrated and gifted a student of the bibli- 
 cal literature as Professor E. G. Moulton 
 ventured to write that, "with the single excep- 
 tion of humorous literature, for which the 
 Hebrew temperament has little fitness, the 
 Bible presents as varied an intellectual food 
 as can be found in any national literature." 
 Carlyle and Eenan also held that the Hebrew 
 genius did not possess the gift of humor, a 
 judgment which is refuted by the literary 
 remains of several mediaeval and modern Jews, 
 as well as by notable examples in the Talmud, 
 with which many readers are familiar. 
 
 Doubtless a particular kind of discernment 
 is essential to the proper evaluation of Hebrew 
 humor. There are temperamental idiosyn- 
 crasies with which one must reckon in estimat- 
 ing Jewish letters, as is the case with any other 
 literature in which one was not bred. It is 
 no detraction from the excellence of Aris- 
 tophanes that some of his jokes require eluci- 
 dation for the mind unfamiliar with the life of 
 the Greeks, and it would be most uncritical 
 to deny the existence of humor in the Bible 
 simply because it is not recognized by all 
 readers. Indeed, an immense amount of 
 laborious dullness has been expended on the 
 vain effort to formulate a definition of humor 
 
OF THE BIBLE 107 
 
 upon which all the wiseacres of the world can 
 agree. 
 
 Though humor is, perhaps, the least appar- 
 ent element in the literature of the Bible, rich 
 veins of it are disclosed to one who has a feel- 
 ing for its subtleties and some knowledge of 
 the language in which it is expressed and of 
 the racial peculiarities out of which it springs. 
 It would be preposterous to class the Bible 
 with facetious books, and one reason for the 
 failure justly to appraise its humor is our 
 proneness to test it by our modern ideas of the 
 comic. This is a fatal and perfectly irrational 
 blunder. The Hebrew consciousness expressed 
 itself in moral and religious modes. It is this 
 which differentiates its literature, in large 
 part, from that of other races. There is a 
 decided flavor of morality in all genuine 
 humor, but this quality is preeminently dis- 
 played in the humor of the Bible. 
 
 In defending the propriety of employing 
 humor in religious discourses an English 
 clergyman has very justly said: "If you can- 
 not make men ashamed of doing wrong, you 
 may often make them afraid of being ridicu- 
 lous. A man who does not feel that he is sinful 
 may often be convinced that he is absurd." 
 The humor of the Bible serves this precise 
 purpose. Its exposures of the folly of a sinful 
 life are all the more effective because they 
 
108 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 
 are in many instances suffused with a humor- 
 ous quality. Said Hazlitt, "Sir, I am a meta- 
 physician, and nothing makes an impression 
 upon me but abstract ideas." So there are 
 abnormally serious souls who see only theo- 
 logical values in many Scripture narratives 
 which are actually drenched with humor. In 
 order to recognize and relish this humor one 
 must put off the prepossession that the Bible 
 is uniformly solemn, and divest himself of the 
 impression that it is sacrilege to smile at any- 
 thing in the Scriptures. He will then discover 
 that there is much humor in the stories of the 
 Bible which is not intentional, perhaps, on the 
 part of the writers, but is inseparable from 
 the facts which they record. This may be 
 called the humor inherent in a situation, of 
 which we take a few examples. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how any person 
 who is susceptible of humorous ideas can read 
 the history of the Israelites in the Wilderness 
 without being provoked to innocent mirth as 
 he observes the foibles and follies of human 
 nature breaking out in the ludicrous perform- 
 ances of the chosen people. The absurd 
 apology of Aaron for yielding to the equally 
 ridiculous plea of the Israelites for tangible 
 gods (Exod. 32. 22-24) would invariably excite 
 the risibilities of pious readers if they were 
 not awed into solemnity by the reflection that 
 
OF THE BIBLE 109 
 
 the narrative is sacred. A similar effect would 
 be produced by the protest of the people 
 against the everlasting monotony of their bill 
 of fare and their lusting for the varied diet of 
 their Egyptian bondage (Num. 11. 4, 5) if the 
 reader were not restrained from realizing the 
 unconscious humor of a ludicrous situation by 
 an artificial conception of the Bible as litera- 
 ture. Many like illustrations in the Old Testa- 
 ment will occur to the mind intent upon find- 
 ing them, which for the lack of space are not 
 here set down. If we turn to the New Testa- 
 ment, we discover in the childishness of the 
 disciples shades of humor, which were prob- 
 ably unobserved by themselves, but which are 
 obvious enough to others. The ignoble striving 
 of some of the twelve for precedence ; the naive 
 indignation of the rest of the company, who 
 were perhaps just as emulous but less candid; 
 the prating of those fishermen about the sacri- 
 fice involved in abandoning their precarious 
 means of a livelihood to follow Jesus, and their 
 solicitude respecting the reward they might 
 expect for such an amazing act of self-denial ; 
 the absurd and frantic eagerness of Peter to 
 thrust himself forward in every conversation, 
 whether he understood the matter or not 
 these are examples of the humor inherent in 
 a situation, which the frank writers of the 
 Gospels have preserved for our instruction, 
 
110 THE LITEKARY PRIMACY 
 
 and which we may wisely read with a recog- 
 nition of their pathetic humor, though those 
 w r ho recorded them possibly only saw the pain- 
 ful aspects of each incident. 
 
 The authors of some of the biblical stories, 
 however, must have been conscious of the 
 humor playing like sunbeams upon their lines. 
 The book of Jonah is pervaded by a subtle 
 humor from which it seems strange that any- 
 one should be obtuse enough to escape. The 
 superficial persons who giggle over the great 
 fish which is represented as first swallowing 
 and then disgorging the recreant prophet, and 
 look no farther, miss the finest elements of 
 humor in the entertaining tale. The meshes 
 of their minds are so coarse that the more 
 delicate items slip through. The preposterous 
 mood of Jonah when he witnesses the repent- 
 ance of Nineveh can scarcely fail to provoke 
 a smile in us if we are sensitive to its pitiful 
 absurdity. The lugubrious wail of the prophet 
 for death because forsooth he is a discredited 
 foreteller of events is as fine a stroke at pom- 
 pous self-esteem as one can find in any litera- 
 ture. The pungent humor of the divine para- 
 ble of the gourd is superb. If we found this 
 story in Turgenieff we should unhesitatingly 
 applaud its cleverness, but discovering it in 
 the Bible we pull a long face and solemnly 
 set about to prove its historicity in order to 
 
OF THE BIBLE 111 
 
 protect its sanctity; not realizing that, even 
 if it were shown to be pure fiction, it would 
 still contain some of the richest spiritual 
 teachings in the Scriptures. 
 
 Perhaps the most admirable example of folk- 
 lore humor in the Bible, and one of the best 
 in any literature, is the fascinating story of 
 Samson, who is not only portrayed as rioting 
 in practical jokes, but also as being a genuine 
 wit. The disasters which mark his life and 
 the tragedy with which it concludes only serve 
 to bring out more clearly the frolicsome spirit 
 of the man. Bunyan's lines are appropriate : 
 
 Some things are of that nature as to make 
 One's fancy chuckle while his heart doth ache. 
 
 The pathos of Samson's folly need not deter 
 us from appreciating the humor of his per- 
 formances. This accretion of tales around the 
 memory of a popular hero is one of the most 
 delicious bits of literary art in the Bible or 
 out of it, and has furnished poets and dra- 
 matists with one of the most fruitful themes 
 upon which they could engage their talents. 
 The wit of Samson's riddle, propounded as a 
 wager at his own wedding feast, is obvious 
 to all as soon as the circumstances which 
 originated it are apprehended: "Out of the 
 eater came forth meat, and out of the strong 
 came forth sweetness." One can see the sunny- 
 
112 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 haired giant gleefully felicitating himself on 
 the impossibility of his competitors ever guess- 
 ing the secret of the honey in the lion's carcass. 
 The way in which he paid the wager, when it 
 had been lost through the treachery of his 
 bride, illustrates the man's sense of humor: 
 "And he went down to Ashkelon, and slew 
 thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and 
 gave change of garments unto them which 
 expounded the riddle." One can imagine him 
 smacking his lips over the grim jest of making 
 his enemies pay his debt of honor. The same 
 spirit is manifest in his slaying of a thousand 
 men with the jawbone of an ass. He evidently 
 takes a sardonic delight in the instrument with 
 which he accomplishes this bloody feat, for 
 he makes a pun about it which it is impossible 
 to reproduce in translation. The word chamor 
 which he employs has two meanings: an ass 
 and a heap. A modern Hebrew scholar, Dr. J. 
 Chotzner, has attempted to bring out the 
 humor of the words describing Samson's exul- 
 tation over his triumph by the following para- 
 phrase : 
 
 With the jawbone of an ass 
 Have I plenteous asses slain; 
 
 Smitten thus it came to pass 
 Fell a thousand on the plain. 
 
 The drastic quality of Samson's humor 
 appears again in the episode of the three hun- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 113 
 
 dred foxes sent scurrying through the corn- 
 fields of the Philistines with firebrands tied 
 to their tails. One can easily fancy the reck- 
 less jester clapping his hands and prancing 
 about with unholy joy as he beholds the con- 
 flagration he has produced. In all his feats 
 of prodigious strength and agility the same 
 humorous feeling is discoverable. His snap- 
 ping the cords with which his enemies have 
 bound him for delivery into the hands of the 
 Philistines, his carrying off the gates of Gaza 
 and depositing them upon the hill before 
 Hebron in fact, all of the adventures which 
 signalize his stormy career are shot through 
 with a mischieveous spirit of fun. He evi- 
 dently luxuriates in his vindictive buffoonery. 
 Nor is this wanton gladness absent from his 
 unfortunate experiences with his Philistine 
 paramour. Each time he fools her about the 
 secret of his strength laughter shakes his pon- 
 derous frame and mockery pours from his lips. 
 He revels in the deception of which she is the 
 pouting victim. When finally he surrenders 
 to the blandishments of Delilah, and compasses 
 his own ruin by telling the truth about himself, 
 the first impression upon his mind seems to 
 be scarcely more serious than that the biter 
 has been bitten at last. The joke is on him : 
 "He wist not that the Lord was departed from 
 him." When the fatality of his situation 
 
114 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 dawns upon him his inveterate humor still 
 survives. His position is deplorable enough 
 a blind slave making sport for his hereditary 
 foes. Nevertheless he will extract a morbid 
 gratification from his misfortunes. He will 
 add a climax to all his rude jokes upon his 
 enemies by making them die with him. He 
 pulls down the building in which they are 
 making merry and they perish like cattle. The 
 very grotesqueness of it mitigates the gloom 
 of the catastrophe. Tears and smiles lie close 
 together. The writer of the narrative records 
 with ill-concealed satisfaction: "So the dead 
 which he slew at his death were more than 
 they which he slew in his life." The fun is fast 
 and furious, though senseless and sinful, to 
 the last. We are to remember that Samson 
 is not the only man who has made a grim jest 
 of death, whose life has been a thoughtless 
 frolic. 
 
 We laugh at Samson, though we realize that 
 he made a sorry fool of himself, knowing that 
 the fool is one of the staple articles in the 
 humorist's wares. Without his kind the wit 
 would find his occupation gone. Were all 
 humanity of flawless wisdom it is difficult to 
 see how the contrasts and incongruities which 
 are so vital to humor could be conceived. The 
 Bible deals more severely with fools than does 
 other literature, because its writers are so 
 
OF THE BIBLE 115 
 
 deeply concerned with the moral aspects of 
 folly. Yet even they base their diagnosis of 
 the fool on irresponsibility, rashness, and lack 
 of common sense characteristic of their class; 
 a kind of egotistical self-sufficiency and 
 absence of self-restraint, coupled with exces- 
 sive love of talk and itch for disputation; all 
 of which traits reach their acutest stage in 
 the crowning stupidity of a foolish life 
 opposition to the will of God. 
 
 It is in the Wisdom literature of the Old 
 Testament Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and 
 certain psalms and prophecies that the fool 
 receives most elaborate attention. The points 
 of humorous criticism to which he is subjected 
 in these writings are so familiar to students 
 of the Bible and so numerous that specific cita- 
 tions do not seem necessary or desirable. 
 Though the author of Ecclesiastes is com- 
 monly regarded as sounding a melancholy 
 note, a modern critic has ventured to say of 
 Koheleth : "His humor is mostly of the cheer- 
 ful order; and far from weeping over the 
 foibles and follies of the human race, he makes 
 merry over them." The contentious woman, 
 the slothful man, the meddler with other 
 people's affairs, the person with itching ears, 
 the trader who brags of a sharp bargain 
 these and many more are etched in epigrams 
 which provoke mirth in this wisdom literature. 
 
116 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 The vanities of worldliness are delineated in 
 a way to excite a smile of philosophic scorn. 
 With these amusing bits of wisdom may be 
 compared the broader rebukes of arrogance 
 and ambition contained in the Fable of Jotham 
 (Judg. 9. 8-15) and the Apologue of Jehoash 
 (2 Kings 14. 9) to which reference has already 
 been made in discussing fiction. 
 
 It will be objected by some that those ex- 
 posures of human folly are so satirical as not 
 properly to be classed with humor, which is 
 gentle and good-natured. It is significant, 
 however, that Thackeray, who is entitled to 
 be called an authority, and whose definition 
 of humor as "a mixture of love and wit" has 
 been widely accepted, in his lectures on the 
 English humorists of the eighteenth century 
 actually begins with Swift, whose temper was 
 vitriolic. It is in this first lecture of the series 
 that he says : "The humorous writer professes 
 to awaken and direct your love, your pity, 
 your kindness your scorn for untruth, pre- 
 tension, imposture your tenderness for the 
 weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. 
 . . . He takes upon himself to be the week-day 
 preacher, so to speak." It would seem, then, 
 that the gentle humorist may be severe if his 
 motive be benevolent. 
 
 The absurdity of idol worship is a favorite 
 subject of caricature with the prophets, admir- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 117 
 
 able examples of which are to be found in 
 Isaiah (44) and Jeremiah (10) and elsewhere. 
 Everybody notices the grim humor of Elijah's 
 suggestion to the priests of Baal on Mount 
 Carmel : "Cry aloud, for he is a god ; either 
 he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a 
 journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must 
 be awaked." Job's famous rejoinder to his 
 tormentors is appreciated by the dullest mind : 
 "No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom 
 shall die with you." Other equally humorous 
 bits may be culled from the wonderful book 
 which bears his name. Irony is employed with 
 much effect by the apostle Paul, who is pro- 
 ficient in almost every rhetorical expedient, to 
 whom also a variety of puns may be accredited. 
 There is no resisting this stroke at the self- 
 assurance of some of his followers: "Now ye 
 are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as 
 kings without us : and I would God that ye 
 did reign, that we also might reign with you. 
 . . . We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are 
 wise in Christ ; we are weak, but ye are strong ; 
 ye are honorable, but we are despised" ( 1 Cor. 
 4. 8, 10). Of similar quality is this admoni- 
 tion, "If ye bite and devour one another, take 
 heed that ye be not consumed of one another" 
 (Gal. 5. 15). 
 
 No one questions that Jesus was a master 
 of ironical speech. "Many good works have 
 
118 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 I showed you from my Father; for which of 
 these do you stone me?" he asks of his enemies. 
 "When thou doest thine alms, do not sound a 
 trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in 
 the synagogues and in the streets/' he admon- 
 ishes his disciples. Though the scholars tell 
 us that there is no proof that the Pharisees 
 ever did such a ludicrous thing, yet the spirit 
 of it endures to our time, and derision is the 
 only effective method of discouraging it. The 
 parable of the unjust steward is a masterpiece 
 of satire. When Jesus compares his genera- 
 tion to children playing feast and funeral, and 
 complaining of one another, "We have piped 
 unto you, and ye have not danced; we have 
 mourned unto you, and ye have not wept," his 
 criticism must have brought a smile to the 
 faces of those who heard him. 
 
 One cannot speak of the humor of Jesus 
 without the utmost delicacy; he must not in 
 the slightest degree abate his reverence for the 
 Divine Saviour. Nevertheless, it is to be re- 
 membered that the Son of Mary was a whole 
 man, and that to ascribe anything abnormal 
 to his human nature is to do violence to any 
 reasonable and scriptural interpretation of 
 his person. When we recall certain traditions 
 of our Lord from extracanonical sources, 
 which have been preserved by orthodox Chris- 
 tians of primitive times with the apparent feel- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 119 
 
 ing that these might in part be authentic, we 
 are inclined to wonder whether a certain re- 
 serve may not have prevented the evangelists 
 from recording humorous incidents and say- 
 ings of his life with which they were familiar. 
 Are not we also affected by an artificial 
 veneration and a fragmentary conception of 
 Christ's nature to such an extent that in some 
 measure we dehumanize him? Ought we not 
 to concede to him a natural sense of humor, 
 quickened by the rarest intelligence and re- 
 fined by his divine spirituality? 
 
 We are not left to mere conjecture regarding 
 the humor of Jesus. His recorded utterances 
 are before us bearing incontrovertible evidence 
 that his genial spirit found expression in 
 kindly pleasantries and humorous suggestions. 
 His colloquy with the Syrophoenician woman 
 (Mark 7) is a good-natured challenge of a 
 heathen's right to ask anything of him until 
 he has attended to all the applications of his 
 own people. The mother's rejoinder is unmis- 
 takably witty, and is apparently very much 
 relished by Jesus : "Yes, sir ; but the dogs 
 under the table eat of the children's crumbs." 
 Back of the woman's quick intelligence our 
 Lord sees faith in his actual mission, and he 
 instantly responds to it and grants her peti- 
 tion. 
 
 Observe his quaint characterizations of 
 
120 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 those who carefully cleanse the outside of the 
 cup and platter, forgetting that they drink and 
 feed from the inside of these vessels; of men 
 who carefully strain out a gnat but inconti- 
 nently swallow a camel. Notice how he hits 
 off the absurdity of trying to serve two mas- 
 ters, of feeding pearls to swine, of putting a 
 light under a bushel, of proffering a stone for 
 bread, or a serpent for a fish, or a scorpion 
 for an egg, of pitting Beelzebub against him- 
 self. What a grotesque thing it is for a camel 
 to try to squeeze through the eye of a needle, 
 or for a blind man to attempt to lead another 
 sightless mortal, with the result that both 
 pitch into the gutter. How preposterous it is 
 for a man with a beam in his eye to offer to 
 remove a mote from his brother's eye. Con- 
 sider the ludicrous plight of the architect who 
 places a house on the shifting sands, of the 
 general who goes to war without thinking it 
 worth while to estimate the possible resources 
 of his enemy, of the man who makes himself 
 the laughing-stock of his town by commencing 
 to build a tower which he has no means to 
 finish. These are delicious bits of our Lord's 
 humor with a high moral purpose. 
 
 Think of the quaint shrewdness of admon- 
 ishing his disciples not to think of the morrow, 
 because that was characteristic of the Gen- 
 tiles, nor to depend on the worldly policy of 
 
OF THE BIBLE 121 
 
 loving only their friends, since that was the 
 habit of the publicans. Remember the pathetic 
 humor of his response when the Pharisees 
 warned him that Herod was on his track : "Go 
 ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, 
 and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the 
 third day I shall be perfected . . . for it can- 
 not be that a prophet perish out of Jerusa- 
 lem." Recall his quiet remark, probably 
 accompanied by a tremulous smile, when his 
 disciples brought out two old swords with 
 which to confront the world "It is enough !" 
 Run through his parables, and observe how 
 rich a vein of humor pervades all of the more 
 important ones. What further need is there 
 of illustrations? though the number of those 
 not mentioned here is very considerable. It is 
 perfectly evident that Hebrew humor did not 
 fail him of whom "Moses in the law, and the 
 prophets, did write." 
 
122 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 CHAPTEK IV 
 
 THE BIBLE THE MOST PERSISTENT FORCE IN 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 NOT the least remarkable fact about the 
 Bible is the astonishing way in which it has 
 survived the loss and decay which are inci- 
 dental or inevitable to literature. The mor- 
 tality of books is one of their most striking 
 characteristics. It used to be said, and it 
 probably is still true, if indeed the figures are 
 not too restrained, that of every thousand 
 volumes published six hundred and fifty do not 
 see the end of their first year ; one hundred and 
 fifty do not last until their third year; and 
 only fifty survive seven years. Of scientific 
 books, it is safe to assert that the majority of 
 them are obsolete in less than ten years. Theo- 
 logical and philosophical works cumber the 
 shelves of second-hand bookstores a few years 
 after they are issued. A comparatively small 
 number of volumes contain the quintessence 
 of all human learning. It is high credit for 
 the Bible that, as the centuries of its history 
 accumulate, its power upon the human imagi- 
 nation increases. When the Revised Version 
 
OP THE BIBLE 123 
 
 of the New Testament appeared in 1881, so 
 great was the demand for it that large sums 
 of money were offered for a copy in advance 
 of its advertised date of publication. The 
 streets of New York and other cities were 
 blockaded with express wagons waiting to 
 transport copies of it. Millions of the volumes 
 were sold as fast as they could be delivered, 
 and from the Gospel of Matthew to the Epistle 
 to the Romans the contents of that book were 
 telegraphed from New York to Chicago, in 
 order to get them into the newspapers twenty- 
 four hours before the trains could transport 
 the matter. This is an illustration of Ameri- 
 can journalistic enterprise, but it is also an 
 impressive demonstration of the deathless in- 
 terest of humanity in this great library of 
 ancient writing which some people believe to 
 be obsolete. 
 
 The antiquity of the Bible increases the sig- 
 nificance of its popularity. The probability 
 is that some portions of the Old Testament 
 antedate all other literatures of the world. 
 Certainly the ethnologists and anthropologists 
 are compelled to have recourse to this book 
 when they are considering the origins of hu- 
 manity. Some portions of the Pentateuch 
 doubtless preceded the earliest of the Vedas 
 by two or three centuries. Moses lived and 
 died a thousand years before Confucius saw 
 
 
124 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 the light. Abraham flourished eight hundred 
 years before Zoroaster. Buddhism did not 
 begin to bloom till Abraham had left the world 
 fifteen centuries. The laws of Moses were 
 given seven hundred years before Lycurgus 
 wrote his, and nearly a thousand years before 
 Solon gave his laws to Athens. 
 
 Herodotus has been called the "Father of 
 History/' but Moses wrote the story of his 
 campaigns eleven hundred years before He- 
 rodotus lived. The lyric poetry of the Hebrews 
 sprang into being a thousand years before 
 Horace wrote his Odes. Deborah sang her 
 triumphant song five hundred years before 
 burning Sappho stirred the thought of man. 
 Thus part by part the literature of the Bible 
 surpasses in antiquity that of any volume in 
 existence. It has outlived its most ambitious 
 competitors. Men used to talk about banish- 
 ing the Bible from the literature of the world 
 a futile boast, since the Bible has imbedded 
 itself in manifold forms of literature, which 
 have taken their inspiration from it. We are 
 told that Lord Hailes of Scotland searched 
 the writings of the Christian fathers up to the 
 end of the third century, and actually found 
 the whole of the New Testament, with the 
 exception of less than a dozen verses, scattered 
 through their extant writing. "The grass 
 withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away : 
 
OF THE BIBLE 125 
 
 but the word of the Lord endureth forever" 
 (1 Pet. 1. 24, 25). 
 
 The Bible has also withstood the perils of 
 translation, and these are more numerous and 
 embarrassing than those would fancy who 
 have not made an examination of the case. 
 Lord Bacon tells us somewhere that when 
 Queen Elizabeth, just before her coronation, 
 it being customary to release prisoners at the 
 inauguration of a sovereign, went to the Koyal 
 Chapel, one of her courtiers, who was well 
 known to her, presented her with a petition 
 and, before a number of court favorites, be- 
 sought her with a loud voice that there were 
 four or five prisoners unjustly detained in 
 prison. It was inquired who they were, when 
 the petitioner replied that they were the four 
 evangelists and the apostle Paul, who had long 
 been shut up in an unknown tongue, as it were, 
 in prison, so that they could not converse with 
 the common people. The queen answered very 
 gravely that it was first best to inquire of them 
 whether they desired to be set at liberty or not. 
 Her Majesty probably had little doubt as to 
 the answer which would be returned from an 
 examination of these extraordinary captives. 
 At any rate we know that the prisoners were 
 speedily released, and in an authorized ver- 
 
126 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 sion of the Scriptures known as "The Bishops' 
 Bible," they were permitted to converse with 
 the common people who were not able to visit 
 them in prison. Now the real story of the 
 unbinding of the writers of the Bible from 
 chains of ancient and little used languages 
 began much earlier than this and reads like 
 a romance. Moreover, it has continued down 
 to our own day, and is not finished yet, nor 
 will the business of translation be completed 
 till the Bible is made available to every kin- 
 dred and tribe and tongue on the face of the 
 whole earth. 
 
 Now there are some writers imprisoned in 
 foreign tongues whom it would be unwise to 
 lead out of prison. Their characters are not 
 sufficiently pure to make their mingling with 
 society a benefit to mankind. Max Mtiller, the 
 famous student of philology and comparative 
 religions, when editing and publishing a col- 
 lection of the Sacred Books of the East, was 
 constrained to suppress some parts of them 
 as being too foul and immoral for publication. 
 One of these productions is so utterly vicious 
 that it was declared by the highest legal 
 authority of Bombay to be a criminal offense 
 to translate it into any living language of 
 India. This is a very significant fact, the 
 meaning of which ought not to be lost on those 
 persons who profess to believe that the reli- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 127 
 
 gious systems of the Orient are sufficient for 
 the inhabitants of those Eastern countries. 
 
 But the Bible is a book which can be trans- 
 lated into the speech of any people without 
 jeopardizing their morals. There are over- 
 nice persons in the modern church who would 
 like an expurgated edition of the Scriptures 
 for family use, and we have had attempts at 
 recomposition and modernization of the Bible 
 from early days down to the work of Dr. James 
 Moffatt called "A New Translation of the New 
 Testament," a work which in some parts is 
 almost a vulgarization of the Scriptures, but 
 which in general is an illuminating aid to their 
 interpretation. Long ago a certain Dr. Geddes 
 made a translation of the Scriptures with a 
 similar purpose. He translated the word 
 "Passover" as "Skipover," and introduced con- 
 stables among the ancient Israelites. A man 
 named Sebastian Castillon produced among 
 the Spaniards a classical version of the Bible, 
 into which he introduced phrases and whole 
 sentences from profane writers, but, as the 
 elder Disraeli, from whom we take these ex- 
 amples, says: "Of the noble simplicity of the 
 Scripture he seems not to have had the re- 
 motest conception." A French writer named 
 Berruyer wrote a paraphrase of the Scriptures 
 after the style of the fashionable novel, telling 
 the stories of David and Joseph, for example, 
 
128 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 in the elaborate embellishments of a modern 
 society fiction; and so great a man as Arch- 
 bishop Tillotson prepared what was known as 
 a Family Bible, from which had been excised 
 whatever might be offensive to domestic taste. 
 But however wise it may be to ignore certain 
 unimportant sections of the Old Testament 
 when prescribing what portions of the Bible 
 should be read by the young and immature, it 
 is true as a general statement that the Bible 
 contains nothing unwholesome, and that in 
 translating it no peril to the morals of man- 
 kind is incurred. On the other hand, the 
 whole intention and accomplishment of the 
 Bible is to denounce and destroy evil. 
 
 But there are perils in translating the Bible 
 which subject it to the severest tests. In whole 
 or in part it has been translated into more than 
 five hundred dialects and languages. It would 
 be natural to suppose that in some of these 
 it would lose its power, since to suit itself to 
 many civilizations and conditions it must have 
 marvelous adaptability ; and to speak through 
 such different vocabularies it must transcend 
 in its thought the words employed to translate 
 it. It is a dangerous expedient to translate a 
 book simply because in its native tongue it is 
 impressive. When rendered into another lan- 
 guage it may lose its distinctive charm. This 
 is indisputably the case with the Sacred Books 
 
OF THE BIBLE 129 
 
 of the East. They have been translated into 
 idiomatically faultless English; yet they re- 
 pose in undisturbed silence on the shelves of 
 the great libraries like mummies in a museum, 
 only observed now and then by the learned 
 antiquary or the curious searcher after Orien- 
 tal treasure. The Koran is a good illustration 
 of all of them. Arabic scholars declare that 
 in the original it has a certain rhetorical 
 rhythm which charms the Arab ear and holds 
 the attention of the reader; but when the 
 thoughts are translated into another language 
 they become vapid, insipid, and inane. John 
 Ruskin says : "I have read three or four pages 
 of the translation of the Koran and never want 
 to read more." Carlyle calls it "insufferably 
 stupid." Gibbon says: "Mahomet's loftiest 
 strains must yield to the sublime simplicity of 
 the book of Job, composed in a remote age and 
 in the same country." Yet it is said we have 
 a good English translation. But, according 
 to a recent writer, there are not twenty men 
 living who have read the Koran in English, 
 though it could be done in a dozen hours. In 
 its translated form it appeals to no one. But 
 this peril the Bible has endured and the num- 
 ber of its students is constantly increasing. 
 
 Still there are great difficulties in translat- 
 ing it. With some portions exact rendering 
 is literally impossible. Lucretius, the Latin 
 
130 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 poet, who lias given us a fine exposition in 
 verse of the Epicurean philosophy, complains 
 in the beginning of his famous poem of the 
 difficulty of his task because of the poverty 
 of the Latin language, and the novelty of his 
 theme. He was compelled to invent a scientific 
 terminology in order to express the ideas of the 
 philosophy he was enunciating. Paul and 
 other New Testament writers experienced a 
 similar difficulty in the use of classic Greek, 
 so that it was necessary for them to infuse new 
 meanings into old words, and in some in- 
 stances practically to manufacture words and 
 phrases adequately to express the sublime 
 ideas of the gospel of Christ. In the same 
 manner all modern translations of the Chris- 
 tian Scriptures into heathen tongues have been 
 embarrassed. Examples of this may be found 
 in every tongue. Moravian missionaries in 
 New Guinea, for example, could do no better 
 with the Lord's Prayer than to render the first 
 sentence, "Our Father, thou sittest in heaven," 
 and in place of "Thy kingdom come" were 
 forced to substitute, "Come Thou Chieftain 
 Great." In Alaska, where there are no sheep 
 nor shepherds, the missionary could find no 
 better rendering of the first sentence of the 
 twenty-third psalm than to say, "The Lord is 
 a first class mountain hunter." In India and 
 elsewhere it has been found necessary to manu- 
 
OP THE BIBLE 131 
 
 facture words by a kind of transliteration, as, 
 for example, the word "kanshans" for "con- 
 science," and the word "sinipatiaz" for "sym- 
 pathize." Thus the Bible is not inarticulate, 
 though it is compelled to speak through such 
 infirm mediums. It utters itself even through 
 broken and fragmentary vocabularies, and it 
 becomes articulate in such a fashion as to be 
 understood because its thoughts find response 
 in the intuitions of the human mind every- 
 where and among all kindreds, peoples, and 
 tongues. When you have translated the books 
 of the East into the English tongue you have 
 not brought them any nearer to the English 
 mind; but when you translate the Bible into 
 the languages of the Orient, or the restricted 
 vocabularies of the Southern lands, or the 
 narrow tongues of the North, you bring these 
 people a volume which they understand at 
 once. It speaks to them of what God has 
 already spoken to their consciences. To quote 
 a modern writer, "It has taken a position out- 
 side the peculiarities of any race or clime. It 
 is not the book of an empire or of an era or 
 of a civilization or mode of culture. It is a 
 book which has proved itself contemporaneous 
 with all time, coextensive with all space, and 
 coexistent with all culture, and the only ex- 
 planation of the fact that it has been trans- 
 lated without the loss of anything vital is that 
 
132 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 it consists of God's thoughts in men's words." 
 At the beginning of the nineteenth century it 
 was said, "There are over sixty different lan- 
 guages in the world, and it is absolutely im- 
 possible for the Bible to find expression in all 
 of them." Since then we have learned that 
 there are many times as many languages as 
 was once supposed, and that the Bible can 
 speak through all of them without stammering. 
 It has also withstood the furious assaults of 
 its avowed enemies. These have divided them- 
 selves into various classes for different points 
 of attack, even as an army falls into brigades 
 for a like purpose. One division of the foe has 
 sought the destruction of the Bible by acts 
 of violence on the book itself, of which class 
 Jehoiakim, the King of Judah, who attempted 
 to destroy a part of prophecy by cutting it 
 with a knife and burning it on the hearth, is 
 an illustration. Another is Antiochus IV, who 
 one hundred years before Christ gathered all 
 the Scriptures he could find and obliterated 
 them with dastardly vandalism. Still another 
 is Diocletian, the emperor, who in 312 A. D. 
 issued an edict for the annihilation of the 
 Scriptures; and still others are the Roman 
 Catholic authorities, who times without num- 
 ber down to the present day have heaped the 
 sacred books into blazing piles in the vain 
 effort to suppress their influence. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 133 
 
 Failing to drive the Bible itself into oblivion, 
 the enemies of truth have sought to silence the 
 champions of the Bible who have preached its 
 doctrines and disseminated its teaching. The 
 book is most powerful when it has a man of 
 religious sincerity back of it. Hence the 
 Waldenses and the Albigenses must be hunted 
 to the death. John Huss must be burned at 
 the stake and his ashes scattered on Lake Con- 
 stance. Jerome Savonarola must be murdered 
 in the same fashion in the Florentine market- 
 place. William Tyndale must be brutally 
 sacrificed at Smithfield, England. And hosts 
 of Bible readers and colporteurs down to this 
 hour must be mobbed, imprisoned, stoned, and 
 killed in the futile attempt to destroy these 
 immortal books, for despite the burning of 
 millions of copies and hundreds of translators 
 and disseminators of the Scriptures, the irre- 
 pressible volume has leaped on to wider popu- 
 larity than is known to any other work of 
 genius. 
 
 Since it could not be exterminated, its 
 enemies have sought to invalidate its influence 
 by impugning its character, disputing its 
 authenticity, and disproving its veracity. Yet 
 the very stones have cried out to proclaim its 
 trustworthiness. The spade of the excavator 
 has turned up evidences of its reliability in 
 the ruins of buried cities. Tablets, columns, 
 
134 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 monuments, and every species of inscribed 
 stone have repeatedly confirmed its records. 
 
 Failing to destroy the historical character 
 of the Bible, its enemies have sought to under- 
 mine the influence it has gained through the 
 religious system founded upon it. Wicked 
 men, whose lives it condemns, have consist- 
 ently assaulted it, not because they found hard 
 intellectual difficulties in accepting it, but be- 
 cause its sentences smote them fiercely in the 
 face and they must fight it or surrender. False 
 religionists have consistently opposed it be- 
 cause it asserts its supremacy over the con- 
 sciences of men and will brook no rivals. In- 
 fidels have attacked it because it rebukes them 
 and their lives. Voltaire condemned it and 
 said that before the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century Christianity would have van- 
 ished, but Voltaire's prediction is ingloriously 
 annulled, and Voltaire's scholarship, which in 
 the Bible was not equal to that of the average 
 boy, is discredited and his life stands to ex- 
 plain his antagonism to it. Thomas Paine 
 condemned it, but his blunders were so great 
 that he found it necessary to apologize for 
 them by saying that when he wrote one of his 
 treatises he had no copy of the New Testament 
 with him; and he died an outcast drunkard, 
 leaving behind him a record which showed why 
 he was hostile to the Bible. When you learn 
 
OP THE BIBLE 135 
 
 what kind of men many of the enemies of 
 Christianity have been you instantly know the 
 reason of their hostility. You also realize to 
 some extent why their assaults have been so 
 puerile and futile. No bad man can prevail 
 against a good book. 
 
 The Bible has also withstood the abuse to 
 which it has been subjected by its avowed 
 friends, and this has been as severe a test of 
 permanency as the ability to survive the hos- 
 tility of its open foes. The champions of every 
 great reform have been constrained to pray 
 that God would deliver them from their 
 friends, and the defenders of the Bible might 
 ask with equal reverence that God would save 
 the precious volume from the ravages of its 
 friends. No book has ever suffered such abuse 
 from conscientious persons. Puzzled by sen- 
 tences in the Holy Scripture which seemed 
 repellent to morality or contradictory to rea- 
 son, men who were anxious for the reputation 
 of the Bible have felt that the doctrine of 
 divine inspiration could be supported only by 
 attributing to the Scriptures an allegorical or 
 inner meaning. Philo, the Jew, thus inter- 
 preted the Holy Scriptures. Origen, one of 
 the noblest of the Christian fathers, followed 
 the same practice. The venerable Bede, who 
 gave to the world a truly wonderful transla- 
 tion of the New Testament, indulged in similar 
 
136 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 nonsense. Swedenborg, in modern times, car- 
 ried the method to the wildest extremes. The 
 total effect of these misguided efforts has been 
 to discredit the sacred Scriptures in the eyes 
 of cool-headed and thoughtful people and to 
 make the Bible an occasion of ridicule. No 
 one has been more successful in thus injuring 
 the repute of the Scriptures than Mrs. Eddy, 
 with her grotesque paraphrases and absurd 
 interpretations of such portions of Scripture 
 as she found useful for her purpose. 
 
 Again the friends of the Bible have made 
 it ridiculous by using it to refute scien- 
 tific theories which subsequently were tri- 
 umphantly established. The writers of the 
 Bible never intended to be scientists. It is 
 wonderful how God has preserved them from 
 the folly of placing themselves in antagonism 
 to the investigations of the ages following 
 their time. It is as important to be kept from 
 being a fool as to be inspired with the power 
 to be brilliant. Some well-meaning, but wrong- 
 headed individuals have always insisted on 
 making the Bible an authority in physical 
 science. Thus, on the basis of the Scriptures, 
 Lactantius denied that the world is round; 
 Ambrose stated that the sky is a solid vault; 
 Augustine denied the antipodes; Spanish 
 priests argued the impossibility of Colurnbus's 
 scheme; Calvin protested against the helio- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 137 
 
 centric system; Wesley disputed the Coper- 
 nican system ; Kepler was opposed by Calvin ; 
 Eoger Bacon, Galileo, Buffon, Darwin, and 
 numerous others were remorselessly assailed 
 by the Church. Professor Tyrrell of Dublin 
 University declares: "I have myself seen an 
 old edition of the Trincipia 7 by a learned 
 Abbe who took care to explain in his preface 
 that, though the conclusions of Newton con- 
 stituted a good discipline for the exercise of 
 the mental faculties, and, therefore, might be 
 studied with profit, yet they must not be re- 
 garded as true, inasmuch as a bull of the Holy 
 Father had spoken of the sun as revolving 
 around the earth." In much the same fashion 
 Protestants, who substituted the Bible for the 
 Pope, have condemned the teachings of science 
 on the ground that the Scriptures contradicted 
 them. 
 
 Reputed friends of the Bible have made it 
 a scandal to the good and the pure by appeal- 
 ing to it for authority for many species of 
 wickedness, especially for the justification of 
 religious persecution, proving the truth spoken 
 by one of Shakespeare's characters : 
 
 In religion, 
 
 What damned error, but some sober brow 
 Will bless it, and approve it with a text, 
 Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? 
 
 Romanists and Protestants alike have been 
 
138 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 guilty of this folly. Witchcraft was punished 
 by cruelties immeasurable on the basis of 
 Scripture texts. Crimes have been justified, 
 polygamy defended, slavery supported by the 
 same process. As some one has truthfully 
 said, "Men betray the Bible with a kiss." The 
 words of Burns are pertinent : 
 
 E'en ministers, they have been kenn'd 
 
 In holy rapture 
 A rousing whid at times to vend, 
 
 And nail't wi' Scripture. 
 
 Not the least of the strains placed upon the 
 Bible it has suffered from zealous theologians, 
 who have violently twisted its lines to conform 
 to their theories and support their doctrines. 
 "Men have first formed a creed, and then gone 
 to the Bible to seek its confirmation," says one, 
 "instead of going to God's Word simply to 
 ascertain what God has said, and what the 
 mind of the Spirit is." 
 
 The superstitious uses to which the Bible 
 has been subjected constitute a source of in- 
 jury to it which has been operative from a 
 very distant time until the present hour. In 
 a recent book on The Influence of the Bible on 
 Civilization, Professor Ernst von Dobschtitz 
 says concerning this abuse in an earlier day : 
 
 There was the gospel, representative of Jesus himself 
 in his heavenly power; superstition made it a vehicle 
 of its own magical rites. There was the Bible, the book 
 
OP THE BIBLE 139 
 
 of divine oracles; human inquisitiveness turned it into 
 a book from which to read the dark future. The heathen 
 had done this with the poems of Homer and Vergil. 
 Turning over the pages they suddenly stopped at a 
 verse and then tried to find in this verse the answer 
 to their question. The fathers of the early church 
 detested this method as something quite alien to the 
 Christian mind, but as early as the end of the fourth 
 century people came to feel that it was all right if they 
 only used the Bible for the same purpose. In the sixth 
 century even church officials kept to this practice. When 
 a bishop had to be elected they almost always consulted 
 the Psalter first on behalf of the man to be elected. 
 Bible verses written on parchment were attached to easy 
 chairs in order to keep away the evil spirits. ... A 
 rolled sheet of lead, inscribed with a psalm and a dread- 
 ful curse against any robber, has been found on one 
 of the ^gean Islands hidden in the ground of a vine- 
 yard. Evidently the psalm was supposed to be one of 
 the most effective spells. Even the Lord's Prayer and 
 other parts of the Gospels have been abused in the same 
 way. 
 
 It is a remarkable book which, in the first 
 place, acquires a reputation for transcendent 
 powers sufficient to incite such superstitious 
 veneration, and which, in the second place, is 
 so full of dignity and force that it can with- 
 stand the influences which seek everlastingly 
 to degrade it. 
 
 II 
 
 From this negative demonstration of the 
 vitality of the Bible we may now profitably 
 turn to the positive and constructive influence 
 
140 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 it has exerted on civilization. We shall find 
 that it has been a perpetual liberator of man- 
 kind from ecclesiastical, political, and social 
 bondage ; that what it has achieved among the 
 nations which have experienced the benefits of 
 its influence gives promise that ultimately it 
 will effect all those adjustments by which 
 society is to conform to the highest ideals of 
 justice. 
 
 In the earliest Christian centuries the Bible 
 occupied a unique place in the esteem of those 
 who counted themselves the disciples of Jesus, 
 and who in three hundred years brought their 
 religion to a commanding position in the Ro- 
 man empire. While Christianity was, as now, 
 primarily devotion to Christ, the Bible became 
 the supreme manual by which the life of the 
 Christian was guided, as well as the means by 
 which the principles of the Christian religion 
 were inculcated. In the beginning it con- 
 sisted of the Old Testament alone, but the 
 ancient collection was so interpreted as to 
 make all its lines converge upon Christ, as he 
 had himself taught his immediate disciples to 
 believe. As the written memorials of Jesus 
 began to circulate a generation after his cruci- 
 fixion, and the letters of the apostles to 
 churches and individuals gained currency, a 
 New Testament was gradually formed and 
 added to the sacred writings of the Hebrews. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 141 
 
 This double collection of books then became 
 the ruling agency in the development of the 
 church. 
 
 Persecution was unable to stay the multipli- 
 cation of manuscripts of the Bible or to 
 quench the devotion of the Christians to their 
 venerable Scriptures. When at length a Chris- 
 tian emperor came to the throne of the Caesars, 
 he ordered fifty fine copies of the Bible to be 
 prepared for the churches of Constantinople, 
 the recently founded capital of his realm, at 
 his own expense. From that hour copies of 
 the Scriptures increased with great rapidity, 
 and the influence of the Bible in the national 
 life advanced with equal pace. A copy of the 
 sacred volume lay upon the presidential chair 
 at each great church council. It was present 
 in every court room, being used in taking an 
 oath. The Scriptures began to influence legis- 
 lation from the days of Constantine. Jus- 
 tinian supplemented the old Roman law, which 
 he codified, with laws of his own, in which he 
 sometimes referred to the Bible for his au- 
 thority. Lawyers in this period made com- 
 parisons between the legal enactments of 
 Rome and the law of Moses. The contact of 
 Rome with surrounding nations brought the 
 Bible to the barbarous tribes. Continental 
 Europe was illumined by the Scriptures; and 
 when Augustine entered Britain, it was to 
 
142 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 place the Bible before the Anglo-Saxons. 
 Charlemagne regulated his public and private 
 conduct by the Scriptures. 
 
 What power the Bible exerted in the affairs 
 of men in those centuries, despite the difficulty 
 of circulating it, may readily be understood 
 when we reflect that, once the Canon of Scrip- 
 ture had received general acceptance, the 
 theory of the equal authority of all its parts 
 became dominant, and the Scriptures were 
 conceived as a reservoir of advices suitable for 
 every condition of life and sufficient for every 
 problem which might present itself; or as an 
 arsenal from which weapons might be drawn 
 to meet the antagonism of every enemy of the 
 truth. This view of the Bible persists in our 
 time, but has no such sovereignty as it main- 
 tained then, when the church had not yet 
 asserted itself to be an authority above the 
 Bible the supreme custodian and interpreter 
 of revelation. 
 
 In the mediaeval period of European civili- 
 zation the influence of the Bible upon popular 
 thought and action was first obscured and 
 finally almost extinguished, because its pre- 
 cepts were no longer brought into immediate 
 contact with the common mind. Scarcely any- 
 one but the clergy could read. They did not 
 take the Bible away from the laity so much 
 as it was ignored by the latter. Being depend- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 143 
 
 ent on the priests for both the knowledge of 
 its contents and an explanation of their mean- 
 ing, they were easily ruled by the hierarchy, 
 and those desolate decades of ecclesiastical 
 tyranny which are the shame of Christendom 
 naturally ensued. 
 
 After the gloomy night of the middle cen- 
 turies had passed away, a revival of learning 
 having brought scholars to the study of the 
 Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, the Bible, which 
 had been so great a power in training the early 
 church, came to be the force which upheaved 
 ecclesiastical traditions and institutions, and 
 created grave alarm among the priestly 
 authorities of the Church. It would be most 
 profitable to survey the reforms which swept 
 over Europe in consequence of the rediscovery 
 of the Bible, but names must stand to us for 
 epochal movements. Peter Waldo and his 
 poor men of Lyons, the Albigenses, Wiclif, 
 Huss, Tyndale, Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, 
 Zwingli, Melanchthon, Knox, and others 
 figures which represent the whole stream of 
 influences which culminated in the spiritual 
 and churchly reformation of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury sprang into the arena with the Bible in 
 their hands. 
 
 That the church would resist this movement 
 was inevitable. Its hostility extended all the 
 way from ignorant assaults upon the Scrip- 
 
144 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 tures themselves to brutal persecutions of 
 those who sought the religious freedom offered 
 to them in the Bible. A French priest said 
 from his pulpit in 1530 : 
 
 They have found out a new language, called Greek. 
 We must carefully guard ourselves against that language. 
 It will be the mother of all sorts of heresies. I see in 
 the hands of many people a book in that tongue called 
 the New Testament. It is a book full of brambles, with 
 vipers in them. 
 
 But even the fires of Smithfield, the whole- 
 sale murders in the Netherlands, the frightful 
 massacres in France, the martyrdoms multi- 
 plied in every corner of Europe, could not 
 paralyze the energies which were inspired by 
 the Bible. Religious freedom was procured at 
 an enormous cost, A spiritually decadent 
 church, compelled to adjust herself to new and 
 perilous conditions, instituted reforms within 
 her borders, and a new beginning was made in 
 the religious life of the world, which has been 
 maintained with increasing vigor down to the 
 present time. 
 
 It is not too much to affirm that in every 
 land where the Bible has been permitted free 
 access to the people national life has been puri- 
 fied and enriched. It is no mere accident that 
 countries in which the Scriptures have been 
 given a dominant influence are the supreme 
 nations of the world. To go no farther afield 
 
OF THE BIBLE 145 
 
 than England and limitations of space 
 enforce the requirement of restricted illustra- 
 tion we find an example which is a type of 
 many others. Whether John Wiclif realized 
 that the Bible is by its very nature inevitably 
 an ecclesiastical and political emancipator, 
 when he began his translation of the Scrip- 
 tures into the English vernacular, one cannot 
 tell. But that is precisely what this "morning 
 star of the Keforrnation" proved by his mag- 
 nificent work, as did also those noble succes- 
 sors of his who brought it down to later 
 generations through their skillful rendering of 
 the Bible into popular speech. 
 
 That fine historian of the English people, 
 J. H. Green, says of the influence of the Bible 
 in England: 
 
 But far greater than its effect on literature or social 
 phrase was the effect of the Bible on the character of 
 the people at large. Elizabeth might silence or tune the 
 pulpits; but it was impossible for her to silence or tune 
 the great preachers of justice and mercy and truth who 
 spoke from the book which she had again opened for her 
 people. The whole moral effect which is produced now- 
 adays by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, 
 the lecture, the missionary report, the sermon, was then 
 produced by the Bible alone. And its effect in this way, 
 however dispassionately we examine it, was simply 
 amazing. The whole temper of the nation was changed. 
 A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. 
 A new moral and religious impulse spread through every 
 class. Literature reflected the general tendency of the 
 time; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and 
 
146 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 piety, which still crowd our older libraries, drove before 
 them the classical translations and Italian novelettes 
 of the age of Elizabeth. 
 
 It is significant of all, in this respect, that 
 occurred in the civilization of Great Britain, 
 that when in the early days King Alfred col- 
 lected the laws of his people, he placed the 
 Ten Commandments at the beginning. Black- 
 stone said in his commentaries that the Bible 
 had always been regarded as a part of the com- 
 mon law of England. Queen Victoria told a 
 pagan ambassador, as she handed him a copy 
 of the Bible, "That is the secret of the great- 
 ness of England." "All that we call modern 
 civilization," says Froude, "in a sense which 
 deserves the name, is the visible expression 
 of the transforming power of the gospel." 
 
 In our own country the story is the same. 
 The influence of the Bible on the public life 
 of the Puritans in New England was com- 
 manding. In June, 1639, "all the free plant- 
 ers" of the colony of New Haven "assembled 
 together in a general meeting to consult about 
 settling civil government according to God." 
 After much deliberation and careful thought 
 it was unanimously voted "that the word of 
 God shall be the only rule to be attended unto 
 in ordering the government in this planta- 
 tion." This resolution was observed for a long- 
 time, with such variations from the strict 
 
OF THE BIBLE 147 
 
 letter as would occasionally be demanded by 
 erring human nature. The Massachusetts Bay 
 Company were bound by their charter "to act 
 according to the laws of God and for the 
 advancement of his gospel, the laws of this 
 land, and the good of this plantation," and in 
 the laws which the colonies framed for them- 
 selves they constantly appealed to the Scrip- 
 tures. Despite the ridicule which has been 
 heaped upon these worthies and their succes- 
 sors for the austerity of their public and 
 private conduct, and the severity of the regula- 
 tions they adopted for the guidance of civic 
 affairs, it is known to all students of New 
 England history that the moral and religious 
 trend they imparted to the national life of this 
 country had much to do with the subsequent 
 virility of its people. Our colonial period, as 
 it emerged into the stormy days of the Revolu- 
 tion, was unquestionably corrupted by the 
 malign influences of French infidelity and 
 English deism, but the revival of religion 
 which swept over our territory, and which left 
 neither colleges nor wilderness cabins un- 
 touched by its invigorating breath, turned our 
 people back to the Bible and the sanctifying 
 power of the morality and spirituality which 
 it inculcates. 
 
 Many of our leaders and publicists through 
 the succeeding years have not hesitated to 
 
148 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 declare in unequivocal terms that the per- 
 petuity of our American institutions is depend- 
 ent upon the practical veneration we give to 
 the Bible. During his last illness Andrew 
 Jackson, pointing to the family Bible, said, 
 "That book, sir, is the rock on which the 
 republic rests." Not less striking is the tribute 
 of Daniel Webster : "If we abide by the prin- 
 ciples taught in the Bible, our country will go 
 on prospering and to prosper; but if we and 
 our posterity neglect its instructions and 
 authority, no man can tell how sudden a catas- 
 trophe may overwhelm and bury our glory 
 in profound obscurity." In the Centennial 
 Letter which President Grant addressed to the 
 American Sunday schools he said : 
 
 Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor to your 
 liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice 
 them in your lives. To the influence of this book we 
 are indebted for all progress made in our true civiliza- 
 tion, and to this we must look as our guide in the future. 
 
 After the battle of Manila and the extraor- 
 dinary defeat of the Spanish fleet at Santi- 
 ago, the editor of an influential newspaper 
 in Buenos Aires declared in his columns that 
 the success of the United States in these and 
 other conflicts was due to the fact that it was 
 a Protestant nation and that its people were 
 nourished on the Bible. 
 
 It was no sentimental and passing impres- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 149 
 
 sion that led Garibaldi to say, "The Bible is 
 the cannon that will make Italy truly free." 
 The rugged democracy of the English people 
 is to be referred to the potent sway of the Bible 
 over their writers and speakers for a thousand 
 years. For it was not Cromwell alone, and the 
 Puritan hosts which surrounded him, who 
 derived from the Bible their inspiration to 
 fight for constitutional liberty; but virtually 
 every leader of the people's causes in all 
 civilized lands, who has left an abiding mark 
 upon succeeding generations, has found his 
 instigation and sustenance in the same source. 
 The pressure of the Bible upon the social 
 conscience of mankind is but another phase 
 of its influence on the political destinies of 
 nations. Lord Morley declares that Gladstone 
 went no farther for his social doctrines "than 
 the Sermon on the Mount, where so many 
 secret elements of social volcano slumber." 
 He had no need to search elsewhere. It is in 
 the Scriptures that revolutions for the sake 
 of ameliorating human conditions are most 
 prolifically bred. Tyranny has no more ex- 
 plosive book to dread, and wherever its pages 
 are read and its teachings followed despotisms 
 and social iniquities are doomed to destruc- 
 tion. Wendell Phillips said: "The answer to 
 the Shastras is India ; the answer to Confucian- 
 ism is China ; the answer to the Koran is Tur- 
 
150 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 key; the answer to the Bible is the Chris- 
 tian civilization of Protestant Europe and 
 America." There is not so much as a hint of 
 any social question in the far East until the 
 Bible comes to disturb the hideous caste 
 systems of the Orient. Injustice is secure 
 everywhere till the righteousness of the gospel 
 draws its flaming sword. Oppression and in- 
 humanity are driven out only when the Bible 
 is given its supremacy over the consciences of 
 men. 
 
 Think of the barbarities which flourished in 
 England, despite the fact that she was nomi- 
 nally Christian, before the Bible, through the 
 wide distribution afforded it by societies or- 
 ganized for the purpose, had made them impos- 
 sible. Lawbreakers were under the ban of a 
 penal code which now seems incredibly sense- 
 less and cruel. Says William Canton, in a 
 recent volume on The Bible and the Anglo- 
 Saxon People : 
 
 It was death for sacrilege, forgery, letter-stealing; 
 death for horse, sheep, and cattle lifting; death for 
 house-breaking and pocket-picking; death for poaching 
 and destroying young trees; death for blackmailing or 
 appearing disguised on a public way; the law recognized 
 two hundred and twenty-three capital offenses. 
 
 "The horrors of Newgate when Elizabeth 
 Fry visited it with the Bible" are thus de- 
 scribed : 
 
OP THE BIBLE 151 
 
 It was a very caravansary of iniquity and despair. 
 There were men in hundreds, women in hundreds, 
 women with numerous children. Unemployed, uncared 
 for, herded together like brutes, they passed the time in 
 gambling, drinking, fighting, masquerading, singing lewd 
 songs, telling tales of vice and villainy, planning fresh 
 crimes. Among the prisoners there were boys and girls 
 from nine to thirteen years of age, growing up for the 
 gallows though there was little need to grow, for a 
 child of ten was not too young for the hangman. 
 
 How from these frightful abuses public 
 sentiment gradually demanded relief, how, 
 through the labors of such lovers of the Bible 
 as Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and 
 their friends, slavery was abolished in the 
 British dominions, how eventually the condi- 
 tions of manual toil for men, women, and chil- 
 dren, which were as intolerable in their way 
 as the lives of prisoners, were made more 
 humane these are reforms known to all the 
 world, and they were achieved through the 
 energy which the Bible put into the souls of 
 philanthropists. 
 
 When Nicholas I was emperor of Russia 
 there were millions of serfs in his domain. 
 His son Alexander expressed profound sorrow 
 for them. When he was asked the reason for 
 his compassion, he replied that he derived 
 his sympathy "from reading the Bible which 
 teaches that we are all brethren." When at 
 length he became Czar he gave the serfs their 
 
152 THE LITEKARY PRIMACY 
 
 freedom, to the astonishment of the world. 
 Abraham Lincoln was one of the most diligent 
 readers of the Bible in modern times. His 
 mind and heart were literally full of the Scrip- 
 tures. He was ruled by them in thought, word, 
 and deed. His hatred for human slavery was 
 not merely the result of a nature singularly 
 humane, but also of his veneration for a book 
 which taught him the iniquity of regarding 
 any man, however degraded, as rightfully the 
 chattel of another, however strong and wise. 
 It needs but a superficial acquaintance with 
 reforms in the past hundred years to induce 
 one to agree with William Lloyd Garrison, 
 "Take away the Bible from us, and our war- 
 fare against intemperance, and impurity, and 
 oppression, and infidelity, and crime is at an 
 end. We have no authority to speak, no cour- 
 age to act." 
 
OP THE BIBLE 153 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE BIBLE AS ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 REPUTATIONS are sometimes ruined by 
 assigning to men motives of which they have 
 never dreamed. Religion may be libeled in the 
 same way. When Ingersoll the agnostic went 
 up and down the United States making flip- 
 pant people shriek with laughter at his paltry 
 witticisms over what he alleged to be Chris- 
 tianity, he was really pounding a theology that 
 had been dead for at least fifty years, though 
 his auditors were not aware of the deception 
 that was being practiced on them, never hav- 
 ing given ten minutes of serious investigation 
 to the problems of religion, or to the develop- 
 ment of the greatest of the sciences. The 
 attacks made on the Bible, in so far as they 
 seek to discredit its actual worth, are chiefly 
 and ignorantly directed against a Bible that 
 never had any existence outside the misconcep- 
 tions of uncritical persons. For a great pro- 
 portion of this fanciful misinterpretation of 
 the significance and claims of the Bible its 
 own avowed friends are responsible, as has 
 already been explained. A further illustration 
 
154 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 of this fatuity will fittingly introduce us to an 
 assessment of the true values of the Bible as 
 literature with a moral and spiritual function. 
 
 We are told that Alexander the Great placed 
 under his pillow at night a copy of Homer's 
 Iliad and the sword with which he carved his 
 way toward universal empire. Though we 
 may properly regard the Bible as, in a true 
 sense, both intellectual stimulus and militant 
 weapon, yet a superstitious veneration for the 
 physical entity which embodies its sacred 
 literature is absurd and belittling. Some 
 people pack copies of the Bible away in their 
 traveling bags when they begin a journey, as 
 women place sachet packets among their cloth- 
 ing, or as pagans hide talismans and charms 
 on their persons to keep away evil powers. 
 They have seen the Bible kissed by witnesses 
 in court as a solemn pledge of veracity. They 
 know that it is believed to have a sanctity 
 which is supposed to attach to no other book. 
 Though they do not intend to manage their 
 lives by an undeviating fidelity to its precepts 
 which they seldom read, yet they would on no 
 account be at any time without a copy of the 
 Scriptures as a protection against peril and 
 plague. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 155 
 
 On a little higher range, but one that is 
 almost as injurious to the character of the 
 Bible, are those persons who consider it the 
 ultimate authority on every subject, no matter 
 how remotely or meaninglessly it may ap- 
 proach such a question. They are determined 
 to press this doctrine to the utmost. The result 
 is that, whenever a clash comes between a 
 biblical writer who was working from the 
 standpoint of the knowledge of his day and a 
 scientific investigator who has all the advan- 
 tage of modern familiarity with the universe, 
 such misguided individuals are compelled 
 either to stultify themselves by denying the 
 evidence of their senses, or to surrender their 
 faith in the validity of the Scriptures. They 
 are like the Caliph Omar, who, when he had 
 captured Alexandria, and was shown its mag- 
 nificent library, asked, "What is the good of 
 all these books? They are either in accord 
 with the Koran, or they are contrary to it. 
 If the former, they are superfluous, if the latter 
 they are pernicious. In either case let them 
 be burned." So perished many priceless prod- 
 ucts of human genius. A like attitude is taken 
 toward all literature, of whatever sort, when 
 compared with the Bible, by those who are 
 convinced that it is the final word on every 
 matter. If there be discovered any supposed 
 wisdom that seems to impair the credit of the 
 
156 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 Scriptures in the most obscure corner of the 
 least important book, let it be anathema. Such 
 persons need the admonition of James Russell 
 Lowell : "Theology will find out in good time 
 that there is no atheism at once so stupid 
 and so harmful as the fancying God to be 
 afraid of any knowledge with which he has 
 enabled man to equip himself." It is no less 
 degrading to man's intellect and conscience 
 to assume that literature, however sacred, 
 which contravenes the actual and certified dis- 
 coveries of research must be made to invali- 
 date those findings in order to hold its primacy 
 as a moral and spiritual force. 
 
 Another misconception, which is more 
 plausible, but hardly less injurious, if carried 
 to its logical conclusion, is that of supposing 
 the Bible to be the source rather than the 
 result of religion. The Old Testament did not 
 produce Judaism, and the New Testament did 
 not produce Christianity. The actual process 
 was just the reverse. Religion made both these 
 collections of books; they did not make reli- 
 gion. The Hebrew religion existed before the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, and the Christian religion 
 existed before the Christian Scriptures. If all 
 the New Testaments now in existence were 
 swept off the face of the earth, the Christian 
 religion would still remain, and would doubt- 
 less produce another New Testament, as in a 
 
OF THE BIBLE 157 
 
 broad sense it is actually doing now in the 
 records of its evangelizing triumphs. 
 
 We shall never get the right clue to this 
 wonderful literature until we perceive that the 
 Bible is a book of life, a record of moral and 
 spiritual development, a variegated transcript 
 of human experience, the dominant tone of 
 which is religion. "The Bible," says Joseph 
 S. Auerbach, "rightly understood, is the story 
 of the fashioning of men from feeble begin- 
 nings to great issues; the toughening of the 
 fiber of character, and the emancipation, 
 through suffering and humiliation and defeat 
 and captivity and exile, from the* bondage of 
 idolatry and littleness to moral triumph and 
 spiritual excellence." 
 
 The Bible presents an intelligible exhibit of 
 what happened in the evolution of a religion 
 whose advocates predict that it will one day 
 control the w^orld. They believe that it is the 
 substance of a revelation to men of the ulti- 
 mate means of redeeming human society. In 
 what has occurred, as the report of it trans- 
 mitted by the Scriptures shows, there was a 
 continuous manifestation of divine influence. 
 But the supernaturalisin which is accredited 
 to the Bible must by no means be permitted to 
 efface the impression of naturalism very 
 apparent in its writings. 
 
 These considerations should save us from 
 
158 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 being scandalized by those occasional diverg- 
 ences from the highest ethical standards which 
 are met in the Bible. We early find that its 
 morality is not uniform. That is precisely 
 what we ought to expect, if we have received 
 this literature for just what it is, the bodying 
 forth in written form of that slow but steady 
 development of the moral sense of mankind 
 under divine tutelage, and not a ready-made 
 counsel of perfection without a flaw or a 
 blemish. Incalculable harm has been done to 
 the Bible by its professed friends trying to 
 explain every act of "the chosen people" which 
 they ascribed to divine command as necessarily 
 in harmony with the divine will. This is to 
 forget that the persons who wrote were men 
 of like passions with ourselves, and that they 
 were as likely to attempt to prejudice future 
 generations in their favor by laying the re- 
 sponsibility of their unworthy deeds on God 
 as the monarchs of Europe are at this moment 
 claiming divine approval for their unspeakably 
 foolish and wicked war. Whittier's reverent 
 analysis is pertinent : 
 
 But nothing can be good in Him 
 That evil is in me. 
 
 God's character has not changed in the 
 course of the centuries. He is no holier now 
 than he was three thousand years ago. Nor 
 lias he any time fallen from those sublime 
 
OF THE BIBLE 159 
 
 heights of excellence described by Jesus. We 
 are, therefore, left to the conviction that when 
 in certain historical portions of the Old Testa- 
 ment, Jehovah is represented as ordering 
 actions which in our day would be under the 
 ban of Christian sentiment, the narrators have 
 spoken without divine warrant. Wholesale 
 murder in the interest of a tribe claiming 
 special divine favor cannot be justified by such 
 a violent attack upon God's character under 
 the plea that his providences are inscrutable. 
 
 We are well aware how confidently men of 
 infirm moral sense resort to the Scriptures for 
 the encouragement of their wicked designs. 
 Not only do they seek justification there for 
 their personal ambitions, as Napoleon Bona- 
 parte read the books of Samuel and the Kings 
 to ascertain what warrant they gave for 
 monarchy, but they proceed to buttress every 
 sort of villainy in the same fashion, the mean- 
 est crimes of history having been palliated by 
 this method. If we should tarry in the Old 
 Testament, or if we should give the same value 
 to the documents of the Old Testament that 
 we ascribe to the Gospels, preferring the teach- 
 ings of those who affirm that the divine 
 sanction was given to acts of rapine and 
 plunder to the dual law of love to God and 
 man, so clearly enunciated and illustrated by 
 Jesus, we should surely be lost in uncertain 
 
160 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 shadows. But the morality of the Bible is to 
 be measured in all its parts by the ethical 
 teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and by 
 that inner sense of right which, first implanted 
 by our Creator, and then developed into acute- 
 ness by Christian culture, has qualified us to 
 make such discriminations as men of old seem 
 not to have had the ability to make. Security 
 for moral judgment may be found by bringing 
 all the ethical precepts of ancient writings up 
 to the test of such noble discourses as the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount and the thirteenth chapter 
 of First Corinthians. 
 
 When we have thus determined to gauge the 
 morality of the Bible by the highest it con- 
 tains we may unhesitatingly give the Scrip- 
 tures the primacy among manuals of conduct, 
 and ask with Faraday, "Why will people go 
 astray when they have this blessed book to 
 guide them?" The sufficient answer to our 
 question will be that either they do not read it 
 at all, or that, reading it, they do not properly 
 interpret it. The effects of a reasonable appro- 
 priation of biblical literature are such, that 
 even men without much repute for devotion, 
 or whose attitude toward Christianity as a 
 
 */ 
 
 system is one of suspicion, unite with the 
 saints in commending it enthusiastically. 
 
 Attention has already been given to the in- 
 fluence which the Bible has exerted upon civili- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 161 
 
 zation, and a general description has been pre- 
 sented of its power as a liberator of thought, 
 a quickener of the social conscience, and an 
 adjuster of political rights and duties. It 
 could not have fulfilled these functions with- 
 out first affecting the individuals who in the 
 aggregate constitute society. Said Lord 
 Bacon, "There never was found in any age of 
 the world either religion or law that did so 
 highly exalt the public good as the Bible." 
 Said Goethe, "The mere ethical teachings of 
 the Bible would alone stamp it as the greatest 
 literary treasure of mankind." Said Thomas 
 Jefferson, "I have always said, and always will 
 say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred 
 Volume will make better citizens, better hus- 
 bands, and better fathers." Eecognized as the 
 foundation of the surest prudential wisdom, 
 without which success in life is impossible, the 
 Bible has sometimes been held to contain the 
 very seeds of destruction for the Christian 
 religion which is inculcated by it. For those 
 who follow the practical advices of the Bible 
 for the conduct of their lifework are fairly 
 certain to attain success, and experience has 
 shown that worldly prosperity has a strong 
 tendency to discourage the simple and sacri- 
 ficial life which fidelity to the Christian reli- 
 gion requires. But the higher morality which 
 the Bible teaches, and which swings those who 
 
 
162 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 accept it away from the blunder of esteeming 
 worldly success the worthiest object of human 
 effort, effectively counteracts this disintegrat- 
 ing peril. The Bible is the supreme guide for 
 conduct. As Matthew Arnold says : 
 
 As well imagine a man with a sense for sculpture not 
 cultivating it by the help of the remains of Greek art, 
 and a man with a sense for poetry not cultivating it by 
 the help of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a 
 sense for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the 
 Bible. 
 
 To the same purport are the words of 
 William H. Seward : 
 
 I do not believe human society, including not merely 
 a few persons in any state, but whole masses of men, 
 ever has attained or can ever attain, a high state of 
 intelligence, virtue, security, liberty, or happiness with- 
 out the Holy Scriptures. 
 
 Thomas H. Huxley will not be regarded as 
 a prejudiced witness for the Bible, yet he could 
 say: 
 
 Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deduc- 
 tions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings 
 and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay teacher 
 would do if left to himself, all that it is not desirable for 
 children to occupy themselves with; and there still re- 
 mains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral 
 beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great his- 
 torical fact that for three centuries this book has been 
 woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in 
 English history. ... By the study of what other book 
 could children be so much humanized, and made to feel 
 that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, 
 
OF THE BIBLE 163 
 
 like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval 
 between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the 
 curses of all time, according to efforts to do good and 
 hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment 
 for their work. 
 
 Unite with this the verdict of John Quincy 
 Adams : 
 
 I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; 
 and I say to you search the Scriptures. The Bible is 
 the book above all others to be read at all ages and in 
 all conditions of human life; and not to be read once 
 or twice through, and then to be laid aside, but to be 
 read in small portions every day. In what light soever 
 we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revela- 
 tion, to history or to mortality, it is an invaluable and 
 inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue. 
 
 Dean Stanley relates an incident which 
 occurred during a visit he paid to Heinrich 
 von Ewald, the German scholar and critic, 
 that deserves repeating. A copy of the New 
 Testament which was lying on a small table 
 chanced to fall to the floor. He stooped down, 
 picked it up, and laid it on the table, saying 
 with deep emotion, "In this little book is con- 
 tained all the best wisdom of the world." The 
 narrator declares that "it is impossible to for- 
 get the noble enthusiasm with which this 
 'dangerous heretic,' as he was regarded, 
 grasped the small volume" and uttered these 
 words. 
 
 It is perhaps a tribute to the universality of 
 the biblical literature that on a building of 
 
164 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 the Harvard Law School there should be in- 
 scribed this sentence from Exod. 18. 20 : "Thou 
 shalt teach them ordinances and laws, and 
 shalt show them the way wherein they must 
 walk, and the work that they must do." 
 
 There is no richer storehouse of wisdom 
 than the Bible, and many learned men will 
 \varmly indorse the words of Whittier in his 
 poem, "Miriam" : 
 
 We search the world for truth; we cull 
 The good, the pure, the beautiful 
 From graven stone and written scroll, 
 Prom all old flower-fields of the soul; 
 And, weary seekers of the best, 
 We come back laden from our quest, 
 To find that all the sages said 
 Is in the book our mothers read. 
 
 So convinced was Jeremy Taylor of the pre- 
 eminence of the Bible as a book for the regula- 
 tion of life, that he gave this admonition : "Do 
 not hear or read the Scriptures for any other 
 end but to become better in your daily walk, 
 and to be instructed in every good work and 
 increase in the love and service of God." It is 
 not to be supposed that this pious instructor 
 intended by this injunction to put a ban upon 
 the study of the Bible as literature, or the 
 reading of the great book for purposes of in- 
 tellectual pleasure, though these pursuits 
 would have been esteemed by him of small 
 consequence in comparison with the object he 
 
OF THE BIBLE 165 
 
 named. What Godet wrote a friend who was 
 preparing for the ministry is a more discrimi- 
 nating exhortation : 
 
 Keep your two readings of the Bible carefully apart 
 one for your personal edification and the other for the 
 increase of your knowledge, and never allow the first 
 to be merged in the second. Never let a morning pass 
 without feeding on the Bible. The Bible ought to be the 
 bread of life for our hearts before it becomes a light 
 for our eyes. I speak from my own experience. Don't 
 be afraid that your scientific reading may suffer from 
 this separation. Outward separation is often the very 
 path of inward reunion. 
 
 BengePs suggestion may well be added to 
 these counsels, as a safeguard against the folly 
 of making subordinate matters of dispropor- 
 tionate importance : "Eat in peace the bread of 
 Scripture, without troubling thyself about the 
 particles of sand which may have been mixed 
 up with it by the millstone." 
 
 Now these are exemplary advices in that 
 they warn us against artificial measures with 
 the Bible, against false preconceptions and 
 injurious prejudices. The Bible has a message 
 for each of us, from the heart of man to the 
 hearts of men. We must read it untrammeled 
 by any personal prepossessions, to ascertain 
 what it holds of good for us, entirely apart 
 from any theory we may hold respecting its 
 inspiration. "I see that the Bible fits into 
 every fold and crevice of the human heart," 
 
166 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 said Arthur Henry Hallam. "I am a man, and 
 I believe that this is God's book because it is 
 man's book." 
 
 II 
 
 The beneficial effects of habitually reading 
 the Bible, as disclosed in the character thus 
 developed, can scarcely be described in terms 
 too large. The influence of any great litera- 
 ture on the personal invigoration of life is 
 very considerable. Scipio Africanus, we are 
 told, was made a hero by reading Xenophon's 
 graphic histories. In them he met and con- 
 versed with Cyrus. Selirn II heightened his 
 military ardor, it is said, by poring over 
 Caesar's Commentaries. In them he learned 
 the art of war by studying the campaigns of 
 a consummate general. Bourdaloue perused 
 the writings of Paul, Chrysostom, and Cicero 
 every year. They increased his blood-earnest- 
 ness and moral fearlessness. Illustrations of 
 this sort could be multiplied almost indefi- 
 nitely from the biographies of forceful men 
 and women. But the Bible, with its vast 
 diversity of writings and its marvelous adapta- 
 bility to all the needs of humanity, is able to 
 show more wonderful results in the strengthen- 
 ing of character than any other literature 
 whatsoever. It is quite unnecessary to point 
 to particular instances, since it is common 
 
OF THE BIBLE 167 
 
 knowledge that the most vigorous nations in 
 the world are those which have been the bene- 
 ficiaries of Bible culture, and that the firmest 
 heroes of these several countries are men who 
 have inflamed their courage and heightened 
 their aspirations from the teachings of the 
 Scriptures. Anent the fructifying influence 
 of the Bible on national character take the 
 testimony of two of America's foremost men : 
 Says Theodore Koosevelt : 
 
 Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the 
 teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and intertwined 
 with our whole civic and social life, that it would be 
 literally I do not mean figuratively, but literally 
 impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life 
 would be if these teachings were removed. 
 
 At the close of a lecture on The Bible and 
 Progress, Woodrow Wilson said: 
 
 I ask of every man and woman in this audience that, 
 from this night on, they will realize that part of the 
 destiny of America lies in their daily perusal of this 
 great book of revelation that if they would see America 
 free and pure they will make their own spirits free 
 and pure by this baptism of the Holy Scriptures. 
 
 No force more frequently depresses the 
 moral vitality of human beings than the sor- 
 rows and burdens of life, for which they can 
 give no reasonable account. Aware of this 
 many of the world's noblest writers have 
 sought to pour balm upon troubled spirits, 
 and to hearten them for the conflicts of life 
 
168 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 by such words as should seem to make the 
 discipline of suffering more rational, or at 
 least fortify the soul against evils which must 
 be endured, however inexplicable they may 
 be. In this ministry to the vexed and discon- 
 solate the Bible holds the crown of supremacy. 
 Eiobert Browning has treated the problem of 
 pain and suffering with such intelligence and 
 skill as few men have shown who have under- 
 taken to reconcile their fellows to the ordeal 
 of a troubled life. But in Ezekiel, Proverbs, 
 the Psalms, Jeremiah, and especially Job, we 
 have demonstrations of ability in this regard 
 surpassing everything outside the range of 
 Scripture. "Pascal says that Job and Solo- 
 mon knew most and spoke best about the 
 misery of man. One was the happiest, and the 
 other the most unhappy of mortals. One knew 
 by experience the vanity of pleasures, as the 
 other knew in the same way the reality of 
 evils." Gladstone said, "On most occasions 
 of very sharp pressure and trial some word of 
 Scripture has come home to me as if borne on 
 angels' wings." With greater particularity 
 William T. Stead, the brilliant editor and 
 publicist, relates his experiences with the great 
 book: 
 
 The first time I felt the influence of the Bible was 
 when I first went to a boarding school. I was unspeak- 
 ably miserable and forlorn. I was only twelve, and had 
 
OF THE BIBLE 169 
 
 never been away from home before. It was then I dis- 
 covered the consolatory influence of many of the Psalms. 
 Take them all around, the Psalms are probably the best 
 reading in the world when you are hard hit and ready 
 to perish. After I left school, Proverbs influenced me 
 most; and I remember, when I was first offered an editor- 
 ship, reading all the Proverbs relating to kings as 
 affording the best advice I was likely to get anywhere 
 as to the right discharge of editorial duties. When I 
 was busy with active direct work among the ignorant 
 and poor, the story of Moses' troubles with the Jews in 
 the wilderness was most helpful. Later, when, from 
 1876 to 1878, no one knew when he went to bed but that 
 by morning Lord Beaconsfield would have plunged the 
 empire into war, the Hebrew prophets formed my Bible. 
 In 1885 it was the story of the evangelists. If I had 
 to single out any one chapter which I am conscious of 
 having influenced me most, I should say the first of 
 Joshua, with its oft-repeated exhortation to be strong 
 and to be very courageous; and if I had to single out 
 any particular verses, it would be those which were 
 taught me when a boy, and which I long afterward saw 
 on the wall of General Gordon's room at Southampton: 
 "Trust in the Lord with all thy heart; lean not unto 
 thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge 
 him, and he shall direct thy paths." 
 
 After returning from his hazardous journey- 
 ings in Tibet, Sir Sven Hedin wrote : "Without 
 a strong and absolute belief in God and in his 
 almighty protection I should not have been 
 able to live in Asia's wildest regions for twelve 
 years. During all my journeys the Bible has 
 always been my best lecture and company." 
 
 Out from the heart of nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old; 
 
170 THE LITEKARY PRIMACY 
 
 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 word unto the Prophets spoken 
 Was writ on tablets yet unbroken; 
 Still floats upon the morning wind, 
 Still whispers to the willing mind; 
 One accent of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world has never lost. 
 
 So sings Emerson; and while the last two 
 lines of this quotation from his poem called 
 "The Problem" cannot be taken literally, what 
 goes before truthfully expresses the reason for 
 the Bible's incomparable power to move the 
 souls of the sorrow-stricken and to assuage 
 their griefs. It is man's literature the prod- 
 uct of a bleeding heart suffused with divine 
 compassion inspired by the Holy Ghost. Its 
 sublime union of the divine and human is 
 nowhere more impressively exhibited than in 
 the prayers which are found here and there 
 in its pages. Robert Louis Stevenson has pro- 
 duced a book of prayers notable for their 
 simplicity, suitability, and chaste eloquence; 
 and many writers have essayed to put into 
 form for devotional use offerings of praise, 
 thanksgiving, and petition. But the prayers 
 of the Bible transcend them all, as a reading 
 of the supplications of Hannah, David, Solo- 
 mon, Habakkuk, and others will prove. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 171 
 
 George Peabody, when an old man, said to 
 a lad who for some purpose had brought a 
 Bible to him in his office : "My boy, you carry 
 that book easily in your youth, but when you 
 are as old as I am, it must carry you." But 
 if we are not acquainted with the glorious 
 literature of the Bible, it cannot have the 
 opportunity of refreshing and invigorating us 
 when the evils of life oppress and the decrepi- 
 tude of old age steals upon us. 
 
 If we pursue with penetration our inquiries 
 into the reasons for the Bible's unparalleled 
 power over the conscience and spirit of man- 
 kind, we shall discover certain fundamental 
 truths of the utmost value in attempting to 
 estimate the full worth of the Scriptures. 
 Among these may be mentioned first of all the 
 Bible's ability to reveal men to themselves. 
 In many pagan countries the people, on mak- 
 ing their first acquaintance with the book, are 
 with difficulty persuaded that it is not a 
 modern book, written by shrewd missionaries, 
 with the needs and deficiencies of their heathen 
 audiences in mind, so perfectly does it report 
 their characteristic sinful propensities. The 
 Bible has often been called a mirror, and as 
 a medium of communicating to man a clear 
 sense of his real being it has no equal. We are 
 often urged to read the best fiction as a means 
 of acquiring a desirable knowledge of human 
 
172 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 nature. Biography is recommended for the 
 same purpose. The poets are suggested be- 
 cause they delve into the depths of the spirit 
 of man. But no literature lays bare the inmost 
 secrets of the human heart with such merciless 
 fidelity to truth as does the Bible. Thousands 
 have been driven by terror away from its blaz- 
 ing disclosures of humanity's weaknesses and 
 wickedness who ought to have been goaded 
 thereby to penitence and righteous resolution, 
 thus confirming the observation of a man of 
 humble circumstances who, upon reading the 
 Bible attentively for the first time, said to his 
 wife, "If this book is true we are lost," but 
 who, upon pushing his way into farther depths 
 of the book, exclaimed, "But if this book is 
 true we may be saved." 
 
 From the rude awakening which many a 
 conscience receives from a hurried glance into 
 this mirror the Bible passes on to a companion- 
 ship with the persistent reader which amounts 
 to a spiritual monitorship. No intimate friend 
 could more indefatigably and affectionately 
 pursue a wayward comrade with admonitions 
 and encouragements of a personal character 
 than does the Bible attach itself as a private 
 counselor to him who freely reads it. Said 
 Robert Browning, "Sydney Smith laughs 
 somewhere at some Methodist or other whose 
 wont was, on meeting an acquaintance in the 
 
OF THE BIBLE 173 
 
 street, to open at once on him with some in- 
 quiry after the state of his soul. Sydney 
 knows better now, and sees that one might 
 quite as wisely ask such questions as the price 
 of Illinois stock or condition of glebeland." If 
 there be no such energetic soul to prod us with 
 eternal queries about our spiritual estate, the 
 Bible will supply inquisitorial agencies in 
 abundance. There is no getting away from its 
 scalpel. There is no escaping its radium 
 searchings. The Bible is a man's book because 
 it knows man to the very bottom of his life. 
 
 Having revealed a man to himself, the Bible 
 proceeds to teach him a philosophy of life 
 which makes him confident for time and eter- 
 nity. "We account," said Sir Isaac Newton, 
 "the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime 
 philosophy." It is also the most practical, for 
 it is adapted to every grade of intelligence. 
 The contrast between those who have no 
 authority for life, no guide for conduct, and 
 those who steer their course by this book was 
 skillfully drawn by Cowper in his comparison 
 of the indigent English lace-worker with the 
 supercilious French philosopher Voltaire: 
 
 Yon cottager who weaves at her own door, 
 Pillows and bobbins all her little store, 
 Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night 
 Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light; 
 Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true, 
 A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew; 
 
174 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 And in that treasure reads with sparkling eyes 
 Her title to a mansion in the skies. 
 O happy peasant! O unhappy bard! 
 His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward. 
 He, praised perhaps for ages yet to come; 
 She, never heard of half a mile from home; 
 He, lost in errors his vain heart prefers, 
 She safe in the simplicity of hers. 
 
 During the coronation ceremonies of the 
 young King Edward VI, three swords were 
 brought to him, as a sign that he was to be 
 ruler over three kingdoms. He remarked that 
 there was still another sword which had been 
 overlooked. When surprise was expressed, the 
 royal lad went on to say: "It is the Bible, 
 which is the Sword of the Spirit, and to be 
 preferred before these swords. That ought in 
 all right to govern us, who use them for the 
 people's safety by God's appointment. With- 
 out that sword we are nothing, we can do noth- 
 ing, we have no power. From that we are 
 what we are this day. From that alone we 
 obtain all power and virtue, grace and salva- 
 tion, and whatever we have of divine strength.'' 
 It does not diminish the worth of these words 
 that they may have been suggested to the boy 
 by some older head, since we know how devout 
 an attitude he took toward the Bible through 
 all the years of his brief reign, and since we 
 have many proofs of the truth of those words 
 independently of their authorship. The kings 
 
OF THE BIBLE 175 
 
 of the earth, no less than the lowliest of their 
 subjects, can find no lamp for their pathway 
 upon whose guiding beams they can more 
 confidently rely than the Bible. 
 
 When one turns to the best that the writers 
 of the Orient and the classic poets and philoso- 
 phers of Greece and Rome have set forth with 
 reference to the possibilities of a future life, 
 and the nature of those rewards and penalties 
 which the intuitions of humanity have in all 
 ages declared to be inevitable, on the supposi- 
 tion that personality survives the grave, the 
 impression made is one of uncertainty and 
 dissatisfaction. We discover in the Bible 
 alone a definite, undeviating, and reasonable 
 doctrine of the consequences of this life 
 through the projection of mundane experience 
 into the unlimited existence of a future world. 
 "I am a creature of a day," said John Wesley, 
 "passing through life as an arrow through the 
 air. I am a spirit, coming from God, and re- 
 turning to God; just hovering over the great 
 gulf; a few moments hence I am no more seen ; 
 I drop into an unchangeable eternity. I want 
 to know one thing the way to heaven; how 
 to land safe on that happy shore. God himself 
 has condescended to teach the way. He hath 
 
 / 
 
 written it down in a book. O give me that 
 book. At any price give me the book of God. 
 I have it; here is knowledge enough for me. 
 
176 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 Let me be a man of one book. Here then I am 
 far from the busy ways of men. I sit down 
 alone; only God is here. In his presence I 
 open, I read his book ; for this end to find the 
 way to heaven." 
 
 The Bible not only thus reveals a man to 
 himself, places before him a reliable philoso- 
 phy of life, and gives him a solid expectation 
 of immortality, but it does all this through 
 the unveiling of a great personality known to 
 history as Jesus of Nazareth and to faith as 
 the Son of God. As spiritual literature the 
 Bible carries its own key. Without it the in- 
 terpretation of the Bible is a profitless and 
 confusing business. In Jesus the Christ the 
 shadows of this book resolve themselves into 
 a radiant picture of God's age-long process 
 of redeeming mankind from meanness and sin. 
 "Ye search the Scriptures," said Jesus to some 
 who were unfriendly to him, "because ye think 
 that in them ye have eternal life; and these 
 are thev which bear witness of me." It is not 
 
 ts 
 
 too much to say that the supreme function of 
 the Bible is to convey to men a knowledge of 
 God through one sublime Figure, who is "the 
 effulgence of his glory, and the very image of 
 his substance." All history previous to his 
 advent is but the dramatized evolution of the 
 divine idea for human disenthrallment. All 
 prophecy, whether predictive or hortatory, 
 
OF THE BIBLE 177 
 
 points unerringly to him. All poetry, romance, 
 fiction, tradition, myth, fable, and philosophy 
 of the ancient people of Jehovah, whether 
 dimly recognized or utterly unknown to their 
 authors, were weaving garlands for his brow. 
 He is the center upon which all this splendid 
 literature converges, and he is the power by 
 which its incalculable wealth of thought is 
 transmuted into living character. 
 
 After a fleet of foreign vessels had left the 
 bay of Jeddo, a Japanese gentleman of high 
 standing and influence was walking one day 
 upon the beach. He noticed a little object 
 floating on the water at some distance, and 
 sent one of his attendants into the sea to 
 secure it. They brought to him a small book. 
 He could make nothing out of it. He carried 
 it to some Dutch traders, and they told him it 
 was a copy of the New Testament in English. 
 That was of no use to him. He was told that 
 the book had been translated into Chinese, and 
 that by writing to China he could obtain a 
 copy of that version. When he had finally 
 secured it, he invited in some' friends and they 
 read it together. There was much in it that 
 was unintelligible to them, for they had no 
 copy of the Old Testament to introduce them 
 to the meaning of this mysterious volume. 
 They eventually learned that in Nagasaki 
 there was a man whose business it was to ex- 
 
178 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 plain the book. They dispatched an inter- 
 preter to this man to proffer their questions 
 concerning what they had been reading. The 
 minister answered them, and an interchange 
 of inquiry and reply went on for two or three 
 years. Then the Japanese gentleman notified 
 the missionary that he was coming to see him. 
 His retinue was so great that on arriving it 
 filled the whole of the ground floor of the 
 temple in which the Christian teacher was 
 living. In a private conversation after the 
 public interview the Japanese gentleman ex- 
 pressed a wish to be baptized, and said, "When 
 I read the character of Jesus Christ, I cannot 
 tell you how I was affected. I had never heard 
 or read or thought of or imagined any such 
 personage as that; and I believe in him and 
 I love him. You cannot tell how much I, a 
 mature man, reading that for the first time, 
 was affected by the life and character of Jesus 
 Christ." Thus on the bosom of that broad 
 stream which we call the Bible, and which is 
 fast girdling the globe with its sanctifying 
 waters, the knowledge of God in Christ is 
 being borne to earth's remotest inhabitants. 
 It is in this way the literature of a great people 
 attains its true significance. 
 
 It is not strange that in the early Christian 
 centuries men and women suffered martyrdom 
 rather than surrender their ownership of writ- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 179 
 
 ings which possessed such inestimable worth. 
 Eusebius, the church historian, relates a touch- 
 ing story of a young Christian officer of the 
 Roman army who was quartered at Csesarea in 
 Palestine. He was greatly esteemed by his 
 superiors and was in line for early promotion. 
 Out of envy a comrade denounced him to the 
 commander as a Christian. He was summoned 
 before his master, asked if the charge was true, 
 confessed at once, and was urged to abjure his 
 faith. He was given three hours for reflection. 
 He went to a small Christian church and told 
 his story to the aged bishop, who took the Bible 
 in one hand and the soldier's sword in the 
 other, and bade him take his choice. Without 
 delay the soldier grasped the Bible, returned 
 to assert that he would continue to be a Chris- 
 tian, and lost his life for his loyalty to the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 No such extreme temptation will, in all 
 probability, ever be offered to men in civilized 
 lands. The Bible is making its conquests 
 everywhere in the earth, and where it triumphs 
 peace, order, and fraternity prevail. But it is 
 to be hoped that the ease and immunity from 
 punishment with which men may now profess 
 their devotion to the Bible and the faith which 
 it teaches will not betray them into the folly 
 of esteeming lightly that which has been be- 
 stowed upon them at such high cost, and the 
 
180 THE LITEKARY PRIMACY 
 
 possession of which is the richest blessing of 
 their lives. 
 
 A song among Welsh peasants, prepared 
 for them by a clerical poet at a time when the 
 Scriptures in their native tongue were being 
 widely distributed, contains wholesome truth 
 for our times : 
 
 The Little Bible for a crown 
 Thou mayest buy in any town 
 The Bible in thy mother's tongue. 
 
 Ere that thou lack 
 
 Sell shirt from back, 
 'Tis trustier than thy father's roof 
 To keep thee sure and peril proof. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 181 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE BIBLE AS INSPIRED LITERATURE 
 
 IT is quite impossible to say anything new 
 about the sublimity of the Bible, but the Bible 
 is always saying something new about itself. 
 Practically all that is most noble in praise of 
 the Scriptures was said during the early 
 centuries of Christianity. But the Scriptures 
 themselves continue to pour forth tides of in- 
 spiration, and seem to be inexhaustible as 
 fountains of intellectual and spiritual vitality. 
 "I am convinced," said John Eobinson to the 
 Pilgrim Fathers who sailed away from Delft 
 in the Mayflower, "that the Lord hath yet more 
 light and truth to break forth from his Holy 
 Word." This is precisely what has occurred 
 in the centuries since these words were uttered. 
 Says Francis Peabody, "As it has happened a 
 thousand times before, so it is likely to happen 
 again, that the gospel, examined afresh, with 
 a new problem in mind, will seem to have been 
 written in large part to meet the needs of the 
 new age." Dean Stanley used to say that the 
 Bible had far more in it than had ever been 
 taken out of it. Vinet declared, "The world 
 
182 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 will come to an end when Christianity shall 
 have spoken its last word." At seventy-seven 
 years of age a prominent preacher said, "Much 
 in the Bible seems like news to me." This 
 power of the Scriptures to vitalize the thought 
 of men is of itself a demonstration of its own 
 inherent inspiration. 
 
 The method in which the Bible writings 
 were inspired is sufficiently indicated by the 
 statement in 2 Pet. 1. 21 : "Prophecy came not 
 in old time by the will of man; but holy men 
 of God spake as they were moved by the Holy 
 Ghost." The prophet was a seer, into whose 
 mind and heart God had poured the rich 
 stream of his own life, thus imparting clear 
 moral judgment and deep spiritual enthu- 
 siasm. When the prophet spoke for God he 
 was speaking from God. He was borne along 
 by the Holy Spirit just as modern preachers 
 frequently leave the impression upon their 
 auditors that they are being carried quite 
 beyond themselves by a power which is greater 
 than their native abilities. Luther told 
 Melanchthon that "because the prophets were 
 holy and serious people, therefore God spoke 
 with them in their consciences, which the 
 prophets held as sure and certain revelation." 
 
OF THE BIBLE 183 
 
 It was for this reason that the prophets were 
 wont to authenticate their deliverances by the 
 phrase: "Thus saith the Lord." 
 
 An examination of the Scriptures will show 
 that it was upon this kind of inspiration that 
 the great messengers of truth built their reli- 
 ance for the authentication of their utterances. 
 The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 states the matter comprehensively and yet con- 
 cisely when he says: "God, who at sundry 
 times and in divers manners spake in time 
 past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in 
 these last days spoken unto us by his Son, 
 whom he hath appointed heir of all things" 
 (Heb. 1. 1, 2). God was using a variety of 
 spokesmen through the ages preceding the 
 advent of Jesus, but in the world's Redeemer 
 the office of prophecy culminated. Christ 
 spoke with finality. When Moses was ordained 
 of God to perform the task of deliverance, 
 which he thought too vast for his talents and 
 begged that he might be excused from the im- 
 possible work on the ground that he was not 
 an eloquent man, but slow of speech, the Lord 
 said unto him : "Who hath made man's mouth? 
 or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the see- 
 ing, or the blind? have not I, the Lord? Now 
 therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and 
 teach thee what thou shalt say" (Exod. 4. 
 11, 12). When Jeremiah received his commis- 
 
184 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 sion as a prophet unto the nations, he said: 
 "Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak ; for I 
 am a child. Then the Lord put forth his hand, 
 and touched his mouth, and said to him: Be- 
 hold, I have put my words in thy mouth" 
 (Jer. 1. 6, 9). When Isaiah beheld the 
 sublime vision of the Lord upon a throne, high 
 and lifted up, attended by seraphims, and felt 
 himself disqualified for the prophetic office be- 
 cause he was a man of unclean lips, and dwelt 
 in the midst of a people of unclean lips, a live 
 coal taken from the altar of the temple was 
 laid upon his lips, and he was told that his 
 iniquity had been taken away. Then when 
 he heard the voice of the Lord saying : "Whom 
 shall I send, and who will go for us?" he re- 
 sponded, "Here am I ; send me," and God said 
 "Go," and gave him the message he was to 
 declare (Isa. 6). Jesus said to his disciples, 
 in referring to the test which would be made 
 of them before synagogues by their enemies: 
 "When they shall lead you, and deliver you 
 up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall 
 speak, neither do ye premeditate; but whatso- 
 ever shall be given you in that hour, that speak 
 ye; for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy 
 Ghost" (Mark 13. 11). In his wonderful fare- 
 well discourse before the disciples on the eve 
 of his crucifixion, Jesus said : "The Comforter, 
 which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will 
 
OF THE BIBLE 185 
 
 send in my name, he shall teach you all things, 
 and bring all things to your remembrance, 
 whatsoever I have said unto you" (John 14. 
 26). And again: "When he, the Spirit of 
 truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth : 
 for he shall not speak of himself ; but whatso- 
 ever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and 
 he will show you things to come" (John 16. 
 13). In all these instances, and many others 
 which might be given, God is represented as 
 urging on by his personal pressure the speech 
 which his servants are to deliver. Now this is 
 the process by which the writers of the Old 
 Testament and the New Testament Scriptures 
 fulfilled their mission; and it will be remem- 
 bered that much which appears in literary 
 form was first given orally. 
 
 It is not books, therefore, but men of whom 
 we predicate inspiration. No one fancies, it 
 is to be hoped, that the Spirit of God operates 
 on parchment or paper or leaden types or any 
 other material employed to convey truth to 
 those who can read. Only the wielders of 
 these agencies of communication can be truly 
 inspired. We simply make use of a poetic 
 figure when we speak of inspired pens, pages, 
 poems, books. It is the human mind produc- 
 ing literature that is inspired. In the early 
 part of Genesis a beautiful picture is presented 
 which portrays God as blowing the breath of 
 
186 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 life into the nostrils of the inanimate figure 
 he had created, endowing the body with a 
 spirit. Here we have a fine symbol of the fact 
 which is of highest significance in the person- 
 ality of man. He has received the breath of 
 life from God's inspiration. The energy of the 
 Eternal has been imparted to him. He is a 
 being capable of responding to the mind of the 
 Creator. Nothing but a rational creature, 
 made in the spiritual image of God, can yield 
 to divine inspiration. Still earlier in the 
 Genesis account of creation the Spirit of God 
 is represented as moving upon chaos and pro- 
 ducing out of it life in manifold expressions, 
 but there was no conscious, intelligent re- 
 sponse to the touch of the infinite thought; 
 God was simply operating creatively upon the 
 abyss. Nor would it be correct to say that 
 God inspires animals of a lower order than 
 man, simply because he may be represented as 
 sustaining their lives by his personal will. 
 They have no spiritual intelligence and are 
 therefore not touched by what we call inspira- 
 tion. 
 
 Inspiration, therefore, is bringing the 
 human mind into responsive contact with the 
 mind of God. Illustrations of this process are 
 multitudinous in number. "What is prayer," 
 asks Emerson, "but a sally of the soul after 
 the unfound infinite?" "No man ever prayed 
 
OF THE BIBLE 187 
 
 earnestly without learning much." "The in- 
 spiration of the Almighty giveth them under- 
 standing/ 7 we are told in the book of Job 
 (32. 8). "If any of you lack wisdom, let him 
 ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, 
 and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him" 
 ( James 1.5). "The secret of the Lord is with 
 them that fear him" (Psa. 25. 14). In the 
 book of Exodus we are told that God had 
 called out Bezaleel for w r ork upon the taber- 
 nacle and "filled him with the spirit of God, 
 in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowl- 
 edge, and in all manner of workmanship ; and 
 to devise curious works, to work in gold, and 
 in silver, and in brass, and in the cutting of 
 stones, to set them, and in carving of wood, 
 to make any manner of cunning work" (Exod. 
 35. 30-33). There was a man named Ephraem 
 Syrus whom his comrades dubbed "The harp 
 of the Holy Ghost." Novalis called Spinoza 
 "A God intoxicated man." Paul prayed that 
 certain Christians might be "filled with all 
 the fulness of God" (Eph. 3. 19). In all these 
 examples we have illustrations of varying 
 types of inspiration, though the source and 
 method are identical. 
 
 Inspiration as thus described is not limited 
 to the writings of the Bible. It will be remem- 
 bered that on Mars' Hill Paul quoted from one 
 of the Grecian poets in substantiation of his 
 
188 THE LITEEARY PRIMACY 
 
 teaching that God is not far from any of us, 
 but "in him we live, and move, and have our 
 being." Peter affirmed when his eyes had been 
 opened, after his interview with Cornelius, the 
 centurion, "Of a truth I perceive that God is 
 no respecter of persons; but in every nation 
 he that feareth him, and worketh righteous- 
 ness, is accepted with him" (Acts 10. 34, 35). 
 Jesus himself recognized in the Syrophenician 
 woman and the Gentile centurion such faith 
 as he had not found in Israel. Augustine con- 
 fessed that he was incited toward a nobler life 
 by reading the Hortensius of Cicero. Socrates 
 said, "I am moved by a certain divine and 
 spiritual impulse." Pericles before making 
 one of his famous speeches was accustomed to 
 ask that the gods would preserve him from 
 uttering anything which was not helpful to his 
 subject. Haydn, referring to his oratorio, "The 
 Creation," said, "It was not from me but from 
 above it all came." Wherever a writer is in 
 communion with God he will inevitably speak 
 for God. Nearly every race has its sacred 
 books. No man can impartially examine them 
 without being convinced that "the true Light, 
 which lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world," has shed his radiance upon some of 
 the pages of this literature. In these writings 
 he will find noble thoughts of God, high moral 
 ideals, sharp consciousness of sin, earnest 
 
OF THE BIBLE 189 
 
 solicitude for salvation, anticipations of the 
 future life, prayers and songs which might be 
 used in Christian temples, and parables which 
 will remind him of Jesus. It would be unjust 
 to declare that divine inspiration had nothing 
 to do with these productions. As Lowell has 
 so pertinently said: 
 
 Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 
 
 And not on paper leaves or leaves of stone, 
 
 Each age, each kindred adds a verse to it, 
 
 Texts of despair or hope, or joy or moan; 
 
 While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud, 
 
 While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 
 
 Still at the prophet's feet the nations sit. 
 
 Hence our question is not whether other 
 literature may have been inspired, but whether 
 the literature of the Bible is so preeminently 
 inspired as to be supreme in this regard. And 
 the general tone of the Scriptures is such that 
 few readers of deep intelligence can avoid the 
 impression that they have a quality transcend- 
 ing that of any other writings. Once when 
 Thackeray had been reading Victor Hugo he 
 said, "He is great and writes like God 
 Almighty." He meant no irreverence by this 
 striking utterance, but he gave expression to 
 the supreme test by which the quality of the 
 Bible writers is to be measured. In so far as 
 they speak like God they are the preeminent 
 teachers of truth. Chief Justice Chase said: 
 
190 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 "There came a time in my life when I doubted 
 the divinity of the Scriptures, and I resolved 
 as a lawyer and a judge I would try the book 
 as I would try anything in the court room, 
 taking evidence for and against. It was a 
 long, serious, and profound study: and using 
 the same principles of evidence in this reli- 
 gious matter as I always do in secular matters, 
 I have come to the decision that the Bible is 
 a supernatural book, that it has come from 
 God, and that the only safety for the human 
 race is to follow its teachings." 
 
 II 
 
 Since inspiration relates to men and not to 
 books, it is apparent that it will be conditioned 
 by certain human limitations, unless we 
 regard the writers as mere automatons, a thing 
 quite incredible. Though these men were 
 moved by the Holy Ghost their individuality 
 was not effaced. As Chrysostorn said, "Even 
 though it was Paul, yet he was a man." The 
 inspired writer will follow his intellectual 
 aptitudes not less than the man who is devoid 
 of divine inspiration. Paul was a logician; 
 inspiration did not make him a writer of 
 romances. David was a poet; inspiration did 
 not make him a historian. Bezaleel was a 
 skillful artificer ; inspiration did not make him 
 
OF THE BIBLE 191 
 
 an orator. Inspiration fills a man with divine 
 energy, but this operates within human out- 
 lines just as when the tide sweeps in it fills 
 the bays, inlets, and capes and follows the 
 configuration of the coast. Life in the seed, to 
 use another figure, fulfills the promise of the 
 species, in one case making the gnarled oak 
 and in another the straight palm. We have 
 one Spirit working through a diversity of gifts. 
 The treasure is in earthen vessels, and thus it 
 occurs that the Bible presents a great variety 
 of literature. The Holy Ghost employs the 
 talents which men possess, raising them to the 
 highest point of efficiency, but never imparting 
 new gifts which are foreign to the native con- 
 stitution of a particular mind. 
 
 If inspiration is thus limited by the peculiar 
 qualities of the individual writer, so also it 
 must be modified by intellectual deficiencies. 
 If a writer is not a scientist, inspiration will 
 not make him one. If he is a poor Greek 
 scholar, inspiration will not make him a good 
 one. If he has slight acquaintance with his- 
 tory, or has been misinformed about events, 
 inspiration will not make him an accurate 
 chronicler of human affairs. It is inconsistent 
 for us, therefore, to demand that the literature 
 of the Bible shall be taken as authoritative on 
 matters of lesser import than those which deal 
 with the spiritual life. It is wholly unneces- 
 
192 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 sary for us to be disturbed when we are told 
 that the biblical writers show a faulty chro- 
 nology, imperfect scientific conceptions, or use 
 unreliable statistics. If the Bible is inspired 
 for the purpose of lifting humanity to loftier 
 planes of spiritual thought and to induce the 
 purest form of living, then it is of small con- 
 cern to what extent its writers may deviate 
 from mere historicity, or fall below the scien- 
 tific knowledge of our times. When a minister 
 was asked, "How do you reconcile the teach- 
 ings of the Bible with the latest conclusions 
 of science?" he very properly replied: "What 
 are the latest conclusions of science? I have 
 not seen the morning newspaper." The steady 
 advance in the knowledge of the universe and 
 its energies is recognized by all intelligent 
 persons; and devout people, jealous for the 
 reputation of the Bible, would save themselves 
 much pain and embarrassment if they would 
 frankly concede that the biblical authors were 
 invariably writing from the standpoint of the 
 crude science of their day whenever they made 
 allusions to supposed facts of the physical 
 universe. Niothing could have more thoroughly 
 discredited the authenticity of the Scriptures 
 than their perfect correspondence in all points 
 of human knowledge with the results of subse- 
 quent investigations such as are now in the 
 hands of our generation. If a book purporting 
 
OF THE BIBLE 193 
 
 
 
 to be five hundred years old should disclose an 
 acquaintance with the wonderful discoveries 
 which science has made in our own time, every- 
 body would at once denounce the work as an 
 imposture. If we should demand that inspired 
 writers shall, through the control of divine 
 omniscience, be able to anticipate the conclu- 
 sions of scientific research, then we should find 
 the Bible wholly inexplicable to us, because 
 our deepest thinkers feel that the riddles of the 
 universe are far from being solved. In one 
 hundred years the world will know vastly 
 more about the universal frame than it is 
 possible for us to conceive by any exercise of 
 the imagination. If the Bible embodied such 
 facts as will come to men's knowledge in the 
 long future it w r ould be an inscrutable book. 
 It may be said with all reverence that one of 
 the charms of the Bible is its complete human- 
 ness. It is so perfect as a manual of religion 
 because it is so imperfect in many of those 
 qualities which make a scientific book valuable 
 to students of phenomena. The supposed con- 
 flict between science and religion, based upon 
 a thoroughly inadequate interpretation of the 
 Scriptures, is an absurdity when it is closely 
 analyzed. Science can take care of itself and 
 the Bible can take care of itself, and the 
 friends of one need not worry about the wel- 
 fare of the other. They do not fall into the 
 
194 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 same category. They do not seek the same 
 outcome. The fact that the Bible writers can- 
 not be trusted to speak authoritatively upon 
 matters which they never intended to treat 
 definitely does not disqualify them from speak- 
 ing to the souls of men concerning the deepest 
 interests of human life. A lawyer is not dis- 
 qualified for pursuing his profession because 
 he has no acquaintance with Assyriology, nor 
 is a physician disqualified for following his 
 healing art because he does not know the 
 Chinese alphabet. A geologist may know 
 vastly more about the structure of the Swiss 
 mountain peaks than does his Alpine guide, 
 but the man who has safely led many parties 
 of tourists over the perils of a mountain ascent 
 is of incalculable value to the most learned 
 scientist who desires to scale the sublime 
 heights of a snow-clad peak. The writers of 
 our Bible are unquestionably ill-informed 
 about many things when judged by the stan- 
 dards of modern knowledge, but they know 
 the human heart as no other producers of 
 literature have known it, and they lift before 
 the soul ideals which were never conceived by 
 the human mind until their inspired writings 
 were delivered to the world. 
 
 Since the writers who have given to us this 
 superb library we call the Bible lived in 
 periods of history remote from us, and under 
 
OF THE BIBLE 195 
 
 civilizations which were different from ours, 
 and were affected by circumstances and for- 
 tunes dissimilar from one another, it is not 
 strange that the ethical and spiritual quality 
 of what they gave varies in value. It would 
 seem to be manifestly unfair to compare the 
 moral standards of men living in the early 
 centuries of civilization with the principles of 
 conduct which Christianity has taught men 
 and which many centuries of Christian history 
 have developed. It is mere justice to demand 
 that Paul shall be tested by more severe 
 measurements than Abraham. To submit the 
 Song of Solomon to the same scrutiny which 
 the Gospel of John bears without injury, and 
 to demand of it the same spiritual excellence 
 which we observe in the fourth Gospel, would 
 be obviously inequitable. The book of Ecclesi- 
 astes and the Sermon on the Mount are very 
 far apart, as the unprejudiced critic must 
 admit. To affirm that the books of Chronicles 
 are to be judged by the same canons we apply 
 to the Epistle to the Romans is little short 
 of ridiculous. It is only by an artificial 
 method of interpreting the Bible that it is 
 possible even to think of it as possessing uni- 
 form value. The spiritual sense of devout 
 believers is revolted by any such mechanical 
 insistence upon the equal value of all parts of 
 the Bible. Whenever a saint proclaims that 
 
196 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 certain portions of it have an exalted influence 
 upon his life, he sits in judgment upon other 
 portions of Scripture and intimates that they 
 are of inferior worth. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Hence the theory of strict verbal inspiration 
 is untenable. Perhaps there are not many 
 Christians in our day who hold that the Bible 
 was dictated to its writers and that they were 
 simply instruments employed by God to repro- 
 duce with absolute accuracy the words which 
 flowed from his mouth. Yet there lingers 
 among us enough of that tradition to cause 
 serious embarrassment. While the church has 
 not committed itself baldly to any such teach- 
 ing, there is a widespread feeling that some- 
 thing akin to it is the authoritative position 
 of the orthodox bodies. Great harm has been 
 done to religion by the feeling that if we can- 
 not hold to the inspiration of every word in 
 the Bible, a total surrender of the great volume 
 as the source of religious authority must fol- 
 low. Either we must take the Bible as perfect 
 in every detail, or we must reject the Bible as 
 unreliable. It is important we should make as 
 clear as possible to our generation that no 
 such alternative exists. Years ago, at Ox- 
 ford University, Dean Burgon, preaching on 
 
OF THE BIBLE 197 
 
 the Bible, declared : "Every book of the Bible, 
 every chapter of it, every verse of it, every 
 word of it, every syllable of it, every letter of 
 it, is the direct utterance of the Most High, 
 faultless, unerring, supreme." The father of 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to Hebrew 
 as "The intimate language of the Holy Ghost." 
 On the other hand, Jowett of Balliol College, 
 said that "in a certain sense the Authorized 
 Version was more inspired than the original." 
 If our theory of inspiration is correct, then 
 this startling statement is not the rash thing 
 that some would suppose. It is to be pre- 
 sumed that the translators in 1611, being very 
 devout men, constantly invoked the blessing of 
 God upon their work, and that infinite wisdom 
 was pleased to grant their request, so that 
 upon the inspiration originally given to the 
 Bible writers there was added the inspiration 
 which God gave to the revered translators of 
 the ancient tongues into the English vernacu- 
 lar. Such a notion of the continuance of in- 
 spiration as a positive help to the illumination 
 of the Scriptures is entirely hostile to the 
 traditional view. But the dictation theory, 
 which we really derive from the old Hebrew 
 rabbins, if pursued to its logical ends, leads 
 to whimsical absurdities. We are told by an 
 early Jewish legend that God dictated the 
 Pentateuch to Moses, and that the writer pur- 
 
198 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 sued his task solemnly and with self-poise 
 until the account of his own death was given, 
 which he described weeping. There is an old 
 tradition that all the books of the Old Testa- 
 ment had been destroyed at the time of Nebuch- 
 adnezzar, when the temple at Jerusalem was 
 burned. To repair the loss God dictated these 
 books to Ezra. Nothing could be more me- 
 chanical than this, and nothing more likely to 
 encourage the doctrine that all parts of the 
 Old Testament are equally inspired. The Jews 
 of the dispersion had a somewhat similar 
 theory about the inspiration of their Greek 
 Bible. They said that when Ptolemy Phila- 
 delphus, King of Egypt, gathered at Alex- 
 andria, seventy elders of the Jews to make a 
 Greek translation of their law, he put each one 
 of them in a separate cell, in order to avoid 
 any communication between them. Then, after 
 working for seventy days, all at once they 
 shouted "Amen!" from their cells, their task 
 having been accomplished. And when the 
 seventy copies had been compared they were 
 found to agree even in the smallest detail. 
 Preposterous as this story seems to the modern 
 mind, it goes scarcely beyond the position 
 taken by some stanch defenders of the in- 
 errancy of the Scriptures. It is evident that 
 we must seek a better theory of inspiration 
 than this. 
 
OF THE BIBLE 199 
 
 What has served to sustain such an unten- 
 able doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible is 
 the mistaken idea that Protestantism is built 
 upon such a conception of the Scriptures. 
 When the spiritual authority of Rome was de- 
 fied in the sixteenth century, and a substitute 
 was required for the ultimate sovereignty of the 
 Pope over the consciences of men, it is sup- 
 posed that the Bible was taken to be that de- 
 sired authority, that in fact it became the Pope 
 of Protestantism. Such a view does great in- 
 justice to Martin Luther and to many other 
 of the reformers. They did indeed substitute 
 the Word of God for the word of man, but they 
 meant not so much that the Bible in its totality 
 should be regarded as the final authority, but 
 the message of salvation contained in the book, 
 the Bible within the Bible. They bowed in 
 adoration not before certain documents, but 
 before the God revealed in Christ through the 
 gospel of redemption. They went still further 
 and found through the witness of the Holy 
 Spirit in the heart of the believer the same 
 spirit that inspired the Bible and gave them 
 assurance that it came from God. In later 
 periods it cannot be denied that Protestants 
 not quite satisfied with the position of the 
 early reformers did make the whole Bible as 
 it now stands the literal W T ord of God in all 
 its parts, as if every syllable had been written 
 
200 THE LITERARY PEIMACY 
 
 by the finger of God himself. This position 
 did great harm to religion, and we have not 
 fully escaped its baneful influence. It pro- 
 ceeded from the fact that those who were 
 responsible for it could not divest themselves 
 of the feeling that an external authority was 
 indispensable. The logic of the Roman Catho- 
 lic Church in this respect is well-nigh perfect. 
 These are its positions: The Bible is not in- 
 errant. It must be interpreted, therefore, by 
 illumined authorities, such as Church Coun- 
 cils. These Councils are not, however, always 
 convenient or possible when they are most 
 needed. A Pope, therefore, who is endowed 
 with infallibility, must be utilized. All this 
 has the great merit of simplicity, and it has 
 awakened the jealousy of some Protestants. 
 They insist that in the place of an infallible 
 Pope they shall have an infallible Book. They 
 forget that the purpose of God with respect 
 to the Bible is to reveal himself, not to pre- 
 serve a faultless literature. Their mental atti- 
 tude is well described by James Martineau : 
 "Yes ; the heavenly essence in the earthern jar, 
 the ethereal perfume in the tainting medium, 
 the everlasting truth in the fragile receptacle 
 this is just the combination which does not 
 content the weakness and self-distrust of men. 
 They want not the treasure only, but the 
 casket too, to come from the sky, and be of 
 
OF THE BIBLE 201 
 
 the crystal of the sky." John Locke said, "He 
 that would take away reason to make room for 
 revelation puts out the light of both.' 5 God 
 has dowered man with powers and functions 
 which, when properly safeguarded by spiritual 
 fellowship with him, enable human beings to 
 discriminate, in any writings purporting to 
 be sacred, the mind of God from the mind of 
 man. The normal process of seeking revela- 
 tions of the Eternal is illustrated in the lines 
 with which Bishop Ken describes a righteous 
 man: 
 
 Three volumes he assiduously perused, 
 Which heavenly wisdom and delight infused, 
 God's works, his conscience, and the Book inspired. 
 
 It is not irreverent to say that some sort 
 of agreement between these media of divine 
 communication ought to be possible in arriv- 
 ing at an authentic revelation of God. Protest- 
 antism is in its very essence an emphatic dis- 
 sent from the proposition that an unassailable 
 and indefeasible authority for religion should 
 be found in the church. By the same token it 
 does not demand perfection of detail in the 
 Bible to such an extent as to exclude the opera- 
 tions of the Holy Spirit on the minds of those 
 who read the Scriptures. It reposes some 
 confidence in the spiritual consciousness of the 
 individual Christian. It holds that one of the 
 
202 THE LITERAKY PRIMACY 
 
 prime necessities for the interpretation of the 
 Bible is not merely a consistent theory of its 
 inspiration, but men to read it who are them- 
 selves inspired by the same Energy which pro- 
 duced it. "God reveals himself to the readers 
 of the Scriptures," said Dr. George P. Fisher, 
 "as really as to their writers." "There are 
 inspired readers," said Joseph Parker, "as 
 certainly as there are inspired writers." How 
 can anyone read the New Testament, particu- 
 larly the words of Jesus, with regard to the 
 Holy Spirit's office in leading men to the truth, 
 without believing that? 
 
 We should be saved much trouble if in every 
 inquiry concerning the inspiration of the Bible 
 we were to retain a clear understanding of 
 what the Bible actually is, as distinguished 
 from what it is ignorantly supposed to be. 
 Then we should be in a position to examine 
 intelligently its contents and motives, and ask 
 whether it could be what it is and undertakes 
 to do without being inspired. A recapitula- 
 tion of certain steps already taken may not 
 be amiss at this point. 
 
 The Bible did not produce religion : religion 
 produced the Bible. 
 
 The Bible is, therefore, a record of religious 
 evolution or an exposition of religious experi- 
 ence under, as we believe, divine tutelage. 
 
 This shifts the question of inspiration from 
 
OF THE BIBLE 203 
 
 documents to their authors. Inspiration is 
 given to men, not to books. 
 
 These writers of the Bible were under divine 
 inspiration for one end only the development 
 of spiritual truth, not the teaching of science, 
 nor even the making of a historical record 
 perfect in every detail. 
 
 They were still men after they were the 
 recipients of inspiration. Therefore they wrote 
 as men. They lost nothing of their individu- 
 ality. 
 
 They were men of differing degrees of spirit- 
 ual excellence. Therefore their writings are 
 not of uniform religious value. 
 
 The test to be applied to their writings is 
 the correspondence of those writings with the 
 known character of God, specifically as re- 
 vealed in Jesus the Christ. 
 
 The Bible as a whole may be regarded as 
 an infallible guide in morals and religion only 
 by admitting this principle of interpretation, 
 the New Testament supplementing and cor- 
 recting, where needed, the Old Testament ; the 
 Sermon on the Mount carrying forward the 
 Decalogue; the Gospels and Epistles moving 
 on to higher ideals than the Psalms and the 
 prophets express. 
 
 It is a great blunder to confuse inspiration 
 with omniscience. 
 
 Inspiration is a continuous gift of God, 
 
204 THE LITERAKY PRIMACY 
 
 modern believers in him having this endow- 
 ment as surely as the men of old, "who spake 
 as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." 
 
 IV 
 
 The interior grounds on which men believe 
 that the Bible is inspired have already been 
 suggested. If we cannot find reasons for con- 
 fessing our faith in the inspiration of the 
 Scriptures in the quality and contents of the 
 literature itself, surely we cannot be induced 
 to adopt this article of faith on the basis of 
 any mechanical conception of its divine origin. 
 It is because the Bible writers speak to the 
 spiritual sense of mankind with unerring aim 
 that we credit those great documents with 
 divine inspiration. Coleridge has phrased the 
 fact of human experience touching the Bible 
 in well-known words: "In the Bible there is 
 more that finds me than I have experienced 
 in all other books put together: the words of 
 the Bible find me at greater depths of my 
 being ; and whatever thus finds me brings with 
 it an irresistible evidence of its having pro- 
 ceeded from the Holy Spirit." 
 
 In a similar strain Joseph Parker says, "I 
 now know that the Bible is inspired. It 
 addresses itself to every aspect and every 
 necessity of my nature. It is my own biog- 
 
OF THE BIBLE 205 
 
 raphy. I seem to have read it in some other 
 world. We are old friends; the breathing of 
 eternity is in us both, and we have happened 
 together, to our mutual joy, on this rough 
 shore of Time." 
 
 .Bishop Boone of the Church of England was 
 being assisted by an intelligent Chinese secre- 
 tary in translating the New Testament. Work- 
 ing together one day, the secretary arose from 
 his table, walked up and down the room for 
 some time in apparent mental perturbation, 
 and finally exclaimed, "Bishop, this book must 
 be of God, for it tells me of myself." That is 
 the fundamental test of the divine inspiration 
 of the Bible. 
 
 There are, of course, other grounds upon 
 which reason may construct arguments for a 
 belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures. 
 For example, there is a certain unity binding 
 all these various documents together in a pur- 
 pose to lead the minds of men into fellowship 
 with the Spirit of God, and this unity is evi- 
 dently not the result of collusion between the 
 writers who were in many instances far apart 
 in time from one another, but is the inevitable 
 consequence of their dominance by one great 
 mind. The first sentence in Macaulay's His- 
 tory of England reads: "I purpose to write 
 the History of England from the accession of 
 King James II down to a time which is within 
 
206 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 the memory of men still living." To this plan 
 Macaulay made all his work conform, and this 
 undertaking he developed as far as he went 
 with much fidelity. Now in the Bible there 
 is no definite proposal stated at the beginning, 
 because the Scriptures do not constitute one 
 book, but a library of books. Nevertheless, no 
 man reads the Bible through without per- 
 ceiving that the books are actually strung 
 upon a single thread, the redemption of man- 
 kind and the restoration of the race to fellow- 
 ship with God. This fact greatly impressed 
 the poet Dryden, who wrote: 
 
 Whence but from heaven could men unskilled in arts 
 In several ages born, in several parts, 
 Weave such agreeing truths, or how, or why 
 Should all conspire to cheat us with a lie? 
 Unasked their pains, ungrateful their advice, 
 Starving their gain, and martyrdom their price. 
 
 Now it is not merely this unity of purpose 
 which impresses us with the unquestionable 
 inspiration of the Scriptures, but also the 
 theme upon which this literature is concen- 
 trated. The characteristic and dominant note 
 is the story of redeeming love, a golden strain 
 which, whatever may be our theories of in- 
 spiration, never was touched by the noblest 
 writers of the world until the Bible authors 
 took it up. Indeed, we know from searching 
 our own hearts that no man would have dared 
 
OP THE BIBLE 207 
 
 to assume that God, the infinite and absolute, 
 was concerned for the welfare of the least crea- 
 ture in his universe if the Bible had not first, 
 through prophets and priests, intimated it, and 
 finally, through the lips of Jesus Christ, made 
 it a sublime certainty. The bare dream that 
 God would stoop to the lowest human intelli- 
 gence, to the basest and most brutal indi- 
 vidual, to lift him up into fellowship with 
 himself, is so impossible without the aid of 
 divine revelation that it never came to a 
 human brain until the Bible introduced it. 
 Nor could that vast and unmatched conception 
 of Deity retain currency in the world to-day 
 were it not for the fact that this enduring 
 literature which inspires men to preach and 
 to write were still the possession of mankind. 
 If it were possible to remove from the litera- 
 ture of the world the influence of the Bible, 
 and to banish from the recollections of men 
 the teachings of Jesus, there would never 
 spring into the thought of the world the faint- 
 est hope that God would actually love sinful 
 men. If there were no other ground for believ- 
 ing in the inspiration of the Scriptures, this 
 would be a compelling reason for accepting 
 the teaching that God gave through these great 
 writers of the Bible his own message to man- 
 kind. 
 
 If we accept all that the destructive critics 
 
208 THE LITERARY PRIMACY 
 
 of our day have asserted, for the sake of avoid- 
 ing controversy; if we admit that the Bible 
 is a compilation of books which are evidently 
 the product, for the most part, of transcendent 
 human genius, but which exhibit all the falli- 
 bility which ordinarily characterizes the work 
 of men ; the historical sections are unreliable, 
 the chronology is faulty, the statistics are 
 erroneous, the science is puerile, and some of 
 the miracles recorded are preposterous; there 
 is nothing in these writings which cannot be 
 accounted for on natural grounds ; though the 
 Bible as a whole is obviously superior to all 
 other religious and philosophical works pro- 
 duced by man, yet its inspiration is only such 
 as moved the pen of Homer, of Plato, of Shake- 
 speare, of the best and clearest minds of the 
 ages then we are left with the problem of 
 the Bible's unparalleled influence on civili- 
 zation unsolved, and the power of the Scrip- 
 tures to regenerate human nature unexplained. 
 What the Bible has done for the world of 
 letters, for the redemption of society, for the 
 salvation of men, has been but sketchily and 
 imperfectly touched upon in these lectures. 
 The record of its magnificent achievements one 
 may read in the open books of history. Our 
 modern civilization could have had no exist- 
 ence without the influence of the Bible. The 
 social fabric of the leading nations of the 
 
OF THE BIBLE 209 
 
 world would dissolve if the Bible were re- 
 moved from its structure. When one thinks 
 of this and it is a subject fit for the most 
 patient and exhaustive investigation he is 
 moved to agree with the sentiment eloquently 
 phrased by Dr. Richard S. Storrs : 
 
 Surely, unless all experience is a lie, and all argument 
 a dream, but one mind that has ever wrought in the 
 earth was competent to this: to make a book, through 
 so many writers, which the Malay should love as well as 
 we; which Newton should cherish as of all most precious, 
 and Pascal should accept as furnishing in its structure a 
 new proof for Christianity, and which the ragged and 
 unkempt child, picked out of the streets, or drawn from 
 the depths of vilest slums, should find to him the most 
 fascinating of volumes. The theophany of Sinai was 
 more striking than this; but even it was scarcely more 
 vivid in its exhibition of the presence of God. 
 
 And now if it were written in intelligible lightnings 
 in yonder sky, "The Bible is from God," and underneath 
 the declaration were stamped, in intervolved thunder- 
 bolts, the very signature of Jehovah, it could hardly be 
 more demonstrative than this of his authorship in the 
 Scripture. We meet the mind that built the earth when 
 we open the leaves of this Book of the World. 
 
 Were all the seas one chrysolite, 
 
 This earth a golden ball, 
 And diamonds all the stars of night, 
 
 This book were worth them all. 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $I.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 AUG 
 
 1947 
 
 ij 
 
 1 wj *i - * 
 
 ' f 
 
 
 LD 21-100m-7,'4<3 (6936s) 
 
YB 21778 
 
 359894 
 
 :V^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY