IFR46 99 
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 LECTirRES AND ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK W. FARRAR, D. D. 
 
 Canon of Westminster, 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 JOHN B. ALDEN. PUBLISHER, 
 
 1883.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Dante, - - - . . 5 
 
 The Ideals of Nations, - - 35 
 
 Temperance Address, - - 51 
 
 Thoughts on America. - - - 67 
 
 The Inspiration of the Holy Scripture, 99
 
 DANTE. 
 
 I WISH this evening to speak to you about 
 the life and teachings of one of the greatest, 
 perhaps I should say the greatest, religious 
 poet who ever lived. Of the multitudes of 
 poets who have in all ages been inspired to 
 teach us the noble in conduct and the pure in 
 thought, few only have deserved the high 
 Latin title of Vatcs, a name which means not a 
 poet only, but also a bard and a seer. And of 
 these are there still fewer who impress us with 
 the sense of something peculiarly sublime 
 in their personality. Indeed, I hardly know 
 of more than three whom I should name as 
 exercising this magnetic effect on the imagina- 
 tion. Those three, are ^schylus, Dante, and 
 Milton ; — and of these three, neither of the 
 others in so supreme a degree as Dante. 
 
 Wordsworth, that pure and lofty poet whose 
 soul was akin to Milton's own, has expressed 
 this aspect of Milton's character. 
 
 *' Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart ; 
 
 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free ; 
 So didst thou travel on life's common way 
 In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay.' 
 
 And again, in his Prelude, he calls him, 
 
 " Soul awful, if this world has ever held 
 An awful soul." 
 
 Now with all this eulogy, lofty as it is, I 
 fully agree ; and if there be any other poet to
 
 6 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 whom it belongs, in even fuller measure, it is 
 Dante Alighieri. His very names sound like 
 a prophetic intimation of his greatness, Dante 
 is said to be an abbreviation of " Durante " — 
 the lasting, the permanent ; Alighieri, one 
 (that is) of the " wing-bearers," of whom his 
 coat of arms — an eagle's wing in an azure field 
 — is the most fitting symbol. 
 
 Gray, in his ode on the " Progress of Poesy," 
 spoke of Milton as 
 
 " he who rode sublime 
 Upon the seraph-wings of ecstacy, 
 The secrets of the abyss to spy. 
 He passed the flaming bounds of time and space, 
 The living throne, the sapphire blaze, 
 Where angels tremble while they gaze 
 He saw, but blasted with excess of light, 
 Closed his eyes in endless night." 
 
 The last lines are but a fanciful allusion to 
 Milton's blindness ; but of Dante it may be 
 said that he saw with eagle's eye undazzled. 
 No poet's soul ever showed the same heroic 
 dauntlessness. He trod, with unseared feet, 
 the very depths of Hell, in all its agony and 
 ghastliness ; he toiled up the mountain terraces 
 of Purgatory ; he moved as unfalteringly over 
 heaven's azure as over the burning marble ; 
 he mingled on equal terms among its living 
 rubies and topazes ; he saw the whole rose of 
 Paradise unfolded ; he gazed on the mystic 
 triumph of Christ, and on the Beatific Light of 
 the Triune God ; and in every scene, lurid or 
 celestial, before every personage, demonic or 
 divine, whether he be speaking to lost souls, 
 or giants, or coarse fiends, or beatified spirits 
 of the redeemed, or apostles, or " thrones, 
 dominations, virtues, princedoms, powers," he 
 retains before them all and everywhere the 
 royal Priesthood, the immortal dignity of a 
 man — of a man made in the image of God, and 
 for whom Christ died. 
 
 It is because such a poet seems to me 
 peculiarly fitted to teach, and elevate this age.
 
 DANTE. y 
 
 and to make it blush for its favorite vices, that 
 I have ventured to speak of him. There is 
 no function which poets can fulfil comparable 
 to their high posthumous privilege of perma- 
 nently enriching the blood of the world, and 
 raising humanity to higher levels. Nations 
 that possess such poets as Dante and Milton 
 ought never to degenerate. But they belong 
 not to nations only, but to all the world. If 
 any young men should chance to be among my 
 audience to-night, I would earnestly invite 
 them to hold high and perpetual companion- 
 ship with such souls as these. And if there 
 should be any here who have hitherto found 
 their chief delight in meaner things, which 
 dwarf the intellectual faculties and blunt the 
 moral sense, I would fain hope that, here and 
 there, one of them may be induced to turn 
 away from such follies, to breathe the pure, 
 difficult, eager air of severe and holy poems 
 like the " Divina Commedia," and the " Para- 
 dise Lost." 
 
 For, indeed, the " Divine Comedy," is, as 
 has been said, " one of the landmarks of his- 
 tory. More than a magnificent poem, more 
 than the beginning of a language, and the 
 opening of a national literature, more than the 
 inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, 
 it is one of those rare and solemn monuments 
 of the mind's power which measure and test 
 what it can reach to ; which rise up, inefface- 
 ably and forever, as time goes on, marking out 
 its advance by grander divisions than its 
 centuries, and adopted as epochs by the con- 
 sent of all who come after. They who know 
 it best would wish others also to know the 
 power of that wonderful poem ; its austere yet 
 subduing beauty; what force there is in its free 
 and earnest and solemn verse to strengthen, 
 to tranquillize, to console. Its serioiisness has 
 put to shame their trifling ; its magnanim- 
 ity their faint-heartedness ; its living energy 
 their indolenre : its stern and sad trrandeur
 
 8 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 has rebuked low thoughts ; its thrilling tender* 
 ness has overcome sullenness, and assuaged 
 distress ; its strong faith quelled despair and 
 soothed perplexity ; its vast grasp imparted the 
 sense of harmony to the view of clashing 
 truths. After holding converse with such 
 grandeur, our lives can never be so small 
 again." * 
 
 He was born in Florence in 1265, and I 
 shall not now dwell upon his biography. 
 Suffice it to say that the outline of his life may 
 be summed up under the four words, Love, 
 Philosophy, Politics, Exile. 
 
 I. First, Love. He was but a dreamy, poetic 
 boy of nine years old when he first saw and 
 loved Beatrice, the daughter of Folco Portinari. 
 The story of his love is told in his " Vita Nuova." 
 Love was his earliest idol, and God — whose 
 hand is so visible in this poet's life — early 
 shattered it. Beatrice, at twenty, married 
 another, and at twenty-five she died. 
 
 " Death, the great monitor, oft comes to prove 
 ' Tis dust we dote on when 'tis man we love." 
 
 And yet let us not say that Dante's love came to 
 nothing. It came to something far more divine 
 than could have been the disenchantment of 
 any mere earthly satisfaction. He might have 
 said, with the modern poet : 
 
 " He who for love hath undergone 
 
 The worst that can befall, 
 Is happier, thousandfold, than one 
 
 Who never loved at all. 
 A grace within his soul hath reigned 
 
 That nothing else can bring; — 
 Thank God for all that I have gained 
 
 By that high suffering." 
 
 By that absolutely pure, noble, ideal, ethereal 
 love the youth's whole soul was elevated. The 
 sweet child, the lovely maid, the pure and noble 
 gave to Dante's soul those wings of 
 
 * Dean Church.
 
 DANTE. 9 
 
 unselfish devotion by which it was lifted up to 
 God. 
 
 So, then, for his own good, and for the riches 
 of the world's ennoblement, was Dante's first 
 idol broken — the idol of earthly adoration ; 
 broken, or let us rather say, transfigured into 
 something heavenly. Nor was it otherwise 
 with his second idol. Philosophy. Of this we 
 cannot say much, because Dante has only 
 alluded to it obscurely and in enigma. He 
 says that philosophy became his consolation, 
 and he studied Boethius and Cicero. But it is 
 clear from the stern reproaches addressed to 
 him by Beatrice at the end of the " Purgatorio," 
 that during these years of his life he fell away. 
 His philosophy engrossed him. It led him to 
 offer strange fire upon the altar of his life. 
 He forgot the new life which an ideal love had 
 breathed into him, and " an intellectual and 
 sensitive delight in good ran parallel with a 
 voluntary and actual indulgence in evil." From 
 this he represents himself as delivered by a 
 vision of Beatrice, now in glory, and now to 
 him the emblem of divine knowledge. But we 
 can see this only — that earthly knowledge was 
 not suffered to absorb the soul which could 
 only be satisfied by heaven, and that the second 
 idol also was broken. 
 
 Then began the third phase of his life in 
 politics. His public life was full and passion- 
 ate. He loved his native city with an intense 
 devotion. He has crowned her with an im- 
 mortal shame and an immortal glory. Florence 
 was to him as all the world. Hell and Purga- 
 tory and Heaven ring with the name of Flor- 
 ence, and are filled with Florentines. And 
 nobly, and with stern justice, did Dante serve 
 and help to govern her. I shall not follow 
 him into the obscure and miserable imbroglio 
 of the struggles of his day — the parties of 
 Guelph and Ghibelline, the family feuds of 
 Bianchi and Neri, which only derive a touch of 
 interest from their connection with his intense
 
 I o LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 and supreme personalit}'. Suffice it to say 
 that, in the course of that divine education 
 whereb}'- God trains us all, as the lover had 
 become a student and a soldier, so the student 
 became a politician. He fought in the battle 
 of Campaldino ; he took part in no less than 
 fourteen embassies. By the age of thirty-five 
 he had risen to be the first magistrate of 
 Florence. 
 
 The struggle and passion of politics, forcing 
 him into collision with his fellow-men and with 
 the hard facts of life, made him something 
 more than the soft poetic boy, so sensitive and 
 delicate, writing sonnets, recording visions, 
 painting angels, trembling at a touch ; more 
 even than the student of letters, science, and 
 philosophy. It also decided the destiny of his 
 remaining years. Caught up in the whirlwinds 
 of political strife, he hurried back from an em- 
 bassy at Rome to hear that his house had been 
 pillaged and burnt to the ground, and himself 
 infamously charged with malversation and em- 
 bezzlement. He was banished from Florence, 
 the city of his birth, the city of his manhood, 
 the city of his love, and hurled into exile under 
 sentence of being burnt alive, if we ever set 
 foot again in the city for which, for a short time, 
 he had ruled. " Alas," he says, " I have gone 
 about like a mendicant, showmg against my 
 will the wounds with which fortune has smitten 
 me. I have, indeed been a vessel without sail 
 and without rudder, carried to divers shores by 
 the dry wind that springs out of poverty." It 
 was long before he abandoned the hope that one 
 day his fellow-citizens, repenting of their base 
 injustice, might recall him ; and that he might 
 claim the poetic wreath standing by his own 
 baptismal font in his beloved church of San 
 Giovanni, the font which, to the horror of form- 
 alists, he had once (it is said) unhesitatingly 
 broken to save a drowning child. He was 
 offered, indeed to return, but under conditions 
 which he disdained.' " The stars and the
 
 DANTE. 1 1 
 
 heaven, he said, *' are everywhere ; and in 
 any region under heaven I can ponder the 
 sweetest truths ; and if I cannot return with 
 perfect honor, I will not return at all." Yet 
 how hard was that path ! how bitter that lot to 
 his intensely proud and pre-eminent spirit ! 
 What the cage is to the mountain eagle, that 
 was to Dante the dangling as a dependant about 
 the courts of little men. Is it wonderful that 
 bitter words sometimes escaped him ? " How 
 is it," said his magnificent patron. Can Grande, 
 to him one day, " that a poor fool, like my 
 jester, amuses us all so much, while a wise man 
 like you, day after day, has nothing to amuse 
 us with?" "It is not strange," said Dante 
 bitterly, " Remember the proverb, like to 
 like," One day the Prior of Santa Croce, 
 struck with the far-off look in his yearning eyes, 
 asked him what he was seeking." ^^ Face ! " 
 was the answer. " Peace ! " a peace which on 
 earth, alas, he never found. He went on an 
 embassy to Venice for his last patron, the Lord 
 of Ravenna ; and not being able even to obtain 
 an audience, he returned to Ravenna over- 
 whelmed with disappointment, and died at the 
 age of fifty-six of a broken heart, A century 
 later remorseful Florence begged that his 
 remains might be restored to her; but the 
 request, though renewed still later by Leo X. 
 and Michael Angelo, was rightly refused ; and 
 at Ravenna, on the bleak Adrian shore, and 
 near the blighted pine-woods, his dust sleeps 
 until the Judgment Day, 
 
 Those pine-woods were green then, though 
 they are blighted now ; and Dante's life which 
 was so blighted for himself has put forth green 
 leaves for us. His loss was our gain. But for 
 that long exile, but for that unutterable despair 
 and weariness of heart, he might have been a 
 graceful love-poet, or a scholastic philosopher, 
 but he never would have written for all time 
 the Divine Comedy, Like many other poets 
 he was
 
 12 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 " Nurtured into poetry by wrong, 
 
 And learnt in suffering what he taught in song." 
 
 If the myrrh gave forth its immortal fragrance, 
 it was because it was incensed and crushed. 
 If the gold was fine gold, it was because 
 heaven had purged it in the furnace and fretted 
 it into forms of eternal loveliness. 
 
 The name, " Divine," was given to his poem 
 after his death, because it dealt with the most 
 sacred topics. He himself called it a " Com- 
 ed}^" partly because it had a happy ending, 
 partly because it was written in a simple style 
 and in the vernacular tongue. It sums up all 
 that was greatest in previous poetry and relig- 
 ious thought. It is a vision ; an ideal ; an 
 autobiography; a satire ; an allegory; amoral 
 exhortation. There had been visions of the 
 unseen world in Homer and Virgil and in many 
 mediaeval works : there had been autobiog- 
 raphies like the " Confessions " of St. Augus- 
 tine ; and bitter political poems like the plays 
 of Aristophanes and the satires of Juvenal ; 
 and poems full of scientific and theological 
 knowledge like those of Lucretius ; and ideals 
 of perfect conditions like St. Augustine's " City 
 of God." But in Dante's poem all these ele- 
 ments are fused by imagination into one in- 
 tense whole, and made the vehicles of the 
 deepest religious thoughts which at that day 
 were known to man. Without a moment's 
 hesitation Dante claims his eternal place 
 among the very greatest poets who had gone 
 before him, " as though some stranger had ap- 
 peared at the ancient games, and at once flung 
 to its farthest cast the quoit of the demi-gods." 
 Nor has the " Divine Comedy " ever been 
 equalled since. Wordsworth's " Excursion " is 
 a philosophical and autobiographic poem ; 
 Goethe's " Faust " is a soul's history ; Bunyan's 
 " Pilgrim's Progress " is a vision of things un- 
 seen ; Milton's "Paradise Lost" deals with 
 God and Satan and Heaven and Hell ; but 
 Dante's " Divina Commedia "is a work incom-
 
 DANTE. 
 
 '3 
 
 parably greater than Wordsworth's or Bunyan's 
 or Goethe's, great as those are ; it is greater 
 even than the " Paradise Lost." Except, per- 
 haps, the plays of Shakespeare, which may be 
 greater in their oceanic and myriad-minded 
 genius, it is perhaps the supremest product 
 which has come from the intellect of man. 
 
 But in reading Dante we must not at all 
 suppose that we shall be able at once to grasp, 
 and to admire him. Great poems require a 
 severe and noble tone and temper of mind to 
 understand them. The eminent man who said 
 that of its three parts, the " Inferno " was re- 
 volting, the " Purgatorio " dull, and the " Para- 
 diso " unreadable, condemned not Dante, but 
 himself. If men prefer to make their entrances 
 and exits on the stage of life with clowns and 
 vices, they are not fit companions for those 
 " whose worth erects them and their actions to 
 a grave and tragic bearing," Dante never de- 
 sired more than fit audience, though few. You 
 will find much in his poem to scarify a feeble 
 conventionality. He himself warns off all base 
 and feeble readers. " Ye," he says, " who, in 
 your little boat, are eager to follow in the 
 track of my bark, which speeds, singing on its 
 way, turn back to see again your own shores. 
 Trust not yourselves to the deep, lest haply, 
 losing me, ye remain bewildered. Ye other 
 few, who look up betimes for the bread of the 
 angels, on which we can live here, but not 
 enough to satisfy ; ye, ere the quickly closing 
 wake is reunited, 
 
 " 'Mid the deep ocean ye your course may take. 
 My track pursuing the pure waters through." 
 
 The vision narrated in Dante's " Divine 
 Comedy " is supposed to have happened in the 
 year 1300. Dante was then thirty-five. " In 
 the middle of the journey of our life," so it be- 
 gins, " I found myself astray in a dark wood, 
 for the straight way was lost. Ah ! how hard 
 a thing it is to tell how wild, and rough, and
 
 14 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 stubborn this wood was, which, in thinking of 
 it, renews my fear, bitter almost as death." 
 And while he has thus lost his way, and lost 
 Him who is the way, in this erroneous wood of 
 confused aim and sinful wandering — the wood 
 in which most of us, alas ! spend all our lives — 
 he reaches the foot of a hill whose summit was 
 bathed in sunshine. The bill is the high 
 ground, the Delectable Mountain of faith, of 
 holiness, of moral order, of Christian life ; and 
 from the pass that leads to death Dante turns 
 to, and makes a strenuous effort to climb the 
 hill. But he is instantly hindered by three 
 wild beasts : a bright and bounding leopard, 
 with spotted skin, of which he admires the 
 beauty ; a lion, which approaches him with 
 head erect and furious hunger ; and a gaunt 
 she-wolf that looks full of all cravings in her 
 leanness. Terrified by these wild beasts, he 
 sees a figure approach him, to whom he appeals 
 for help. This figure is the poet Virgil, who, 
 after dwelling on his peril, tells him that he 
 must follow him. Now, the poem of Dante is 
 crowded by many meanings, but the chief of 
 these, and the only one which I shall touch 
 upon, is the moral allegory. Of the beasts 
 that would fain drive Dante back from the 
 sunny hill to the dark wood, the leopard is 
 pleasure; the lion is anger; the wolf is the 
 love of money. " Behold a lion out of the 
 forest shall slay them, a wolf of the evenings 
 shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over 
 their cities." * Sensuality, passion, avarice — 
 these have to be conquered before a man can 
 become a true follower of Christ, or climb the 
 mountain of His beatitudes. Virgil is the per- 
 sonification of human wisdom — the spirit of 
 imagination and poetry — able to witness to 
 duty, its discipline, its hopes, and its vindica- 
 tions, but unable to confer grace. And Virgil 
 tells Dante that, at the bidding of his Beatrice, 
 
 * See Jerem.
 
 DANTE. 
 
 15 
 
 who becomes henceforth the personification of 
 Divine knowledge, he is commissioned to lead 
 him through Hell where sin is punished, and 
 through Purgatory where sins are cleansed. 
 In order to be delivered from the seductions 
 and semblances of life, Dante is to be led to 
 see, with his own eyes, the awful eternal reali- 
 ties. Thus the " Divine Comedy " compre- 
 hends all time and all space. It represents 
 the life-history of a human soul, redeemed 
 from sin, error, from lust, and wrath, and 
 mammon, and restored to the right path by 
 the reason and the grace which enable him to 
 see the things that are, and to see them as 
 they are. 
 
 Of the three great divisions of the poem, it 
 is of course, only possible to offer you the 
 barest outlines, and that solely for the sake of 
 the remarks which I have to make respecting 
 them. 
 
 Together the two poets reach a gate, over 
 whose summit runs, in dark letters, the inscrip- 
 tion : 
 
 " All hope abandon, ye who enter here; " 
 
 and Dante weeps as he passes into a dolorous 
 realm where sighs, and lamentations, and 
 voices deep and hoarse, and the sounds of 
 smitten hands re-echo through the stained and 
 startled air. Here, on the Vestibule of Hell, 
 are the fallen angels who were faithful neither 
 to God nor to Satan, but only to themselves ; 
 and with them swept round and round the dole- 
 ful circle, naked, stung by hornets, with faces 
 stained with tears and blood, following in 
 countless multitudes the fluttering flag of 
 Acheron, are all the wretched caitiffs, displeas- 
 ing alike to God and to His enemies, who had 
 died but never lived. Mercy and judgment 
 alike disdain them. Heaven chases forth their 
 ugliness ; Hell spurns their selfish pusilla- 
 nimity. " Let us not speak to them," says 
 Virgil, "but look and pass."
 
 1 6 LECTURES BY CANON FA REAR. 
 
 Here you have Dante's central idea, that 
 Hell is selfishness ; the human will set up in 
 defiance of the divine. The " Inferno " through- 
 out is the history of self-will in its lower and 
 lower stages of development. The soul in 
 Cocytus is utterly emptied of God, and wholly 
 filled with the loathly emptiness of self ; in the 
 " Purgatory " the soul is gradually emptied of 
 self; in the "Paradise" the soul is wholly 
 filled with God. 
 
 Then, after the sad, but not tormented, 
 Limbo of unbaptized infants and the virtuous 
 heathen, the Hell of Dante is divided into three 
 sections, according to the three all-inclusive 
 sins. Those sins are Lust, Hate, Fraud. 
 There is the Upper Hell, the Hell of Inconti- 
 nence ; the Central Hell, the Hell of Malice ; 
 the Neither Hell, the Hell of Fraud and 
 Treachery, in the lowest pit of which is Satan 
 himself. The two poets, seeing and convers- 
 ing with many lost souls, traverse the nine 
 circles. They see the Impure, swept round 
 and round, without respite, by a hellish storm, 
 in a circle of darkness which bellows like the 
 sea in a tempest beaten by horrid winds. They 
 see the Gluttons and Epicures, their bellies 
 cleaving to the dust, terrified by a barking 
 monster, and beaten by a foul, eternal, heavy 
 rain in the poisonous air. They see the Misers 
 and the Spendthrifts, rolling huge stones un- 
 discernibly in the howling gloom. They see 
 the Wrathful and the gloomy-sluggish tearing 
 each other in the slime of the Stygian marsh. 
 In the red-hot city of Dis, guarded by Fiends 
 and Furies, and reserved for Brutalism, that is, 
 for besotted intellectual folly, they see im- 
 prisoned in burning tombs the souls of Here- 
 tics and Infidels. Then in the Central Hell, 
 the Hell of Malice, separated from the upper 
 by a chaos of shattered rocks, are those who 
 have sinned by violence — against themselves, 
 against their neighbors, and against God. 
 Here are the Tyrants and Murderers, immersed
 
 DANTE. 17 
 
 in the boiling, crimson waves of Phlegethon. 
 Here is tlie ghastly wood of the Suicides, 
 haunted by the obscene Harpies of Despair 
 and Misery. Here the blasphemers against 
 God, and all who have violated the law of 
 nature, pace the scorchings and under a slow 
 rain of ceaseless fire. At this point the stream 
 of Phlegethon plunges into the abyss in " a 
 Niagara of blood," and the serpent-monster 
 Geryon carries them into the Nether Hell — the 
 Hell of Fraud. Here, in every variety of shame, 
 horror, and anguish, weltering in a lake of 
 pitch ; or hanging, head downward, in tombs, 
 v/hile from toe to heel a flame flickers unceas- 
 ingly along the soles of their quivering feet ; 
 or crushed under cloaks of gilded lead; or 
 hewn to pieces ; or lettered with leprosy ; or 
 wrapped in tongues of flame he sees the souls of 
 all who have sinned by Falsity — seducers, flat- 
 terers, simonists, diviners, usurers, hypocrites, 
 thieves, falsifiers, breeders of evil discord, and 
 all liars. Down one more chasm they descend 
 to the lowest Hell, the pool of Cocytus, locked 
 up in eternal frost by blasts from the vampire 
 wings of Lucifer — the blasts of Envy, Impo- 
 tence, and Rage. There, in those " thrilling 
 regions of thick-ribbed ice," frozen into that 
 glassy lake in an agony which makes their 
 faces livid and dog-like, and congeals their very 
 tears, he finds the souls of those traitors who 
 have betrayed their friends, their country, or 
 their benefactors. It is a Hell of Ice, not of 
 Fire ; — •" to show," it has been said, that " the 
 most dreadful thing in treachery is not the 
 fraud but the cold-heartedness of it," and that 
 is the reason why, " the eyes, once cruelly tear- 
 less, are now blind with frozen tears." Lowest 
 of all, with three faces — one crimson with rage, 
 one black with ignorance, one yellow with envy 
 — Dante sees the Archtraitor, Satan himself ; 
 and, grasping the shaggy fell of his frozen and 
 bat-like wings, the poets climb up through an 
 opening in the solid earth, until catching a
 
 l8 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 glimpse of the beauteous things which heaven 
 bears, they issue forth to see once more the 
 stars. 
 
 Now I would ask you to remember that this 
 is only the crudest outline of the poem, un- 
 diversified by its human elements, its constant 
 pathos, its oft-recurring touches of insight and 
 nobleness. I have not attempted to give you 
 any conception either of its terrifically realistic 
 touches or of its numberless relieving elements. 
 But what we ought to learn from its intense 
 moral purpose is to see evil as Dante had seen 
 it ; to feel the same hatred and fierce scorn of 
 sin wherewith God had inspired him ; to feel, 
 as he felt, that sin, whether it takes the forms 
 of malice, fraud, or lust, is foul and horrid. 
 He sets sin before us both in its nature and in 
 its punishment; now thrilling us with fear; 
 now melting us with pity ; now freezing us 
 with horror ; now making us feel aflame with 
 indignation — but meaning always to set before 
 us this lesson more than any other, that sin is 
 Hell, and that the wilful, willing sinner is in 
 Hell ; and that so long as he remains an alien 
 from the love of God he must say, with the evil 
 spirit, 
 
 " What matter where, if I be still the same ? " 
 
 The vulgar conception of punishment is that 
 it is something external to and apart from sin. 
 Dante's conception is that penalty is the same 
 thing as sin : it is only sin taken at a later 
 stage of its history. 
 
 Let me try to show you, by one or two in- 
 stances, how full this poem is of tremendous 
 lessons. 
 
 i. First, observe the fearful illustration which 
 it furnishes of St. Paul's words : " What fellow- 
 ship has light with darkness > " Wishing to 
 represent sin as awful and ghastly, Dante 
 beautifies his " Inferno " with no brightening 
 touch. The name of Christ is never mentioned 
 in the poem, as though its accents were too
 
 DANTE. 
 
 19 
 
 blessed to be uttered in that polluted air. One 
 Angel only appears in it to drive back the 
 demons who would oppose the poet's entrance 
 into the burning city. But how unlike he is to 
 the Divine birds — the radiant, tender, love- 
 breathing Angels of the " Purgatorio " and the 
 " Paradiso ! " Through the gloom the poets see 
 more than a thousand ruined spirits flying, like 
 frogs before the waterwake, at the face of one 
 who, with unwetted feet, is speeding over the 
 Stygian marsh. He perpetually moves his left 
 hand before him, as though he would wave off 
 from his countenance the gross air of the abyss. 
 He speaks no syllable to the Poets, as they 
 bow to him in reverence, but stands, disdain- 
 ful, indignant, on the horrid threshold, taunt- 
 ing the outcasts of Heaven ; and when, wilh 
 one touch of his wand, he has burst open the 
 burning gates, he speaks no further syllable, 
 but speeds back, swift and disdainful, through 
 the filthy gloom. There can be no brightness, 
 no beauty there ; no Angel can wave his pur- 
 ple wings in the atmosphere of Hell. Dante 
 anticipated by six centuries the scientific doc- 
 trine of modification by environment. If they 
 are forced to enter Hell, even for a few 
 moments, his very Angels become unangelic. 
 And, in illustration of the same truth, notice 
 how revoltingly hideous, how horrible in his 
 loathliness, Dante has made his Lucifer. He 
 is not the haughty, splendid, defiant Satan of 
 Milton, standing, 
 
 " Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved." 
 
 and even in his fall seeming not " less than 
 Archangel ruined or excess of glory obscured." 
 Nor is he the mocking, gibing, flickering, phil- 
 osophic, gentlemanly Mephistopheles of Goethe. 
 No ; but, with far deeper moral insight, he is 
 a hideous, foul, three-headed, shudder-causing 
 monster — a portent at whose foulness the solid 
 earth recoils.
 
 20 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 ii. Notice next the awful power with which 
 Dante illustrates the truth that men become 
 what they desire ; that penalty bears most 
 often a ghastly similitude to the vice whereby 
 it was caused ; that " wherewithal a man 
 sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished." 
 If in Dante sensual sinners are swept along a 
 whirling storm, what is that storm but the un- 
 bridled passions of those that lawless and un- 
 certain thoughts imagine howling ? If yet 
 worse carnal offenders are baked by slow- 
 heating flakes of fire, are not the thoughts of a 
 corrupted heart full of such unhallowed flames ? 
 If his gluttons lie prostrate in the slush, 
 tormented by Cerberus, what is gluttony and 
 drunkenness but " on thy belly shalt thou go, 
 and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy 
 life ? " If his hypocrites are like the monks 
 of Cologne, with their huge hoods, which dis- 
 play from afar their dazzling falsity, what is 
 hypocrisy, with its fringes and phylacteries, but 
 such a cloak of gilded lead ? If his misers 
 are plunged in a lake of foul pitch, what is that 
 lake but money basely gained and sordidly 
 spent and selfishly amassed ? — money which 
 sticks to the fingers and defiles the mind and 
 causes it to bubble up and down with excite- 
 ment and depression, and the sighing of souls 
 which cannot be satisfied ? What is the frozen 
 pool of Cocytus but the heart benumbed with 
 cruel and treacherous selfishness ? Are there 
 no living men, who, in the truth of things, un- 
 less they repent, are doomed to such places 
 hereafter because such places are their own 
 place ? Nay, who are in such places now ? Is 
 vice dead, or has it ceased to be in its inmost 
 nature grotesque and vile ? Are there no liv- 
 ing usurers, traitors, liars, furious, sluggards, 
 seducers, slanderers, evil counsellors in high 
 places and in low places, whom a Dante of this 
 day — were he brave enough or had enough of 
 moral insight — would doom to such scenes 
 now as he did six centuries ago ? If so, Dante
 
 DANTE. 21 
 
 has some very stern and very needful lessons 
 for us as for the men in days in which he lived. 
 Do men in these days need no warning against 
 vulgar, meaningless, facing-both-ways lives ? 
 Are none of us stung by the wasps of mean 
 cares ? Do none of us trim and shufifle in the 
 wake of popular opinion, following it like some 
 giddy and fluttering rag of Acheron ? Are 
 none of us tempted, like these wretches, to 
 stand selfishly neutral in the great conflict be- 
 tween good and evil ? Have none of us made, 
 like the young ruler, the great refusal ? 
 
 iii. Next, I would ask you to consider the 
 awful and almost lurid light which Dante has 
 flung on his own meaning in the 33d canto. 
 There, in the lowest circle, frozen in the icy 
 pool, the poets see a lost spirit who entreats 
 them to remove from his eyes the dreadful, 
 glassy congealment which, while permitting 
 sight, increases torment by rendering tears im- 
 possible. Dante asks who he is, and finds 
 that he is Friar Alberigo, who, with horrible 
 treachery, has murdered his ovwi guests at a 
 banquet. But Dante knows that Alberigo is 
 alive, and asks with surprise how he comes to 
 be here ? He receives the fearful answer, that 
 when souls have committed crimes so deadly as 
 his, they instantly fall rushing down to that 
 lowest pit, leaving their bodies upon earth. 
 From that moment they are really dead. Their 
 body, indeed, all unknown to them, eats, 
 drinks, sleeps, seems to live on earth. But 
 their soul is not in it ; it is but a mask of clay 
 which a demon animates. And he proceeds 
 to mention others whom Dante has seen in 
 hell, which still seem to be alive on earth, hav- 
 ing a name to live though they are dead — 
 being the most awful kind of ghosts, not souls 
 without bodies, but bodies without souls. Is 
 not the world full of such ghosts — of those 
 who " have a name to live while they are 
 dead," of men and women who living in 
 pleasure, are " dead while they live " — not
 
 2 2 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAK. 
 
 disembodied souls, but disensouled bodies, 
 flitting about their living tombs of selfishness 
 and vice ? The fourteenth century, you see, 
 had not yet learned to legitimize vice by com- 
 placent doctrines. To Dante sin was not a 
 thing to make a mock at. His Cerberus, and 
 his horned demons, and his red-hot cities, and 
 his boiling blood of Phlegethon, and his snow 
 of scorching flames, are but the shadow and 
 reflex of men's vices, crimes, and sins. 
 
 iv. Again observe that in Dante's Hell each 
 soul is condemned for one sin, and mainly for 
 one definite act of sin ; whereas you will say 
 that sins are complex and manifold, and en- 
 meshed together by links subtle and number- 
 less. But Dante is awfully right here also. 
 It is true that no man is ever contented with a 
 single sin ; yet it is always one sin, and that 
 the favorite one, which destroys souls. That 
 conquered, all others fall with it ; that victo- 
 rious, all others follow it. The lust and anger 
 of the flesh do not of necessity or finally de- 
 stroy ; but ^when they become the lust and 
 anger of the heart, " these," says Mr. Ruskin, 
 " are the furies of Phlegethon, wholly ruinous. 
 Lord of these, on the shattered rocks, lies 
 couched the infamy of Crete. For when the 
 heart as well as the flesh desires what it should 
 not, and the heart as well as the flesh kindles 
 to its wrath, the whole man is corrupted, and 
 his heart's blood is fed in its veins from the 
 lake of fire." The single consummations of 
 sin which, with a glare of unnatural illumina- 
 tion, reveal to the man what he is, are never 
 single acts, but are the epitome of long years 
 of sin, indulged in thought and wish, and minor 
 offences ; just as the crimson flower of the 
 fabled aloe issues from the sap, which has been 
 circling in its leaves for a hundred years. 
 
 II. Time does not permit me to give you 
 even an outline of Purgatory. It is the moun- 
 tain where sins which have been repented of 
 before death, are washed away. We have left
 
 DANTE. 
 
 n 
 
 behind us forever the horror and the infamy, 
 the noisome gloom, the agonizing frost, the me- 
 phitic rivers of boiling blood. No sooner have 
 the Poets reached the upper light, than their 
 eyes are gladdened with the sweet hue of the 
 Eastern sapphire, deepened to the far horizon 
 in the pure serenity of air. Overhead shine the 
 four stars of the Southern Cross ; and bidden 
 by Cato, the guardian of the ante-Purgatory, 
 where those sinners are detained who have de- 
 layed their repentance. Virgil and Dante 
 come to a shady place, where first they catch 
 the tremulous shimmer of the sea, and Virgil, 
 placing his hands on the ground, bathes in dew 
 the cheeks of Dante, stained as they are with 
 tears, and with the mirk of the abyss, and girds 
 him with a rush, the emblem of humility. 
 Round the mountain of Purgatory run nine 
 terraces, of which each is devoted to the pun- 
 ishment of one of the seven deadly sins. The 
 penance is, on each terrace, analogous to the 
 sin. The proud crawl along, bent under huge 
 weights. The once evil eyes of the envious are 
 sewn together with iron wire. The angry grope 
 their way through a dense, bitter, blinding fog. 
 The slothful are hurried round and round in 
 incessant toil. The avaricious lie prostrate and 
 weeping on the earth. The gluttons and drunk- 
 ards are punished by the emaciation of perpet- 
 ual hunger. The sensual expiate their carnal 
 wickedness in burning fiame. Dante has to 
 pass through each terrace — yes, even through 
 that burning flame. He shrinks from it, indeed, 
 with a death-like horror. " When I was within 
 it," he says, " I would have flung myself into 
 molten glass to cool me, so immeasurable was 
 the burning there." But thenceforth he is 
 cleansed from sin. He is crowned and mitred 
 over himself. He finds himself under the 
 leaves of a forest, tremulous with soft breezes, 
 and resonant with the song of birds, where, 
 amid May blossoms, flows a stream of purest 
 crystal. A gleam flashes through the forest, a
 
 2 4 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 sweet melody runs through the glowing air-, 
 and he sees a glorious vision of the triumph of 
 Christ and His Church, and, in it, amid a cloud 
 of flowers shed by the hands of Angels, his 
 blood thrills to recognize a lady whose white 
 veil is crowned with olive. It is Beatrice. 
 Virgil has vanished, for human wisdom can do 
 no more. And, as he weeps for Virgil's de- 
 parture, Beatrice bids him rather weep for his 
 own past sins, and, towering over him in im- 
 perious attitude, like a mother over a son who 
 is in fault, she reproaches him so sternly for 
 the backslidings of the past, that the Angels, 
 as though indirectly pleading for him with the 
 beautiful, stern monitress, suddenly begin the 
 strain : " In thee, O Lord, hath been my hope." 
 Then his heart breaks like melting ice into 
 sighs and tears, and he stands mutely listening 
 to her reproaches, like a boy ashamed of guilt, 
 with his eyes upon the ground, and at last falls 
 down in a swoon. Then at last, truly, utterly 
 penitent, he is plunged in the waters of Lethe. 
 He hears the angels sing " Thou shalt wash 
 me, and I shall be whiter than snow." The 
 four Virtues receive him. He is bidden to 
 gaze on Beatrice, and sees the light of Christ 
 reflected in her eyes. Then he is suffered to 
 drink the waters of Eunoe, which is sweeter 
 than words can tell ; and refreshed like young 
 plants which are reclad by spring in tender 
 leaves, he issues from the holy wave purified, 
 and ready to mount up to the stars. 
 
 The " Purgatory " of Dante represents a 
 present reality, not a future possibility. _ It is 
 the history of a process, not the description of 
 a place. There is scarcely a page of this mag- 
 nificent poem which is not full of subtle allego- 
 ries and noble lessons. Gladly, had time per- 
 mitted, would I have endeavored to show the 
 mighty compression of imagination with which 
 Dante conveys a manifold instruction in pas- 
 sage after passage, and how he sometimes 
 condenses a supreme truth into a single smit-
 
 DANTE. 
 
 25 
 
 ing line. As it is, I can only point out one 
 central lesson of the entire poem. 
 
 It is that just punishment, though hard to 
 bear, is yet very blessed. Into the theology of 
 Dante we will not enter, but at least he enforces 
 on us the lesson that forgiveness of sins is not 
 the same thing as remission of consequences. 
 The spirits of Purgatory are all ready to say 
 with the modern poet, 
 
 " Ah ! not the nectarous poppy lovers use, 
 Not daily labor's dull Lethean spring, 
 Oblivion in lost angels can infuse 
 
 Of the soiled glory of the trailing wing." 
 
 The spirits in Purgatory are happy, for they 
 have hope. They yearn for the presence of 
 God, but do not desire their punishment 'to be 
 shortened. They do not desire, they do not 
 feel worthy to see God till the soft plumes of 
 angels have brushed from their foreheads all 
 trace of the seven deadly letters. The sense 
 of shame, the sense of justice prevail with them. 
 The blush of the carnal sinners in the seventh 
 terrace of fire adds to the flame a yet fiercer 
 glow ; and when they converse with Dante, 
 they v.ill not lean so much as one inch out of 
 the healing fire, because they do not desire one 
 moment's respite from the agony which is purg- 
 ing away their sin. When the poet Guido has 
 finished speaking with Dante, he vanishes in 
 the flames as a fish darts to the bottom of the 
 water. Surely there is a deep lesson here. It 
 is the lesson that 
 
 " Hearts which verily repent 
 Are burdened with impurity, 
 
 And comforted by chastisement. 
 That punishment's the best to bear 
 
 Which follows soonest on the sin, 
 And guilt's a game where losers fare 
 
 Better than those who seem to win." 
 
 " I will make but one more remark about 
 the " Purgatorio " before I pass on to say very
 
 26 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 few words about the " Paradiso." It is, as my 
 friend Dean Plumptre has well pointed out, 
 that the poem is intensely autobiographical. It 
 contains the confessions of the man Dante 
 Alighieri. We see in it the sins to which he 
 had been, and to which he had not been tempt- 
 ed. The man so proud, so reserved, so reti- 
 cent, so craving of praise, so sensitive to blame, 
 here like St. Augustine, and like Rousseau, lays 
 bare the secrets of his soul. In the 31st canto, 
 the words of Beatrice are the reproaches of 
 his own transfigured and illuminated conscience. 
 And we watch with deepest interest the gradual 
 cleansing and dilatation of his soul. In the 
 "Inferno" the contact with evil, and even 
 with the Nemesis which falls on evil, had not 
 been without its own deadly perils. He feels 
 the taint of the vices on which he looks. He 
 becomes half base as he listens to the revilings 
 of the base ; half false among the treacherous ; 
 savagely relentless among the furious. In the 
 " Purgatory " and the " Paradise " he has to be 
 cleansed from this blackness of infection. And 
 he is so, in part, by the outward influences of 
 all things sweet, lovely, and ennobling. By 
 the clear reminiscences of history and litera- 
 ture ; by the exquisite and consummate fidelity 
 of Art, especially of sculpture ; by Poetry, 
 especially sacred poetry ; by Music, of which 
 not one note is heard in Hell, but which rings 
 round him constantly and exquisitely in the 
 Purgatory and the Paradise ; above all, by 
 Nature — by the serene and stainless glory of 
 the sky, by the pureness of the dew, and by 
 the glories of unequalled dawn. Dante had 
 felt, as it would be well for all of us to feel, 
 that beauty is the sacrament of goodness ; that 
 in the sense of beauty, satisfied by the beauty 
 of God's works, we see and we recognize the 
 very autograph of God. And this beauty is re- 
 flected in the graciousness and goodness of all 
 God's creatures. The men, and the women, 
 and the fiends of the abyss are, for the most
 
 DANTK. 
 
 27 
 
 part, abhorrent and revolting ; while the demo- 
 nic creatures, Cerberus and tlie Minotaur and 
 Geryon, are loathly; and the fiends of the 
 Malebolge, Malacoda, andCagnazzo, and Graf- 
 fiacane, and Cirialto are as gross and as in- 
 famous as imagination can conceive. Compare 
 these with the fair, white-winged creatures with 
 faces like the quivering gleam of the morning 
 star — falcons and swans of God — who move 
 through the " Purgatorio." Green are their 
 plumes, green as the fresh-born leaflets of spring; 
 and green — the radiant color of hope — are the 
 robes fluttered by the beating of their wings ; 
 and their fair, golden heads are visible, though 
 their faces dazzle the sight. And in the sixth 
 circle, the Angel, who obliterates one more 
 fatal letter from Dante's brow, is glorious as 
 gold in the furnace, and the touch of his plumes 
 breathes fragrance like the Mav breeze blown 
 over grass and flowers at dawn, and " sated 
 with the innumerable rose." 
 
 III. I shall say scarcely anything of the 
 " Paradise." It is the least read of the three 
 by the multitude, and most dear of the three to 
 the real student. Whatever else it may be, it is 
 emphatically and pre-eminently the Poem of 
 Light; of light, lost at last in the blinding in- 
 tensity of that central lake of light and the daz- 
 zling beatific vision of Him who is Light, 
 
 " And never but in unapproached light 
 Dwelt from Eternity ; dwelt then in Thee, 
 Bright effluence of bright essence uncreate, 
 Whose fountain who shall tell ? " 
 
 If you would understand it — if you would 
 feel its magic influence, you must bathe your- 
 selves in light ; you must clothe yourselves in 
 light ; you must walk in light ; you must gaze 
 on light with the eagle's undazzled eyes. For 
 here Dante leaves earth behind him. He talks 
 with no meaner beings than Virgins, and Saints, 
 and Patriarchs, and Apostles. He talks with 
 the Emperor Justinian about the Roman Em-
 
 2^ LECTUkES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 pire ; with St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura 
 about the Dominican and Franciscan orders; 
 with his crusading and knightly ancestor, Cac- 
 ciaguida, about the beautiful simplicity which 
 contrasted with the deepening luxury of his 
 own Florence ; with St. Benedict about mon- 
 astic corruption. He sees Adam and Solomon. 
 St. Peter questions him about Faith ; St. James, 
 about hope ; St. John, about Love ; and the 
 happy choirs of heaven sink into astonished 
 silence, and the happy lights of heaven flicker 
 into fiery indignation, while St. Peter fulmi- 
 nates his more than Papal anathema against the 
 blood-stained and avaricious pontiffs who on 
 earth usurp " my place, my place, my place ; " 
 and St. Bernard of Clairvance, shows him the 
 queen of heaven herself, Mary, " who is the 
 centre of the eternal rose," with Eve sitting at 
 her feet ; and at last he is suffered to gaze in 
 vision ineffable on the Supreme Triune, And 
 everywhere, till the last, Beatrice is with him, 
 and in her eyes are the demonstrations, and in 
 her smiles the persuasions of wisdom. 
 
 And everywhere there is light ; in every 
 circle of the planetary, and the starry, and the 
 crystalline heavens ; and in the Empyrean, and 
 in the mystical White Rose, and in the Lad- 
 der of Gold, whose summit is invisible, and 
 in the River of Life, flaming with splen- 
 dor, between two banks bright with the 
 flowers of spring, of which he drinks ; and 
 in the central point of light itself, " so in- 
 tense that no eye can gaze on it, so minute 
 that the smallest star in the firmament would 
 seem a moon beside it." The very regions 
 through which he passes are like eternal pearls, 
 and they glide through them as rays of light 
 enter into the water without disturbing the 
 unity of the wave, for they are lucid and white 
 as sunstruck diamonds. And in this brimming 
 flood of light move the beatified saints, in 
 melody and glory, more sweet even in voice 
 than brilliant in aspect, circling round Dante
 
 DANTE. 29 
 
 111 vivid garlands of eternal roses, or swathed 
 in environments of ambient radiance, shooting 
 from place to place like fires in alabaster, 
 happy fires, living topazes, living rubies, flam- 
 ing in ethereal sunshine, multitudes of splendors 
 flitting through the crystal gleam like birds, 
 and eVen after these unimaginable " varieties 
 of light, and combinations of stars, and rays, 
 and jewelled reflections," there are fresh 
 throngs of splendors — cressets, and crowns, 
 and circles, singing round the Virgin in inef- 
 fable, indescribable glories, in blinding and 
 bewildering brilliances. And Paradise itself is 
 one great white rose, and its yellow centre is 
 the Central Light, whose circumference would 
 outgird the sun ; and its petals upon petals are 
 innumerable ranks of spotless spirits, all gaz- 
 ing upon the Light of Light ; and, as bees flit 
 among the flowers, so fluttering about the 
 petals of the Eternal Rose, " their wings of 
 gold, their robes white as snow, their face radi- 
 ant as pure flame," enjoying and enjoyed, the 
 multitude of the Angels deposit in the recesses 
 of those happy petals, the peace and glow 
 brought down from the bosom of God. And 
 all these are happy, equally happy, for though, 
 to mortal apprehension, they seem to attain a 
 lower or a higher sphere in the circles of beati- 
 tude, they are all and equally the denizens of 
 the mystic Rose, because the will of each and 
 all is exclusively and absolutely the will of God, 
 so that 
 
 " Each spot in heaven 
 Is Paradise, though with like gracious dew 
 The Supreme Virtue showers not over all." 
 
 And through all these scenes Dante passes, 
 until at last he is suffered to gaze, for one 
 reason-annihilating instant, on the supernal 
 glory of the Trinity in Unity ; seeing, as in one 
 lightning-flash, which melts his memory as the 
 sunlight melts the snow, a triple orb of three 
 different colors, of which the one seems to
 
 30 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 reflect the other, and the third is like fire 
 breathed from both. Here thought and speech 
 fail him ; but henceforth his desire and will are 
 as a wheel, rolled on in even motion by the 
 same love 
 
 "That moves the sun in heave, and all the stars." 
 
 So high as that range no poetry has ever 
 reached ; higher than that range the waxen 
 wings of poetry are melted, and it sinks down 
 through the intense inane. 
 
 I hasten to conclude. Dante lived in very 
 wild days ; not in a smooth silken century like 
 this, when so many are destitute of faith, yet 
 terrified by scepticism. You must bear this in 
 mind. He lived in the days when the Sicilian 
 Vespers had deluged Palermo witli massacre. 
 He had heard, as a young man, the grim tragedy 
 of Ugolino, starved to death with his sons in 
 the Tower of Famine, and the awful murder of 
 Paolo and Francesca by her husband and his 
 brother, Giancotto, He had seen men burnt 
 alive. He had himself been sentenced to be 
 burnt alive by his own countrymen, on a charge 
 which nobody believed. A few years after his 
 poem was written, Fra Dolcino was torn to 
 pieces with hot pincers in the public market- 
 place at Vercilli, and his follower, the rich and 
 beautiful Margarita consumed at a slow fire 
 before the eyes of men. Here is a single 
 incident in the family quarrel of the Bianchi 
 and Neri, in the course of which his fortunes 
 were shipwrecked. A lad of the Neri family 
 had, in a quarrel, struck one of the Bianchi, 
 and was sent by his father to apologize to the 
 head of the Bianchi. This chief took hold of the 
 boy then and there, chopped off his right hand 
 on a dresser, and sent him back with the remark, 
 " Injuries are wiped out by blood and not by 
 words." 
 
 It is not strange that such terrible times had 
 terrible beliefs, and in all those beliefs Dante
 
 DANTE. 31 
 
 shared. Whatever Hell may be, we do not 
 believe that it is like the Hell of Dante, a 
 burning slaughter-house, a torture-chamber of 
 endless vivisection and worse than inquisitorial 
 horrors, where souls welter in the crimson ooze 
 of Phlegethon, or move about like Nero-torches 
 of animated flame. Nevertheless, under that 
 dreadful imagery, so weird, lurid, and grotesque, 
 lie truths of eternal import. About the horror 
 and infamies of a material Hell, about the steep 
 ascents of a Purgatory, — if such there be — 
 about the glories and employments of the Par- 
 adise of God, Dante knew just as much, which 
 is just as little, as ourselves. But that there is 
 a moral Hell and a moral Heaven ; that 
 Heaven and Hell are tempers and not only 
 places ; that they are states of the soul, and 
 not physical fires or golden cities in the far-off 
 blue, he knew, as all must know, who have 
 enough of soul left in them undestroyed by vice 
 and worldliness to know what God is, and to 
 feel what sin means. Is there not many a* man 
 of whom, as of Dante, it might be said, "That 
 man has been in Hell ? " Happy the man who, 
 like Dante, has struggled through the abyss 
 where sin is punished, to the mountain where 
 sin is purged, to the Paradise where it is 
 remembered no more. The poem was not 
 written to give mere poetic pleasure, but to 
 teach and to warn. He says that for many 
 years it made him lean. The seed of it was 
 sown in tears, and reaped in misery," and it 
 was intended to describe not merely or chiefly, 
 an obscene Hell or a material Heaven, but to 
 bring home to us the truth that this world is 
 the next, in the light of the Eternal Yea and 
 the Eternal Now. 
 
 I will end with two remarks. 
 
 i. One is his sense of the awful transcendency 
 of goodness — the sense that Good and Evil are 
 " the two polar elements of this creation, on 
 which it all turns," and that they differ "not 
 by preferability of one to the oiher, but by
 
 32 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR, 
 
 incompatibility absolute and infinite ; that the 
 one is excellent and high as light and Heaven, 
 the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the 
 Pit of Hell." If you would know how Sin and 
 Holiness appeared to one of the grandest of 
 human souls, who had the power also to clothe 
 his symbols in the intensest imagery ; if you 
 would be lifted from that base condition of con- 
 ventionality and compromise in which good and 
 evil are not in real and fierce antagonism, but 
 lie flat together, side by side, in immoral acqui- 
 escence and infamous neutrality ; then you may 
 learn a life-long lesson by humble study of the 
 " Divine Comedy," which strips evil bare from 
 all its masks and hypocrisies, that you may see 
 it in all its naked ghastliness, and which shows 
 you what is pure and good in the white intensity, 
 the seven-fold perfection of undivided light. 
 
 ii. Observe, lastly, that Dante writes avow- 
 edly with a high moral purpose. He knows 
 nothing of the prurient Tojan talk about art for 
 art's sake, still less of its nudities, which are 
 naked and not ashamed. He reveals to us, in 
 the poem, step by step, his own moral ameliora- 
 tions. He desires to make his readers par- 
 ticipate in the same nobleness. Man, he says, 
 in his prose work on "Monarchy" (iii. 15), 
 stands midway between the corruptible and the 
 incorruptible. His body is corruptible ; his 
 spirit is incorruptible. Hence his destinies 
 also are twofold, so far as he is corruptible, and 
 so far as he is incorruptible. God has set 
 before him two ends — the happiness of this life 
 in the earthly Paradise, which may be attained 
 by virtue, and the happiness of life eternal, 
 which consists in the fruition of the Divine 
 countenance, to which our own virtue cannot 
 ascend unless aided by the Divine light, and 
 which is indicated by the celestial paradise. 
 Human knowledge may help us to attain the 
 first ; Divine knowledge, by working in us faith 
 hope and charity, can alone help us to attain 
 the second, which was revealed by Jesus Christ.
 
 DANTE. 33 
 
 Hence the object of Dante was to hold up 
 *' before men's awakened and captivated minds 
 the verity of God's moral government ; to 
 rouse them to a sense of the mystery of their 
 state ; to rouse them to a sense of the mystery 
 of their state ; to startle their commonplace 
 notions of sin into an imagination of its variety, 
 its magnitude, and its infinite shapes and 
 degrees; to open their eyes to the beauty of 
 of Christian temper, both as suffering and as 
 consummated ; to teach them at once the faith- 
 fulness and awful freeness of God's grace ; to 
 help the dull and lagging soul to conceive the 
 possibilities, in its own case, of rising, step by 
 step, in joy without an end — of a felicity not 
 unimaginable by man, though of another order 
 from the highest perfection of earth — this is 
 the poet's end." His subject, as he himself 
 
 explained it, is not so much the state of souls 
 after death, as man — man as rendering himself 
 liable by the exercise of free will, by good and 
 ill desert, to the rewards or punishment of 
 justice. It is solely by realizing such truths 
 that men can obtain the ideal character which 
 Dante pictures forth the picture of one who, in 
 boyhood is gentle, obedient modest ; in youth, 
 temperate, resolute and loyal; in ripe years, 
 prudent, just and generous ; and in age has 
 attained to calm wisdom and perfect oeace in 
 God.
 
 IDEALS OF NATIONS. 
 
 *' Keep, therefore, and do them ; for this is your wis- 
 dom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, 
 which shall hear all these statute?, and Fay, surely this 
 
 freat nation is a wise and understanding people.''— 
 )eut. iv. 6. 
 
 You will see from this verse that the fame 
 and wisdom of Israel are to be tested solely by 
 her obedience to the laws of God. For Israel, 
 for England, for America, for every nation 
 under the sun there is no other criterion. Man- 
 kind has many tests ; God has but one. If the 
 ideal of the nation be righteous, she will be 
 great and strong. If the ideal of the nation be 
 base or evil, she will sooner cr later perish in 
 her iniquity, and become a hissing and byword. 
 That lesson you can learn very easily from 
 Scripture, for, though modern religion has 
 sometimes dwindled into a feeble rill of per- 
 sonal egotism. Scripture deals even more with 
 men in masses than with men as individuals. 
 
 And the reason of this is, that in the history 
 of nations God writes more at large the mean- 
 ing and the secrets of His providence. In our 
 individual lives they are written in letters so 
 much smaller that we cannot always decipher 
 them, and often we have not had time to 
 master their meaning until it has become too 
 late to profit by them. But the history of 
 nations, though it has less immediate interest 
 for our selfishness, has this twofold importance : 
 one, that every one of us individually con- 
 tributes to the glory or the shame of the nation
 
 36 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 to which we belong ; the other, that if we have 
 no power to save our people from walking in 
 evil paths, we can at least do something to 
 elevate and restrain them, and to preserve in 
 the midst of them a saved and saving remnant 
 which is dear to God. 
 
 Let us, then, clearly and fully recognize 
 that we have duties, not only as men, but as 
 citizens. These duties require us to help our 
 nation to the attainment of a true ideal. Is the 
 ideal of our people, as expressed by its pre- 
 dominant aims and aspirations, a right or a 
 wrong — is it a noble or base ideal } So far as 
 it is a wrong ideal, can we help to amend it ? 
 So far as it is a right ideal, can we promote 
 and further it ? 
 
 1. The ideal of many nations has been de- 
 light in war. They have not cared to have any 
 annals which were not written in blood. Such 
 a people were the ancient Assyrians, of whom 
 we read so much in Scripture. In the sculpt- 
 ures of their kings' palaces you may see how 
 they exulted to portray themselves. Pass the 
 huge portals, guarded by winged bulls, and 
 lions with human faces, and on every wall you 
 will see delineated people of frightful fierce- 
 ness, defeating their enemies, swimming rivers, 
 shattering fortresses, dashing cities into pot- 
 sherds, torturing and slaughtering their pris- 
 oners, sweeping from land to land like a de- 
 vouring fire, while over their heads fly fierce 
 spirits who protect and foster these cruelties, 
 and eagles who carry in their claws the entrails 
 of the slain. In the hall of Sargon that king 
 has had himself represented stabbing and 
 butchering his captives with his own hands. 
 In the one domestic scene found among these 
 sculpturings of horror and bloodshed (you may 
 see it if you ever visit the British Museum of 
 London), the son of Sennacherib is seated in 
 a vine-clad arbor at a feast. Opposite to him 
 is his queen among her maidens, and close 
 behind the queen hangs from the branch of a
 
 IDEALS OF NATIONS. 
 
 37 
 
 palm tree a ghastly human head with an iron 
 ring drawn through the lip. Such were the 
 awful ornaments of queens' chambers in days 
 of old. Well, did it prosper, this bloody city? 
 Did it endure, this home of lions and of young 
 lions, where the lion fed its whelps and 
 strangled for his lioness, and filled his dens 
 with raven? Read the prophet Nahum for 
 answer, and you will see how soon it passed 
 away in fire and sword amid the wrath and 
 hatred of the nations. And did war-loving 
 Egypt fare better? We see her triumphant 
 dynasts sweeping into battle amid the serried 
 ranks of her numberless archers ; we read 
 pompous enumeration of the victories of her 
 Ramises ; but Egypt snapped like one of her 
 own river reeds before the might of Persia, 
 and the fellaheen scooped their millstones out 
 of the face of Ramises, the most colossal statue 
 in the world. We ask, then, is the ideal of 
 England, is the ideal of America, a war ideal ? 
 Thank God, the two nations, which are one 
 nation, may plead not guilty to that charge. 
 War is not the ideal of England. We look 
 back with no vaunting, but yet with pride, to 
 the names of Crecy and Agincourt, of Blenheim, 
 and Ramilles, of Talavera, and Waterloo, of 
 Alma and Inkerman ; but enough of such 
 victorious names, and more than enough are 
 blazoned upon our flags. We do not drain our 
 resources by bloated armaments. There is no 
 need that we should be reminded of the hor- 
 rors, the agonies, the crimes of war. The 
 nation will never draw her sword without neces- 
 sity ; never without a deep reluctance which 
 cannot impeach a tried courage, but which will 
 show a just cause of awful responsibility Nor 
 is war the ideal of America. You have shown 
 to the world a striking demonstration that 
 mighty nations can be governed and can be 
 safe, and can be formidable without standing 
 armies. At the wave of the hand your host of 
 a million men sprang to its feet in the war of
 
 38 LECTURES B V CANON FA REAR. 
 
 North and South. At a wave of the hand, 
 like the men of Roderick Dhu, they sank out 
 of sight. You seized the sword in the cause 
 of liberty. You laid it aside when that was 
 won. " The sword," after all, " is but a 
 hideous flash in the darkness. Right is an 
 eternal ray." 
 
 2. But there has been another ideal of na- 
 tions : not war, but glory ; not the tyranny and 
 vengeance of armies, but their pomp and fame. 
 This, until she learned wisdom by bitterly 
 humiliating experience, was the ideal of France. 
 When Napoleon blasted the fields of Europe, 
 as with the blaze of some flaming heath, he 
 indulged freely in the empty vanity of dictat- 
 ing frivolous orders about the opera at Paris, 
 from the palaces of Vienna and Berlin. To 
 the impulses of a limitless ambition he sacri- 
 ficed hundreds of thousands of lives. " Tyrant," 
 said an inscription on the famous column in 
 the Place Vendome — that column which was 
 deemed so glorious that Louis Napoleon said 
 it was worth to him more than a hundred 
 thousand votes — " Tyrant, if the blood that 
 you have shed should be collected in this 
 square, you might drink of it without stooping 
 your lips." And what came of that loud- 
 echoing, flaming, blood-stained path of the first 
 Napoleon } 
 
 It left France poorer, feebler, more burdened, 
 more wretched than before. It sapped the 
 very life-blood of the people, which was poured 
 forth like water to feed the laurels of fruitless 
 triumph, and yet France did not learn the 
 lesson. The scenes of the Franco-German war 
 are still in our recollection ; the vain warning 
 of Mexico ; the plain signs of a decrepitude 
 and a disorganization, which, by the confession 
 of her own greatest men, were the natural 
 fruits of infidelity and corruption ; the braggart 
 thrones who swacrsered through the streets of 
 Paris "k Berlin;" the exploded statesman 
 who entered into the war with a light heart ;
 
 IDEALS OF NATIONS. 
 
 39 
 
 the theatric, " not a stone of our fortresses ; 
 not an inch of our territories ; " the scenes at 
 Strasburg and Metz ; the immeasurable humil- 
 iation of Sedan ; the reduction of the exiled 
 emperor to a despised broken idol ; the abso- 
 lute surrender of Alsace and Lorraine, all cul- 
 minating the other day in the ignominious 
 steaming of the French fleet out of the Bay of 
 Alexandria. Alas ! it was an infinite collapse 
 of that inflated bubble of glory. Do we say 
 these things by way of boast over a fallen 
 rival ? God forbid. It is not our temptation 
 to say, " Aha ! " in any glad spirit when na- 
 tions fall from high estate. Na}-, we pray with 
 all our hearts, and with perfect friendliness, 
 that France may spring from her ashes on 
 wings of a better wisdom, a purer faith. But 
 to this false ideal again we in England and you 
 in America may boldly plead not guilty. That 
 poor, delusive word, glory, occurs again and 
 again in the dispatches of Napoleon ; I am not 
 sure that it occurs so much as once in the dis- 
 patches of Washington or of Wellington. And 
 this is what Wellington wrote on the eve of Wat- 
 erloo : " I cannot express the regret and sorrow 
 with which I contemplate the heavy loss I have 
 sustained. Believe me, nothing except a battle 
 lost is so terrible as a battle won. The glory 
 arising from such actions is no consolation to 
 me, and I cannot suggest it has any consola- 
 tion to you." Yes, he sought but duty's iron 
 crown, 
 
 " And not once or twice in our fair island's story 
 The path of duty was the way to glory." 
 
 A nation which follows glory follows a Will-o'- 
 the-wisp, which flutters over the marshes of 
 death ; the nation which follows duty has its 
 eye fixed on the Polar star. 
 
 3. Again many nations — in the East, from 
 natural selfishness and indolence of tempera- 
 ment ; in the West from preposterous letter 
 worship of the Bible — have cherished the
 
 40 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 grovelling idea of absolutism ; the crawling at 
 the foot of some royal house, the deification of 
 some human divinity. So it was under the 
 cruel, blood-poisoned despotism of Asia. So 
 it was under the wicked, deified Caesars. So 
 it was for whole cycles in China. So it was, 
 until quite recently, in Russia ; and so, at one 
 time — one can only blush to say it — the clergy 
 tried to make it at the most calamitous period 
 of our history under the Stuarts in England. 
 From this debased notion that mankind has no 
 nobler destiny than to be made the footstool 
 for a few families ; that kings have a right 
 divine to govern wrong ; that nations ought to 
 deliver themselves bound hand and foot to the 
 arbitrary caprice of autocrats ; from this de- 
 graded misuse of texts by an ignorant and 
 time-serving clerg)', thank God, the blood, and 
 the good sense, and the God-fearing manhood, 
 and the mighty passion for liberty in the breasts 
 of our fathers saved us. We have done forever 
 with that dismal and most degrading of epochs 
 — the day of servitude without loyalty, and sen- 
 sualism without love ; when, as the historian 
 says, the government had just ability enough to 
 deceive, and just religion enough to persecute, 
 and when the principles of liberty were the 
 scoff of every time-server and fool. Yes. 
 Thanks to the thought, and the courage which 
 God had put into the hearts of a Hampden, and 
 a Cromwell ; thanks to 
 
 "The later Sidney, Marvel, Harington, Young, Vane, 
 And others who called Milton friend," 
 
 that false ideal based on systems which would 
 have made the Bible the bulwark of an uncon- 
 trollable tyranny is past. Caesarism, autocracy. 
 Napoleonism is, for us and for you, impossible 
 forever. When you fought against us in the 
 war of independence, you were fighting us in 
 the spirit which you drew from our own English 
 blood. You were reteaching us the lesson
 
 IDEALS OF i\A llUivS. 41 
 
 which our fathers had taught to you. The 
 blessing has come to us both. 
 
 "Whatever harmonies of law 
 
 The growing world assume, 
 The work is ours; the single note 
 From that deep chord which Hampden smote 
 
 Will vibrate to the doom." 
 
 4. Other nations again, many of them, have 
 had as their ideal the gaining of vveakh. For 
 a nation is but the aggregate of its sons, and 
 the love of money, that mammon-worship which, 
 as Scripture again and again tells us, cannot 
 coincide with the service of God, has been the 
 snare of countless individuals. Of all false 
 gods, the lowest spirit that fell is Mammon, 
 who, with the most hypocritical meekness, as- 
 sumes the air of injured innocence and perfect 
 respectability ; even though he transform him- 
 self into an angel of light, even though he hide 
 the heart of the demon under the ephod of the 
 saint, like all false gods, Mammon is the curse 
 of all who put their trust in him. He was the 
 god of ancient Babylon, of ancient Tyre, of 
 declining Rome, and of mediaeval Spain. " If 
 the King of Mexico has any gold," said Cortes, 
 *' let him send it to us, for I and my compan- 
 ions have a disease of the heart which is cured 
 by gold." Yes, and it was this disease of the 
 heart which drove the conquerors of Peru and 
 Mexico to their careers of shameless atrocity. 
 But if our pleasant vices are ever made the in- 
 strument to punish us, from the deep-vaulted 
 mine springs the pale fiend Avarice, with a 
 whip of scorpions in hand. It was the insati- 
 able greed, as well as the inquisitorial bigotry 
 of the Spaniard, which, most of all, moved the 
 fury of England — the predestined scourge of 
 that haughty, cruel, and avaricious power. The 
 sun of Athens did not sink more surely in the 
 Bay of Syracuse, than the glory of Spain sank 
 with her Armada on the rocky shores of Eng- 
 land. And that God may save His world
 
 42 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 from endless corruption, so it ever will and 
 must be with every nation which takes to the 
 worship of " Covetousness, lady of ignoble 
 competition and of deadly care, of ignoble 
 victory, builder of streets in the city of ignoble 
 ease." What has this material wealth, the 
 only kind of wealth which we recognize, the only 
 kind of wealth which Scripture either will not 
 recognize at all, or only with intense warn- 
 ings? What has it ever done for man or for 
 nations ? " Was ever any nation the better for 
 having coffers full of gold ? Look into the 
 history of any civilized nation, analyzed with 
 reference to this one cause of crime and misery, 
 the lives of thousands of their nobles, priests, 
 merchants, and men of luxurious life. Every 
 other temptation is concentrated into this. 
 The sin of the whole world is essentially the 
 sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve in Christ — 
 they sell Him." Now, in the common name 
 of England and America, we have pleaded not 
 guilty to the other false idols. Can we also 
 plead not guilty to this ? I fear not. I fear 
 that we are guilty of it in all ranks down to the 
 poorest ; guilty of it as individuals, and guilty 
 of it as nations. The growth and habit of 
 luxury, the multiplication of things which are 
 falsely deemed necessary for life, the deepen- 
 ing cleft between capital and labor, the more 
 and more glaring contrast between the ever- 
 breeding thousands and boundless superfluities 
 of the affluent rich and the cramping misery 
 and ingrained envy of the poor ; the toleration 
 in great cities of infamous streets full of rotting 
 ancl fever-causing habitations ; the all but 
 total absence of the conception that each one 
 is the steward, and not the owner, of what we 
 have ; that wealth is a talent intrusted to us for 
 God's service, not a gift heaped on us for our 
 own aggrandizement ; the hard clutch and grip 
 of that selfishness which has never so much as 
 tasted the bliss of doing habitual kindness to 
 those that lack ; the proofs everywhere of a
 
 IDEALS OF NA TIONS. 43 
 
 passion for amassing money, which gloats, like 
 the rich fool in the parable, over its much 
 goods laid up for many days. Ah, when we 
 are content with all this, are we never afraid 
 of that awful doom which crashed upon the 
 confidence of sensual and self-congratulating 
 ease ? " Thou fool ! this night — this night 
 they shall require of thee thy soul ! " There is 
 no sin in the winning of wealth ; no sin in the 
 possession of wealth ; but there is sin — sin 
 which benumbs all nobleness as with a torpedo- 
 touch — sin which envenoms all spirituality of 
 soul as with a serpent's sting, in the worship of 
 wealth ; in the trusting in wealth ; in the pas- 
 sionate desire for wealth ; in the base idolatry 
 of wealth ; in unworthy means of acquiring 
 wealth ; in the selfish accumulation of wealth ; 
 in the selfish' squandering of wealth ; in the 
 measuring by wealth, whether in dollars or in 
 pounds, of the worth and success of life. 
 " Despise the glare of wealth," said Joseph 
 Hancock in Boston a hundred years ago. 
 " Break asunder with noble disdain the chains 
 with which the Philistines have bound you." 
 Ah, if the life of England and of America be- 
 come ever real enough to be guided by the 
 Lord, to whom we profess a lip allegiance, let 
 us judge of these things not by the smooth 
 tongue of convention, but by the plain words of 
 Christ. Riches may increase and may be a 
 blessing if we employ them nobly ; if we set 
 not our heart upon them ; if we use them as 
 the wise men used them who gave to Christ 
 their gold and frankincense and myrrh ; if we 
 use them as Joanna, the wife of Chuza, used 
 them, to minister to Him and His ; if we bring 
 them, as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea 
 brought them, to His cross ; if we bestow them 
 as Barnabas bestowed them to help the needs 
 of His struggling church. We in England 
 have had some instances of a princely magna- 
 nimity in millionaires, and you in America yet 
 more. On the slab in Westminster Abbey,
 
 44 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 whereunder lay for a time the mortal remains 
 of George Peabody, is carved his daily prayer 
 to the Giver of all wealth, that He would en- 
 able him before he died to render some con- 
 spicuous service to his fellow-men. Such ex- 
 amples are blessed ; would that they were 
 multiplied a hundred-fold. And blessed, too, 
 in these days is every example which illustrates 
 how few and simple are the real needs of life ; 
 every example, whether of the rich or of the 
 struggling, which pours silent contempt on the 
 divinity of gold. " For departed kings there 
 are appointed honors, and the wealthy have 
 their gorgeous obsequies ; but it shall be the 
 nobler lot of these to clothe nations in spon- 
 taneous mourning, and to go to the grave 
 among the benedictions of the poor." 
 
 Let England then, and let America, learn 
 that swollen fortunes and material prosperity 
 are no signs of a nation's strength. Pagan 
 Rome was never so strong as when her dicta- 
 tors came from the ploughshare, never so weak 
 as when in her colossal wealth she had scarcely 
 a freeman left. In the Middle Ages, Papal 
 Rome stood raking into chests the countless 
 gold of her jubilee, just before she endured 
 her most humiliating disgrace. Spain was 
 dropping to pieces in the rottenness of inward 
 decay just when all the gold of the New World 
 was flowing like the tide of La Plata into the 
 treasury of her kings. Oh, let us learn that 
 the country's wealth means a country's weal, 
 and that does not consist in gold, but in the 
 justice, the mercy, the temperance, in the 
 strong, pure hearts of her sons and daughters. 
 Without these wealth may be but a sign of in- 
 ward weakness, just as the gorgeous conflagra- 
 tion of your autumnal woods is but the precur- 
 sor of their barrenness and the proof of their 
 decay. 
 
 5. Once more, as some nations have had a 
 false idea of absolutism, many, and especially 
 modern nations, have had a false idea of liberty.
 
 IDEALS OF NA TIONS. 
 
 45 
 
 There is no ideal more grand and inspiring 
 than that of true freedom. But what is free- 
 dom ? It is the correlative of order. It is the 
 function of righteousness. Freedom is self- 
 reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. 
 
 " August obedience by the world denied 
 Is God's economy to make us free." 
 
 Liberty is not the liberty to do wrong unre- 
 buked. It is not to do as we wish, but as we 
 ought. It is not to follow impulses of appetite, 
 but to listen to the dictates of reason. It is 
 not to rend, like the demoniac among the 
 tombs of Gadara, the beneficent features of 
 just restraint, but to sit at the Lord's feet 
 clothed, and in our right mind. To be free, 
 for instance, is not synonymous with infinite 
 facilities for drunkenness, or robbery, or wrong. 
 To be free, as Milton said, is the same thing 
 as to be pious, to be temperate, and to be 
 magnanimous. 
 
 " He is a freeman whom the truth makes free. 
 And all are slaves besides." 
 
 The description " everybody " did that which 
 was right in his own eyes, which is rapidly be- 
 coming a national ideal, is a description not of 
 heroic freedom, but of modern anarchy. Man's 
 liberty ends, and it ought to end, when that 
 liberty becomes the curse of his neighbors. I 
 look on nothing as more menacing in the whole 
 position of our race than the growth through 
 all classes, the growth which is most disastrous 
 to all in our barracks and schools and univer- 
 sities, of this base and ignorant notion that a 
 man ought to be free to do what he likes. It 
 seems to me a drying up of the very spring of 
 national nobleness. It was in the days of the 
 slave trade, when, as we are told, the loudest 
 yelps for liberty always came from the drivers 
 of the negroes. ''Would you interfere with 
 the liberty of the subject ? " sneers the econo- 
 mist to the material reformer. No ! But if
 
 46 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 the libert}' of one subject is to mean the slavery 
 of ten thousand I would traniple the liberty of 
 that subject into the dust. I would trample 
 every vested interest or sham-vested interest 
 into the dust which exists only for the blight 
 and ruin of mankind. 
 
 I would have no trees among us, which 
 ought only to grow in that thicket of the In- 
 ferno, where the trees are the souls of self- 
 destroyers, on whose grim branches the Har- 
 pies build their nests. Let us not confuse 
 liberty with license ; with demagogism ; with 
 the anarchy of the socialist ; with the undetect- 
 ed tyranny of rings ; with the wire-pulling of 
 the interested ; with the shout of the noisiest; 
 with the tyranny of the strongest ; with the 
 violent silencing of the voices of the wise 
 and reasonable few ; with that dead level 
 of envious mediocrity in which every mole- 
 hill is a mountain and every thistle a forest 
 tree. We do not want the liberty of the Reign 
 of Terror with its lullaby the Carmagnole, its 
 toy the guillotine, nor of the Parisian Commune, 
 with cities shattered with dynamite, or blazing 
 with petroleum. " That a good man to be 
 free, as we call it," said Carlyle, " and to be 
 permitted to unfold himself in works of good- 
 ness and nobleness, is surely a blessing to him 
 and to those about him, but that a man may be 
 free to be permitted to unfold himself in his 
 particular way is contrariwise the fatalest curse 
 you can inflict upon him, a curse and nothing 
 less to him and to all his neighbors. Him the 
 very heavens call upon you to persuade, to 
 urge, to compel him to something of well-doing 
 and if you absolutely cannot, the only blessing 
 left is the speediest gallows you can lead him 
 to." Liberty cannot be had but at the price of 
 eternal vigilance. The wise and the refined 
 must not shrink with cowardly fastidiousness 
 from the effort to keep it pure. Nations must 
 have courage enough and nerve enough to put 
 down every form of crime, whether respectable
 
 IDEALS OF NATIONS. 
 
 47 
 
 or disreputable, every crime whether plated 
 with gold or clothed in rags, with the infliction 
 of stern, swift, and wholesome penalties. Liberty 
 is no true liberty if she suffers the cheat, or 
 the officer or the treacherous, invader of her 
 own prerogatives to find inviolable refuge 
 under the shadow of her shield. She is 
 false to her mighty beneficence if she deal 
 not with the unblushing, multitudinous im- 
 morality of the states which spring up un- 
 der her shelter, if she does not trample out 
 of existence the hot-beds of temptation. Woe 
 to the nation which is not fearlessly faithful 
 enough to grapple with its own vice and its own 
 corruption. Woe to the nation which has become 
 too feebly timid to repress infamy, too morally 
 perplexed to scourge the back of crime. Let 
 the hands of every man who stands erect, every 
 man and woman in God's sacramental altar 
 tear down from its pedestal the brazen image of 
 such a spurious freedom and break it into pieces 
 Call it nehushtan, a thing of brass, nor suffer 
 men to exclaim in anger, " Oh Freedom, what 
 crimes are committed in thy name ! " 
 
 To conclude, then, what should be the one 
 and only true ideal of each nation, if it would 
 indeed be a wise and understanding people ? 
 Let the frivolous sneer and the faithless deride, 
 but there is only one such ideal. It is duty. 
 It is righteousness. It is the law of Sinai. It is 
 the law of Christ. It is purity of life. It is hon- 
 esty of trade. It is absolute allegiance to truth. 
 It is the inviolable sanctity of the marriage 
 law. There is a law above all the enactments 
 of human gods, the same in all times. It is 
 the law written by the finger of God upon the 
 hearts of men, and by that law, unchangeable 
 and eternal, while men despise, fear, and 
 loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they will reject 
 with indignation the delusion that any iniquity 
 and any idolatry can ever be anything to man 
 or to nations but a ruin and a curse. If a 
 nation be not the uplifter of this power of
 
 48 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 righteousness, it is predestined to ultimate in 
 an irretrievable ruin. The heathen may rage 
 and the people imagine a vain thing, but 
 where they strove to rear their Babels in op- 
 position to His eternal will, God shall send 
 forth His voice and the earth shall melt away, 
 " For glory," said Oliver Cromwell to the men 
 of England, " you glory in the ditch which 
 guards your shores ; I tell you that your ditch 
 will not save you if you do not reform your- 
 selves." It is no less true of America, I have 
 said before ; I say again, she may be the en- 
 lightener of the nations, the beautiful pioneer 
 in the vanguard of the progress of the world, 
 but should the day ever come when she shall 
 choose to spread a table to fortune, or to en- 
 shrine Mammon upon her altars ; should her 
 commerce become dishonest, her press debased, 
 her society frivolous, her religion a tradition 
 and a sham, then, though the double ocean 
 sweep her illimitable shores, their waves shall 
 but flash to future generations a more sad, a 
 more desolate, and a more unending dirge. 
 The Bible is still the best hand-book of the 
 worthy citizen, for it teaches us many truths 
 which make nations strong and keep them so. 
 It will teach us firmness in the appointed, in- 
 scrutable law of human life, and in the great 
 race of mankind we must hand down to future 
 generations a brighter and ever brighter torch 
 of knowledge and of love. It will teach us to 
 know man simply as man, and to regard all men, 
 from the highest to the lowest, as absolutely 
 equal before the bar of justice ; equally under 
 the stroke of her sword, equally under the 
 shadow of her shield. It will teach us that 
 always and invariably the unjust and immoral 
 practices of this class must be put down in the 
 interests of the communitv, and that the in- 
 terests of the community are subordinate always 
 to those of the entire people. And it will teach 
 us that the true glory of nations lies not in the 
 splendid misery of war, but in the dissemina-
 
 IDEALS OF NA TIOISTS. 49 
 
 tion of honorable happiness and encourage- 
 ment of greatness, and the suppression of 
 vice ; and it will teach us that the true wealth 
 of a nation is not in gold and silver, but in the 
 souls of strong, contented, and self-respecting 
 men ; and it will teach us that the true 
 freedom of a nation lies not in the anarchic 
 right of licensed temptation and unrestricted 
 facilities for crime, but in the bonds of a 
 material obedience deeply cherished by the 
 good, but inexorably enforced on all the bad. 
 When statesmen and nations have learned these 
 lessons they will not be long in learning others. 
 Nations will aim at only such conditions of life 
 and government as shall make it easy to do right 
 and difficult to do wrong. They will see that 
 politics, no less than individual conduct, have 
 no other rule than the law of God. States- 
 men will not toil for reward. They will 
 not count on praise. They will hold alle- 
 giance to the loftiest ideal of godliness to be 
 far dearer than claims of party and all the 
 glories of place. Like Edmund Burke, they 
 will bring to politics a terror of crime, a deep 
 humanity, a keen sensibility, a singular vivacity 
 and sincerity of consciousness. Like Sir 
 Robert Peel, they will, amid all the fortunes of 
 their career, be able to turn from the storm 
 without to the sunshine of the approving 
 heart within. Like Washington and Lincoln, 
 they will be just and fear not, putting 
 their trust in God. They will not be afraid to 
 to cut against the grain of godless prejudice. 
 They will not be sophisticated by the pruden- 
 tial maxims of an immoral acquiescence. They 
 will sweeten with words of justice and gentle- 
 ness the conflicts of party. They will be quick 
 to the encouragement of virtue. They will be 
 fixed and fearless, and all the strong and God- 
 fearing men and women, and all the pure and 
 noble, all the bright youth, will help them to 
 be inviolable, inexorable in the suppression and 
 extirpation so far as the powers of govern-
 
 50 LECTURES B V CANON FARRAR. 
 
 ment can do it, of all apostacy from the eternal 
 laws of God. Happy are the people that are 
 in such a cause. Blessed are the people that 
 have the Lord for their God.
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 
 
 DELIVERED AT CHICKERING HALL, NEW YORK, 
 OCTOBER 29, 1S85. 
 
 Ladies and Gentleme7i : 
 
 I MUST, first of all, thank you from my heart 
 for this far too kind and generous recognition 
 of such poor efforts as I have been enabled to 
 make in the cause of Temperance. Your ap- 
 preciation wijl be to me the strongest outward 
 incentive which I have yet received, if, indeed, 
 any incentive were needed to prevent my flag- 
 ging in so sacred a cause. But I will venture 
 to hope that this reception is given to me be- 
 cause of what I have done, or rather tried to 
 do, in the past, and not in the expectation that 
 I can make to you any great speech on the 
 present occasion. I cannot do it, because al- 
 ready in America, my time has been too much 
 occupied, and my physical power strained to 
 the utmost by the repeated necessity for ad- 
 dressing large audiences. 
 
 On this ground to-day, also, my remarks will 
 be general, and above all, they will be free 
 from any admixture of oratory, rhetoric, or elo- 
 quence — words of which the two first have al- 
 ways had for me an obscure meaning, and of 
 which the third expresses a magnificent gift of 
 God, to the possession of which I have never 
 had the smallest claim, or put forth the smallest 
 pretension.
 
 52 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 1. Let me begin with telling you why I be- 
 came a total abstainer. Perhaps, at this point, 
 some of my non-abstaining friends will shudder 
 and say to themselves, now we are going to 
 have a specimen of tliat intemperate language 
 which a bad and stale epigram has identified 
 with temperance reformers. Now we shall have 
 all kinds of interference with the liberty of the 
 subject on the plea of ending the slavery of 
 the abject. Now we shall hear dubious Scrip- 
 ture arguments, and uncharitably Pharisaic 
 judgments. Ladies and gentlemen, in my 
 hands I think that you ought to feel secure. 
 I am a Vice-President of the Church of Eng- 
 land Temperance Society, and that great 
 society is on a double basis, and not only wel- 
 comes, but cordially invites, the co-operation 
 of its non-abstaining section. I am ready to 
 defend the principles of Total Abstinence 
 ■when they are attacked, and even when they 
 are depreciated ; but I am not ready, and 
 never have been ready, to say one word which 
 should be construed into the condemnation of 
 my brethren. Let every man be fully persuad- 
 ed in his own mind. The statement of my 
 own reasons for having become, ten years ago, 
 a total abstainer, is not meant to involve the 
 shadow of the shade of a judgment upon 
 others. 
 
 2. My reasons, then, for taking the pledge 
 were partly general and partly special. First, 
 1 became convinced that the use of alcohol in 
 any form was not a necessity. I saw that 
 whole nations have lived and flourished with- 
 out it. I believed that the whole race of man 
 had existed for centuries previous to its dis- 
 covery. I was struck by the indisputable fact 
 that in England 20,000 inhabitants of our 
 prisons, accustomed to it all their lives, and 
 the majority of them brought into prison di- 
 rectly or indirectly by the abuse of it, could 
 t)e, and were, from the moment of their im- 
 prisonment, absolutely deprived of it, not only
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 
 
 S3 
 
 without loss, but with entire gain to their 
 personal health. Men enter prison sickly 
 and blighted, are deprived of drink, and leave 
 prison strong and hale ; and v^'omen who, 
 when incarcerated, are hideous to look upon, 
 after being made compulsorily sober by Act 
 of Parliament, recover the bloom of health and 
 almost of beauty. Next I derived from the 
 recorded testimony of some of our most emi- 
 nent physicians that the use of alcohol is a 
 subtle and manifold source of disease even to 
 thousands who use it in quantities convention- 
 ally deemed moderate ; and from the testimony 
 even of many who discountenanced total absti- 
 nence that all the young, and all the healthy, 
 and all who eat well and sleep well do not re- 
 quire it, and are better without it. Then the 
 carefully drawn statistics of many insurance 
 societies convinced me that total abstinence, 
 so far from shortening life, distinctly and in- 
 disputably conduced to longevity. Then I 
 accumulated proof that drink is so far from 
 being requisite to physical strength or intellect- 
 ual force, that many of the greatest athletes, 
 from the days of Samson onwards, " whose 
 drink was only of the crystal brook," have 
 achieved, without alcohol, mightier feats than 
 have ever been achieved with it ; and many of 
 the world's wisest, even if they have not said 
 with Pindar, have yet drawn a better inspira- 
 tion from other sources than can be drawn 
 chemically from the fumes of wine. Seeing, 
 all which, and much more — seeing, too, in 
 the Holy Scripture God's own approval of 
 His Nazarites, who, as the Prophet Jeremiah 
 tells us, were " purer than snow, they were 
 whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in 
 body than rubies, their polishing was of sap- 
 phires." I saw, or thought I saw, grounds 
 sufficient and superfluously sufficient to make 
 me an abstainer. And besides all this I knew 
 that the life of man always gains by the aboli- 
 tion of needless expenses and artificial wants.
 
 54 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 Your own wise Benjamin Franklin said a hun- 
 dred years ago, " Temperance puts wood on 
 the fire, meat in tlie barrel, flour in the tub, 
 money in the purse, credit in the country, 
 clothes on the bairns, intelligence in the brain, 
 and spirit in the constitution." 
 
 Some of us then, perhaps, became abstainers 
 on some such grounds as these. We believed 
 by evidence, and we found by experience, that 
 our small self-denial, if self-denial it could even 
 be called, would conduce to health, to clear- 
 ness of mind, to strength of bod)', to length 
 of days and simplicity of life. Further than 
 this, we saw that life is full of temptations, and 
 that there was one fatal temptation, at any 
 rate, from which we should be absolutely and 
 under all circumstances exempt. 
 
 3. And yet these, I will venture to say, were 
 not the reasons which prevailed with most of 
 us. We looked into the field of history, and 
 from the days of that horrible scene in the tent 
 of the Patriarch down to the records of yester- 
 day, we saw that from the flood downward 
 strong drink had been to the masses of man- 
 kind a curse intolerable in its incidence and 
 interminable in its malignity. Even the most 
 ancient writers, profane as well as sacred, have, 
 like Lucretius, described with horror and in- 
 dignation the agonies and the crimes caused 
 by drunkenness ; and even the most ancient 
 nations, like the Spartans, have endeavored to 
 repudiate its seductions. It is sometimes 
 hinted that total abstainers are plebeian and 
 ignorant persons ; but plebeian and ignorant 
 as we may be, we can refer in support of our 
 views to books the most refined, to authors the 
 most fastidiously delicate, to statesmen the 
 least wedded to our favorite convictions. Read 
 Mr. Trevelyan's chapter on " The Age of 
 Gout," in his life of Charles James Fox; read 
 Sir Henry Havelock's contrast of the siege of 
 Ghuzree by an army without drink, and of the 
 siege of Lucknow by an army with drink ; read
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 
 
 55 
 
 Sir John Kaye's thrilling history of the Indian 
 mutiny, and see how the drunkenness of the 
 troops on the day after our first lodgment in 
 Delhi was within an<fice of causing to us the 
 total loss of our Indian Empire ; read what Mr. 
 Kinglake says in his " History of the Crimean 
 War," of British soldiers, gentle as women and 
 brave as lions, until, and only until, the drink 
 came to demoralize and degrade them ; read 
 the testimony of many eminent generals that a 
 sober army is an army almost without crime ; 
 read Mr, Lecky's remarkable chapter in his 
 " History of European Morals," of the effects 
 caused by the introduction of gin among the 
 lower classes in the year 1724, a year which, 
 on that account, he brands as unapproachable 
 in prolific calamity ; read the testimony of 
 Bishop Benson, the friend and patron of White- 
 field, that gin was making the English people 
 what they never had been before — cruel and 
 inhuman — and that these " cursed spirituous 
 liquors," as he calls them, had changed the 
 very nature of the people ; read the passionate 
 denunciation of the Gin Act by the most 
 polished gentleman of his day, the famous 
 Lord Chesterfield, as an act " calculated for 
 the propagation of diseases, the suppression of 
 industry, and the destruction of mankind." 
 Shall I go farther back still, and tell you how, 
 350 years ago, Shakespeare wrote " Oh, thou 
 invisible spirit of wine, if there is no other 
 name thou art known by, let us call thee devil ; " 
 how, 250 years ago. Bishop Hale said that " it 
 needed a deluge of fire to purge England from 
 her drunkenness " how, 200 years ago, the 
 great Judge, Sir Matthew Hale, declared that 
 " four crimes out of five were the issue of ex- 
 cessive drinking in taverns and ale-houses," 
 Shall I come down to the last generation, and 
 quote to you the testimony of such men as 
 Charles Lamb, as Hartley Coleridge, and 
 Robert Burns ; or shall I come down to the 
 present day, and quote to you (as I could do)
 
 56 Lii- CTURES B Y CANON FA RRAR. 
 
 words — words which, if used by us, would have 
 been denounced as among the worst instances 
 of the intemperate language of temperance 
 reformers — of men of letters like John Morley, 
 and John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle, and of 
 the Archbishop of York, and of the Bishop of 
 London, and of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and of 
 Lord Coleridge, and of nearly every judge 
 who sits on the bench of British Themis, and 
 who knows, by daily and dreadful experience, 
 that drink is totUem Uteris the very synonym 
 of crime. Gentlemen, it is all nonsense for 
 the defenders of drink to try upon us either the 
 conspiracy of silence or the inquiry of con- 
 tempt. As to the first, we will make our own 
 voices come back to us in millions of echoes ; 
 as to the second, we know that contempt is 
 only powerful against that which is contemp- 
 tible. 
 
 4. Or if we needed proof of our position — 
 proof that we abstainers are not the mere 
 ignorant fanatics which we are described to be 
 — let us pass into an atmosphere which is, I 
 fear, singularly unsusceptible to the blind 
 passion for social reform — the atmosphere of 
 the English House of Commons. It is rarely 
 that I have seen a thrill of manifest emotion 
 pass through that assemblage ; but I saw and 
 I felt the thrill, I saw it pass as a breeze passes 
 over the fields of summer corn, when, four 
 years ago Mr. Gladstone, standing at the table 
 as Prime Minister, said that drink had pro- 
 duced evils more deadly, because more con- 
 tinuous, than those caused to mankind by the 
 great historic scourges of war, famine, and 
 pestilence combined. The sentiment was not 
 original. It had first been said by a brewef 
 of genius, a Member of Parliament, Mr. 
 Charles Buxton, who had had amplest oppor- 
 tunities of knowing the truth of what he said. 
 But Mr. Gladstone quoted it ; he accepted it ; 
 he indorsed it with all the weight of his high 
 position, of his immense experience, of his vast
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS, 
 
 57 
 
 knowledge of mankind. He indorsed it ; he 
 abides by it ; he has never withdrawn it. 
 He is not a total abstainer. There are some 
 temperance reformers who do not think that 
 his liquor-legislation has been successful ; 
 there are many who believe that he might have 
 yielded more to us, might have done more for 
 us, than he has done. But at least he has done 
 our cause the service of this tremendous sen- 
 tence, so fatally true, so awfully descriptive, 
 so overwhelming a justification of all we have 
 done and said — nay, so smiting a reproof to 
 us that, after all, we have done and said so 
 little. For, if words have any meaning at all, 
 only think what those words mean. War — you 
 know by no remote experience what war is — its 
 agonies, its horrors, its crimes ; — its widowed 
 homes, its orphaned children, its ghastly 
 wounds — youths with their lives prematurely 
 cut off — brave men with the life-blood slowly 
 ebbing from their veins in the chill moonlight, 
 on the crimson turf. Famine, we know that 
 where that meagre spectre stalks in cities, it 
 turns men into wild beasts, and makes the 
 mother's eye cruel to her infant at the breast. 
 Pestilence we have had of late ; it turns the 
 inhabitants of cities into poltroons ; how men 
 fly from it in thousands, in panic-stricken cow- 
 ardice ; how it paralyzes industry ; how it 
 snatches the last consolation from the living, 
 and a hallowed grave from the dead ; and is 
 there to be vice, a preventable vice, in the 
 midst of us which causes evils deadlier, because 
 more continuous, than the three great historic 
 scourges. War, Famine, and Pestilence com- 
 bined ? And are we to be cold, indifferent, 
 so neutral, so selfishly acquiescent, making no 
 serious, no united effort to put an end to this 
 wide-wasting conflagration — to this immeasur- 
 able catastrophe ? War, if in time of war he 
 deserves a civic crown wlio saves the life of a 
 single citizen ; famine, if he be benefactor of 
 the race who makes two corn-ears grow where
 
 58 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 but one grew before ; pestilence, if one of the 
 noblest acts of history is that of him who stood 
 between the living and the dead, and the 
 plague was stayed ; — if in time o-f war, blessed 
 are the peace-makers ; if in days of famine it 
 be noble to feed the hungry ; if in visitation 
 of plague it is divine to heal the sick ; then 
 surely, in face of an evil more deadly in its 
 effects, because more continuous, than war, 
 famine and pestilence combined, we must be 
 at the last gasp of national honor, in the last 
 paralysis of national selfishness, if there be not 
 among us enough salt of morality, enough fire 
 of courage, enough passion of enthusiasm, to 
 grapple with this intolerable curse. 
 
 5. But, gentlemen, I can tell you in four let- 
 ters of one motive for abstinence, which in my 
 own mirtd was as Aaron's serpent rod and pre- 
 vailed over all the rest. It was pity, sheer 
 human pity. I will not stop to tell you the 
 horrible results of drunkenness which, in my 
 own parish, under the very shadows of the 
 great Abbey, I have seen with my own eyes 
 and heard with my own ears. If I did I could 
 indeed say to you 
 
 " Come, sit you down, 
 And I will wring your heart; for so I shall, 
 If it be made of penetrable stuff 
 If damned custom have not brazed it so 
 That it is proof and bulwark against sense." 
 
 But I may presume that I am speaking to 
 those who are familiar with the common facts 
 — so common yet so ghastly — which in Eng- 
 land, at any rate, are enough to make us blush 
 with shame and burn with indignation. I be- 
 lieved, and still believe, or rather I now not 
 only believe but know, that by becoming an 
 abstainer, by taking part in Temperance Re- 
 form, I could help others ; and if others could 
 have known and seen all that I have seen, I 
 believed that in their case, too,
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 59 
 
 " Pity like a naked, ne\v-)iorn babe 
 Striding the blast, and heaven's cherubim horsed 
 Upon the sightless couriers of the air 
 Would blow these horrid deeds in every eye, 
 That tears could drown the wind." 
 
 I would then appeal to all for pity ; — pity for 
 the vast multitudes who become the helpless 
 victims of a dead chemical product, potent to 
 destroy the souls for which Christ died ; pity 
 for the ravages wrought by this bitter source of 
 human woe ; pity for the hundreds and thou- 
 sands of men, who, under this hideous fascina- 
 tion, degrade their lives into misery and pol- 
 lution of a long-continued death ; pity for the 
 youths who thus " pour poison into the roses 
 of their youth," so that its root is as rotten- 
 ness, pity for the hearts of mothers rent by 
 anguish for these their ruined prodigals ; pity 
 for the wives and husbands on whose hearth 
 burn the fires of hell ; pity for the unmotherly 
 mothers and unwomanly women who nigh turn 
 motherhood to shame, womanliness to loath- 
 ing ; pity for those lurid tragedies where the 
 vitriol maddens ; or is there no voice strong 
 enough to plead like angels trumpet-tongued 
 against the deep damnation of their bodies ; 
 pity for the little children who, in the awful 
 language of South are, because of drink, not 
 not so much born into the world as damned 
 into the world, born to lives of disease and 
 degradation, or in these Christian lands yearly 
 pass through the fire to this idol in far vaster 
 multitudes than were ever sacrificed of old in 
 the Valley of Hinnom to Moloch the abomina 
 tion of the children of Ammon ; pity for Eng- 
 land, which now, for fully two centuries, has 
 been writhing in these dragon-folds of licensed 
 temptations ; pity for the whole race of man- 
 kind, which sends up a cry from every polluted 
 continent, and which yet cherishes — aye, and 
 fondly — in its bosom this venomous and dead- 
 ly asp. Alone of human woes, dear heaven, 
 it is a curse of which the entail might be at
 
 (5o LECTURES B V CANON FARRAR. 
 
 once cut off ; and yet mankind, partly blinded 
 by conceit, partly seduced by pleasure, and 
 partly rendered callous by greed, still suffers 
 drink for year after year, in every continent, 
 almost in every city, to blast innumerable 
 careers and to blight innumerable homes — a 
 folly, which almost drives us to say with the 
 despairing moralist that it seems as if humanity 
 were still half serpent and yet half extracted 
 from the clay, a lacertian brood of bitterness 
 whose trail is on the leaf a guilty slime and in 
 the land a useless furrow. 
 
 6. Gentlemen, this cause of temperance Re- 
 form, which, in my own mind, and I believe in 
 the minds of millions, is mainly the child of pity, 
 appeals to us as Humanitarians ; it appeals to 
 us as Philanthropists ; it appeals to us with 
 million-fold force as Christians ; but if I har- 
 rowed the ground quite indefinitely, might I 
 not assume that it should appeal to us with 
 gigantic force merely as patriots. " National 
 crime," said Oliver Cromwell, "is a thing that 
 God will reckon for ; and I wish it may not 
 lie on the nation a day longer than you have 
 an opportunity to find a remedy." The drink 
 system is a national crime. " A prosperous 
 iniquity," said Jeremy Taylor, "is the most 
 unprofitable condition in the world." I so 
 hold the drink system is a prosperous iniquity. 
 " I do not believe," said Burke, " that any 
 good constitution of government or freedom 
 can find it necessary to drive any part of their 
 people to a permanent slavery." The drink 
 system overcomes tens of thousands. "If I 
 thought," said your own great orator, Daniel 
 Webster, " that there was a stain upon the 
 remotest hem of the garment of my country, I 
 would devote my utmost labors to wipe it off." 
 This is the duty of every patriot. This is 
 what, in my small measure, according to my 
 feeble capacity, I have striven to do. For, 
 whatever may be the case in America, it is 
 certainly the case in England that drunkenness
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 6 1 
 
 and the licensed, the profitable, the wealth- 
 producing monopoly which causes drunken- 
 ness, is a stain not only upon the hem but 
 dyeing all the white robes of England, a stain 
 of the deepest dye — a stain deep and crimson 
 enough to incarnadine the multitudinous lives 
 over which she rules. 
 
 7. Yes, and I will confess that I am weary 
 and disheartened by the slowness of our prog- 
 ress. After so many years of struggle, we are 
 misunderstood, we are misrepresented, we are 
 incessantly made the object of taunts and 
 sneers. For this we care nothing, or less than 
 nothing. They sa}' — what say they ? — let them 
 say. Let echo repeat, if it will, the sounds 
 that are emptiest. Let men fling more stones 
 at us than other men have roses showered on 
 them. We have counted the cost. We have 
 learnt the lesson which some of your own 
 great speakers have helped to teach us that 
 God is the only final public opinion ; that one 
 with God is always in a majority. But what 
 we do grieve at is, if not the comparative 
 failure of our efforts, yet the painful slowness 
 of our success. We have seized the axe, we 
 have thrown it to its backmost poise. We 
 have struck sturdy strokes, but as yet we have 
 have hardly wounded the tough rind of this 
 upas tree. We have not split the gnarled 
 obtusity of the prejudices which are opposed 
 to us. We have not cleft the hoary head of 
 inveterate abuses. We have wrought no de- 
 liverance on the earth, and are not better than 
 our fathers. And yet 
 
 " We bate no jot 
 Of heart or hope, but still bear on, and steer 
 Up-hill ward." 
 
 Cobbett wrote and spoke but for few 5'ears, 
 and then he was helped to carry the Reform 
 Bill. Cobden and Bright harangued for ten 
 years, and then, in the teeth of antagonistic 
 prejudice and ignorant selfishness they pro-
 
 62 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 cured the abolition of the corn-laws. It is fully 
 a hundred years since temperance efiforts be- 
 gan in England. It is more than fifty vears 
 since Joseph Livesey and the seven men of 
 Trenton, formed the first society of Total Ab- 
 stainers, and yet, in spite of an abstract resolu- 
 tion in favor of local option, thrice passed by 
 increasing majorities in the House of Com- 
 mons, we have scarcely advanced one step 
 nearer to effective legislation. So strong is 
 the might of callous selfishness, of interested 
 wealth ! Yet we do not and we will not de- 
 spair. I have some hopes in the recent enor- 
 mous extension of the franchise. I shall see 
 cause to despair, indeed, if the more the power 
 is given into the hands of the people, the less 
 it does not become in the tyrannous hands of 
 gin distillers and publicans. " Give me," said 
 Wendell Phillips, " anything that walks erect 
 and can read, and he shall count one in the 
 millions of the Lord's sacramental host, which 
 is yet to come up and trample all oppression 
 into the dust." I know how dumb, how patient 
 a people may be when it has succumbed for 
 long years to the temptations so sedulously 
 prepared for it, when the minimum of resist- 
 ance is enringed as with a cordon of fire by the 
 maximum of seductive ruin, when it is bafHed 
 by sophistries, and bewildered by epigrams, 
 and deafened by the cries for liberty which are 
 often raised most loudly by oppressors. Eut I 
 know, also, that if we still try to educate in the 
 people the moral sense, if we awaken in drink- 
 besotted multitudes the dormant conscience, if 
 we kindle in slain souls the passion for deliver- 
 ance, sooner or later the people will speak in a 
 voice of thunder ; in a voice whose mandates 
 can no longer be resisted ; in a voice whose 
 roar shall be as the sound of the advancing 
 chariot wheels of Retribution ; in a voice which 
 shall thunder through senates and palaces, and 
 be heard at the Almighty throne. When the 
 snow begins to vanish from the crater of the
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 63 
 
 volcano, the clay may not be distant when bel- 
 lowing eruptions shall shatter its rocky fast- 
 nesses, the burning lava shall flood its slopes. 
 
 8. It is thus that every great moral, social, 
 and religious reform has been achieved. Many 
 spring from the few, mostly from the individual, 
 one man becomes impressed with a deep con- 
 viction. It haunts — it masters him. It be- 
 comes the ruling purpose and passion of his 
 life. While he is musing the fire burns, and at 
 last he speaks with his tongue. And no sooner 
 has he spoken, be it even with a tongue stam- 
 mering like that of Moses, than he finds that 
 he has not been solitary in his convictions. 
 Others have already thought as he has done. 
 They rally round him ; they catch fire with a 
 common enthusiasm ; they flash into other 
 hearts the same nobleness, the same readiness 
 to spend, and to be spent, in a good cause. 
 
 This was the history of the abolition of 
 gladiatorial games. This was the history of 
 the Reformation. This was the history of the 
 most lovely and righteous acts in the long an- 
 nals of England — first the abolition of the slave- 
 trade, then the emancipation of the slave. 
 
 Whenever I walk through the aisles of West- 
 minster I see the record of the struggle there 
 in the grave of Wilberforce, the statue of Sir 
 F. Buxton, the tombs of Granville, Sharp, and 
 Zachary Macaulay, who rescued their native 
 country from the guilt of using the arm of free- 
 dom to rivet the fetters of the slave. Such 
 memorials are the historic witnesses to great 
 truths. They remind us of the toil and the 
 peril required for moral reformation ; the slow 
 awakenment of the conscience of mankind ; the 
 kindling of enthusiasm, first of all, in the minds 
 of the few, and then its reflection like some 
 beacon-light flashed from mountain peak to 
 mountain peak by the minds of the many. 
 
 Well, gentlemen, in this great crusade to de- 
 liver mankind — at any rate to deliver, to the 
 utmost of our power, the English-speaking race,
 
 64 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 to whom are manifestly intrusted the future 
 destinies of the world — from this curse of in- 
 toxication, next to God, we must trust to two 
 things — one the life-long purpose of some in- 
 tense and absorbing enthusiasm, burning like 
 the altar flame in the heart of some single man, 
 or of some few men ; and next, the rousing of 
 some great people shaking those invincible 
 locks — the laws of the moral convictions — 
 which lie like the sunny locks of Samson, wav- 
 ing over its illustrious shoulders. Men — single 
 men — must rise first like Clarkson, or Lloyd 
 Garrison ; groups of men, like the early Aboli- 
 tionists, who shall not be afraid to lift their 
 strong arms to bring heaven a little nearer to 
 this earth. And if we cannot be of these 
 glorious few, we may help them in the moral 
 world by something analogous to the physical 
 law, which is known as the superimposition of 
 small impacts. Let the great beam of iron 
 hang in the air, dull, and heavy, and motion- 
 less ; strike it again and again with but a little 
 pellet of pith or cork. At first your endeavor 
 will look utterly ridiculous. Every one will 
 laugh at you. But however, it will not be long 
 before the great mass begins to thrill, then to 
 shiver, then to tremble, then to move, then to 
 sway and oscillate, lastly to swing with vast, 
 regular, and rhythmic swing. The thousands 
 of tiny impacts have had an aggregate or collec- 
 tive force, stronger than would have been pro- 
 duced by a giant's arm. In this way, at least, 
 we all can give our help. In this way each one 
 of us may contribute his infinitesimal quota to 
 the amelioration of the world. 
 
 9. But you in America must help us in 
 England with all your might. You in this mat- 
 ter must lead the way. You are doing it. I 
 do not say it to flatter you. I do not desire to 
 flatter you. I say it in the dark. In all mat- 
 ters of Temperance Legislation, in the educa- 
 tion and enlightenment of the moral sense on 
 the great question, you are already far ahead
 
 TEMPERANCE ADDRESS. 65 
 
 of us. In this field, more than any other, you 
 can repay the debt of gratitude you owe to us. 
 You owe to us the debt of your liberty of inde- 
 pendence, for it was Hampden and Cromwell, 
 and young Vane who sowed the seed which re- 
 sulted for you also, after your civil war, in the 
 glorious decision that there should be slaves 
 no longer in the country of the free. " Only 
 once in the broad sweep of human history," 
 said Mr. Wendell Phillips, "only once was any 
 nation lifted so high that she could stretch her 
 imperial hand across the Atlantic, and lift by 
 one peaceful word a million of slaves into 
 liberty. God granted that glory only to your 
 mother land." Yes, but you can emulate that 
 glory ; you can repay that debt of moral grati- 
 tude. We helped you to bear the sentiment 
 and the convictions which at last obliterated 
 forever from your history the stains and shame 
 of slavery. Do you help us to wipe away from 
 our annals the plague spots of tolerated vice. 
 You are about to erect in the entrance of the 
 harbor of this mighty city your statue of 
 Liberty, the enlightener of the world. You 
 have already erected the staff pedestal ; soon 
 may the furled statue rear in the august surges 
 her boundless brow. See that her shield is 
 stainless, see that there be no rust upon it, 
 — no splashes upon it in the blood of souls, 
 which shall prevent it from flashing back the 
 sun of God, the sun of the righteousness of 
 heaven. Behind the vast amplitude of that 
 immortal shield may the oppressed of all lands 
 find an inviolable refuge, but never let the ty- 
 rant or the oppressor hide under its silver 
 shadow to shoot them with deadly arrows in 
 Freedom's prostituted name. Then shall your 
 Liberty wear forever the crown of stars upon 
 her head, and hold fast the olive branch in her 
 hand, and trample the chains of every slave 
 beneath her feet. So shall America strengthen 
 England as England has inspired America. 
 May both nations alike be animated by the
 
 66 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 Strong conviction of devoted faithfulness. May 
 we alike feel that " in God's war slackness is 
 infamy." I would say to you, to each of you, 
 and to the whole of this great nation, in the 
 dying words of the holy and eloquent Ravig- 
 nan, "Fight, Hght, fight the battles of the 
 Lord."
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 
 
 DELIVERED IN BOSTON, PHILADELPHIA, AND NEW YORK. 
 
 Among the commonest questions addressed 
 to the stranger who visits your hospitable 
 shores are, " What do you thinlc of our coun- 
 try ? " " What do you think of our institu- 
 tions ? " The frequency of the questions 
 proves, I suppose, a real desire to know the 
 general impressions formed by those from the 
 old home, whom you welcome here. May one 
 who has been received among you with an 
 overflowing kindness far beyond his deserts, 
 and with a warmth of recognition to which he 
 has no claim ; who, though a stranger, has 
 been treated as a friend in every city he has 
 entered ; who has received words of cordial 
 welcome and appreciation from the members of 
 every religious community among you, from 
 Roman Catholic Archbishops to Shaker Elders ; 
 who has spoken at nine or ten of your Colleges 
 and Universities ; who has been again and 
 again invited to preach in your Churches, and 
 to address many assemblages of the clergy or 
 of theological students ; — may such a stranger, 
 whom you have encouraged to regard himself 
 as a friend, endeavor to give, or perhaps I 
 should rather say, to indicate, some shadow of 
 an answer to the familiar question ? 
 
 Such an answer might be given — perhaps has 
 been sometimes given — in a tone of vanity and
 
 68 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 arrogance. Your brilliant representative, Mr. 
 Lowell, who, in spite of the fact that he has 
 spoken some sharp words to England and the 
 English, was honored and beloved in England 
 as few of your many popular Ministers have 
 been, has written a paper on "A certain con- 
 descension in Foreigners." The humbleness 
 of my position, the smallness of any claims of 
 mine on your attention, exempt me from all 
 temptations to vanity and arrogance. Others 
 again have offended you by fiattery, and others 
 have vexed you by sarcasm and censure. I 
 hope that I shall not be so unfortunate as to 
 fall either into the Scylla of flattery — a whirl- 
 pool of which I have always tried to steer clear 
 — or into the Charybdis of criticism, which, on 
 my part, would be purely presumptuous. Thus 
 much, however, I may say. I have stood in 
 simple astonishment before the growth, the 
 power, the irresistible advance, the Niagara- 
 rush of sweeping energy, the m.agnificent ap- 
 parent destiny of this nation, wondering where- 
 unto it would grow. I have been touched by 
 the large generosity, the ungrudging hospitality 
 of friends in America whom I had never known 
 before. I should consider myself privileged 
 beyond anything which I can express, if any 
 poor word which I have been asked to speak in 
 America might prove to be an influence for 
 good ; if it could be one more link, even mi- 
 croscopically small, in the golden chain of mu- 
 tual amity which now happily unites the two 
 nations which yet are, and ought to be one na- 
 tion ; or if it could add anything to the feeling 
 of essential unity between religious bodies 
 which, in spite of their differences, have yet 
 one great end in view. I should indeed rejoice 
 if I could thus repay some small part of the 
 debt of my gratitude and contribute my infini- 
 tesimal quota to the efforts of those who — feel- 
 ing the inherent grandeur of this mighty 
 people, and impressed with the eternal truth 
 that righteousness is the sole palladium of the
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 69 
 
 nations — are devoting heart and soul to the 
 purest efifort of patriotism, the effort which 
 shall enable their fellow-countrymen to rise to 
 the height of this great argument, and by their 
 means to elevate the moral condition of the 
 world. And why should this hope of mine be 
 condemned as entirely presumptuous ? Any- 
 thing which I can do or say must be in itself of 
 trivial value ; but still it may serve its own 
 small purpose even as it is the despised mica- 
 flake which helps to build the bases of the 
 mountain, and the tiny coral-insect which lays 
 the foundations of the mighty continent, and 
 the grain of sand which is, " taken up by the 
 wings of the wind, to be a barrier against the 
 raging of the sea." 
 
 Surely, your history, so brief yet so memo- 
 rable, has been too plainly marked by the in- 
 terpositions of God to leave any American un- 
 impressed by the responsibilities which God 
 has made to rest upon the Atlantean shoulders 
 of this His people. There are some who are 
 fond of looking at the apparently trifling inci- 
 dents of history, and of showing how the stream 
 of the centuries has been diverted in one or 
 other direction by events the most insignificant, 
 General Garfield told his pupils at Hiram that 
 the roof of a certain court-house was so abso- 
 lute a water-shed that the flutter of a bird's 
 wing would be sufficient to decide whether a 
 particular rain-drop should make its way into 
 the Gulf of St. Lawrence or into the Gulf of 
 Mexico. The flutter of a bird's wing may have 
 affected all history. Some students may see 
 an immeasurable significance in the flight of 
 parrots, which served to alter the course of 
 Columbus, and guided him to the discovery of 
 North and not of South America. There is no 
 need for us to touch on such curiosities. Suf- 
 fice it for me to quote a testimony which you 
 will all reverence — the testimony of Washing- 
 ton : " When I contemplate," he says, in his 
 letter to the c:overnors of the States, in 1783.
 
 yo LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 " the interposition of Providence, as it was 
 visibly manifest in guiding us through the 
 Revolution ... I feel myself oppressed and 
 almost overwhelmed with a sense of Divine 
 munificence. ... No people can be bound to 
 acknowledge and adore an Invisible hand 
 which conducts the affairs of men more than 
 the people of the United States. Every step 
 by which they have advanced to the character 
 of an independent nation seems to have been 
 distinguished by some token of Providential 
 agency. ... Of all the dispositions and habits 
 which lead to political prosperity, religion and 
 morality are indispensable supports. In vain 
 would that man claim the tribute of patriotism 
 who should labor to subvert these great pillars 
 of human happiness, these firmest proofs of 
 the duties of men and of citizens." So wrote 
 Washington, the Father of his Country. Such 
 was his conviction, and such the inference to 
 which it led him. 
 
 In truth, this lesson — the Providence of God 
 in the affairs of nations — seems to be stamped 
 upon your history from the first. When Colum- 
 bus ceased to speak before the courtiers at 
 Barcelona, and told them the discovery of the 
 Western world, 
 
 " The king and queen 
 Sank from their thrones and melted into tears, 
 • And knelt, and lifted hand and heart and voice 
 In praise of God who led him through the waste. 
 And then the great ' Laudanius ' rose to heaven." 
 
 When William Penn founded, among the 
 forest trees from which its streets are yet 
 named, the City of Brotherly Love, — " It is," 
 he said, " a holy experiment, which it depends 
 upon themselves to accomplish or ruin " ; and 
 he intended Pennsylvania to be an endeavor 
 " to improve an innocent course of life on a 
 virgin Elysian shore," " Let us," said the great 
 Edmund Burke — " let us auspicate all our pro- 
 ceedings in America with the old Church cry, 
 " Sursum corda." George Herbert wrote :
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 71 
 
 " Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, 
 Ready to pass to the American strand." 
 
 May I try to show that every fact of your 
 early history emphasizes the religious prophe- 
 cies which thus attended its early dawn ? 
 
 I. Who were your Fathers ? Look to the 
 rock whence you were hewn, and the hole of 
 the pit whence you were digged. The stream 
 of life in some colonies has been tainted by 
 the blood of criminals. Some of you may have 
 read Walter Savage Lander's fine address to 
 Mrs. Chisholm : 
 
 ** Chisholm ! of all the ages that have rolled 
 Around this rolling world, what age hath seen 
 Such arduous, such heaven-guided enterprise 
 As thine ? Crime flies before thee, and the shores 
 Of Australasia, lustrated by thee, 
 Collect no longer the putrescent weed 
 Of Europe, flung by senates to infect 
 The only unpolluted continent." 
 
 But, gentlemen, the line you draw from is the 
 line of- men brave and free, and the blood in 
 your veins is the blood of heroes. " A Syrian 
 ready to perish was thy father," says the He- 
 brew prophet to his people. A few English- 
 men ready to perish were your ancestors ; but 
 they were true, brave, godfearing men, and 
 therefore the irresistible might of their weak- 
 ness shook the world. Sicut Patribus, sit 
 Deus nobis ! * 
 
 There were Recusants in Maryland, there 
 were Cavaliers in Virginia, but the type of your 
 manhood was derived from the awful virtue of 
 the Pilgrim Fathers. If " the feet of a few out- 
 casts pressed Plymouth Rock, and it became 
 famous," it was because those outcasts were 
 men of fixed determination, of indomitable 
 courage, of deep faith, of earnest prayer. The 
 hundred who in their frail little bark braved 
 the fury of the elements, were frowned upon 
 alike by kings and priests, but, animated by a 
 
 * The motto of Boston.
 
 72 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 passion for Liberty, they carried to America, 
 as Mr. Gladstone has said, "all that was 
 Democratic in the policy of England, and all 
 that was Protestant in her religion." Well 
 might your orator exclaim, " Victims of perse- 
 cution ! how wide an empire acknowledges the 
 sway of your principles ! Apostles of Liberty ! 
 what millions attest the authenticity of your 
 mission." But what was their safeguard ? The 
 power of faith, the passion for freedom. _" We 
 do verily believe and trust," wrote Robinson 
 and Brewster to Sir E. Sandys, in 1617, "that 
 the Lord is with us unto whom and whose ser- 
 vice we have given ourselves in many trials, 
 and that He will graciously prosper our endeav 
 ors according to the simplicity of our hearts." 
 
 There is scarcely a man whose name is con- 
 nected with the early colonization of North 
 America that is not noble and memorable. 
 There was the brilliant and unhappy Raleigh 
 — brightest star in the galaxy of stars which 
 clustered round the Virgin Queen who gave her 
 name to Virginia. There was Captain John 
 Smith, a man with the soul of a Crusader, 
 whose favorite book was " Marcus Aurelius," 
 who " in all his proceedings made justice his 
 first guide and experience his second, combat- 
 ing baseness, sloth, pride, and iniquity more 
 than any other dangers." There was William 
 Penn, ever acting in the spirit of his own con- 
 viction that the weak, the just, the pious, the 
 devout are all of one religion. There was 
 Bradford, the stern governor. There was 
 Oglethorpe, with his " strong benevolence of 
 soul." There was the hero of the Indian wars, 
 Miles Standish. There was Roger Williams, 
 the founder of Providence. There were Win- 
 throp and Endicott, the worthy founders of 
 worthy lines. 
 
 And how clearly is the will of Heaven 
 marked in your history. It is but " God's un- 
 seen Providence " which men nickname chance. 
 Least of all nations can America prepare a table
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 
 
 73 
 
 for chance or furnish a drink-offering for des- 
 tiny. * 
 
 It was not Chance which made the history 
 of mankind hang on the fortunes of handfuls 
 of strugglers in the forests of Canada. It was 
 not Chance which gave the New World to the 
 industry of Puritans, the individuaUsm of busy 
 traders. At one time, as Mr. Parkman has so 
 finely shown, it seemed certain that America 
 would have become the appanage of France. 
 That would have meant the predominance of 
 the principles of Richelieu and Loyola. It 
 would have meant the sway of the despot, the 
 noble, and the Jesuit in the continent of 
 freedom. " Populations formed in the habits 
 of a feudal monarchy and controlled by a 
 hierarchy profoundly hostile to liberty would 
 have been a hindrance and a stumbling-block in 
 the way of that majestic experiment of which 
 America is the field." But the hopes of the 
 Jesuits, in spite of all their noble labors and 
 heroic martyrdoms, were, in the Providence of 
 God, shattered to pieces by the fierce tomahawks 
 of the Iroquois. The gigantic ambition of 
 France was foiled by the " little, sickly, red- 
 haired hero " at Quebec ; and the weak and 
 broken line of English colonies along the shores 
 of the Atlantic, the descendants of an oppressed 
 and fugitive people, dashed down the iron 
 hand of monarchy in the flush of its triumphant 
 power. 
 
 At another time it seemed as if the New 
 World were to belong to the proud, sickly 
 blood of decaying Spain. St. Augustine, in 
 Florida, founded in 1565, was the first town 
 built by whites in the United States. That 
 would have meant the horrible despotism of 
 Alvas and Philips ; it would have meant the 
 narrow and crushing tvranny of the bigot and 
 the monk ; it would have meant the Mass-book, 
 the thumb-screw, and the blood-hound ; it 
 
 * See Isa. Ixiv. 12.
 
 7 4 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 would have meant the inert and execrable rule 
 of men like Menendez, the outcome of an 
 infernal ignorance animated by an infernal 
 religious zeal. But Spain was foiled by De 
 Gourges, who justly hanged, " not as Spaniards, 
 but as traitors, robbers, and murderers," the 
 Spaniards who had hanged Huguenots, *' not as 
 Frenchmen, but as Lutherans ; " — and again 
 by General Oglethorpe, who with eight hundred 
 men attacked and drove from Frederica their 
 fleet with five thousand men on board. 
 
 And so it has been written in God's Book 
 of Destiny that over America should wave 
 neither the golden lilies of France, nor the 
 lion and tower, "pale emblems of Castilian 
 pride ; " but first the stainless seinper eadem of 
 England, and then — we do not grudge them to 
 you — the stars and stripes which you borrowed 
 from the English tomb of the Washingtons. 
 
 America was God's destined heritage, not 
 for tyranny, not for aristocracy, not for privilege 
 — not for Spanish bigotry or French ambition 
 — but for England, and for the Reformation, 
 and for progress, and for liberty, and for the 
 development — if you fall not short of the vast 
 obligations which rest upon you — of a great 
 and noble type of righteous, fearless, and in- 
 dependent manhood. 
 
 11. The voices of prophetic insight, from 
 Seneca downward, point to such a destiny. 
 
 Alluding to King James and the foundation 
 of Jamestown, Shakespeare, in the prophecy 
 which he puts into the mouth of Cranmer, says : 
 
 " His honor and the greatness of his name 
 Shall make new nations." 
 
 *' Westward," wrote Bishop Berkeley in the 
 four memorable lines, now engraved over the 
 portal of the University of San Francisco — 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its way, 
 The first four acts already past, 
 The fifth shall close the drama with the day, 
 Time's noblest offspring is the last."
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 75 
 
 Those lines seem to have been written in a 
 flash of prophetic insight ; and years later 
 Emerson wrote : 
 
 " Lo I I uncover the land, 
 Which 1 hid of old time in the West, 
 
 As the sculptor uncovers his statue, 
 When he has wrought his best." 
 
 But it is for America, not to repeat these proph- 
 ecies with complacency, but rather to register 
 in heaven the vow that they shall be fulfilled. 
 When the sword of Cornwallis was surrendered 
 to Washington at Yorktown, some of the 
 Americans, with a want of consideration which 
 at such a moment was perhaps venial, began 
 to cheer. But, turning to them, the noble 
 Virginian said, with a fine rebuke, " Let 
 posterity cheer for us." Gentlemen, you, as 
 the youngest of the nations, may put your 
 sickle into the ripened harvest of the world's 
 experience, and if you learn the lessons which 
 that revelation has to teach. Posterity will raise 
 for you such a cheer as shall ring through all 
 the ages. But the lessons of History are full 
 of warning. " I will overturn, overturn, over- 
 turn," saith the Lord, " till he come whose 
 right it is." When the representatives of many 
 nations met Alexander at Babylon, the Roman 
 ambassadors were, it is said, the obscurest 
 among them ; yet Greece was overturned, and 
 Rome snatched the sceptre from her palsying 
 hands. Babylon, Assyria, Carthage, Greece, 
 Rome, have passed away. " Since the first 
 dominion of men was asserted over the ocean," 
 says Mr. Ruskin, " three empires, of mark 
 beyond all others, have been set upon its 
 sands : the thrones of Tyre, of Venice, of 
 England. Of the First of these great powers 
 only the memory remains ; of the Second, the 
 ruin ; the Third, which inherits their greatness, 
 if it forget their example, may be led through 
 prouder eminence to less pitied destruction." 
 — Is not the warning thus given to England as 
 needful for the United States ?
 
 ^6 LECTURES BY CAXON FAKRAR. 
 
 III. I have touched on your Fathers, but 
 yet another mighty impulse for good comes to 
 you from the early Visitors to your shores. 
 With what interest do we remember Robert 
 Hunt, Vicar of Reculver, in Kent, who on June 
 21, 1607, celebrated the first English communion 
 ever held in the New World with the unruly 
 crew of Captain John Smith. Was it no boon 
 to you that Charles Wesley, the sweet poet of 
 the Methodist movement, was the secretary of 
 General Oglethorpe, and accompanied him to 
 Georgia with his brother John Wesley ? In 
 St. Simon's Island 'you can still point to 
 Wesley's oak, and in Newburyport Church to 
 the grave of George Whitefield. It was he 
 who suggested the motto, Nil desperandum 
 Chris to dnce, 
 
 " That day when sunburned Pepperell, 
 His shotted salvoes fired so well; 
 The Fleur de Lys trailed sulky down, 
 And Louisburg was George's town." 
 
 Thus to you also was communicated, by strange 
 interpositions of Providence, the electric thrill 
 of that awakenment which startled the eigh- 
 teenth century from its torpor of indolence and 
 death. 
 
 Besides these, there came to you two great 
 visitors of whose interest and affection any 
 country might be proud. One was the gallant, 
 the chivalrous, the stainless Lafayette, burning 
 with the passion for freedom and the enthusi- 
 asm of humanity ; the other was that whitest 
 of human souls, Bishop Berkeley, whose wooden 
 house still stands at Newport. It is something 
 that you can point to the sea-cave in which was 
 written the " Minute Philosopher; " something 
 that the early streams of your history are com- 
 mingled with the purest glories of the French 
 Revolution, and the serene dawn of modern 
 Philosophy ; with the influence of one who 
 added to the holiness of a saint the keenness of 
 a philosopher, and to whom one of the most
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 
 
 11 
 
 cynical of poets could ascribe " every virtue 
 under heaven." Lafayette hung the key of 
 the Bastile in Mount Vernon ; Berkeley left 
 his library to Yale. 
 
 Then, still keeping to the earlier stages of 
 American historv, how distinctive and how 
 beautiful are the characteristics of your great 
 men in Church and State : — In the Church, or, 
 if you prefer it, in the churches — but to me 
 there is but one great flock of God, however 
 many may be the folds — you may look back 
 with pride to the holy enthusiasm and bound- 
 less self-sacrifice of David Brainerd : to the 
 lion-hearted courage of John Elliot ; to those 
 four students at Williamstown who gave the 
 first impulse to the mighty work of missons ; 
 to the heroic endurance of Adoniram Judson ; 
 to Johnson of Yale, who in 17 17 was the first 
 to teach the Copernican system in America ; 
 to the faith and determination of Bishop Sea- 
 bury ; to the large-hearted theology and far- 
 seeing wisdom of Bishop White ; to the intense 
 if Cimmerian theology of Jonathan Edwards ; 
 to the fiery courage of Theodore Parker ; to 
 the conquering sweetness and charity of William 
 EUery Channing, " whose words went forth like 
 morning over the Continents." In the State, 
 time would fail me to tell of JefTerson, who 
 wrote your immortal Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence ; of Otis, with his tongue of flame, who 
 " breathed into your nation the breath of life ; " 
 of Patrick Henry, that 
 
 " Forest-born Demosthenes, 
 Whose thunder shook the Philip of the Seas ; " 
 
 of young Warren, with his death and glory. 
 Yes, in your old South Church, which I trust 
 you will preserve inviolate forever. 
 
 " Adams shall look in Otis' face, 
 
 Blazing with freedom's soul, 
 And Molvneux see Hancock trace 
 The fatal word which frees a race ; 
 There in New England's well-earned place. 
 
 The head of Freedom's roll 1 "
 
 yg LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 And two there are who must have separate 
 and special mention. One was the true patriot 
 and sage, who 
 
 *' Called the red lightning from the o'er-rushing cloud, 
 And dashed the beauteous terror on the ground, 
 Smiling majestic; " 
 
 the other, he who, " first in war, first in peace, 
 first in the hearts of his countrymen," has been 
 called by an English writer " the greatest of 
 good men, and the best of great men," and of 
 whom your own great orator has said that 
 " America has furnished to the world the char- 
 acter of Washington." 
 
 " So sacred ! is there aught surrounding 
 Our lives, like that great Past behind, 
 Where Courage, Freedom, Faith abounding, 
 One mighty cord of honor twined? " 
 
 IV. Let me pass on to the War of Indepen- 
 dence, and I am certain that every one here 
 will agree with me when I say that Americans 
 in the last few years have begun to understand 
 far better the feelings of Englishmen respect- 
 ing it. In reading some of the Fourth of July 
 utterances we might fancy that you believed us 
 to entertain a sore and sullen feeling, and that 
 no Englishman could think without a blush of 
 shame and a spasm of anger of the surrender 
 of Burgoyne at Saratoga and of Cornwallis at 
 Yorktown. I hope that I need not in the year 
 1885 stop to remove so unfounded an impres- 
 sion. I have myself preached a Fourth of 
 July sermon in Westminster Abbey, and have 
 invited your eminent countryman. Dr. Phillips 
 Brooks, to do the same. Strange that any 
 American should overlook the fact that the 
 opponents of the American colonies were not 
 the English people, but the king and the rulers 
 who misrepresented them. Have you forgot- 
 ten the words of Burke ? Have you forgotten 
 that Barre' called you " Sons of Liberty ? " 
 Have you forgotten his daring words in the
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 
 
 79 
 
 House of Commons, once familiar to your very 
 school-boys ? — " They planted by your care ! 
 No ! Your oppression planted them in America, 
 . . . They nourished by your indulgence ! 
 They grew up by your neglect of them. They 
 protected by your arms ! They have nobly 
 taken up arms in your defence ! " Can you 
 ever forget the volcanic outburst of Chatham ? 
 — " The gentleman tells us that America is 
 obstinate, America is almost in open rebellion. 
 Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted ! 
 Three millions of people so dead to all the 
 feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to 
 be slaves, would have been fit instruments to 
 make slaves of all the rest." If our glories 
 are yours, we have learned also to look on 
 yours as ours. We do not grudge you your 
 Marathon of Bunker Hill, and we can repeat 
 as proudly as you — 
 
 *' By the rude bridge that arched the flood 
 Their flag to April's breeze unfurled ; 
 In arms the embattled farmers stood, 
 
 And fired the shot heard round the world." 
 
 And I will tell you why we can look to the 
 defeat of our forces without any of that shame 
 which we should have felt had the defeat come 
 from any hands but yours. It is because Eng- 
 land could say, almost with a smile. My sons 
 have conquered ; it is from me they drew their 
 strength ! When the lioness was taunted with 
 bringing forth only one cub at a time, she an- 
 swered : " Yes, but that is a lion." You 
 fought us in our own spirit. You retaught us 
 what you had learned from us ; your rebellion 
 was but a vibration of " that deep chord which 
 Hampden smote." When American friends 
 gave me a window in honor of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, the founder of Virginia, the Father 
 of the United States, I asked Mr. Lowell to 
 write the inscription, and he wrote this qua- 
 train :
 
 8o LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 " The New World's sons, from England's breast we 
 drew 
 Such milk as bids remember whence we came ; 
 Proud of her Past, from which our Present grew, 
 This window we erect to Raleigh's name." 
 
 Keep your Fourth of July celebrations as long 
 as you will. Let them teach you to say, with 
 good reason, "Thank God, I also am an 
 American." But I am sure that they will be 
 kept no longer in any spirit of hostility to your 
 mothei-land. An Arab in the desert once 
 asked a traveller if he was an Englishman. 
 " No," was the answer, " I am an American." 
 The Arab's only reply was to hold out two of 
 his fingers. He had never heard Fluellen's 
 proverb, " As like as my fingers to my fingers," 
 but he knew that England and America are 
 one in language, one in manner, one in desires 
 and habits and aspirations, one in worship and 
 birth and blood. 
 
 In the issue, then, of your War of Indepen- 
 dence, we too see the hand of God. Franklin, 
 in 1783, mentions the daily prayer offered up 
 for the Divine protection. " Our prayers," he 
 says, " were heard, and they were graciously 
 answered. All of us who were engaged in the 
 struggle must have observed frequent instances 
 of a superintending Providence in our favor. 
 Have we forgotten that Divine Friend, or do 
 we no longer need His assistance .'' I have 
 lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live 
 the more convincing proofs I see of the truth 
 that God governs in the affairs of men." Per- 
 haps Franklin was thinking of the sudden 
 tempest which came in answer to Thomas 
 Prince's prayer, when, in 1746, Admiral D'An- 
 ville had sworn to ravage Boston Town. 
 
 V. I pass on to the great crisis of your 
 modern history — the war of secession, the civil 
 war, the war between the North and South. 
 In that war, too, in its origin, in its issues, in 
 its many incidents, I see as manifestly as in 
 your origin, and in the War of Independence
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 8 1 
 
 the light of God, which shines on so steadily, 
 and shows all things in the slow history of their 
 ripening. 
 
 What an awful time it was, and how you 
 learned to realize, as we had realized two cen- 
 turies and a half before you, the horrors of a 
 house divided against itself ! Civil war is at 
 the best a heart-rending word, and if the 
 younger generation fail to realize all it meant, 
 we can feel what it meant — we who have lived 
 through the Indian mutiny and the Crimean 
 war. We know how your hearts ached to think 
 of those whom God touched with his finger in 
 the woods of Tennessee and by the green hill- 
 slopes of the Potomac ; of that disaster at Bull 
 Run, where your new volunteers were faint with 
 thirst and hunger, and fell asleep on the green- 
 sward for very weariness ; of Washington 
 turned into one great hospital ; of those multi- 
 tudes of terrible oblong boxes which the trains 
 carried to various cities ; of the tears of the 
 nation which fell so hot and heavy over her 
 dead volunteers. You can never forget, while 
 life lasts, the days when, as the eye glanced 
 over the daily papers, the two words " mortally 
 wounded," struck an unutterable chill into so 
 many hearts of mothers and wives ; when men, 
 sacrificing all, locked up the shops and chalked 
 up, " We have enlisted for the war "; when those 
 brave hearts went down in the stream on board 
 the Cu?nberland. sloop of war ; when the red 
 stains on the woodland leaves were not only 
 from the maple's conflagration ; when your 
 land, even amid her anguish, rejoiced that she 
 had sons with hearts like these. In those days 
 God ordained for you famine and fire and sword 
 and lamentation. The blood of the gallant and 
 good flowed like a river, and the dear ones at 
 home hungered for news ; and dread memories 
 were left for years, and the hearts of women 
 slowly broke. It was not only gray-haired 
 fathers who sank under the bayonet thrust, and 
 men who came home crippled for the rest of
 
 82 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 life, but the shots which pierced the breasts of 
 young men drenched in blood a picture and a 
 lock of woman's hair ; and in the delirious fever 
 of their wounds bright-eyed, gallant boys 
 talked of their mothers and babbled of the 
 green fields at home. How full is that page in 
 your history of noble and tender memories ! 
 " In how many paths," said Mr. Lowell, " lead- 
 ing to how many homes, where proud memory 
 does all she can to fill up the fireside gaps with 
 shining shapes, do men walk in pensive mood ? 
 Ah, young heroes, safe in immortal youth as 
 those of Homer, you at least carried your ideal 
 hence untarnished. It is locked for you, be- 
 yond moth and rust, in the treasure-chamber 
 of death." Your poets, even your unknown 
 poets, spoke of it in touching accents : 
 
 " All quiet along the Potomac to-night, 
 
 Except now and then a stray picket 
 Is shot, as he walked on the beat to and fro, 
 
 By a rifleman hid in the thicket. 
 'Tis nothing — a private or two now and then 
 
 Will not count in the news of the battle; 
 Not an officer lost — only one of the men. 
 
 Moaning out, all alone, the death-rattle. 
 « * # * 
 
 " He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree, 
 
 His footstep is lagging and weary, 
 Yet onward he goes through the broad belt of light, 
 
 Though the shades of the forest be dreary. 
 Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves? 
 
 Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing ? 
 It looked like a rifle—' Ha ! Mary, good-night ! ' 
 
 And the life-blood is ebbing and plashing. 
 
 " All quiet along the Potomac to-night, 
 No sound save the rush of the river. 
 While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead ; — 
 The picket's off duty forever." 
 
 Men left at home their pale young wives 
 and sweet groups of little children, and how 
 many thought — 
 
 " You have put the children to bed, Alice, 
 Maud and Willie and Rose; 
 They have lisped their sweet Our Father, 
 And sunk to their night's repose,
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 83 
 
 Did they think of me, dear Alice, 
 
 Did they think of me and say, 
 * God bless him,' and ' God bless him, 
 
 Dear father far away ? ' " 
 
 And then, what indomitable determination 
 was breathed forth by some of your songs : 
 
 " For the birthright yet unsold, 
 For the history yet untold, 
 For the future yet unrolled — 
 Put it through ! 
 
 " Father Abram, hear us cry — 
 We can follow, we can die; 
 Lead your children, then, and try- 
 Put it throui^h ! 
 
 '£>■ 
 
 ** Here's a work of God half done, 
 Here's the kingdom of His Son, 
 With its triumph just begun — 
 Put it through ! 
 
 " Father Abram, that man thrives 
 Who with every weapon strives, 
 Use our twenty million lives — 
 Put it through ! 
 
 " 'Tis to you the trust is given, 
 'Tis by you the bolt is driven, 
 By the very God of Heaven, 
 Put it through I " 
 
 Yes, those sad days had their nobleness and 
 their deep, unbroken human affections amid 
 the horrors of war. Bad practices and fierce 
 factions were forgotten. You remember how 
 when two regimental bands were hurling re- 
 sponsive and defiant strains at each other, at 
 last one of them struck up " Home ! Sweet 
 Home !" and to that challenge the enemy had 
 no defiance ; all they could do was to join their 
 strains also with the strains of their foemen in 
 *' Home ! Sweet Home ! " So does 
 
 " One touch of nature make the whole world kin." 
 
 You remember how when General Lee lay 
 sleeping under a tree for weariness, the army
 
 84 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 of the South marched by him in utter silence, 
 having passed along the lines the whisper, 
 "Uncle Robert's asleep; don't disturb him." 
 You remember how once the two hostile armies 
 delayed the charge and stopped firing because 
 a little child had strayed between the lines. In 
 that war, too, I see distinctly 
 
 " God's terrible and fiery finger 
 Shrivel the falsehood from the souls of men." 
 
 You had bitter feelings against England be- 
 cause of the Alabama, and because you thought 
 she sympathized with the South more than the 
 North. Well, in the first place, the great heart 
 of England was in no sense whatever respon- 
 sible for the muddle of international law which 
 allowed the escape of the. A/abama, and, in the 
 second place, even for her voluntary entangle- 
 ment in the doings of that vessel, though they 
 were done against her will, England has made 
 you frank acknowledgment and has paid you 
 ample reparation. Nor was it true that the 
 voice which John Bright raised for you in 
 Birmingham was a voice without an echo. It 
 woke hundreds and thousands of echoes ; only 
 you must remember that in those days, if many 
 of us by no means understood the issue, neither 
 did many of you. God has flashed the light of 
 history over the obscurities of those days, and 
 made many things plain which then were com- 
 plex. It was He who gave you grace as a 
 nation to decide aright; for 
 
 " Once to every man and nation comes the moment to 
 
 decide. 
 In the strife of truth and falsehood for the good or 
 
 evil side. 
 Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each 
 
 the bloom or blight, 
 Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep 
 
 upon the right; 
 And the choice goes by forever \vi\xt the darkness 
 
 and the light." 
 
 In that hour America had the wisdom given 
 her to decide —
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERIAC. 85 
 
 " In whose party she should stand, 
 Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shook the dust 
 against her land." 
 
 And God gave you the right men to guide 
 you. He gave you that strong, homely, wise, 
 fearless type of American manhood, Abraham 
 Lincoln, calling him as clearly from the wood- 
 shanty and the store as ever he called David 
 from following the ewes great with young ones. 
 From the leather-store at Galena, He called 
 your indomitable soldier, Grant, with his clear- 
 sighted purpose and his demands of " uncon- 
 ditional surrender." From the log-hut and the 
 school-master's desk He called the firm spirit 
 of James Garfield. The shot of the assassin 
 cut short their martyr-lives, but not until their 
 work was done; and "when God's servants 
 have done their day's work He sends them 
 sleep." Each of them has sunk to sleep amid 
 your tears. " For departed kings there are 
 appointed honors, and the wealthy have their 
 gorgeous obsequies ; it was their nobler function 
 to clothe a nation in spontaneous mourning, 
 and to go down to the grave amid the bene- 
 dictions of the poor." 
 
 Your civil war ended, and ended gloriously. 
 The South accepted the terrible arbitrament 
 and read God's will in its issue, and bowed her 
 head and clasped your hand in fraternal union. 
 The bow of peace spanned once more the 
 stormy heaven, and the Hag which had been 
 rent was one again, and without a seam. 
 
 " Then hail the banner of the free, 
 The starry flower of liberty; 
 Behold, its streaming rays unite 
 Mingling flood of braided light — 
 The red that fires the Southern rose 
 With spotless white from Northern snows, 
 And spangled o'er its azure sea 
 The sister stars of Liberty." 
 
 Thenceforth the question of slavery is set- 
 tled on the right side forever — the life-long ef- 
 fort of Channing, and Theodore Parker, and
 
 86 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 Whittier, and Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell 
 Phillips, and all the glorious army of Abolition- 
 ists was accomplished, and you will remain, we 
 trust, 
 
 " One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, 
 One Nation evermore, 
 
 while your genius of Liberty holds forth her 
 olive-branch and tramples the broken fetters of 
 four million slaves beneath her feet. 
 
 VI. And then at once and most gladly, and, 
 let us hope, for many a century, you laid the 
 sword aside. " The sword, after all," as Victor 
 Hugo says, " is but a hideous flash in the 
 darkness," while " Right is an eternal ray." 
 " As the sword," said Washington, " was the 
 last resort for the preservation of our liberties, 
 so it ought to be the first they lay aside when 
 those liberties are firmly established." When 
 the Duke of Cambridge asked General Grant 
 to review the English army, he made the noble 
 answer that a military review was the one thing 
 which he hoped never to see again. But the 
 War of the Secession established your national 
 position. Just as, during the fighting, many 
 a boy, learning to look death in the face, 
 sprang into manhood at the touch of noble re- 
 sponsibility, so the war strengthened and sober- 
 ed you, and gave to your thoughts, your politics, 
 your bearing as a people, a grander and man- 
 lier tone. The nation waved her hand, and 
 her army of more than a million sank back in- 
 stantly into peaceful civil life, as the soldiers 
 of Roderic Dhu sank back into the heather. 
 " Cincinnatus," says Mr. Gladstone, " became 
 a commonplace example. . . . The gen- 
 erals of yesterday were the editors, the secre- 
 taries, and the solicitors of to-day." It was a 
 noble lesson to mankind, and a splendid ser- 
 vice to the cause of popular government 
 throughout the world. And again I say that 
 the man must be blind indeed who cannot see 
 that God's manifest Providence led and pro-
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 87 
 
 tected you. " If a sparrow cannot fall to the 
 ground without God's notice, is it probable 
 that an empire can rise without His aid ? " * 
 " Stand still and see the salvation of God " — 
 such was the telegram flashed by President 
 Lincoln on one memorable occasion. And 
 when Lincoln had fallen ; when the population 
 of New York was wild with passionate excite- 
 ment ; when, like a spark falling on gunpowder, 
 a single wrong word might have launched a 
 terrible multitude into conflagration and mas- 
 sacre, Garfield appeared at the window shaking 
 a white flag, and when he had hushed the at- 
 tention of the multitude into breathless silence, 
 what did he say ? He said : " Fellow-citizens, 
 clouds and darkness are round about him ; 
 righteousness and judgment are the habita- 
 tions of his seat." Again and again the words 
 of Scripture have been potent at the crises of 
 your history. " That book, sir," said President 
 Andrew Jackson, pointing to the family Bible, 
 as he lay on his death-bed, " is the rock on 
 which our republic rests." The first words 
 ever flashed along an electric wire in America 
 were the words, " What hath God wrought "i " 
 sent by a young girl from Washington to 
 Baltimore. And when man's science subdued 
 the forces of the lightning and the ocean, and 
 the electric cable first thrilled its flaming mes- 
 sages of love and hope " through the oozy 
 dungeons of the rayless deep," almost the first 
 words flashed from hemisphere to hemisphere 
 were the divine message of Christmas, " Glory 
 to God in the highest, and on earth peace, 
 good-will toward men." 
 
 Vn. How quickly, again, by Heaven's bless- 
 ing you recovered from the shock of war ; how 
 your prosperity advanced by leaps and bounds ! 
 What the Priest Vimont said to the followers 
 of Maisonneuve, when they landed at Montreal, 
 in 1642, applies to you : "You are a grain of 
 
 * Franklin.
 
 88 LECTURES BY CANON EARRAR. 
 
 mustard-seed that shall rise and grow till its 
 branches overshadow the earth. You are few, 
 but your work is the work of God. His smile 
 is on you, and your children shall fill the land." 
 It is a theme too familiar to dwell upon how a 
 handful has become a mighty nation ; how 
 groups of log-huts have sprung in a few years 
 into splendid cities ; how a fringe of precari- 
 ous seaboard has become an empire of which 
 the two great seas of the world wash the one 
 and the other shore ; how your commerce, 
 reaching to every land and spreading white sails 
 on every sea, is already a dangerous if friendly 
 rival to the commerce of England ; how in a 
 single century of freedom you have sprung 
 from one to fifty millions ; how a band of 
 daring fugitives has become almost in a cen- 
 tury the wealthiest and one of the most power- 
 ful of all the nations on the globe. Are we 
 not startled into astonishment when we hear of 
 those who have spoken to men whose grand- 
 fathers remembered to have been present as 
 children, in 1704, at the funeral of Peregrine 
 White, the first English babe born on the New 
 England shores ? And now vou have more 
 than three millions of square miles of territory ; 
 26,000 miles of river wav : 12,000 of indented 
 shore ; and more than sixty millions of living 
 souls rich in their •' inherent and inalienable 
 rights ! " 
 
 Surely, you might apply to yourselves the 
 words of Tennyson : 
 
 " Our enemies have fallen, have fallen; the seed. 
 The little seed they laughed at in the dark, 
 Has risen and cleft the soil and grown a bulk 
 Of spanless girth that lavs on every side 
 A thousand arms and rushes to the sun — 
 A night of summer from the heat, a breath 
 Of autumn dropping fruits of power; and rolled 
 With Music in the growing breeze of Time, 
 The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs 
 Shall move the stony bases of the world." 
 
 VIII. But all this pompous detail of material 
 triumphs is worse than idle unless the men of
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 89 
 
 the two countries shall remain and shall be- 
 come greater than the mere things that they 
 produce, and shall know how to regard those 
 things simply as tools and materials for the 
 attainment of the highest purposes of their be- 
 ing. The voice of Milton tells you, as it told 
 England after her civil discord, that 
 
 " Peace hath her victories 
 Not less renowned than war." 
 
 In many directions you have been mindful of 
 those victories. Suffer me to point out some 
 of your immense gains and advantages. You 
 have shown a marvellous inventiveness. You 
 develop more quickly, you adapt more rapidly 
 and unhesitatingly than on the other side of 
 the Atlantic the latest discoveries and applica- 
 tions of mechanical science. You have shown 
 multitudes of examples of that splendid munifi- 
 cence — illustrated by such names as those of 
 John Harvard, of George Peabody, of Peter 
 Cooper, of Johns Hopkins, and many more — 
 which leads men who have made colossal for- 
 tunes among you to spend part at least of 
 those fortunes not in the endownent of idle 
 families, but in enriching and benefiting the 
 cities of their birth, the nation under whose 
 gentlest of sways their path was paved from 
 the lot of ragged and laboring boys to that of 
 an affluence beyond the dreams of avarice. 
 Your libraries, with their admirable card-cata- 
 logues, with their generous facilities, with their 
 ample endowments, with their accumulated aid 
 to research, ought to make a nation of scholars. 
 Your svstem of education is one of the freest 
 and most ungrudging in the world. Best per- 
 haps of all, you have developed and are devel- 
 oping a fine and original literature. You may 
 well be proud of your poets : of Bryant, who 
 "entered the heart of America through the 
 Gate Beautiful ; " of Longfellow, that pure and 
 exquisite singer, whose bust in Westminster 
 Abbey is the delight of our two nations ; of
 
 90 LECTURES BY CANOiV FARRAR. 
 
 Edgar Poe's weird genius; of the living fame 
 of such men as Lowell with his generous cul- 
 ture, of Holmes with his sunny geniality, of 
 Whittier with his passionate love of right and 
 hatred of wrong. Among your novelists you 
 count the honored names of Fenimore Cooper, 
 the delight of our boyhood, of Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorne, whose works have the immortality of 
 genius. You have the humor of James, of 
 Howell, of Bret Harte, of Mark Twain. You 
 have the brilliant histories of Washington Ir- 
 ving, of Bancroft, of Prescott, of Motley, of 
 Parkman. You have the splendid oratory of 
 Clay, of Daniel Webster, of Wendell Phillips. 
 All this is well. To borrow the image sug- 
 gested by the late beloved Dean of Westmin- 
 ster when you welcomed him among you, the 
 rush and fury of Niagara is a type of the life 
 of your people — " its devouring, perplexing, 
 fermenting, bewildering activity ; " but it would 
 lose nine-tenths of its splendor and loveliness, 
 if it had not the silvery column of spray above 
 it as the image of your future history — of the 
 upward, heaven-aspiring destiny which should 
 emerge from the distractions of your present. 
 And if that glittering column of heaven-ascend- 
 ing spray is to be the type of your aspirations, 
 may I not add that the vivid rainbow — " in 
 sight like unto an emerald " — which to my eyes 
 lent its chief glory to the Falls, may also be 
 the symbol of your nation's hope ? 
 
 IX. It would be false and idle to imply that 
 you have no perils — that there are no rocks, 
 no whirlpools which lie in front of your steam- 
 driven ship of state. It is hardly for me, it is 
 not for any stranger to dwell on these. A 
 stranger does not know, he cannot know much 
 if anything about the spoils system ; about 
 bosses and bossism ; about the danger of a 
 secularized education ; about the subtle op- 
 pression of popular opinion ; about frauds, and 
 rings, and municipal corruption ; about the 
 amazing frivolousness, the triviality, the
 
 THO UGHTS OAt A M ERICA . 9 1 
 
 tyranny, the ferocity, the untruthfulness, the 
 reckless personality and intrusiveness of the 
 baser portion of your Press. He reads, indeed, 
 in your leading journals, of evils " calculated to 
 humiliate and discourage those who have both 
 pride and faith in republican institutions ; of 
 political scandals, and commercial dishonors; 
 of demagogism in public life ; of reckless finan- 
 cial speculations ; of a lessening sense of the 
 sacredness of marriage ; of defalcations, mal- 
 feasance, sinister legislation, bought and paid 
 for by those whom it benefits ; of a false ideal 
 of life which puts material interest above the 
 spiritual, and makes riches the supreme object 
 of human endeavor and an absorbing passion 
 for paltry emulations." Of all these he reads 
 in your papers and magazines, and of the warn- 
 ing of your wisest writers, that "popular gov 
 ernment is no better than any other except the 
 wisdom and virtue of the people make it so," 
 and that " Democracy has weakness as well as 
 strength," Clearly all these questions demand 
 most solemn care. As the same voice has 
 said, " when men undertake to do their own 
 kingship they enter on the dangers and respon- 
 sibilities as well as on the privileges of the 
 function." Times of long peace, times of 
 growing prosperity are times of serious peril. 
 " About the river of human life there is a wintry 
 wind but a heavenly sunshine ; the iris colors 
 its agitation, the frost fixes on its repose." 
 You have freedom, but freedom demands an 
 eternal vigilance. Franklin warned you a hun- 
 dred j'ears ago of the peril of being divided by 
 little, partial, local interests. There can be 
 no liberty without honesty and justice. " You 
 may build your capitol of granite," said Wen- 
 dell Phillips, " and pile it high as the Rocky 
 Mountains ; if it is founded on or mixed up 
 with iniquity, the pulse of a girl will in time 
 beat it down." Public spirit, watchfulness, the 
 participation of all in the burden and heat of 
 the day, are requisite if America would work
 
 9 2 LECTURES B Y CANON FA RRAR. 
 
 out her own salvation, and therewith ahnost 
 the salvation of the race. 
 
 X. But not for one moment would your most 
 pessimistic citizen despair. To despair of 
 America would be to despair of humanity ; for 
 it would show that men, after all, have no 
 capacity for governing themselves : that they 
 have, after all, no nobler destiny than to be 
 the footstool of the few.* 
 
 And there are two reasons why not even the 
 most cynical pessimist need despair of America 
 — the one because your government is a 
 government of manhood, the other, because 
 you have succeeded in training men. It is a 
 government of the people, by the people, for 
 the people. The multitude may sometimes be 
 careless and supine ; it may fail to understand 
 the responsibilities which attach to liberty. 
 But sooner or later it awakens in all its strength 
 and treads wicked laws and base combinations 
 under his feet. The rousing of a magnificent 
 people when it " views its mighty youth, and 
 shakes its invincible locks," is as when 
 
 " The lion shakes the dew-drop from its mane." 
 
 Nay, even these metaphors of Shakespeare 
 and Milton are too weak to image forth the 
 outburst of volcanic wrath which sometimes, 
 almost in a moment, transforms a peaceful and 
 careless commonwealth into terrific and irre- 
 sistible agitation, as vast subterranean forces 
 in one moment transform into bellowing erup- 
 tion the mountain which but yesterday had 
 snow in its long-slumbering crater, and gar- 
 dens and vineyards upon its sunny slopes. 
 
 I ask, then, with President Lincoln in his 
 first Inaugural Address : " Why should there 
 not be a patient confidence in the ultimate 
 justice of the people ? Is there any better or 
 equal hope in the world ? " 
 
 * See the speech of Franklin in the convention for 
 forming the Constitution of the United States in 1783.
 
 THOUGHTS OAT AMERICA. 93 
 
 Shakespeare in his day complained that 
 
 *' Not a man, for being simply man, 
 Hath any honor, but honor for those honors 
 That are without him — as place, riches, favor, 
 Prizes of accident as oft as merit." 
 
 It has not been so with you. You have felt 
 the sacredness of manhood, the dignity of man- 
 hood, the illimitable horizon of its hopes, the 
 immeasurable capability of its powers. Your 
 very Declaration of Independence lays it down 
 as a self-evident truth, " that all men are 
 created equal ; that they are endowed by their 
 Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that 
 among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness." If often upon a small scale in 
 local communities, and upon a large scale in 
 your national history, you have witnessed the 
 irresistible revolt of the national conscience 
 against the growth of intolerable wrongs, the 
 cause of this latent force is because you have 
 honored men simply as men. 
 
 From the street and from the store, from 
 the forest and from the prairie, you have taken 
 ragged, bright-eyed boys, with little or no reg- 
 ular education even, but enriched by the les- 
 sons of experience and crowned and mitred by 
 the hands of invisible consecration, and not 
 asking who they were but only what they have 
 proved themselves capable to be — because of 
 their homely wisdom, because of their native 
 strength, because of their undaunted righteous- 
 ness — you have fearlessly set them to com- 
 mand a million of your soldiers, to rule over 
 fifty millions of their fellow-men. Such a man 
 was James Garfield ; such a man was Ulysses 
 Grant ; such a man was Abraham Lincoln. 
 Were manlier words ever spoken than those 
 with which he ended his New Vork speech in 
 i860 : " Let us have faith that right makes 
 might ; and in that faith let us to the end dare 
 to do our duty as we understand it." A man, 
 in one aspect, may be but a shadow and a
 
 94 LECTURES BY CANO.Y FAKRAR. 
 
 vapor ; in another, he is immortal, immeasur 
 able, infinite, and he is never so great as when 
 he is uplifted by the aspirations of a great land. 
 "Governments, religion, property, books," 
 said Humboldt, " are nothing but the scaffold- 
 ing to build a man. Earth holds up to her 
 Master no fruit but the finished man." " Man- 
 kind," said Kossuth, " has but one single ob- 
 ject — mankind itself; and that object has 
 but one single instrument — mankind again." 
 " Men," said Pericles, " are a city, and not 
 walls." The prayer of every great community 
 should ever be, O God, give us men. 
 
 " What constitutes a State ? " asks Sir Wil- 
 liam Jones in his ode in imitation of Alcaeus. 
 
 " Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, 
 Thick walls or moated gate; 
 
 Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned; 
 Not bays and broad-armed ports, 
 Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride; 
 Not starred and spangled courts. 
 No? Men — high-minded men; 
 Men who their duties know. 
 
 And know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain; 
 Prevent the long-aimed blow. 
 And crush the tyrant, while they rend the chain — 
 These constitute a state: 
 And sovereign Law that, with collected will, 
 On crowns and globes elate 
 Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill." 
 
 XI. But am I wrong in saying — if I am you 
 will forgive me, for it is only the impression to 
 which I have been led by studying the minds 
 of some of your greatest thinkers — am I wrong 
 in saying that at this moment in her history 
 America needs nothing more imperatively than 
 a new and concentrated enthusiasm ? If 
 Prophets be needed to stir up the monotony of 
 wealth, and re-awaken the people to the great 
 ideals which are constantly fading out of their 
 minds — " to trouble the waters that there may 
 be health in their flow " — in what directions 
 could such Prophets point which should give 
 any grander aims than the achievement of the
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 
 
 95 
 
 old eternal ideals ? "That motionless shaft," 
 said Daniel Webster, pointing to the pillar on 
 Bunker Hill " will be the most powerful of 
 speakers. Its speech will be of civil and 
 religious liberty. It will speak of patriotism 
 and of courage. It will speak of the moral 
 improvement and elevation of mankind. De- 
 crepit age leaning against its base, and ingen- 
 uous youth gathering round it, will speak to 
 each other of the glorious events with which it 
 is connected, and exclaim, " Thank God ! I also 
 am an American." But that depends. The 
 boast of ancestral excellence is worse than 
 unavailing if it be used by the lips of degenerate 
 descendants. Vast is the work before America, 
 and if in her the nations of the world are to be 
 blessed, that work will need all her seriousness 
 and all her energy. 
 
 I have endeavored to emphasize the thought 
 on which all your own greatest and best men 
 have insisted, that the hand of God is pre- 
 eminently manifest in your history ; and the 
 correlative thought, that there rests upon the 
 American nation an immense burden of heaven- 
 imposed responsibility. 
 
 What is that responsibility ? 
 
 It is to combine the old with the new — the 
 experience of the East with the daring of the 
 West — " the long past of Europe with the long 
 future of America." 
 
 It is to guard the idea of Freedom as the 
 fabled dragon guarded of old the very garden 
 of the Hesperides — taking good heed that 
 liberty be not confounded with license ; nor 
 republican government with the shout of pop- 
 ular anarchy ; nor freedom with the freedom 
 to do wrong unpunished ; nor manly indepen- 
 dence with lawless self-assertion. It is to keep 
 the equilibrium between stability and advance, 
 between liberty and law. " As for me," said 
 Patrick Henry, in 1775, "give me liberty or 
 give me death." 
 
 It is to work out the conception of Progress;
 
 96 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 to recognize that it is your duty not only to 
 preserve but to improve ; to bear in mind that 
 the living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind 
 of yesterday. You and your churches will 
 have to decide whether, in the words of Caste- 
 lar, you will confound yourselves with Asia, 
 " placing upon the land old altars, and upon 
 the altars old idols, and upon the idols immov- 
 able theocracies, and upon the theocracies 
 despotic empires ; or whether by labor and 
 by liberty you will advance the grand work 
 of universal civilization." Despots, whether 
 priestly or secular, may they "stand still!" 
 But 
 
 " God to the human soul, 
 
 And all the spheres that roll 
 Wrapped by her spirit in their robes of light, 
 
 Hath said, ' The primal plan 
 
 Of all the world and man 
 Is Forward ! Progress is your law, your right ! ' " 
 
 It is to workout a manly and intelligent cor- 
 relation of religious tradition with the advancing 
 knowledge of mankind. The churches must 
 show to the world the rare example of religious 
 tolerance ; of many folds existing happily side 
 by side in the one flock. The laity must teach 
 their churches not to supersede but to supple- 
 ment each other. They must beware of stag- 
 nant doctrines and stereotyped formulae. They 
 must learn the spirit of those grand words in 
 which John Robinson addressed the Pilgrim 
 Fathers when they sailed from the shores of 
 Europe — " I am persuaded that the Lord hath 
 more truth yet to come for us ; yet to break 
 forth out of His Holy Word. Neither Luther 
 nor Calvin has penetrated into the counsel of 
 God." 
 
 " New occasions teach new duties, 
 
 Time makes ancient good uncouth; 
 They must upwards still, and onwards, 
 Who would keep abreast with Truth." 
 
 Judge Sewell set a noble example when, in 
 1696, he stood up in his pew in the Old South
 
 THOUGHTS ON AMERICA. 97 
 
 Church to confess his contrition for his share 
 in the witchcraft delusion of 1692. 
 
 That preacher of Georgia spoke wise words 
 who, taunted with a change of opinion about 
 slavery, said in a Thanksgiving sermon, " I 
 have got new light. I now believe many things 
 
 which I did not believe twenty years ago 
 
 If I live till 1900 I expect to believe some 
 things which 1 now reject and to reject some 
 things which I now believe ; — And I shall not 
 be alone." 
 
 It is, above all, to show the nations the true 
 ideal of national righteousness. Two centuries 
 and a half have passed since Peter Bulkley 
 addressed to his little congregation of exiles 
 the memorable words : " There is no people 
 but will strive to excel in something. What 
 can we excel in if not in holiness ? If we look 
 to numbers we are the fewest ; if to strength 
 we are the weakest ; if to wealth and riches we 
 are the poorest of all the people of God through- 
 out the world. We cannot excel nor so much 
 as equal other people in these things, and if 
 we come short in grace and holiness we are the 
 most despicable people under heaven. Strive 
 we therefore to excel, and suffer not this crown 
 to be taken from us." 
 
 How has all this been reversed ! In num- 
 bers you are now, or soon inevitably must be, 
 the greatest ; in strength the most overwhelm- 
 ing ; in wealth the most affluent of all the 
 Christian nations throughout the world. In 
 these things you not only equal other people 
 but excel them. Whv ? Mainlv, I believe, be- 
 cause your fathers feared God. Shall America 
 then dare to kick down that ladder, to spurn 
 the low degrees by which she did ascend, and, 
 despising the holiness which was once her single 
 excellence, now in the days of her boundless 
 prosperity to make in the common life of her 
 citizens a league with death and a covenant 
 with hell ? I do not for a moment believe it. 
 I believe that she will be preserved from all
 
 gS LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 such perils by the memories of the dead and 
 the virtues of the living. I believe that she 
 will cherish the pure homes which have never 
 lost their ancient English dower of inward hap- 
 piness. I believe that she will not suffer the 
 wise voices of the holy and thoughtful few to 
 be drowned in noisier and baser sounds. I 
 believe that her aspirations will dilate and con- 
 spire with the breezes from the sea which sweep 
 the vast horizons of your territory. I believe 
 that she will listen to the three great Angels of 
 History, of Conscience, of Experience, which, 
 as the great teachers of mankind, ever repeat 
 to us the eternal accents of the Moral Law. I 
 believe that she will help to disenchant the 
 nations of the horrible seductions of war, and 
 of a peace crushed and encumbered under war- 
 like armaments. I believe that she is linked, 
 that she will ever desire to be linked, with us 
 of the old home, in the golden yoke of amity, 
 and that by the blessing of God's peculiar grace 
 you with us and we with you, shall be enabled 
 to " make all things new " for the glory and 
 happiness of mankind. Then shall hoary- 
 headed selfishness receive its death-blow, and 
 the vilest evils which have afflicted the corpor- 
 ate life of man 
 
 " Shall live but in the memory of Time, 
 Which like a penitent libertine shall start, 
 Look back, and shudder at his former years."
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF HOLY 
 SCRIPTURE. 
 
 There are, in the book of Exodus, several 
 passages of sublime significance in whicii 
 Moses is represented as having communed 
 with God on the summit of Sinai. There were 
 thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon 
 the mountain, and it *' quaked greatly ; " and 
 " the voice of the trumpet, sounded long, and 
 waxed louder and louder." * But the sight of 
 all this majesty, and the awfulness of that 
 supernatural thunder, was more than the sinful 
 nation could bear. "And they said unto 
 Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear : 
 but let not God speak with us, lest we die. 
 And the people stood afar ofif, and Moses drew 
 near unto the thick darkness where God 
 was," t 
 
 After a sojourn of forty days in the mount, 
 and after witnessing the apostacy of his people, 
 Moses once more returned to speak with God, 
 and he said, " I beseech thee, show me thy 
 glory." And Jehovah answered him, " Thou 
 canst not see my face : for there shall no man 
 see my face, and live. Behold, there is a place 
 by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock : and 
 it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth 
 by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, 
 and will cover thee with my hand while I pass 
 by : and I will take away my hand, and thou 
 shalt see my back parts • but my face shall not 
 be seen. "I 
 
 * Exod. xix. i6, iS, 19, t Exod. xx. 19, 21. 
 
 J Exod. xxxiii. i8-2'^.
 
 lOO LECTURES B V CANON FARRAR. 
 
 In this passage, so full of deep reverence, 
 in spite of its fearless and startling anthropo- 
 morphism, we see a distinct indication that it 
 was God's purpose in the Old Dispensation to 
 reveal himself in a manner wholly different 
 from that which we should have expected. It 
 might have seemed to us that the Creator would 
 have vouchsafed to his creatures a knowledge 
 of his ways, not mediately, but immediately; 
 not individually, but universally ; not partially, 
 but completely ; not demonstrably, but deci- 
 sively ; not progressively, but at once. In all 
 these respects our anticipations are reversed. 
 It is a part of God's revelation to us that his 
 ways are not as our ways, nor his thoughts as 
 our thoughts. One of the very stamps of the 
 authenticity of his revealed will is the manner 
 in which it runs counter to everything which 
 man's unaided imagination could have invented 
 respecting him. Until the fulness of time was 
 come he spoke to many men ; he made known 
 his purposes to them in many fragments and 
 many methods,* 
 
 To Adam he spoke by a voice in the garden, 
 borne upon "the wind of the evening";! to 
 some of the patriarchs by inmiediate intui- 
 tion ; X to Abram by inward utterances, by an- 
 gelic appearances, and by the vision of a smok- 
 ing furnace and a burning lamp ; § to Jacob as 
 an awful presence in the intense agony of 
 prayer ; || to Joshua as the captain of the 
 Lord's host ; IT to his chosen people by Urim 
 and Thummim, and by dreams, and above all, 
 by the voice of his prophets.** Then came a 
 pause of well nigh 400 years, in which, as the 
 Jews believed, they had no new indication of 
 God's will, unless it were from chance voices 
 and mysterious incidental sounds. ft Last of 
 
 * Heb. i. I, t Gen. iii. 8. 
 
 { Gen. V. 24. § Gen. xii. ; xviii.; xv. 17. 
 
 II Gen. xxxii. 24-32. IT Josh, v, 14, 15. 
 
 ** I Sam. xxviii. 6. 
 t1 See various Rabinnical passages quoted in Vi-
 
 INS PI K A TION OF HOL Y SCRIP 7 URE. j o i 
 
 all when the fulness of the time was come, God 
 sent forth his Son * — the brightness of his 
 glory, the express image of his person, f to 
 reveal Him as he had never been revealed be- 
 fore, and thenceforth forever to shed forth his 
 Holy Spirit into the hearts of all his children. 
 
 Such has been the order of God's revela- 
 tions ; and the record of those revelations is 
 contained in Holy Scripture. 
 
 I. The record is marked by all the peculiari- 
 ties, and partakes of all the diversity which 
 characterizes the order and method of the 
 revelation which it perpetuates and enshrines. 
 The Old Testament comes before us as the 
 fragmentary literature of a chosen people : the 
 New as the fragmentary archives t of a sacred 
 Evangel. 
 
 We possess in the Bible a collection of books 
 separated from each other by hundreds of 
 years, written by men in every variety of rank 
 and position, and addressed to a nation under 
 every circumstance of prosperity and adver- 
 sity. Now a single Eastern emir is called out 
 of an idolatrous world to preserve alive the 
 knowledge of the One True God ; now a law- 
 giver is selected to deliver in the wilderness 
 to a perverse nation of slaves and fugitives, a 
 moral code of unequalled majesty ; now pro- 
 phets and kings speak to that nation in its 
 purity or its apostacy, in the zenith of its 
 splendor or on the eve of its desolation ; now 
 priests or captives console its melancholy exile 
 or inspirit its feeble resuscitation ; now a little 
 band of unlearned and ignorant men record 
 the words and life of its divine and rejected 
 Messiah ; now a converted Pharisee preaches 
 that new Gospel with an intense wisdom and 
 
 tringa, Obss. Sacr., ii. 343-363; Prideaux, Connect, ii. 
 354; Lightfoot, Nor. Hebr., ad Matt, iii, 17 ; Otho. 
 Lex. Rahb., p. 68 [s. v. " Bath Kol "), Etc. 
 
 * Gal. iv. 4. t Heb. i. 3. 
 
 \ John x.x. 30; xxi. 25.
 
 I02 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 fire ; now a Galilean fisherman closes the Book 
 of Revelation with words of perfect beauty and 
 visions of unutterable love. In one small 
 volume there is an epitome of all the best and 
 highest and most sacred truths which God had 
 revealed to man ; and those truths are deep as 
 the heart of man, and varied as his life. 
 
 Yet all this infinite diversity is — like the 
 diversity of nature — merged in a yet more 
 marvellous unity. Kings, warriors, prophets, 
 historians, poets, exiles, shepherds, gatherers of 
 sycamore fruit, fishermen, taxgatherers — " we 
 do hear them speak in our tongues the wonder- 
 ful works of God." Whether we read the pas- 
 sionate pleadings of an afiflicted Chaldean 
 noble, or the rhythmic utterances of a great 
 Mesopotamian sorcerer — whether it be the 
 cynical confessions of a sated worlding, or the 
 pathetic cry of a guilty and repentant king — 
 whether it be the exultant thanksgiving for 
 some splendid deliverance, or the impassioned 
 denunciation of some intolerable wrong — 
 whether it be the stately music of some gor- 
 geous vision, or the brief letter of an aged 
 prisoner recommending the forgiveness of an 
 unprofitable slave — we feel that there reigns, 
 throughout, a divine coherency, an unbroken 
 unity ; we feel that the long history is also 
 a symbol and a prophecy ; * that each writer 
 was but the instrument, often the wholly un- 
 conscious instrument, of purposes loftier than 
 his own, and the utterer of language often 
 deeper than he himself could understand ; we 
 feel that in the old Testament the New is pre- 
 figured, in the New the Old fulfilled. From 
 beginning to end we recognize the truth, that 
 though God is in all history, never had any 
 nation a history so significant as that of this 
 nation : none have ever known as these knew, 
 or taught as these teach, the holiness of God 
 and the majesty of man. 
 
 * " Dum narrat gestum prodit mysterium," — Greg. 
 Magn.
 
 INS PI R A TION OF HOL Y SCR IP PURE. 1 03 
 
 Once more, we feel an essential difference in 
 many respects between all other books and 
 those of which the Scriptures are composed. If 
 we take up any uncanonical or Apocryphal 
 book of the same people, they often fill us with 
 an astonishment largely mingled with con- 
 tempt, and we feel that there is hardly one 
 such book which, had it been admitted into 
 the sacred canon, would not have given us a 
 violent and painful shock. And if we take in 
 hand the very richest, loftiest, deepest utter- 
 ances of wisdom, whether Christian or Pagan, 
 we find not only that they never surpass this 
 book, but even when its lessons were before 
 them, and its wisdom had been instilled into 
 them from childhood, they never equal it. The 
 very best of these bear upon their pages the 
 glaring proofs of human infirmity and human 
 sin ; but this book, when accepted in its com- 
 pleteness, when regarded in its true unity, 
 seems, even in what might appear to be its 
 weakest places, to transcend all human imper- 
 fections, and even in its most perilous narra- 
 tives, to be exempt from every human stain. 
 Through other books the gust of passion and 
 emotion sweeps with uncontrollable mastery ; 
 this, because " the spirits of the prophets are 
 subject to the prophets," never even in its 
 most passionate passages, escapes beyond the 
 true limits of a holy self-control. Other liter- 
 atures depend for their power on the gifts of 
 human genius, and the splendor of human 
 eloquence ; this seems to rise superior to the 
 aid of genius, and, though it surpasses all other 
 eloquence of oratory or song, it stands in no 
 apparent need of such adornment ! Other 
 books appeal mainly to their own times and 
 nations ; this is equally dear to any nation in 
 every age. They depend for their chief power 
 and beauty upon the language in which they 
 are written ; this is easily and universally 
 translatable with no real evaporation of the 
 Divine message which it contains. They
 
 I04 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 appeal mainly to separate classes or to isolat- 
 ed intellects ; this is " universal as our race, 
 individual as ourselves." lliey are either for 
 the aged or for the youthful — for the learned 
 only, or only for the ignorant ; this, while in- 
 exhaustible to the learned is intelligible to the 
 ignorant — it neither sates the aged when fa- 
 miliar, nor tires the young when now. It has 
 shallows which the lamb can ford, and depths 
 which the elephant must swim. It is, to borrow 
 the image of the greatest of the Latin Fathers, 
 a great sea, whose smiling surface breaks in 
 refreshing ripples at the feet of our little ones, 
 but into whose unfathomable depths the wisest 
 may gaze with the shudder of amazement and 
 with the thrill of love.* 
 
 ii. And that this book does not stand on the 
 same level as other books — that, in comparison 
 with all other previous or contemporaneous 
 literatures, // is sacred and they profane — all 
 Christians are agreed. They are agreed, 
 too, that it is not written by man's unaided 
 wisdom. Many parts of it contain a history 
 of events and actions which, to an extent that 
 can be predicated of no other historv, were 
 evidently ordained by God as a distinct in- 
 dication of his nature and his will ; many parts 
 of it reveal to us directly, and apart from all 
 allegory or metaphor, the thoughts of God so 
 far as the Infinite may be comprehensible to 
 the finite ; many again furnish us with hopes 
 and promises which give a new impulse and a 
 new dignity to life, such as were never attained 
 by human insight or even dimly shadowed forth 
 in human words. All this is summed up in 
 the one expression, that the Bible was written 
 by Divine inspiration. This, too, is an ex- 
 Dression accepted in all Christian communities, 
 
 * " Mira profunditas eloquiorum tuorum, quorum 
 ecce ante nos superficies blandiens parvulis ; sed mira 
 profunditas, Deus meus, mira profunditas ! Horror est 
 iiitendere in earn ; horror honoris et tremor amoris." 
 Aug., Cotif.
 
 INSPIRA TION OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 1 05 
 
 as similar expressions were by the Jewish.* 
 By St. Paul the Scriptures are called hallowed 
 because given by God, holy as reverenced by 
 men. The terms " God-inspired," " Borne by 
 the Spirit," or simply " inspired " are applied 
 by the Fathers to the writers ; and the books 
 are rarely quoted in the early literature of 
 Christianity without some qualifying adjective, 
 expressive of their sanctity, divinity, or in- 
 spiration. The Church, in every age and every 
 nation, has ever felt that the Holy Scriptures 
 are indeed a tree of life, and that " the leaves 
 of that tree are for the healing of the nations." 
 3. The broad and general meaning of the 
 words " revelation " and " inspiration " admits 
 of no doubt. By " revelation " we imply either 
 the process by which God makes himself 
 known to man, or the knowledge thus obtained ; 
 and all such revelations have been completed 
 and perfected by Christ, the Word of God, who 
 declared and manifested his Father to man- 
 kind. f By "inspiration" we mean that in- 
 fluence of the Holy Spirit which, when in- 
 breathed into the mind of man, guides and 
 elevates and enkindles all his powers to their 
 holiest and noblest exercise. | It is, if we 
 may apply to it the language which Jesus the 
 son of Sirach applies to wisdom, " the bright- 
 ness of the everlasting light," " the breath of 
 the power of God, and a pure influence flowing 
 from the glory of the Almighty ; which being 
 but one can yet do all things ; and remaining 
 
 * Maccabees vi. 23. 
 
 t It is hardly necessary to point out the singular in- 
 completeness of the definition of this word in Hook's 
 C/iiurh Dictionary, whevQ it is defined to be "the 
 declaration of God's will contained in the sacred writ- 
 ings of the Old and New Testament." 
 
 \ " There is a spirit in man ; and the inspiration of 
 the Almighty giveth him understanding " (Jobxxxii. 8). 
 " See, I have called by name Bezaleel . . . and I have 
 filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom. . . to de- 
 vise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and 
 in brass " (Exod. xxxi. 2-4).
 
 io6 LECTURES BY CANOX FARRAR. 
 
 in herself, yet regenerateth all other powers, 
 and maketh all things new," and, " in all ages 
 entering into holy souls, maketh them friends 
 of God and prophets." * And since neither 
 in Scripture nor by the Church is the nature 
 or limit of inspiration further defined — since 
 all Christians, and even many who are not 
 Christians, are fully agreed that " Holy Script- 
 ure containeth all things necessary for salva- 
 tion " — since, if the knowledge were in reality 
 necessary for us, we should hardly have been 
 left without further and more definite guidance 
 — since " God judges that he may teach, not 
 teaches that he may judge," f — might it not 
 be well to accept this belief in the simjDlicity 
 with which w'e have received it, and to avoid 
 all further discussion of it as due to that spirit 
 of system, that idolian theatri, that fruitful 
 source of error and of bigotry, which has done 
 such infinite damage to the cause of Christian 
 charity and the conceptions of Christian faith ? 
 
 4. But however earnestly we might desire 
 to avoid further definition and discussion, the 
 complexities of modern inquiry, the vehe- 
 mences of theological controversy, even the 
 necessities of an extended exegesis, render it 
 imperative either that we should accept one or 
 other of the theories which have been pro- 
 pounded or at least give a calm and careful 
 reason why we prefer to leave the question as 
 little defined as the Holy Scriptures them- 
 selves have left it, and therefore decline the 
 specific adoption of any one of them. 
 
 Now there are no less than five well-marked 
 theories — each of them tenable in the pale of 
 the English Church, each of them supported 
 by powerful arguments, each of them main- 
 tained by men of eminent authority, each of 
 them compatible with earnest Christian faith, 
 each of them depending for their validity 
 upon obvious phenom'^na — which under some 
 
 * Wisd. vii. 25-27. t T. Erskine.
 
 INSPIRA TION OF IIOL V SCRIPTURE. 107 
 
 modification or other have found supporters 
 in every age of the Church. These theories 
 we must first state, and without necessarily 
 giving our definite adherence to any one of 
 them, we must briefly discuss the grounds on 
 which they rest. 
 
 The first may be called briefly the organic, 
 mechanical, or dictation theory. It held that 
 every sentence, every word, nay, even every 
 syllable, letter, and vowel-point of Scripture had 
 been divinely, and supernaturally imparted:* 
 that the authors' of the various books, known 
 or unknown, had no share in the composition ; 
 but they were but the amanuenses and instru- 
 ments, "not only the penmen but the pens " of 
 the Holy Spirit — being not even the active re- 
 cipents, but the mere passive vehicles, of that 
 which through them, but with no co-operation 
 of their own, was imparted to mankind. Ac- 
 cording to those who held, or possibly even hold, 
 this theory, the Bible not only records but is a 
 revelation, not only reveals but is a religion, 
 not only contains but is the Word of God. 
 This theory may indeed be countenanced by 
 incidental expressions of the Fathers rather than 
 by their actual method of dealing with Script- 
 ure, * but it is mainly since the Reformation 
 and in Protestant Churches that it has been 
 formulated into an accurate theological dogma 
 or that any great stress has been laid upon it. 
 It found a partial expression in the popular but 
 loose and narrow formula of Chillingworth, 
 *' The Bible and the Bible only is the religion 
 of Protestants," 
 
 ii. The second theory has been called the 
 dynamic. It holds that Holy Scripture was not 
 
 * We may instance Jerome's criticisims on the " Rus- 
 ticitas " in the style of some of the prophets, the " sol- 
 ecisms " of St. Paul, &c. (Proem in Esaiam? ; Proem in 
 Jerem. ; ad Gal. iii i, &c. ) ; and even his great oppon- 
 ent, St. Augustine, says that the Evangelists wrote " ut 
 quisque meminerat et ut cuique cordi erat'' De Cons, 
 JLvang. ii. v.).
 
 I o8 LEC TURES B \ ' CAXON FA RRA R. 
 
 " dictated by," but " committed to writing un- 
 der the guidance of," the Holy Spirit. While 
 recognizing the Divine energy, it does not an- 
 nihilate the human co-operation. The truths 
 are inspired by the Holy Spirit, the words and 
 phrases are the result of the writer's own indi- 
 viduality ; the material is of God, the form is of 
 man. Just as, in the old mythology, Apollo 
 was regarded as the mere receiver of the or- 
 acles which he delivered — learning them from 
 Zeus, but interpreting them for men — so the 
 prophet is, to use the phrase of Philo, the '' in- 
 terpreter " of those as yet unspoken thoughts 
 which God suggests to his understanding. To 
 borrow a metaphor which is very common 
 among the Fathers, the wind breathes upon the 
 yEolian harp, which without its agency utters 
 no sound, but the resultant melody is largely 
 modified by the actual construction of the lyre 
 itself. There may be weaknesses and imper- 
 fections in the mode of expression ; there can 
 be none in the truth revealed. The books of 
 Scripture, though not dictated, are yet infal- 
 lible, indisputable, perfectly truthful in the 
 minutest particular. The theory may be best 
 summed up in the pregnant expression of 
 St. Augustine, " Inspiratus a Deo sed tamen 
 homo " ; and it is perhaps the view most pre- 
 valent in the English Church. 
 
 iii. The next theory may be called the theory 
 of illuminaiion. I adopt this term because it 
 recognizes various degrees of iiisph-ation. Now 
 inspiration, properly speaking, cannot admit of 
 degrees. lUujnination, as has been frequently 
 pointed out, may be intermittent ; it may sink 
 into the faintest possible twilight, or may beam 
 with noonday splendor; but, from the very 
 nature of the case inspif-ation must be contin- 
 uous. It is true that this theory does not nec- 
 essarily exclude the former, but it regards the 
 subject from a wholly different point of view. 
 This view dates from the days of the Rabbis, 
 who not only divided the Scriptures into the
 
 mSPIRA TION OP HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 1 09 
 
 law, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa, but 
 distinguished also between the " Prophetic 
 Spirit"" which inspired the Law and the Pro- 
 phets, and the " Holy Spirit " which enabhd 
 men to write such words of holiness and wisdom 
 as do not transcend the ordinary faculties^ of 
 man to attain, and which was the only inspiring 
 power recognized by them in the Kethubim. * 
 From the days of the schoolmen downwards 
 the different degrees of inspiration have been 
 variously classified. Some have distinguished 
 between the grace of superintendency, which 
 merely saved from positive error ; the grace of 
 elevation, which uplifted the thoughts and words 
 to a loftv standard ; the grace of direction, 
 which guided them alike in what they omitted 
 as in what they expressed ; and the grace of 
 suggestion, which vouchsafed to supply both 
 words and thoughts. Others, again, and this 
 is a view which has found some favor among 
 leading theologians of the Church of Rome, 
 distinguish between antecedent, concomitant, and 
 consequent inspiration, the last being merely a 
 general sanction that a book, though not writ- 
 ten by the aid of the Holy Spirit, yet contains 
 nothing false. Although this theory does not 
 ostensibly abandon the doctrine of inspiration 
 for the whole of Scripture, it is clear that in its 
 extremest form it nearly merges into the next 
 theory ; for, to quote the words of Bishop Dan- 
 iel Wilson, in his Evidences of Christianity, 
 " where nature ended and inspiration began, it 
 is not for man to say," 
 
 iv. The next theory, which has been widely 
 embraced, may be call theory of essential as 
 distinguished from plenary inspiration. Tts 
 favorite formula is, that the Bible contains the 
 word of God, while it rejects, as inaccurate, the 
 expression that the Bible is the word of God. 
 Those who accept this view believe, indeed, 
 that the Holy Scriptures are the record of a 
 
 * Maimonides, Mo>-e Nevochiin, ii. 37, 45.
 
 1 1 o LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 Divine revelation, and that their authors were 
 inspired by the Holy Spirit, but they confine 
 this inspiration to matters of doctrine, matters 
 of morality, and, above all, matters of faith.* 
 They do not accept as necessarily inspired or 
 infallible the accidental allusions and passing 
 phrases of Scripture. They do not consecrate 
 the obiter dicta auctoris aliud agefitis. They do 
 not believe that the sacred writers would have 
 wished us to attach the slightest importance to 
 the scientific accuracy or inaccuracy of the 
 popular expressions in which they describe 
 natural phenomena or natural laws. They 
 ■would not be in the least shocked to find that 
 Moses could have expressed a current fallacy 
 of observation, that St. Stephen could have 
 fallen into an error of memory, or that St. Paul 
 could have founded an illustration upon a mere 
 Rabinnical tradition. This was the theory 
 held by Erasmus, R. Simon, Grotius, Le Clerc, 
 and Pfaff ;t it is now held by many eminent 
 Roman Catholic divines, even when they differ 
 so widely as Perrone and Dr. DoUinger; it is 
 accepted by the great mass of German theolo- 
 gians of profound learning and unimpeachable 
 orthodoxy ; it has been formally repeated and 
 sanctioned among ourselves, even by writers 
 so widely separated as Bishop Lowth, Bishop 
 Warburton, Archdeacon Paley, Clarke, Dod- 
 dridge, Baxter, Archbishop Sumner, and Mr. 
 Thomas Scott. | 
 
 * St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between the 
 things that belong to faith, principaliter and indirede. 
 
 t See Tholuck in Herzog's Cyclopadia. 
 
 % The name of Luther has often been claimed as 
 sanctioning some such view, and his slighting language 
 as regards the Apocalypse, and the Epistle of Jude, no 
 less than his contemptuous rejection of the Epistle of 
 St. James, as an " epistola straminea," might seem at 
 first sight to sanction it. The fact is, however, different. 
 Luther sets up in his own mind a certain arbitrary test 
 of canonicity and inspiration — viz., that no writing was 
 inspired unless in some degree it testified to the truth 
 of Christ's Gospel ("Auchist das der rechte Pru- 
 festein alle Bucher zu tadeln, wenn man siechet ob sie
 
 TNSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 1 1 1 
 
 V. The fifth theory may be called that of 
 ordinary inspiration. The other four may 
 differ in the extent to which they apply the 
 working of inspiration, but they all agree in 
 regarding it as being an extraordinary, tran- 
 cendant, and supernatural energy. The fifth, 
 on the other hand, which found in Schleier- 
 macher its foremost exponent, regards inspira- 
 tion as a thing entirely subordinate in the 
 Divine economy. It believes that Christ came 
 to reveal and declare his Father to mankind, 
 and that the New Testament contains the truth- 
 ful record of his life, his death, and the doctrine 
 which he taught. The holders of this theory 
 believe that the action of the Holy Spirit, as 
 exercised in the inspiration of Scripture, is 
 not generically distinct from the ordinary in- 
 fluence of that Holy Spirit upon the heart and 
 intellect of Christian men, which all admit to 
 be analogous to it.* They believe that the 
 Bible animates and awakens the religious con- 
 sciousness of man, but they attach no infallible 
 truthfulness to all its utterances, nor any Divine 
 sanctity to its incidental and non-religious 
 teachings. They hold that each book and 
 passage of Scripture must be tested by its 
 inherent consistency with that which we learn 
 of God's will from his revelation of himself, 
 above all, in the life of Christ. They attach 
 consummate importance to the saying of St. 
 Paul, "The letter killeth, the spirit giveth 
 life."t 
 
 Christum treiben oder nicht"); and acting on this test 
 he rejected these portions of the Canon (see Loe on 
 Inspiratiofi,\)Y>. 72, ^26.) 
 
 * Analogous expressions to those in which inspiration 
 is described by the Fathers may also be found in Pagan 
 writers— ^.^. Plato,/<7«., pp. 553, 534; Tim., p. 74; Arist., 
 De Miindo, 4 ; Cic, De Div., i. 50 ; Liv. v. 1 5 ; Sen. , Ep. 
 27 ; Virg./4(f«..-vi. 47; and many other passages, which 
 may be summed up in Cic. Pro Arch. 8: — " Nemo vir 
 magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit." 
 
 t 2 Cor. iii. 6. Cf. Rom. vii. 6, "That we should 
 serve in newness of spirit, not in the oldness of the 
 letter." (ii. 29).
 
 1 1 2 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 It is clear that this theory is the very anti- 
 podes of the first or organic theory. Accord- 
 ing to the organic theory, the Bible is in every 
 text absolutely supernatural, transcendently 
 divine ; according to the dynamic theory, it is 
 throughout human, as well as throughout divine; 
 according to the illmnination theory, it is divine, 
 but in differing degrees ; according to the 
 essential \.\\to\)\ it is divine only in matters of 
 faith according to the ordinary theory, it is in- 
 spired but not always miraculous — sacred but 
 not always supernatural — that it is always to 
 be reverenced, but not always and in every 
 point to be accepted as divinely authoritative ; 
 that it is divine only as all else is divine which 
 is good and noble* — in so far as the heart 
 of man is divine when under the influence of 
 the indwelling Spirit of God. 
 
 5. The very fact that all these theories are 
 severally held by men of authority in the Eng- 
 lish Church, and that, by formal decision of 
 the Court of Ultimate Appeal, even the fifth 
 is, within certain limitations, capable of being 
 maintained without any violation of her form- 
 ularies, would naturally lead us to the conclu- 
 sion that she has pronounced upon the ques- 
 tion no authoritative decision. Such is in- 
 deed the case. The Church of England 
 requires of her ministers a belief that " Holy 
 Scripture containeth all things necessary 
 to salvation ; " f she defines Holy Scripture 
 to be the undoubtedly canonical books of 
 the Old and New Testament ; she makes a 
 passing allusion to Scripture as " God's 
 word written ; " % she declares that the Old 
 Testament is not contrary to the New, and 
 that in both alike everlasting life is offered to 
 mankind by Christ ; § she requires of her 
 priests and deacons "unfeignedly to believe " 
 them, and to be persuaded that they " contain 
 sufficiently all doctrine required of necessity 
 
 * James i. 17. t Art. VI. J Ait. XX. 
 
 § Art. VII.
 
 JNSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIP TURE. 1 1 3 
 
 for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus 
 Christ." It is clear that in these passages, 
 while the Scriptures are accepted as a volume 
 in the highest degree sacred, yet no exclusive 
 sanction is given to any special theory of in- 
 spiration. Indeed, so far as the word is con- 
 cerned, it is a singular, though possibly an un- 
 designed circumstance, that both the word 
 " inspiration " and the verb " inspire " occur 
 but five times in the Book of Common Prayer, 
 and in every one of those five instances are 
 used to imply, not the extraordinary and, so to 
 speak, extinct, but the ordinary and continual 
 workings of the Holy Spirit of God — the in- 
 spiration which cleanses the thoughts of the 
 Christian's heart* — the inspiration which en- 
 ables us to think those things that be goodt — • 
 the inspiration which makes our works pleasant 
 and acceptable to God.l 
 
 6. Nor again is the language of Scripture 
 on the subject of its own inspiration so definite 
 or decisive as to justify us in building up for- 
 mal theological systems on isolated passages, 
 treated apart from the general progress of 
 revelation. Undoubtedly there is a vast mul- 
 titude of passages in which the inspired writ- 
 ers claim to be delivering the direct passages 
 of God.§ The Scriptures generally are called 
 the "oracles of God."|| In three several in- 
 
 * Collect in the Communion Service. 
 
 t Collect for fifth Sunday after Easter. 
 
 I Act. XII. Cf the collect of the service already 
 referred to, and the Hymn Veni Creator Spirihis. The 
 use of the word in other writers accords with this. 
 Thus Milton writes, " Inspire as thou art wont my 
 prompted song, else mute." And in his Animadver- 
 sio'is, " And as thou didst dignify our father's day with 
 many revelations. ... so thou canst vouchsafe to us 
 (though unworthy) as large a portion of thy Spirit as 
 thou pleasest. For who shall prejudice thy all-govern- 
 ing will, seeing the power of thy grace is not passed away 
 with the primitive times, as fond and faithless men im- 
 agine, but thy kingdom is now at hand, and thou stand- 
 est at the door." Many analogous passages might be 
 quoted alike from ancient and modern authors. 
 
 § 2 Sam. xxiii. 2; Jer. i. 9, etc. || Rom. iii. 2.
 
 1 14 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 Stances, passages from the Psalms are attrib- 
 uted to the direct inspiration of the Holy 
 Spirit.* 
 
 St. Peter says that " the 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 ; " 
 and he says that the Spirit of Christ was in the 
 prophets, f St. Paul says that he taught " in 
 words which the Holy Spirit teacheth," that 
 " Holy Scriptures are able to make wise unto 
 salvation through faith in Jesus Christ," and 
 that " all Scripture is given by inspiration of 
 God," and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, 
 for correction, for instruction in righteousness. ":f 
 He also describes his own teaching as not 
 being the word of man, but " in truth the word 
 of God." Our Lord himself appeals to Script- 
 ture from the beginning to the end of his 
 ministry — in the wilderness and on the cross — 
 and often in the emphatic words, "It is writ- 
 ten," or " Have ye not read."§ That these 
 facts and these passages do undoubtedly prove 
 the very deep reverence which we should attach 
 to Holy Scripture, the exceptional weight and 
 sanctity of its language, and its estimable value 
 as the chief source of our knowledge respecting 
 the nature and will of God, is entirely evident; 
 but they cannot, except by a fallacy of exten- 
 sion, be fairly regarded as attributing infalli- 
 bility to each separate statement in Holy Writ, 
 or as implying that every book, and every por- 
 tion of every book, was written under the in- 
 fluence of an exceptional illumination. Luther, 
 in his commentary on Genesis, is careful to 
 point out that the expression " God said," 
 while it does imply the direct conviction of 
 a Divine message, does not mean a necessarily 
 miraculous communication or a voice in the air. 
 
 * Acts i. 16 ; Mark xii. 36 ; Heb. iii. 7. 
 
 t 2 Pet. i. 21 ; I Pet. i. 11. 
 
 X I Cor. ii. 13; 2 Tim. iii. 15, 16. 
 
 § Mark ii, 25; ix. 12 13; xiv. 27.
 
 INSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 1 1 5 
 
 It is said in Scripture of David, and of Samson, 
 that they were powerfully moved and influenced 
 by the Spirit of God ; * yet this did not apply so 
 completely to their words or actions as to save 
 them from the commission of even grave and 
 terrible sins. The Apostles were mitred at 
 Pentecost with the tongues of cloven flame, 
 and were "full of the Holy Ghost," yet we 
 know that they could and did err, and that in 
 serious matters connected with the duties of 
 daily life. Four times in the most solemn 
 manner did they receive from their Divine 
 Master the promise of the Holy Ghost,t and 
 it was his last promise that he would be with 
 them always, even to the end of the world.J 
 We know how fully and richly that promise 
 was fulfilled ; yet it left them to the last " men 
 of like passions with ourselves," § capable of 
 errors both in judgment and in practice. |! 
 It has, indeed, been often and emphatically 
 denied that this possibility of mistake could af- 
 fect them in what they wrote. That they did 
 so err I am not so irreverent as to assert, 
 nor has the ividest learning and acutest ijigeniiity 
 of sceptism ever pointed to one complete and de- 
 monstrable error of fact or doctrine in the Old or 
 New Testament. But what we are now consider- 
 ing is the possibility of arriving at some inflex- 
 ible theory of inspiration ; and it is at least a 
 reasonable argument to suppose that there may 
 be a real analogv between the facts observable 
 in, and the laws which apply to, the hves and 
 the writings of inspired men. Except by a 
 slavishly literal interpretation, and a fallacious 
 extension of applicability, there is no passage 
 of Holy Scripture which can be made to bear 
 
 * I Sam, xvi. 13; Judg, xiii. 25 Cf. Judg. vi. 34; 
 
 I Sam. xi. 6. 
 t 15 Matt. X. 19, 20; Mark xiii. 11; Luke xii. 
 
 II, 12; John, xiv. 
 } Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. 
 § Acts, xiv. 15. 
 11 Acts XV. 36-39; Gal. ii. 11, &c.
 
 1 1 6 LECTURES B Y CANON FA RRAK. 
 
 the immense weight of meaning laid upon it by 
 those who maintain that all Scripture, clown to 
 its minutest particulars, is absolutely infallible 
 and supernaturally inspired. Accepted accord- 
 ing to the ordinary rules of language, and 
 tested by the simple and natural canons of 
 criticism the writers of the Bible never claim 
 for themselves, or for each other, any such 
 purely miraculous exaltation above the possi- 
 bilities of human imperfection. To claim that 
 they write by the aid of the Holy Spirit of God, 
 to insist with the whole emphasis of their con- 
 victions that they are delivering the Gospel and 
 the messages of God, is a widely different 
 thing from claimingthat every word which they 
 utter is as far above all human criticism as if it 
 had been articulated by a voice from heaven. 
 
 A candid and unbiassed examination of the 
 facts and peculiarities of Scripture as they lie 
 open to every attentive reader on the sacred 
 page will help us still further in arriving at a 
 conclusion. 
 
 7 As a general rule, the authors of the his- 
 torical books of Holy Scripture keep them- 
 selves entirely in the background. _ In the 
 Old Testament there is scarcely a single his- 
 torical book of which the author is certainly 
 known, and the exact date at which these 
 books were written is also, to a great extent, a 
 matter of uncertain conjecture. While some 
 of the writers were contemporary, or nearly so, 
 with the event which they narrate, others lived 
 many centuries after those events ; and it is 
 clear from their own distinct and repeated 
 statements that, in the composition of their 
 histories, they adopted the ordinary human 
 means of assistance, that they searched in 
 genealogies and public records, and authenti- 
 cated their statements by reference to previous 
 authorities. No less than ten such documents 
 — by Nathan, Samuel, Shemaiah, Gad, Iddo, 
 Ahijah, Hosai,* Jehu son of Hanani, Isaiah, 
 * This name is given in the margin of 2 Chron.
 
 INSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIP PURE, i j 7 
 
 and others who are unnamed — besides histori- 
 cal papers and collections of songs, are quoted 
 or alluded to in the Books of Chronicles alone. 
 Further, it is clear that many of the books of 
 the Old Testament have undergone a careful 
 and long subsequent revision by other hands. 
 They have, in fact, been edited with explana- 
 tory glosses and other editions and interpola- 
 tions by later writers, * and especially, if we 
 may accept the very probable Jewish tradition, 
 by Ezra and the members of the Great Syna- 
 gogue, t The same remarks do not, indeed, 
 apply to the books of the New Testament, and 
 yet it must be admitted by every honest in- 
 quirer that the language used even by St. Luke 
 with reference to the method and motives of 
 his Gospel, accords more accurately with the 
 conception of reverent narrative and truthful 
 testimony than with that of indefeasible accu- 
 racy and miraculous guidance. t 
 
 8. There are, again, in almost every one of 
 the sacred writers, the clearest possible traces 
 of an intense individuality, and these are the 
 most distinctly marked in those whom we re- 
 gard as the greatest of them all — in a David 
 and an Isaiah, a St. Paul and a St. John. 
 Their style rises and falls as the great gusts of 
 passionate emotion sweep over their mortal 
 spirits, even as the melodies of the wind-harp 
 rise into a scream or die away into a murmur 
 with the rising and falling of the wind. In 
 the Psalms of David we see the reflection of 
 every mood and passion of his soul — the pros- 
 tration of its grief, the fire of its indignation 
 
 xxxiii. 19, where the text of the English version gives 
 " the sayings of the seers." 
 
 * See, for instance, Gen. xiv. 14; xxiii. 2 ; xxxv, 27; 
 xxxvi. 31; Josh. xix. 47 ; Judg. xviii. 29, &c. 
 
 t " Sive Mosen dicere volueris auctorem Pentateuchi, 
 sive Ezram ejusdem instauratorem operis, non recuso." 
 (Jer. ad Helvid. ii. 212.) 
 
 + Or, as some Romish theologians express it, the 
 historical books of Scripture were written not by reve- 
 laiio, but by diredio divina.
 
 1 18 LECTURES B V CANON FARRAR. 
 
 the agony of its repentance, the dawning of 
 its hope, the intensity of its despair. The 
 portraiture of the living, breathing, sinning, 
 suffering, hoping, repenting, triumphing man 
 is impressed on every line and page. Nor is 
 it otherwise with St. Paul. His words are " a 
 perpetual battle," and so instinct are they 
 with the whole being of the man that they 
 have been compared to living things with hands 
 and feet.* And as he goes off at a word, or 
 suffers his metaphors and arguments to get 
 inextricably entangled, or breaks into some 
 passionate self-vindication, and then suddenly 
 cuts it short with the sorrowful apology that 
 his converts have compelled him to become a 
 fool in glorying, or with the sudden overpower- 
 ing conviction that at the foot of the cross of 
 Christ all human glorying becomes ridiculous 
 and base, it is impossible not to feel that we 
 are reading the words of one enriched with all 
 utterance and all knowledge, but not so en- 
 riched as to leave him other than a man 
 whose personal identity has been indeed 
 transfigured, but not annihilated — as a man 
 inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, but still 
 liable to all human passions, and confessedly 
 subject to the same weaknesses as those whom 
 he addressed. 
 
 9. Again the style and Imigiiage in which the 
 Holy Scriptures are written are evidently hu- 
 man. They deliver to us inestimable mes- 
 sages, but often " with stammering lips, and 
 an uncertain tongue." The separate books 
 differ from each other, according to all human 
 
 * What a picture, for instance, of a noble mind 
 smarting under an unjust attack, and fiHed alternately 
 with transports of overpowering indignation, and bursts 
 of yearning tenderness, and victories of reviving joy, do 
 we find in the second Epistle to the Corinthians! All 
 human emotions seems to be intermingled in it until, as 
 we read the boasts wrung from a tortured humility, the 
 egotism extorted from an absolute self-abnegation, we 
 seem to be laying our hand upon a human heart which 
 throbs with indescribable emotion.
 
 INSPIRATION OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. 
 
 119 
 
 judgment, in eloquence, in insight, in gran- 
 deur, nay, even in originality. Some of the 
 sacred writers closely reflect the influence of 
 the thoughts and expression of others. The 
 later and minor Prophets show unmistakable 
 indications of the extent to which their minds 
 and thoughts had been influenced by their 
 greater predecessors : St. Jude echoes not 
 only the thoughts, but even the very words 
 and illustrations of St. Peter. Again, their 
 form of expression is often highly artificial ; 
 as, for instance, in the alphabetical Psalms, 
 or in the elaborate series of plays upon names 
 in the last verses of the first chapter of Micah. 
 Once more, the style of the writers differs 
 most materially with their circumstances and 
 age. The Greek of the Apocalypse is the 
 Greek of a writer very imperfectly acquainted 
 with the language ; it is in many particulars 
 even barbarous and solecistic ; whereas the 
 Greek of St. John's Gospel written after a 
 long residence in a city where Greek was uni- 
 versally spoken, is comparatively polished and 
 correct. 
 
 10. Nor can it be overlooked that not only 
 are the narratives of the sacred historians 
 often fragmentary and incomplete, which 
 might w'ell be due to that Divine purpose for 
 which all Scripture was designed ; but further, 
 that the writers frequently yet decisively vary 
 from each other, generally in minute and unim- 
 portant particulars, but sometimes in grave 
 and serious ones. In some cases a clue is 
 given us which enables us to understand both 
 the causes of the variation, and the true 
 method of reconciling it ; and this is the case 
 in some instances to so remarkable a degree 
 that we entirely believe such reconciliations to 
 be always possible even when we have no da- 
 tum which could enable us to discover them ; 
 but in some cases — as between passages in 
 the Books of Kings and Chronicles — there are 
 apparent discrepancies, and even contradic-
 
 120 LECTURES BY CAJVO?/ FARRAR. 
 
 tions, which may, indeed, be complementary 
 or supplementary to each other, but the exist- 
 ence of which makes it unnatural to suppose 
 that the events were recorded with miraculous 
 and infallible certainty. Even in the Gospel 
 narratives there are variations which require 
 violent and unwarranted hypothesis to recon- 
 cile them with any theory of Divine dictation.* 
 The order of the three temptations in St. 
 Luke, is different from that in St. Matthew, 
 and it is therefore impossible that both should 
 be correct and not natural to believe that the 
 one which accords less exactly with reality 
 should have been altered with any Divine 
 purpose. The title upon the cross is given 
 differently by each of the three Evangelists : 
 two, therefore, of the three must in this minute 
 and unimportant particular vary from literal 
 accuracy ; and the same remark applies to the 
 exact words used by our Saviour in instituting 
 the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. It must 
 not be supposed that we desire to lay any 
 stress on these incompletenesses, minute inex- 
 actitudes, or trivial variations ; on the contrary, 
 we may well regard them as an argument of 
 the independence of our authorities from each 
 other, and therefore as a quadruple confirma- 
 tion of the facts which they narrate, possibly 
 even, in some instances, as a needful trial of 
 our faith, or stimulus to our research. 
 
 No impartial judge would hold that they 
 affect in the slightest degree the veracity of 
 the testimony delivered. No fair critic would 
 dispute the truth of the simple remark of St. 
 Chrysostom, " It is one thing to give different, 
 another to give contradictory accounts." f 
 There are, in fact, in the Gospels only such 
 incidental differences as result from the indi- 
 
 * " Per Inijusumodi evangelistarum locutiones zwr/rti' 
 sed non coiitrarias, discimus nihil in cujusque verliis nos 
 inspicere debere, nisi voluntatem, &c." (Aug. De Con- 
 sens. Evang., ii. 28.) 
 
 t S. Chrys. Proem., Horn. i. in St. Matt.
 
 INS PI R A TION OF II OL Y SCRIP 7 VRE. 1 2 1 
 
 vidual characteristics of the observers and re- 
 corders, and as occur in all histories, even 
 those which are most majestically accurate : 
 they are perfectly consistent with " substantial 
 truth under circumstantial variety." But must 
 it not be unhesitatingly admitted that they do 
 militate against all theories which involve im- 
 mediate supernatural guidance or an absolute 
 exemption from even the most trivial errors ? 
 It is certain that small divergences could not 
 have been obviated without a direct miracle ; 
 but is not the existence of such divergences a 
 clear proof that it was not in accordance with 
 God's will, that any such miracle should be 
 performed ? 
 
 II. An important inference as regards this 
 subject may be derived the quotations made 
 from the Old Testament by our Lord and the 
 Apostles. The general fact about these quo- 
 tations is the extreme diversity of the method 
 adopted. Sometimes they appear to be direct 
 translations from the original Hebrew ; some- 
 times they are taken unaltered from the LXX. ; 
 sometimes they differ so widely from both as 
 to leave us no obvious escape from the con- 
 clusion, either that they are quoted from 
 memory, or that they were only intended as 
 allusions and applications of the most general 
 kind 
 
 The well known verses, " He shall be called 
 a Nazarene ; "* " Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
 heard, neither hath entered into the heart of 
 man, the things that God hath prepared for 
 them that love him ; " t " He that glorieth, let 
 him glory in the Lord ; " t " Awake thou that 
 sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ 
 shall give thee light ; " § together with many 
 others, are either mere adaptations of general 
 prophetic language, altered to a considerable 
 extent, or are a fusion of the spirit of several 
 
 * Matt. ii. 23. t I Cor. ii. 9. % i Cor. i. 31. 
 § Eph. V. 14. It is not improbable that this is a 
 quotation from an early Christian hymn.
 
 1 2 2 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 independent passages into one. Out of 275 
 passages quoted from the Old Testament in 
 the New, there are but fifty-three in which the 
 New Testament and the LXX. agree accurately 
 with the original Hebrew ; there are no less 
 than seventy-six in which the New Testament, 
 by differing from the LXX., differs yet more 
 widely from the Hebrew ; and ninety-nine in 
 which the old Testament, the LXX., and the 
 New Testament vary from each other.* To 
 charge these quotations with inaccuracy and 
 — as has frequently been done — is entirely to 
 misunderstand their scope and character ; but 
 they are not decisive as to this point — that 
 what the inspired writers of the New Testa- 
 ment would teach us to prize and reverence in 
 the Old, is the message delivered rather than 
 the mere words in which it is enshrined — the 
 main thought conveyed to us, and not the min- 
 utiae of the verbal expression .'' 
 
 12. And without entering more closely into 
 this part of the subject, is not the use made of 
 the LXX. itself decisive as to the truth of this 
 view ? To speak disparagingly or contemptu- 
 ously of that famous version, to which we owe 
 so vast a debt as the source whence much of 
 the religious phraseology of the New Covenant 
 was drawn, would be indeed ungrateful ; yet 
 there remains the palpable and undeniable 
 fact that, as a version, it is often most inaccu- 
 rate, sometimes extremely erroneous, some- 
 times apparently untrustworthy. That some of 
 the translators were distinctly biassed by 
 Alexandrian philosophical tenets ;t that they 
 were not superior to the temptations to slight 
 
 * See the very valuable and careful analysis and ex- 
 amination of quotations in Mr. Turpie's The Old Testa- 
 ment in the New. Mill (on Heb. xiii. 25) remarks that 
 the Apostles sometimes quote the LXX. even where 
 " si reponerentur Hebraje, non modo periret vis argu- 
 mentationis Apostolicas, sed ne ullus quidem foret ar- 
 gumentationi locus." 
 
 t See Frankel, Uber den Einfliiss der paldstinischen 
 Exegese atif di^ Alexandr. Hermeneutik. § 7, 17, 25,
 
 tNSPIRA TION OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. 
 
 123 
 
 literary dishonesty when they thought that an 
 improvement could be introduced ; that their 
 version shows traces sometimes of a reference 
 to the Halachah, sometimes to the Hagadah ;* 
 that some of them were very imperfectly 
 familiar with Hebrew, some of them with 
 Greek, and some of them with both Greek and 
 Hebrew ; — in short, that in many places they 
 have not understood, and in others have 
 tampered with, the sacred text, is a fact easily 
 demonstrable t and well known to all who 
 have ever noticed the phenomena which this 
 version displays. And yet this is the version 
 to which the Apostles and Evangelists most 
 frequently refer. Is not this fact alone decisive 
 against what may be termed a materialistic 
 view of inspiration t Any one who holds such 
 a view ought, unless all logic and common 
 sense are set at defiance, to maintain that the 
 LXX. translation is also, even in its diverg- 
 ences from the Hebrew, infallibly inspired. t 
 This has actually been maintained by some 
 writers, but it is a proposition so diametrically 
 opposed to the most indisputable facts, that it 
 
 * A few instances from a single book may sufiSce. 
 See LXX. Avoidance of Anthropomorphism, Exod. 
 xxiv. 10; V. 3; iv. 20, 16; xxxiv. 10, 11 ; xv. 13. 
 Halacha, Exod. xii. 15 ; v. 18 ; xii. 16. Hagadah, Exod. 
 x. 23. Glosses, Exod. i. 11 etc. Alterations, Exod. 
 iv. 6 ; xxii. 63 ; xxxiii. 22, etc. Frankel, ubi supra, 
 passim. Hody, De Bibliortim Textibus Originalibus, 
 passim. 
 
 t The peculiarities of the LXX. in many passages 
 which exhibit the tendencies here alluded to, greatly 
 resemble those which we find in Josephus, when he is 
 particularly anxious to make Jewish history palatable to 
 pagan readers. 
 
 I As even St. Augustine was driven to do " Spiritus 
 enim que in prophetis erat, quando ilia dixerunt, idem 
 ipse erat in LXX. viris quando ilia interpretati sunt. 
 Quicquid est in Hebr. cod. et non est apud interpretes 
 LXX. noluit ista per istos sed per illos Prophetas Dei 
 spiritus dicere," etc., etc. [De Civ. Dei, xv. 43). See 
 Frankel, Vorstudien, I. i. 258, 267. After Hody's great 
 work such an opinion ceases to be possible, but it was 
 maintained by Mr. Grinfield in his Apology for the Sep* 
 taugint.
 
 124 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 can only be regarded as the result of a de- 
 termined but eccentric consistency. 
 
 13. Again, any doctrine of a continuous 
 supernatural inspiration — of an influence di- 
 rectly and immediately Divine over the entire 
 extent of the sacred volume — seems to involve 
 a conclusion antagonistic to all our natural 
 feelings when we read its different parts. Un- 
 less the door be opened to a spirit of boundless 
 allegory and recondite mysticism, it is impos- 
 sible to us, by any natural process, to avoid 
 attaching a wholly different kind of value to 
 different portions of Holy Writ. The ultimate 
 test of the value of Scripture, the ultimate 
 ground of our faithful acceptance of it as a 
 Divine revelation, must, in the nature of the 
 case, lie in its inherent grandeur, in the con- 
 viction produced upon our reason by the in- 
 ternal and external evidence of its inspiration, 
 in its correspondence with the noblest aspira- 
 tions of our whole being, in its satisfaction of 
 the deepest wants of our nature, in its harmony 
 with the deepest revelations which come to us 
 from the starry heavens above, and the moral 
 law within. But different portions of Scripture 
 affect our minds in very different degrees ; 
 there is much that seems to possess only an 
 historical, or moral, or prudential value, as 
 well as much that stirs our being to its very in- 
 most depths. There are writers of it who seem 
 to walk with us familiarly on earth, as well as 
 others who open to us the very heaven of 
 heavens. To hold that all parts were alike, 
 and to the same degree inspired, would be to 
 rob them of their value — to remove them alto- 
 pfether from the region of calm and truthful 
 criticism — to change them from what seems to 
 be their legitimate aspect into an unintelligible 
 burden and a useless mystery. Some, indeed, 
 of the later Jews, who treated the Bible with an 
 extravagant superstition hardly removed from 
 Fetish worship, did not hesitate to say that the 
 whole law was written by Moses from the
 
 INSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 1 2 5 
 
 lips of Jehovah, from " In the beginning " 
 down to " in the sight of all Israel " ; that 
 there was no difference between " I am the 
 Lord thy God " (Exod. xx. 2) and " Timna was 
 concubine to Eliphaz, Esau's son" (Gen. xxxvi. 
 12) ; that every sound, and every word, and 
 every verse, were the words of Jehovah.* This 
 was as illogical as it was unnatural, and it is 
 hardly too severe to apply to it the language 
 used by St. Gregory of Nyssa with reference 
 to other vagaries of Jewish exegesis, that it is 
 simply " a delusion and a vanity." t To em- 
 brace such a view as this — to attach an equal 
 degree of inspiration to the list of the dukes 
 of Edom, or to the genealogies of Chronicles, 
 as to the last discourses in the Gospel of St. 
 John — to accept with equal reverence St. 
 Paul's description of Charity and the strong 
 imprecations which David invokes upon his 
 enemies — to value Canticles and Esther, which 
 do not once mention the name of God, no less 
 highly than the Epistle to the Romans or the 
 Revelation of St. John — to attach equal cer- 
 tainty to the miracle produced by Elisha's bones 
 and the vision of St. Paul on the road to Da- 
 mascus — to reverence with equal devotion the 
 list of clean and unclean beasts, or any other 
 chapter of minute and abrogated Levitical ob- 
 servances, as no less the result of inspiration 
 than the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to 
 the Corinthians — is surely to treat the Holy 
 Scriptures with a spirit of plus-quam-Judaic 
 superstition ; it is to attribute to them an au- 
 thority which they never claim ; it is to deny for 
 them a relativity which they implicitly assert. 
 
 14. But, further, it is a consideration which 
 we should ponder with the deepest care and 
 reverence, for it was stated and revealed by 
 Christ that the constitutions of the Mosaic law 
 were in themselves imperfect ; that the moral- 
 
 (*) Lehach Thobh (quoted in Ersch and Gruber, s-v. 
 "Inspiration"). 
 
 t Greg. Nyss. c. Eunom., Or. xii.
 
 1 2 6 LECTURES B V CANON FARRAR. 
 
 ity which they sanctioned was guided by a 
 spirit of gracious accommodation to the needs 
 and shortcomings of a stiffnecked race.* If, as 
 our Saviour taught in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 even that law which was delivered to Moses 
 on Sinai, and of which the immediate and 
 absolute inspiration is more thoroughly and 
 distinctly attested than that of any other por- 
 tion of the Old Testament, was yet designedly 
 suffered to be weakened by human imperfec- 
 tions, it is more than obvious that we have the 
 highest sanction for admitting the possibility 
 of the same and similar imperfections in other 
 parts of the sacred record. Looking at the 
 Old Testament as a whole, we find ample 
 proofs that it records a revelation of God to 
 man such as is not accorded by any other 
 literature ; but when we find also that it did 
 not formally condemn polygamy and slavery — 
 that it records with no apparent condemnation, 
 at times even with a semblance of approbation, 
 acts of national cruelty, of individual treachery, 
 of indiscriminate extirpation, which the princi- 
 ples of Christ's Gospel teach us to repudiate 
 — when we see in it no specific revelation of 
 Christ's redemption, of universal charity, of an 
 immortality beyond the grave — we are surely 
 driven to the conclusion that, as a whole, it 
 stands on a lower and more imperfect level 
 than that to which Christ's Gospel has lifted 
 us, and that, apart from its relativity, we are 
 not warranted in accepting its every word and 
 narrative as infallibly and in the same degree 
 Divine. 
 
 15. Turning from the phenomena of the struct- 
 ure of Holy Scripture to the facts of its preserva- 
 
 * Cf. Matt. V. 43 ; xix. 8 ; Mark x. 5; 2 Cor. iii. 6; 
 Gal. iii. 13-19; Acts xv. 10. In this last passage one 
 of the most essential ordinances of the Mosaic law is 
 referred to as forming part of " a yoke which neither 
 our fathers nor we were able to bear. " St. Paul also 
 calls it a " yoke of bondage " (Gal. v. i), and " weak 
 and beggarly elements " (iv. 9).
 
 INS P IRA TION OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 
 
 127 
 
 tion, and regarding such facts as in themselves 
 significant indications of what God would have 
 us to believe, we shall find that many circum- 
 stances tend to confirm the general conclusions 
 to which it is evident that our previous in- 
 quiries tend. 
 
 a. The Scriptures are not written in any univer- 
 sal language. Even if they were, all language 
 is inadequate to the full expression of the 
 human mind ; it is at best but an asymptote to 
 thought. But much more is it certain, that 
 although the Bible admits of translation far 
 better than any other book, yet when its 
 thoughts are transferred from one language to 
 another, much of their beauty and delicacy 
 may be lost, something of their meaning and 
 accuracy must be evaporated, in the process. 
 The translator of Ecclesiasticus apologizes for 
 seeming to come short of some words which 
 he had labored to interpret, for, he wisely 
 adds, " the same things uttered in Hebrew, 
 and translated into another tongue, have not 
 the same force in them."* Yet it is from transla- 
 tions alone that the word of God can be known 
 to all but an insignificant fraction of the human 
 
 race. 
 
 b. Nor is it from translations only, but from 
 translations which, as a matter of fact, are 
 often exceedingly imperfect. That this was 
 the case with the LXX. we have already 
 seen , it was even more so with the Vetus 
 Itala so universally used in the Western 
 Church ; it is so with the Vulgate ; it is so 
 with every version, ancient or modern, which 
 has been made during the course of 2,000 
 years, not excluding our own. Most of those 
 who believe the Holy Scriptures to be infallibly 
 dictated attach their reverence to the words of 
 their English Bible, which, great as it is, and 
 
 ' He adds, " and not only these things, but the law 
 itself, and the prophets, and the rest of the books, have 
 no small difference, when they are spoken in their own 
 language." {Prologue to Ecdesiasticits.)
 
 1 28 LECTURES B Y CANON FARRAR. 
 
 admirable and well deserving of our reverence, 
 is yet, in many instances, seriously imperfect. 
 Had it been the fact, that the original was 
 free from every, even the most unimportant, 
 error, or had it been of any importance to 
 mankind that such should be the case, would 
 its translation have thus been left to the in- 
 evitable errors of the uninspired intelligence, 
 or its original text to the inevitable imper- 
 fections of human care ? 
 
 c. For even the original text is bv no means 
 assured to us. That errors have crept into 
 the numbers of the Old Testament has long 
 been evident, and is admitted by the Jews 
 themselves. Both in the Hebrew and in the 
 Greek manuscripts, none of which are auto- 
 graphs — nay, the very oldest of which are 
 centuries younger than the original ones — there 
 are thousands of various readings, which, 
 although for the most part of the most trivial 
 and insigificant description, and although they 
 by no means affect the general sense and 
 tenor of the revelation delivered, are yet some- 
 times of extreme interest and importance. 
 It is certain that many glosses have crept 
 into the text.* There are even passages, now 
 acknowledged to be spurious, f which have yet 
 been accepted for centuries as integral por- 
 tions, even as peculiarly sacred portions, of 
 the inspired books. Is not this sufficient to 
 show that what was really important was the 
 Divine message and revelation, not the form 
 in which it was delivered — the sacred treasure, 
 not the vessel in which it was conveyed ? 
 
 * These glosses, it is true, are mostly of a merely exe- 
 getical character, but this does not affect the position 
 here maintained. — Though, says Bishop Wordsworth 
 (on 2 Cor. iii. 3), "the theory of explanatory interpola- 
 tions of marginal glosses into the text of the N. T. has 
 been sometimes carried too far, yet probably this has 
 been the most fertile source of error in some MSS. of 
 the sacred volume," 
 
 \ e. g. Matt. vi. 13; Acts, viii, 37; i John v. 7. 
 Many would add Mark xvi. 9-20; John v. 3, 4 ; viii. 
 i-ii.
 
 JNSPIRA TION OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 129 
 
 16. We have thus surveyed with a rapid 
 glance the broad and obvious phenomena of 
 Scripture, and it might be supposed that there 
 was nothing fvJther which could guide us in 
 our conclusion. But Scripture is not God's 
 only revelation to mankind ; on the contrary, 
 it is one of the priceless blessings which 
 Scripture bestows upon our race that it both 
 refers us to other sources of revelation and 
 alone teaches us to interpret rhem. "In the 
 deepest meaning of the essential and only 
 truth," says Stier, " all things in the world are 
 only variously embodied words of the Creator, 
 inasmuch as by His mighty word alone they are 
 upheld in being; hence the same words in 
 Scripture signify both ' word ' and ' thing.' " 
 " God does not," says Luther, " speak gram- 
 matical vocables, but true essential things. 
 Thus sun and moon, Peter and Paul, thou and 
 I are nothing but words of God." 
 
 a. For instance, God is revealed to us in 
 HISTORY. With God facts are lessons. Amid 
 the wildest tumults of national confusion His 
 voice is heard. Amid the most intricate per- 
 plexities of human designs His hand guides 
 the crashing wheelwork of human destiny. 
 His Spirit is in the wheels, and unless the 
 Spirit moves, the wheels move not. No man 
 can study the history of any nation without 
 hearing a great voice rolling across the cen- 
 turies which proclaims a law older and more 
 majestic than any human legislation. Such 
 psalms as the 105th, the io6th, the 135th, the 
 136th, and indeed many others, are all but 
 comments on that one Divine truth which is the 
 only real philosophy of history, that " He is 
 the Lord our God, His judgments are in all 
 the earth," They are, in fact, interpretations 
 of Jewish history, which reveal to us the eter- 
 nal principles by which all history may be 
 judged and understood. 
 
 b. Again, Scripture constantly refers us to 
 NATURE, by which word we mean no mysteri-
 
 130 
 
 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 ous entity endowed by the imagination with 
 independent power, but solely the sum total of 
 those laws which God has impressed upon, 
 and whereby He governs, the material uni- 
 verse. " Duo sunt," says St. Augustine, *' quae 
 in cognitionem Dei ducunt Creatio et Scrip- 
 tura." Here again such glorious psalms 
 as the 19th and the 104th, together with the 
 whole concluding section of the Book of Job, 
 lead us to see in nature God's revelation of 
 his omnipotence, his unchangeableness, his 
 infinite majesty, the awfulness of his judgments, 
 and the tenderness of his love. We are dis- 
 tinctly taught, indeed, that this was the main, 
 and, for the essentials of man's eternal safety, 
 the adequate revelation of God to the heathen 
 world. It was hereby that " He left not him- 
 self without witness, in that he did good, and 
 gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, 
 filling our hearts with food and gladness."* 
 It was herein that " they could seek the Lord, 
 if haply they might feel after Him, and find 
 Him, though He be not far from every one of 
 us ; for in Him we live, and move, and have 
 our being." f It was herewith that God made 
 manifest to them what may be known of Him, 
 " for the invisible things of Him from the crea- 
 tion of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
 stood by the things that are made, even his 
 eternal power and Godhead." X 
 
 Once more, God makes himself known by 
 inward intuition, and above all by the voice 
 of CONSCIENCE to the mind of man. This is 
 clearly and emphatically stated by the sacred 
 writers in all ages. " There is a spirit in man, 
 and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him 
 understanding," § " The spirit of man is the 
 candle of the Lord." || This, too, is referred 
 to by St. Paul as a direct source of inspiration. 
 " For," he says, " when the Gentiles, who 
 
 * Acts. xiv. 17. § Acts. xvii. 27, 28. 
 
 t Rom. i. 19, 20. II Job xxxii. 8, 
 
 I Prov, XX. 27,
 
 INSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIP TURE. 131 
 
 have not the law, do by nature the things con- 
 tained in the law, these, having not the law, 
 are a law unto themselves : which show the 
 work of the law written in their hearts, their 
 conscience also bearing witness." * 
 
 The fact, then, that Scripture recognizes 
 apart from itself three great and separate 
 sources of revelation — the fact that it recog' 
 nizes a Divine light in the spirit of man, and a 
 Divine providence in his history — may serve 
 to account for the otherwise perplexing pheno- 
 mena of pagan wisdom. It has been often 
 urged as a sneer by sceptical writers, that 
 there is scarcely a single moral truth or pre- 
 cept of Christianity which may not be par- 
 alleled from pagan writers. This is undoubted- 
 ly true, but so far from involving any discredit 
 to the grandeur and sufficiency of Scripture, it 
 is exactly what Scripture has taught us to ex- 
 pect, and we should rejoice with all our hearts 
 to know that the Divine glory, which has shone 
 like the noonday in our present dispensation, 
 shot many a gleam of enlightenment upon 
 heathen countries and ancient times. Nature, 
 and History, and Conscience were to the 
 heathen " oracles of God ; " they suggested 
 thoughts 
 
 " At which high spirits of old would start 
 E'en from their pagan sleep. 
 
 "Just guessing thro' their murky blind, 
 Few, faint, and baffling sight, 
 Streaks of a brighter heaven behind, 
 A cloudless depth of light. 
 
 " Such thoughts, the wreck of Paradise, 
 Through many a dreary age 
 Upbore whate'er of good and wise, 
 Yet lived in bard or sage."t 
 
 But is not the revelation given us by Nature. 
 Conscience, and History exactly analogous to 
 the fuller, freer, deeper revelation which we 
 
 * Rom. ii. 14, 15,; 2 Cor. i, 12, 
 t Keble, Christian Year^ 
 
 J
 
 132 LECTURES BY CANON FARRAR. 
 
 obtain from Scripture ? It is not vouchsafed 
 to us by miraculous interventions, but by nat- 
 ural processes ; it is not portentous, but nor- 
 mal ; it is not absolute, but partial ; it is not 
 final, but progressive ; it is not perfectly intel- 
 ligible, but in parts obscure. It comes not in 
 one continuous blaze of brightness, but in 
 scattered gleams of light, shining amid inter- 
 spaces of darkness. Much of it belongs not to 
 knowledge, but to faith ; it grants not clear- 
 ness of vision, but certainty of hope. There 
 is no shock of overwhelming conviction, no 
 direct uplifting of the veil. After all that we 
 have been taught of God, it still remains a part 
 of his nature that " clouds and darkness are 
 round about him," though " righteousness and 
 judgment are the habitation of his seat." * 
 
 17. " By their fruits," said Christ, " ye shall 
 know them. Do men gaiher grapes of thorns, 
 or figs of thistles ? " f The remark is no less 
 true of doctrines than it is of men. And what, 
 we may proceed to ask, have been the fruits of 
 those theories which identified inspiration with 
 dictation or infallibility ? 
 
 i. Now, first, it is clear that a belief that the 
 Holy Scriptures have been infallibly dictated, 
 and are free from every error in even the min- 
 utest particular, has not given the slightest aid 
 to those who desired to attain to an infallible 
 standard. It has not tended in the slightest 
 degree to save them from a multitude of aber- 
 rations, not only historical, political, social and 
 scientific, but even theological and moral. Nay 
 more, it has in some respects had a direct ten- 
 dency to increase and multiply those errors, by 
 fostering that style of dogma which, disregard- 
 ing the analogy of faith and the necessary lim- 
 itations of human thought and language, has 
 built inverted pyramids of argument on isolated 
 expressions, and drawn out many an "ever- 
 widening spiral ergo from the narrow aperture 
 
 * Ps. xcvii. 2, t Matt. vii. 16.
 
 INSPIRA TION OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 133 
 
 of single texts." The divergences of doctrine 
 drawn from the same document have been in- 
 finite in scope ; and however infallible the text, 
 the fallibilities of exegesis have robbed it of 
 all decisiveness in many controverted points. 
 Take but one single point, the long, dangerous, 
 discreditable antagonism between Science and 
 Theology, the obstinate opposition to new dis- 
 coveries because they seemed to contradict the 
 apparent meaning of isolated texts. The fierce 
 and bloody persecutions of sectarian hatred, 
 the ruinous aberrations of heretical fanaticism, 
 the reluctant abandonment of obsolete tyr- 
 annies, and the violent defence of unjustifiable 
 institutions, have all been due — have been due, 
 as an historic fact incapable of refutation — to 
 that view of inspiration which held that every 
 word and letter of Holy Scripture came direct 
 from God, and needed no modification from 
 the analogy of faith. Oracles of God, the Holy 
 Scriptures have over and over again been per- 
 verted by infatuated interpreters to their own 
 destruction.* 
 
 Hence it is that the Gospel of Peace, the 
 Gospel of Knowledge, the Gospel of Progress, 
 has been desecrated into an armoury of fanat- 
 icism, an obstacle to progress, and a stumb- 
 ling-block of science ; the Gospel of Light, the 
 Gospel of Love, the Gospel of Liberty, has 
 been perverted to stifle the lamp of the philos- 
 opher, to kindle the fagot of the inquisitor, 
 and to rivet the fetters of the slave. 
 
 ii. Again, these harder and more mechan- 
 ical views of inspiration have caused a burden 
 of incessant terror to the Churches and the 
 theologians that have maintained them. They 
 have led to all kinds of subterfuges, evasions, 
 harmonies, distortions of plain language, avoid- 
 ance of clear inferences, suppositions of 
 impossible ellipse and impossible construction, 
 tamperings with simple fact and simple record, 
 
 * A possibility of which we are warned in Scripture 
 itself, 2 Peter iii. 16.
 
 1 3 4 LECTURES B Y CAA OX FA RRA R. 
 
 which in any other criticism would be branded 
 with dishonesty. As there is hardly a single 
 folly of the human mind which has not shelter- 
 ed itself behind some phrase of Scripture torn 
 away from its context, and interpreted with a 
 hard literalism which ignores every true can- 
 on of interpretation, so there is hardly a great 
 thought or a great mov'ement or a great dis- 
 covery inspired or sanctioned by the inmost 
 spirit of Christianity, which has not at some 
 period or other caused alarm and agitation to 
 those who have persistently forgotten that the 
 letter killeth, and that it is the spirit only 
 which giveth life. 
 
 iii. Once more, such views, from which, 
 as we have seen, nothing can be gained, are 
 the sad cause of much being lost. This hard 
 denunciative literalism repels many from that 
 which they would otherwise reverence ; it dis- 
 gusts many with that in which they would 
 otherwise delight. It destroys sympathy ; it 
 consecrates error ; it invites attack ; it con- 
 fuses all clearness of moral vision ; it blunts 
 all delicacy of spiritual perception ; it provokes 
 controversies which it is powerless to silence ; 
 it accumulates difficulties which it is ineffectual 
 to remove ; it changes a rejoicing reverence 
 into a burdensome superstition, and transforms 
 into a mechanical and unreasoning acceptance 
 a free and fearless faith. 
 
 i8. We believe, then, with an unfeigned 
 heart fervently that Holy Scripture was given 
 by inspiration of God ; that in it is contained all 
 that is necessary for salvation ; that it is the 
 most priceless boon which God has accorded to 
 us, because in it is the fullest and clearest reve- 
 lation of His will and purpose towards us and 
 towards our race — of the duties, of our life 
 here, and our hopes of the life hereafter. We 
 believe that more clearly than in History, 
 more loudly than in Nature, more thrillingly 
 than in Conscience itself, we hear therein the 
 voice of God, and that if its accents had not
 
 INSPIRATION OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 
 
 135 
 
 been vouchsafed to us, those other voices 
 would have sunk, first into lamentable un- 
 certainty, finally into absolute silence. And 
 as regards the method of its deliverance, we 
 have seen a multitude of facts, both external 
 and internal which lead us to believe that it 
 was analogous to the deliverance of those truths 
 which are vouchsafed to us from other sources : 
 i. e. that it was only supernatural as the deepest 
 facts of our spiritual experience are supernat- 
 ural, and only miraculous as any communica- 
 tions must be miraculous whereby the finite is 
 enabled to comprehend the teaching and will 
 of the Infinite. We believe that in reading it 
 we are reading the will, the message, the 
 dealings of God as they were made manifest 
 by the light of His Spirit to the minds of the 
 messengers whom He selected ; but that these 
 messages were not, for the most part, revealed 
 by openings of the heaven, and unearthly 
 voices in the air — not by signs and wonders 
 to startle and overwhelm — not by shocks of 
 visible manifestations sudden and violent — 
 but by spiritual agencies analogous to, though 
 far intenser than, those whereby, in all ages, 
 God — who is the God not of Churches only, 
 but of all mankind — has inspired and illumi- 
 nated the hearts of men.
 
 OCT 23 1980 
 
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 iFarrar, Frederic William, 
 '^^. 1831-1903. 
 
 Lectures and addresses 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY
 
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