¦V *<¦'".'¦' '''.'- :-,,:". '''¦'.'

BOSTON LECTURES.

BOSTON LECTURES,
1871.

CHKISTMITY AM) SCEPTICISM;

COMPRISING

A TREATMENT OF QUESTJQ^

BIBLICAL' CRITICISM.

BOSTON :
CONGKEGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY,
No. 13, CORNHILL.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by
The Congregational Publishing Society,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Boston :
Rand, A very, &> Frye, Stereotypers and Printers.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTORY.
by rev. austin phelps, d.d. Page.
The Relations of the Bible to the Civilization of the Future, 1 1
LECTURE I.
by rev. charles m. mead, ph. d.
The Primeval Revelation  47
LECTURE II
by rev. j. r. thompson, d.d., ll.d.
Moses  86
LECTURE III.
by rev. w. s. tyler, d.d.
Joshua and Judges j or, The Heroic Age of Israel . . . 132
LECTURE IV.
by rev. leonard bacon, d.d.
The Hebrew Theocracy  171
LECTURE V.
by john lord, ll.d.
The Prophet Isaiah  196
7

8 CONTENTS.
LECTURE VI.
by rev. george b. cheever, d.d. Page.
The Gospel of the Hebrew Prophets  22-'
LECTURE VH.
by prof. g. p. fisher, d.d.
The Apostle Paul  293
LECTURE Vin.
by rev. j. henry thayer.
Criticism Confirmatory of the Gospels  324
LECTURE IX.
by rev. d. s. talcott, d.d.
Jesus Christ Himself the All-Sufficient Evidence of Chris
tianity  403
LECTURE X.
by rev. mark hopkins, d.d., ll.d.
Exclusive Traits of Christianity  436

CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.

LECTUBES.

NOTE.
In accordance with an apparent demand, it was the aim of the Com
mittee to secure for the year 1871 a course of Lectures somewhat more
popular in character than those of the year before. They accordingly
chose a series of themes which they believed would be interesting not
only to scholars, but perhaps, in equal measure, to the great community
of intelligent students of the Bible. For the mode of treatment, how
ever, as well as for all particulars of statement or opinion, the several
authors are to have the whole credit and responsibility, each for his own
contribution. While individual themes have been presented, we trust, with satisfac
tory completeness, the Lectures, taken together, do not assume to form
a systematic treatise upon the Bible, or to furnish an exhaustive discus
sion of all the great questions respecting it which interest the present
age. They offer a series of studies upon some of its books, its men, its
times, and its claims.
A third course may be expected next year.
Boston, April, 1871.

INTRODUCTOKY.

THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE TO THE CIVILI
ZATION OF THE FUTURE.1
BY REV. AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D.
HISTORY has learned to recognize the founders
of New England among the civilizing powers
of the world. Their power is, for the most part,
latent, like the forces of Nature. Like those, also, it
is constructive. It has been working now for two
centuries and more ; yet, to-day, it is going on with
its creations, giving birth to States, fashioning insti
tutions, breathing free life into nations, with the
same unconsciousness of its own majesty which be
longs to gravitation.
Like all such unconscious forces in the moral world,
however, it is not the power of the men who represent
ed it, but of certain principles which were in the men.
Those principles, as related to the progress of civili
zation, may be reduced to two, of a very simple char
acter. The one is their faith in the word of God ;
the other, their faith in the world's future.
1 The substance of this discourse was delivered ten years ago, as a sermon,
before the Government of Massachusetts. Having been long out of print, it is
revised and republished here, as being germane to the general object of this
volume. 11

12 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Our fathers had faith in the Bible. They believed
it as no abstraction, concerned rather with other
worlds than with this. They embraced it as the most
intense reality they knew of. It was as necessary to
their daily welfare as the daily sunrise. They ground
ed their domestic and literary and civil institutions
upon it no less heartily than their churches and
creeds and pulpits. They would have put a man in
the pillory who should have so insulted their con
sciences, and expressed the degradation of his own,
as to deny the obligation of a State to conform to the
same standard of right with that which should gov
ern the individual. They consulted the ministers of
religion in the framing of their statutes, at the very
time when their care against priestly domination was
so vigilant, that they forbade the clergy to solemnize
the rite of marriage. They fought the battles of the
State with Bibles in their knapsacks. They ex
pounded the institutes of Moses, and sang the Psalms
of David, on the eve of their victories. It was their
faith in the word of God which moved that act
of the American Congress, by which, at the height
of the Revolution, side by side with appropriations
for the purchase of gunpowder, there stood an order
for the importation of twenty thousand copies of
the Scriptures.
From such a faith as this, it was an inevitable cor
ollary that our fathers should have faith also in the
future destiny of this world. Such men could not
believe that God would abandon the nations. They
were stern predestinarians ; but theirs was faith in
the predestined triumph of right over wrong, of truth
over falsehood, of liberty over slavery, and of a Chris-

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 13
tian civilization, therefore, over barbarism, however
rooted in history. If ever men deserved the title,
they were men of the future. Their ideas penetrated
into coming times farther than they themselves saw.
They were the builders of structures of which they
were not consciously the architects. It has been well
said of them, that they had a " high constructive in
stinct, raising them above their age and above them
selves." Men who are raised above their age and
above themselves, by whatever power, have great
visions of truth, which suggest, when they do not re
veal, a great future. It was a spiritual inheritance
from such men wliieh moved John Adams, in the
Congress of 1775, to say, "No assembly ever had a
greater number of great objects before them. Prov
inces, nations, empires, are small things before us." 2
Tracing our institutions to their origin in such an
ancestry, we may not unfitly regard it as our birth
right to consider, on an occasion like this, —
SOME OF THE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE TO THE CIV
ILIZATION OF THE FUTUKE.
The discussion of this theme here must necessarily
be fragmentary. It will be my object to direct your
thoughts to a few only of the facts in which lie the
germs of the control which the Scriptures must exert
over the progress of mankind.
I. Of these, we may observe, in the first place, that
the Scriptures are believed by candid and scholarly
critics to contain the most ancient forms of truth now
known to men. In any enlarged view of the forces
* Life and Works of John Adams, vol. I. p. 170.

14 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
which civilize communities, a place must be found for
the instinctive reverence of the human mind for an
tiquity. A thing is presumptively true if it is old ;
and an old truth men will revere. Such is human
nature. We all have historic feelers, which reach
out into the past for something to lay hold of, and to
hold on by, in the rush of things around us. He is
not a bold man, but a weak one, rather, who can tear
himself absolutely loose from those roots which run
into the under-ground of other ages. It would be an
irreparable loss to the civilizing forces of Christendom
if the faith of the Christian world could be destroyed
in the descent of the race from one pair ; so ennobling,
and so stimulating to culture, is this instinct of rever
ence for a long-lived unity* Especially is its power
felt in the fashioning and perpetuating of civil and
social institutions. An institution becomes to a nation
like an heirloom to a family : the longer it has been,
the more worthy to be it appears to the nation's heart.
England, within a century, has borne shocks of her
social framework which no other nation in Europe
could have survived, in part because she has a thou
sand years of history.
With all the abuses to which this susceptibility of
our nature is liable, it is in our nature, and for wise
purposes. Within its normal limits, and kept in bal
ance by the opposite spirit of inquiry, its operation is
healthfql. No grand elevation of society is ever at
tained without its aid. The Bible invites a large and
free indulgence of it by the fact, that in this volume
are contained, as we believe, the earliest truthful
thoughts of our race in written forms.
To give definiteness to this view, let several speci-

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 15
fications be observed in its illustration. It is, for
instance, a fact, the significance of which infidelity
appreciates, if we do not, that the only authentic his
tory of the world before the Flood is found in the
sacred books of Christianity. The world of the future
never can know any thing of the antediluvians except
from the Jewish historian. It would be worth cen
turies of toil to the socialism of Europe if the infidel
science on which it is founded could blot out this one
fact in the relations of the world to the Pentateuch.
We have also, in the books of Moses, — what no
other literature can show, — one or two stanzas of
poetry which were actually composed in the antedi
luvian infancy of the race. Does it not help us to
some conception of the venerableness of these vol
umes to recall that they were written eleven hundred
years before Herodotus, whom all other literature de
nominates the father of history ? The Hebrew juris
prudence is seven hundred years older than that of
Lycurgus, and two thousand years older than that
of Justinian. You have heard that Thomas Jefferson
was indebted for his conception of our American
government to the polity of an obscure Calvinistic
church in Virginia ; but republicanism was foreshad
owed in the Hebrew commonwealth three thousand
years before the settlement of Jamestown.
Dr. Johnson once read a manuscript copy of the
book of Ruth to a fashionable circle in London. They
begged to know of him where he obtained such an
inimitable pastoral. What would have been their
amazement if he had concealed the fact of the inspired
origin of the story, and had told them that it was an
ancient treasure, written twenty-five hundred years

16 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
before the discovery of America ! The lyric poetry
of the Hebrews was in its golden age nearly a thou
sand years before the birth of Horace. The author of
Ecclesiastes discussed the problem of evil six hundred
years before Socrates in the dialogues of Plato ; and
the epithalamium of the Canticles is a thousand years
older than Ovid. The book of Esther was a vener
able fragment of biography stranger than fiction, at
least fifteen hundred years old at the dawn of the
romantic literature of Europe. The Proverbs of
Solomon are, by nine hundred years, more ancient
than the treatises of Seneca. The entire bulk of the
prophetic literature of the Hebrews, — a literature ex
traordinary, one which has laws of its own, to which
there is and can be no parallel in any uninspired
workings of the human mind, — this mysterious, often
unfathomable compendium of the world's future,
which the wisdom of twenty centuries has not ex
hausted, was, the whole of it, anterior to the Augustan
age of Rome ; and even the writers of the New Tes
tament are, all of them, of more venerable antiquity
than Tacitus and Plutarch and Pliny the younger.
And what shall be said of the book of Job ? Bib
lical scholars can only conjecture its age ; but if that
conjecture be true, which to many has seemed most
probable, this is the oldest volume now existing, 
at least a thousand years older than Homer. It was
already an ancient poem when Cecrops founded
Athens. When Britain was invaded by the Romans,
it was more time-worn than the name of Julius Caesar
to-day is to us. Natural philosophers now turn to
its allusions as the only recorded evidence we have
of the state of the arts and sciences four thousand

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 17
years ago. A modern commentator on the book has
collated from it passages illustrative of the then
existing state of knowledge respecting astronomy,
geography, cosmology, meteorology, mining operations,
precious stones, coining, writing, engraving, medicine,
music, hunting,* husbandry, modes of travel, the mili
tary art, and zoology. Any other work, surely, which
should be so fortunate as to be of uninspired author
ity, and should give to the world the obscurest au
thentic hints of the state of these sciences and arts
forty centuries back, would be hailed as a treasure
worthy of a nation's purchase.
But these vestiges of antiquity are of little mo
ment considered merely as curiosities of literature.
The thing which gives them claim to notice at the
present is, that through them there- runs a chain of
truth representing a work of God for this world's
welfare, and that this is the only thing in the world's
history which goes back in authentic record to the
beginning of time. Such a, volume must be, sooner
or later, a power in the world's enlightenment ; if for
no other reason, for the strength of its appeal to
man's reverence for long-lived truth. Nations cannot
forever throw off its authority if they would. Gov
ernments cannot permanently seal it up, nor political
science treat it with the contempt of silence. Armies
cannot trample it out of life in the souls of men.
Manly souls will not let it go from them. It must
be felt as one of the powers of control on earth, if
this clinging of our nature to ancient forms of truth
is designed, in God's purposes, to hold the world fast
to any thing in the evolution of its destiny.
2*

18 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
II. The sovereignty of the Scriptures in the prog
ress of mankind is further suggested by the fact,
that they contain the only development of Oriental
mind which can be an authority in the civilization of
the future. In an estimate, on any large scale, of
the probable advancement of our race", it is impossible
to leave out of account the immense masses of being
which are congregated in the East. If the most re
cent reckonings of the population of the globe are
true, considerably more than the half of mankind are
east of the Mediterranean. Oriental scholars tell us
that they find there a civilization as complicated, and
in its kind as perfect, as that of the West. Recent
history indicates a probable design of Providence to
bring the two types of humanity into contact, it may
be for a time into conflict, with each other. The
Western mind is reaching out from Europe overland,
and from this continent across the Pacific ; and from
both it is peering around the Capes to find out the
resources of that Asiatic world, and, if possible, to
use them. Every thing betokens an approach of
these ends of the earth to greet each other. But
for what purpose is the greeting as it regards that
Oriental half of mankind ? What type of the Asiatic
mind, other than that found in the Scriptures, has
any prospect of impressing itself on the world's
future ? What other can possibly become a vitalizing
agency in the progress of any thing that enters into
our ideal of an elevated and refined humanity ?
It is a fact, of which we are apt to be oblivious in
responding to questions of this kind, that all the
ascendant forces working in modern civilization are
Occidental. They are the offspring immediately of

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 19
the Western races, of Western ideals of taste, of man
ners, of learning, of arts, of commerce, of govern
ment, and of religion. The national temperaments
which they represent, the histories which lie back of
them, and the languages which express them, are all
the growth of Western climes. The old fancy, that
empire follows the sun, is sober truth in the annals of
civilization. Oriental life has no perceptible power
in them as an authority in any other development
than that found in the Scriptures. With the excep
tion of a small group of scholars given to Asiatic
researches, the circle even of scholarly thought, in
our day, does not go back of the Greek literature
chronologically, nor eastward of it geographically.
The aiicient seats of power have no lines of tele
graph connecting them, in the conceptions of modern
scholarship, with the empires of the West. The con
nection exists historically ; but it is handed over to
antiquarians. Who thinks of it, often, in observing
the growth of manhood on this side of the Atlantic?
To whom is our derivation from Asiatic progenitors
any thing more than a curiosity in ethnologic history ?
What is there existing in the Oriental forms of life to
remind us of it ? Where are the powers of Eastern
thought which are now creating any thing that seems
worthy of the regard of an American scholar or
statesman? What have we learned from Japanese
and Chinese embassies that has seemed worthy to be
ingrafted upon American life and manners ? Where
are the great libraries of the East, where are the uni
versities, where are the men of literary renown, to
attract literary travel beyond the Bosphorus ? Where
are the advanced forms of government, the improved

20 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ideas of liberty, the superior systems of jurisprudence,
the more perfect balancing of the social forces, which
should lead an American senator to seek out the wise
men of the East ? Where is there any thing East
ern which is now projecting itself, by the energy of. its
own merits, upon Western civilization ? The truth is,
that a new world has sprung up westward of the
Euphrates and the Ural Mountains, which is more than
newly-discovered continents. Occidental mind is a
novelty as related to the earlier developments of the
race. It is almost as much isolated from its Oriental
progenitors, at all those points of sympathy which
form inlets of influence, as if it were the mind of
another planet. The only volume, the only thing of
elemental energy, which forms an isthmus between
the two, on any large scale, is the Christian Scriptures.
These have affinities for both. Through these they
can come together in brotherhood.
Suspending now, for a few moments, the observa
tion of this fact, let it be remarked, on the other
hand, that the Oriental development of man, as a
whole, is giving no signs of having finished its work
in the divine plans respecting the world's progress.
The Oriental races are not only the grandest in respect
of numbers, but they are the most various in respect
of character, which this planet has yet borne. It is
not probable that they are to be a blank in the civili
zation of the future. Is it not to the last degree im
probable that imbecility is to settle henceforth upon
that immense Oriental brain ? He must have a singu
lar theory of the ascendency of races who can per
suade himself that our culture, so exclusively Occi
dental as it is, has received all that it can receive

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 21
from that ancient stock. Nothing in the divine
methods of working gives countenance to such pre
sumption. What is the law of Providence respecting nations
and races which have finished their work as powers
in the world's destiny ? It is the law of dissolution.
When a nation has ended its mission in the evolu
tions of the drama which Providence is enacting, that
nation dies. When a race of men has reached the
point at which God has no further use for them in
the future moulding of nations, that race goes out
of being as a visibly distinct stock of manhood. It
decays and falls off, or by revolution it is pruned off
from the trunk, and the sap of the root flows else
where. When a type of civilization has grown obso
lete in its relations to God's plans for the future, that
civilization caves in, and is swallowed up, and covered
over by something younger and better. God lives, —
we may say it reverently, — God lives, in his govern
ment of this world, for the future, never for the past.
Races, nations, states, churches, civil institutions, even
families, — any thing, in short, that would live, —
must move abreast with Providence.
Christianity, which, as wrought into organic social
forms, is but the flower aud the fruitage of Provi
dence, has always been prophetic in its instincts. It
has always been animated with the soul of a seer.
It has looked to coming generations, and lived for
them. It has never bound itself to the soil anywhere.
It has refused to be hemmed in by geographical lines.
It calls no land holy merely because it was born
there. It has no such romance in its make. The
law of its being is, that it shall pass away from super-

22 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
annuated to youthful races, from decaying to germi-
nant nations, from expiring to nascent languages.
By the decree of God, it is fore-ordained to take pos
session always of the lands of promise. Its affinities
are such as always to draw to itself those elements in
families, in churches, in civil institutions, in states, in
nations, in tongues, in races of men, which are elastic
and eager and foreseeing. Any stock of humanity
which is so far worn out as to have lost beyond re
covery this capacity for future use, Christianity parts
with, leaps away from, and leaves to die. It goes
where it finds the most healthy, exuberant energy of
production. Mere susceptibility of being acted upon
is not sufficient to preserve a nation under this law
of Providence. It must have power to do, either
latent or developed, as well as to be, otherwise its
permission to be is revoked. Nothing in God's plan
of things is purely receptive. Every thing must help
another thing. Any thing dies when it ceases to be
helpful. Under this law, the entire Oriental stock of mind,
if it has finished its work in God's plan, ought now
to be evincing signs of dissolution. The Oriental
type of civilization ought, as a whole, to be approach
ing its extinction. Yet this is by no means the case
with it. The nations which represent it, as a whole,
are not dying out. They are not visibly approaching
their end. More than one of the Asiatic races seem
to be yet as full-blooded, and as virile in their physi
cal make, and as likely to endure for thirty generations
to come, as they did a thousand years ago. That an
cient development of manhood, which began on the
plains of Shinar, bids fair to live by the side of ita

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 23
Occidental rival, even if it does not outlive this by
reason of its calmer flow of life. If it does thus live,
all analogy should lead us to believe that there is
something in it which deserves to live. There is
something in it which Providence has a use for in the
future. It has energy ; it has resources ; it has manly
tastes and proclivities ; it has something or other,
which, under divine regeneration, would be, will be,
a cause of growth, if infused into the life-blood of
the Western races. The circle of Occidental devel
opment may be enlarged by it. The channel in
which our civilization is moving may be thus widened
and deepened.
Resuming, now, the connection of this train of
thought with the theme more immediately before us,
let it be repeated, that the only method by which
the Oriental mind can ever thus again affect the
civilization of the West is through the forces of the
Bible. If new systems of thought are to grow up
among the Asiatics with any function of control in
the world, they must be the creations of the Bible.
Nothing else represents the Oriental mind in any
form which can ever rouse it to its utmost of ca
pacity. Nothing else, therefore, can ever enable it
to become a power in the future civilization. None
but a visionary can look for a rejuvenescence of Asia
in the coming ages, from any internal forces now acting
there, independently of the Scriptures. The history
of the East contains nothing which can ever be to
the world what the revived civilizations of Greece
and Rome were to the middle ages of Europe. What
ever that immense territory has to contribute to the
civilization of the future must come as the illustra-

24 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
tion of scriptural modes of thought, and as the fruit
of scriptural ideas of truth.
Why should it be deemed visionary to look for this
as one of the results of the infusion of European mind
now going on in Western and Central Asia, meeting,
as it soon must, a similar infusion of American mind
from across the Pacific ? What, indeed, may not be
hoped for from this double overflow of the Occidental
civilization, channelled as it is, and is to be, by the
work of Christian missionaries ? Inspired prophecy
aside, it is no more visionary to predict the re-crea
tion of Oriental mind in the forms of new literatures
superior to any the world has yet known, through the
plastic influence of the Scriptures, than it was to an
ticipate the birth of the three great literatures of
Europe as the fruit of the modern revival of the litera
tures of Greece and Rome. The mind of nations
moves in just such immense waves of revolution. Rea
soning d priori, they seem impossible, as geologic cata
clysms do to a race which has never experienced them ;
but, reasoning d posteriori, they are only the natural
effect of a great force generating great forces. They
seem as gravitation does to a race which has no con
ception of what it would be to exist without it. The
diurnal revolutions of the planet are not more normal
or more sure.
The Asiatic races have, indeed, a fairer intellectual
prospect than Europe had at the time of the revival
of letters ; and this for the reason that they are to
receive their higher culture in Christian instead of
Pagan forms. Conceive what a difference would
have been created in the destinies of Europe, what
centuries of conflict with barbarism would to human

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 25
view have been saved, if the forms of Greek and
Roman literatures could have come into the posses
sion of the modern European mind, embodying Chris
tian rather than Pagan thought, and if, thus Chris
tianized, they could have been wrought into European
culture ! Yet just this, to a very large extent, appears
likely to be the process of intellectual awakening to
which the immense forces of Asiatic mind are to be
subjected. Asiatic literatures of the future are to be
the direct product of centuries of Christian culture
in other lands. They are to have no paganism to ex
orcise, as European civilization had, from the very
models which are to inspire them. In Asia, pagan
ism is to represent to the future, not only dead insti
tutions, oppressive governments, degrading traditions,
and popular wretchedness, but a puerile literature as
well. It can never there, as it did in Europe, go into
solution with Christianity through the force of a pa
gan culture so beautiful and so lofty as to command
the reverence of all enterprising scholarship.
Napoleon used to say that the only theatre fit for
great exploits was the East. Europe, he said, was
contracted ; it was provincial : the great races were
beyond the Mediterranean. They were in the ancient
seats of empire, because the numbers were there.
There may be more of truth in this than he meant
to utter. The grandest intellectual and moral con
quests of the world may yet follow the track of Alex
ander. III. Passing now from the Oriental world, we may
observe a further source of the ascendency of the
Bible in the institutions of the future in the fact
8

26 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
that it is already wrought into all the dominant forces
of the civilization of the West. Not that it is in
them all with equal efficiency, but in all of them in
such degree as to make itself obvious. When we
speak of the sway of European and American mind,
we speak the conquests of the Scriptures. The ele
mental ideas of the Bible lie at the foundation of the
whole of it. Christianity has wrought such revolu
tions of opinion ; it has thrown into the world so
much of original thought ; it has organized so many
institutions, customs, unwritten laws of life ; it has
leavened society with such a powerful antiseptic to
the putrescent elements of depravity ; and it has,
therefore, positively created so much of the best
material of humanity, — that now the noblest type
of civilization cannot be conceived of otherwise than
as a debtor to the Christian Scriptures.
This obligation becomes most obvious in our mod
ern literature, because there the ideas which are
creative in our civilization take on forms of speech.
The debt of literature to the Bible is like the debt of
vegetation to light. No other volume has contributed
so much to the great organic forms of thought ; no
other is fusing itself so widely into the standards of
libraries. Homer and Plato and Aristotle long since
gave place to it as an intellectual power. This
volume has never yet, at any one time, numbered
among its believers a fourth part of the human race ;
yet it has swayed a greater amount of mind than any
other volume the world has known. It has the
singular faculty of attracting to itself the thinkers
of the world, either as friends or as opponents,
always, everywhere. The works of comment upon it,

THE BIBLE AND IHE FUTURE. 27
of themselves, form a literature of which any nation
might be proud. It is more voluminous than all that
remains to us of the Greek and Roman literatures
combined. An English antiquarian, who has had the
curiosity to number the existing commentaries upon
the Scriptures, or upon portion's of them, found the
number to exceed sixty thousand. Where is another
empire" of mind to be found like this ?
Here is a power, which, say what we may of its
results, has set the Christian world to thinking, and
kept it thinking, for nearly two thousand years. The
unpublished literature of the Christian pulpit sur
passes in volume all the libraries of all the nations.
" If the sermons preached in our land during a
single year were all printed," says a living scholar,
" they would fill a hundred and twenty million octavo
pages. Many of these sermons are, indeed, speci
mens of human weakness ; but the frailest vase may
hold roots that will far outgrow its own dimen
sions." 3 The Bible is read to-day by a larger num
ber of educated minds than any other book. In
numerable multitudes are poring over its pages, and
are feeling its elevating, refining influence, who never
think of it otherwise than as the authority of then-
religious faith.4 Harvard College, at a time when
the material civilization of Massachusetts was so
meagre that a pewter flagon and a bushel of corn
8 Prof. E. A. Park's Election Sermon, 1851, p. 12.
' " The number of English Bibles and New Testaments, separately, which
have passed through the press within tbe recollection of many now living, has
exceeded tbe number of souls in Britain. In the space of twelve months, the
press has sent forth more than a million of copies; or say above nineteen
thousand every week, above three thousand every day, three hundred every hour,
or five every minute, of working-time." — Anderson's Annals of the English
Bible, vol. i. ; Preface, p. 8.

28 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
were received gratefully as a contribution to the col
legiate funds, was founded by men, some of whom
could regale themselves in their hours of leisure by
conversing in the original language of the Old Testa
ment. Our own language owes, in part, the very
structure it has received to influences exerted upon
it by our English Bible. No Englishman or Ameri
can knows well his mother-tongue till he has learned
it in the vocabulary and the idioms of King James's
translation. In English form, the Bible stands at the
head of the streams of English conquests and of
English and American colonization and commerce.
It must control, in large degree, the institutions which
are to spring up on the banks of those streams the
world over.
It is interesting to observe how the influence of the
Bible trickles down into crevices in all other litera
ture, and shows itself at length in golden veins, and
precious gems of thought, which are the admiration
of all observers, but for which He who made them
often receives no thanksgiving.5 Wordsworth's criti
cism of Milton, that, " however imbued the surface
might be with classical literature, he was a Hebrew
in soul," is true of very much that is most inspiring
and most durable in our modern poetry. The " Ode
on Immortality " could never have been written but
* The late Prof. B. B. Edwards, in his adrpirable Essay on the Hebrew
Poetry, observes, " It supplies tbe seeds of thought, the suggestive hints, the
little germs, the dim conceptions, the outlines, of some of the subllmest poems,
or passages of poems, to be found in modern literature. It is easy to perceive
the influence of the Scriptures on the imagination of Spenser. The Messiah of
Pope is only a paraphrase of some passages in Isaiah. The highest strains of
Cowper, in bis Task, are but an expansion of a chapter of tbe same prophet.
In the Thanatopsis of Bryant, [certain] lines remind us at once of the words of
Job. Lord Byron's celebrated poem on Darkness was evidently founded on a
passage in Jeremiah. — Writings, vol. ii. pp. 389, 390.

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 29
for the creative effect upon the poet's imagination of
such scriptures as the fifteenth chapter of the First
Epistle to the Corinthians and the eighth chapter of
the Epistle to the Romans. Pantheism has a cool
way of appropriating a great deal of Christian
poetry. Thus it claims Wordsworth ; but the most
autobiographic passages in " The Excursion," descrip
tive of the communion of his soul with Nature,
could never have been conceived but by a mind
which was permeated by the inspiration of the hun
dred and forty-eighth Psalm.
" In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,"
is the language in which he himself describes that
communion. Shakspeare's conception of woman is another illus
tration to the same effect. De Quincey claims it as
an absolute original, by no other genius than Shak
speare's. But, in the last analysis, Shakspeare's
ideal is only the Christian ideal, which suffuses with
refinement our modern life. We owe it ultimately,
not to poetry, but to the biblical fact of the atone
ment. Nothing else has made the conception pos
sible of a Desdemona or Ophelia growing out of
a sex degraded in all other than Christian litera
tures. The hymnological literature of all modern lan
guages has been absolutely created by the Hebrew
psalmody. The ancient classics have not contributed
a stanza to it. Not a line of it lives, through two
generations, in which the genius of the Psalms of
David does not overpower and appropriate all other
8*

30 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
resources of culture. The old English and Scottish
ballads never exerted on the national mind a tithe of
the influence of the Hebrew psalm. The Common
wealth of England owed its existence, in part, to the
psalm-singing of Cromwell's armies. On the con
tinent of Europe, also, the whole bulk of the despot
ism of the middle ages went down, for a time, before
the rude imitations of the Hebrew psalmody by
Clement Marot and Hans Sachs. The battle-song of
Gustavus Adolphus was originally published with
this title : " A heart-cheering Song of Comfort on the
Watchword of the Evangelical Army in the Battle
of Leipsic, Sept. 7, 1831, ' God with Us.' "
Who shall worthily portray the obligations of
American institutions to the word of God ? Sir
James Mackintosh says that the " Independent di
vines " first taught to John Locke " those principles
of religious liberty which they were the first to dis
close to the world." 6 But why should the Inde
pendent divines have been the pioneers of such dis
covery? "Democracy is Christ's Government" was
the theme of a pamphlet by a humble pastor of
Massachusetts in 1687 ; which nearly a hundred
years later, on the eve of our Revolution, was re
published as a political document becoming to the
times.7 On a sabbath morning, the 8th of June, 1766, when
« Mackintosh's Miscellaneous Works, second edition. London. Page 152.
In a note upon Orme's Memoirs of Dr. Owen, he adds, "In this very able
volume it is clearly proved that the Independents were the first teachers of reli
gious liberty. . . It is an important fact in the history of toleration, that
Dr. Owen, the Independent, was Dean of Christ Church in 1651, when Locke
was admitted a member of that college, ' under a fanatical tutor,' as Anthony
Wood says."
' Thornton's Pulpit of the American Revolution. Introduction, p. 29.

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 31
the old charter of Massachusetts was in peril, Jona
than Mayhew, pastor of the West Church in Boston,
hallowed his last day of health in that city by writing
to James Otis, "You have heard of the communion
of churches. . . . While I was thinking of this in
my bed, the great use and importance of a communion ,
of colonies appeared to me in a strong light, which
led me immediately to set down these hints to trans
mit to you." 8 That was the germ from which
sprang the union of these States. But where did
Jonathan Mayhew find the idea of the communion of
churches? He found it where he found the other
great thoughts which inspired his love of liberty. In
a sermon preached to his people on the occasion of
the repeal of the Stamp Act, he said, " Having
learned from the Holy Scriptures that wise and brave
and virtuous men are always friends to liberty, . . .
and that, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is lib
erty, — this- made me conclude that freedom is a great
blessing." 9
Eloquent defenders of liberty in parliament and
senate have echoed the voice of this patriotic pastor
by their own indebtedness to the same fountain of
freedom and free speech. The Earl of Chatham ac
knowledged that he owed much of his power in par
liamentary debate to the apostle Paul. Patrick
Henry and James Otis were often likened in their
day to the Hebrew prophets. Lord Brougham and
Daniel Webster have both expressed their sense of
obligation to the same models. Webster was for
<¦* Bradford's Life of Mayhew, pp. 428, 429.
9 The Snare Broken, — a Thanksgiving Discourse by Dr. Mayhew, preached
May 23, 1766; p. 43.

32 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
years the concordance of the Senate of the United
States. It is said that some of his ablest opponents
have been known to seek the aid of his memory to
furnish them with biblical references with which to
condense and point their own speeches against him ;
yet such was his affluence in command of the same
resources, that he could afford to give them liberally,
and without upbraiding.
To all departments of modern thought, the Scrip
tures have been what they have been to modern art.
It has been said that the single conception of the
Virgin and her Child has achieved more for the ele
vation of art than all the exhumed models of Greece
and Rome. It is a well-known fact, that nothing in
art itself succeeded in crushing out the moral abomi
nations which many of those models expressed, until
the Christian religion flooded the realm of beauty
with more intense ideas of life ; so that, to the purest
taste, the Greek Venus has become imbecile by the
side of the Christian Madonna. So is the Bible drop
ping everywhere its germs of refinement in modern
civilization, beyond • the depth of Greek and Roman
thought in its choicest and most durable forms.
I would not weary you with an enumeration of ex
amples of a truth so obvious ; but it is illustrated
with singular vividness in one phenomenon of our
age, which you will permit me to notice. I allude to
the unconscious debt of infidelity to biblical resources.
The energy of a moral power is often seen most im
pressively in the disasters which attend its perversions.
So the power with which the Scriptures are working
in modern mind is disclosed in the vigor of our infidel
literature. That literature owes nearly all the vitality

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 33
it has to its pilferings of Christian nutriment. Its
very life-blood comes by unconscious suction from
Christian fountains. " The Pilgrim's Progress " and
"The Paradise Lost" are not more palpably indebted
to the Bible than are many of the most thrilling con
ceptions in anti-Christian productions of our times.
The most popular and effective of them no man could
have written whose genius had not been developed
by Christianity. No man would have written them
whose infidelity had not been fired by collision with
the Epistle to the Romans.
Atheism, as is well known, is now working dis
astrously among the artisan-classes of Great Britain ;
but it owes the chief source of its power over the
popular mind to the fact that it holds on to so much
of scriptural thought, though struggling to enforce it
without a scriptural God. Its capital ideas are bibli
cal ideas. Strip it of these, and it would have no
more chance of a hearing in the workshops of Bir
mingham and Manchester than the vagaries of Buddh
ism. What else than Christianity ever gave to the
human' conscience spring enough to enable it to con
ceive of such a thing as a practical religion without
a God? Yet just that is English atheism to-day.10
10 On this topic the learned author of the Natural HiBtory of Enthusiasm
remarks as follows : " The disbelief of these last days, so far as it is a scheme
of doctrine, may be shown to be a birth of Christian doctrine. The Atheism
partly, and tho Theism entirely, ofthe present time, is a heresy full of Christian
sap. By calling it Christian, I mean that it has no meaning at all except that
which it has wrung from elements of Christian belief, brought into collision one
with another. Atheism, in these days, is not, as of old, a metaphysic abstrac
tion, or a cold paradox; but it is a living creature, speaking with a loud voice,
and showing a ruddy cheek, because it has drawn life-blood from that which can
spare much, and yet live. If the gospel, the destruction of which ie so eagerly
desired by some among us, were actually to breathe its last, not one of the
schemes of doctrine which is now offered to us in its stead would thenceforward
draw another breath." — The Mestoration of Belief, p. 245.

34 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
It is not vice ; it is not conscious blasphemy; it is not
moral anarchy : it is an aim at morality, at moral cul
ture, at moral principle, at moral progress, at moral
worship after its kind, all sustained in theory by the
force of moral instincts, without a God for their cen
tre. When did any human soul ever get force
enough of moral instincts to conceive such an idea as
that? Similar to this is the chief lesson which we have to
learn from the most captivating phases of infidelity in
our own country. It would be entertaining, if it
were not too painfully solemn, to observe the depth
to which Christian thought has penetrated, and the
extent to which Christian colorings of speech have
suffused, the culture exhibited by the most effective
of the infidel writers among us. Mark it anywhere,
— on the platform, in newspapers, in magazines, in
books, — the materials of thought which these lectur
ers, critics, philosophers, seers, are wielding to the
saddest hurt of Christian faith, are, at bottom, Chris
tian products. No other class of literary men are so
profoundly indebted to the Scriptures, and yet so pro
foundly oblivious of the debt. Open the book of this
class which first occurs to you as the most fascinating
specimen of the whole ; turn to its most captivating
pages ; sift its style ; weigh its thought : and what do
you find of good, sterling worth ? Wherever you find
clear ideas, held in honest Saxon grip, so that you can
get at them, and see them all around and all through,
and know what you know of them,— -if they prove to
be good for any thing, you find them created or vivi
fied by something which the writer owes to Chris
tianity. Here it is a truth as old as Moses ; there it

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 35
is the power to conceive of the opposite of a truth :
again it is an antithesis of half-truths ; farther on it
is a dislocated quotation ; then a warped and twisted
allusion : now it is an infidel fungus overgrowing a
' germ of truth which gives it its power to grow ; then
it is a Pantheistic turn to language, which, in its origi
nal, Christian souls love. Even down to the indefi
nable ingenuities and sinuosities of style, you find at
work the alert or the sinewy fingers of a Christian
culture. The very sentences which express or imply
semi-paganism in theology, but the rhetoric of which
makes them ring like the crack of a pistol, are, as
specimens of style, the product of a Saxon Bible.
Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, at the root of the
thoughts and the forms which move you in such
pages ? Nonsense ! It is Moses ; it is Isaiah ; it is
David ; it is Paul, John, Christ. Eliminate the ele
ments of culture which these have contributed to
such literature, and no man living would care what
gods or heroes or sages might claim the residuum.
The most striking illustration, because the most ear
nest mind, in my judgment, which has exhibited the
truth of the fact before us, is that of Theodore Parker.
For twenty years, the most vital infidelity of this land
was personified and concentrated in him. He brought
to that solitary altar at which he ministered a more
generous scholarship, a more mercurial genius, a more
versatile command of thought, and a more fascinating
style, taking him all in all, a more earnest character
and a more ascetic life, than any other of our country
men has ever arrayed against what he used to call
the " popular theology of New England." For one,
I must concede the vigor of his influence. With all

36 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the evidences which were apparent, that its acme had
been reached, and its decline had commenced, during
the last years of his life, I am compelled to believe
that no candid man among his opponents, who knows
the classes of mind which have been addressed, and
the energy with which they have been moved, in yon
der Music Hall, will feel, that, as a friend of truth, he
can afford to ignore that influence, or to underrate it.
We have not yet seen the end of it. The man has
gone ; but he represented, and his name still repre
sents, opinions which are a power in the conflict of
ideas among us. Yet his power was not the power
of his infidelity : it was the power of his unconscious
obligations to the very truth which he discarded. His
vital and vitalizing ideas — those which were electric
to the popular conscience, and imperial over the popu
lar heart — were Christian ideas. He owed them to
the Bible, which he disowned. He derived them from
all the living literatures which he mastered. He could
not get away from those streams of Christian thought.
He absorbed them from the very atmosphere of our
biblical civilization. The workings of his mind were
in part like respiration, in which a man inhales the
pure air which God made for his sustenance, and ex
hales mephitic vapors. He maligned our religion ; he
ridiculed our sacred oracles ; he denounced our hope
of heaven ; he scoffed at our Redeemer ; he uttered
language, which, from our lips, would be the unpar
donable sin. Yet the internal forces which bore up,
as on a ground-swell, this nameless craft, so revolting
to our view, and propelled it often at the top of the
wave in the popular vision, were forces, every one of
which sprang from that ocean of inspired thought

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 37
whose great deeps were broken up in the civilization
and the literature around him. His idea of the dignity
of manhood, of the singleness of individual being, of
the brotherhood of the race, of the intensity of life
under the shadow of immortality, of the paternity
and the love of God, of the right of free inquiry, of
the despicableness of cant in every form, and the
ideas of social and of political and of moral reform
which grew out of these as corollaries, — such were
the elements of his strength. For the right to wield
them he stood up as a free man, with a free tongue ;
and for this we honor him : yet for every one of
these ideas we hold him as a debtor to the old scrip
tural theology of New England.
Thus it is with every development of infidelity
which has force enough of character to render it
respectable. It feeds on Christianity itself, and grows
lusty therefore. Christian thought comes into this
world, and goes through it, like an immense projec
tile. It creates, in the surrounding atmosphere on
either side, currents which are no part of it. Yet
they imitate its magnitude.; they border on its track ;
they catch the rate of its momentum, and so keep
pace with it in speed, like the wind of a cannon-ball.
Hence it is that infidelity appears often to grow in the
intensity of its spirit. Hence it seems often to accu
mulate resources of destructiveness. Each new phase
of it seems more formidable than the last. It is
because the scriptural standards of thought are
working their way deeper into the convictions of
men, are agitating more profoundly the passions of
men, are swaying the nobler orders of intellect and
the finer forms of culture, and are hastening more
4

38 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
swiftly to the ultimate conflicts of truth with error.
The whole being of a Christian nation is thus in
tensified. The Bible, like the sun, thus shines on the
evil and on the good. It fertilizes the soil of infidel
opinions ; and these, in turn, fling up, in defiance of
it, a portion of the fruits of its own vitality.
IV. Some of the views thus far presented involve
another fact, indicative of the ascendency of the Bible
in the future progress of the race. It is, that the
Bible discloses the only groundwork and process of
a perfect civilization as a practicable result.
A scheme of social advancement, as such, the Bible
does not delineate. The word " civilization " does
not once occur in it. The things in which an elevated
social economy reveals itself to political wisdom are
not at all obtrusive upon the foreground of scriptural
thought. Wealth, arts, literature, science, urbanity
of manners, domestic comfort, institutions of charity,
free governments, — these are not the salient themes
here, either of argument or of promise. A reformer
might study pages of this volume, covering a thousand
years of history, and not discover that inspired minds
ever thought of any such sort of thing ; yet a wise
man, instructed in God's wisdom, may traverse the
same ground, and so discern the gravitating of princi
ples towards social results as almost to imagine that
inspired minds thought of nothing else.
The idea out of which the future civilization must
grow is here, there, everywhere, in this Book of Life.
You anticipate me in affirming that that idea is the
moral regeneration of the individual. In this one aim
lies the rudiment of all that is practicable for the

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 39
amelioration of the race. This is the germ of the
whole tree. The wisdom of God is to begin at
the beginning. The wise master-builder starts at the
foundation, and builds up. The pulpit, especially in
its friction against more flimsy engines of reform, has
made this idea familiar to us all. Let us therefore,
more summarily than would be otherwise desirable,
observe the method by which Christianity works as
an organ of political and social movement.
In the first place, it exalts spiritual over material
forces. It aims at souls rather than bodies. " Mine
is a kingdom," it says, " which is not of this world."
Steam, railways, telegraphs, ships, cotton-gins, spin
ning-jennies, printing-presses, and the like, are not, in
the Christian theory, the elemental civilizing powers.
They are effects and incidents. The powers which lie
back of them are ideas. They lay hold of the only
thing on this earth which is immortal. The stir of
physical forces is only the fermentation incident to the
working of ideas in a world of sense. The material
creation groans and travails because it is put to great
uses in expressing the throes of the spirit, which is its
lord. In such a system of things, cotton is not king,
and corn is not king, and gold is not king : thought
is king, mind is king, character is king.
Working thus with spiritual forces, Christianity
intensifies individual being. It deals, not with human
ity, but with men, and takes them as they are. It sets
the individual man to searching after God. It stimu
lates the sense of individual responsibility to a personal
Deity. It evokes the consciousness of individual sin.
It makes a man feel the infinite solitude of guilt, as if
there were no other beings in the universe but himself

40 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
and God. To that only Friend it directs his cry for
help, as to One who is not shocked nor disgusted by
his vileness, but who can be touched with the feeling
of his infirmities, and who is ever saying to him,
" Come unto me, my child." It reveals the practica
bility of individual regeneration by God only, through
individual faith in Christ, expanding and blooming
into the graces of a Christlike character.
Intensifying thus the individuality of the soul,
Christianity presumes the whole process to be, as in
experience it proves itself to be, a process of symmet
rical elevation. An uplifting of the entire being is
the result. Affinities spring into life with all that is
lovely and of good report. Aspirations after growth
in every thing that may dignify a man come by a law
as sure ae that by which respiration comes to the
newly-born. Advance becomes a necessity. Heavenly
voices speak, saying, " Come up hither ; forget the
things which are behind thee ; thine is a high calling."
Lifting thus the individual mind, Christianity sets
to working a power which is diffusive. The man is a
part of humanity : he begins to move it as he himself
is moved. The individual is an elevating force to the
family, and through the family to the community, and
through the community to the state, and through the
state to the age and the race. Christianity presup
poses what history proves, that individual consciences,
thus illumined, intensified, redeemed from the domin
ion of guilt, will sway the world. Dotting the globe
over with points of light, they radiate towards each
other : each reduplicates the illuminating power of
another. They run together, sometimes by imper
ceptible advances, like the movement of the fixed

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 41
stars ; yet in golden moments of history, times of re
freshing to an expectant and weary world, they are,
like material light, the swiftest of the elements.
Diffusing itself thus as a power of moral illumina
tion, Christianity is affluent in the production of certain
auxiliary ideas. These, like itself, are spiritual ; and
they take on social and civil and political forms.
They are constructive ideas. They work in building
institutions, customs, forms and reforms of govern
ment, much as the instinct in a beehive works. From
the intensity which the Christian theory of manhood
gives to individual being, start forth as collaterals
such ideas as the equality of the race, the brotherhood
of man with man, the nobility of woman, the inhu
manity of war, the odiousness of slavery, the dignity
of labor, the worth of education, and the blessedness
of charity. Institutions which are the consolida
tion of such ideas, Christianity drops from her open
hand, in and around the homes of men, for the heal
ing of the nations ; and the point of significance is,
that the nations never get them from any other
source. I have said that civilization as a scheme of social
progress is not expressed in the Bible. Yet once
more be it observed, that, while throwing out into the
world these ideas which are auxiliary to its direct
aim, the Bible does exhibit, if I may so speak, a cer
tain divine consciousness, that they must and will, and
a purpose that they shall, become constructive elements
in society. This is exhibited, for instance, in that
most luminous fact in scriptural history, that God
educates nations as the representatives of principles.
No thinking man can review the four thousand years
4*

42 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of history covered by the Old Testament without
discerning that nations are servitors of God's pur
poses, arranged along a line of advance in the devel
opment of a plan. They are like a cordon of military
posts along a king's highway.
Equally obvious is this breadth of providential de
sign in the scriptural fact, that God destroys some
nations to make way for the establishment of truth
in others. The biblical interpretation of the history
of such empires as those of Babylon and Egypt is
simply this, — that, when a nation plants itself in the
way of a plan of God for the progress of the race,
Divine Providence waits with long-suffering while
the pride and pomp and circumstance of national
impiety accumulate, but at the same time gathers
alongside of these the materials of retribution ; and
at last, with an awful composure, a composure like
to nothing else than the stillness of eternity, God
sacrifices that nation to a principle. To any people .
who are identified with a principle in God's purposes,
though they be but a handful of slaves under the
taskmasters of the Pharaohs, the language of Provi
dence is, " Fear not : since thou wast precious in my
sight, thou hast been honorable, and I have loved
' thee ; therefore will I give men for thee, and people
for thy life."
The same reach of truth beyond the destiny of the
individual is shadowed forth in certain intimations of
biblical writers themselves, that their teachings must
become disturbing forces in society. A celebrated
English scholar says that the idea of the unnatural
structure of the social life of England, in certain re
spects, first dawned upon his mind in reading the

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 43
Epistle of James and the prophets of the Old Testa
ment. The commission of our Lord himself to his
disciples affirms, as distinctly as language can, that
the gospel- they were to preach was to become the
occasion of social disquietudes and collisions; and
more, that it was to advance amidst the shock of bat
tle, by the agency of suffering, and at the cost of life.
" Think not that I am come to send peace on earth,"
is his language : " I come not to send peace, but a
sword." But we are not left to intimations alone of the in
spired insight into the working of religious ideas in
social institutions. The design of such ideas to work
thus is seen in some of" the actual uses made of them
by inspiration itself. It is an inexplicable anomaly,
that honest minds can read certain portions of the
Scriptures, like some of the teachings of the prophets
and of the apostle James, and yet hold the scriptural
policy in the applications of the gospel to social and
political abuses to be the policy of silence or of reserve.
The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby, who, perhaps more
than any other man of our times, made the Scriptures
his study with reference to this thing, alludes to a
recommendation which had been made in a time of
national commotion in England, that the clergy
should preach only subordination and obedience. " I
seriously say," he writes, " God forbid they should !
for, if any earthly thing could ruin Christianity in Eng
land, it would be this. If they read Isaiah and Jere
miah, and Amos and Habbakuk, they will find that
the prophets, in a similar state of society in Judeea,
did not preach subordination only or chiefly: but
they denounced oppression, and amassing overgrown

44 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
properties, and grinding the laborers to the smallest
possible pittance ; and they denounced the Jewish
high-church party for countenancing these iniquities,
and prophesying smooth things." u
The scriptural principle in the application of Chris
tianity to social wrong may be summed up in this,
— the temporary toleration of evil, followed by timely
efforts for its extinction. It is the wisdom of the Bible,
as of Providence, to be merciful to the evil and the
unthankful. The sufferance of wrong, the toleration
of sin even, it endures, so long as the national con
science is not educated to distinct cognizance of the
sin. " I have many things to say unto you " is often
its sad burden ; " but ye cannot bear them now."
But, on the other hand, the wisdom of the Bible, as
of Providence, is to endure no hiding of wrong, and
no compromise with wrong, seen and felt to be wrong
by the national mind. When Christian truth has so
trained a people that they begin to rise above the cor
ruption of ages, and to grow into capacity to catch
some glimmering of light upon a national distortion,
then the prophets and apostles of Christianity are on
the alert, quick to point out that distortion as a sin ;
to denounce it without stint, as a wrong against hu
manity, and a crime against God. Then truth becomes
a fire and a hammer. It verifies by its working the
saying of one of our wise men, that, "when God
prepares a hammer, it will not be made of silk." This
is the genius of biblical reform. Large portions of
the Bible are alive with it. Suspense of judgment
upon wrong, I repeat, is in the Scriptures, as it is in
Providence, only so far as it is mercy to the weakness
11 Arnold's Life and Correspondence, American edition, p. 179.

THE BIBLE AND THE FUTURE. 45
and the blindness of men. It exists always for the
sake of the extinction of the wrong; never for its
increase, never for its perpetuity, never for the con
venience of letting it alone. Inspiration does, indeed,
practise as it preaches the wisdom of the serpent, but
always in conjunction with the innocence of the dove.
Perhaps more convincingly than in. any other form,
the diffusion of the effects of Christianity into the
social economy is seen in the predictions of the final
triumph of the gospel by the conversion of the world
to Christ. It is impossible to look attentively upon
the scriptural picture of this world as it is to be in its
latter days, without catching from inspiration an as
surance that those are to be days of great intellectual
and social and civil and political as well as of moral
elevation. They are to .be days of peace among the
nations : swords shall become ploughshares, and spears
pruning-hooks. They shall be days of the supremacy
of right over wrong in the government of States : " I
will make thy officers peace, and thine exactors right
eousness;" "Nations shall say, Come, let us go up
to the mountain of the Lord, and he will teach us of
his ways, and we will walk in his paths." They
shall be days in which the great powers of the world
shall acknowledge the dominion of Christ : " All
kings shall fall down before him." It shall be an era
of intellectual advancement : " Wisdom and knowl
edge shall be the stability of thy times."12 They
i" The elder President Edwards, in his History of Redemption, speaking of
the ultimate prevalence of knowledge in the earth, observes, " It may be hoped
that then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines ; and that excellent
books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary, and other now the
most barbarous countries ; and not only learned men, but others of more ordi
nary education, shall then be very knowing in religion. Knowledge shall then
be very universal among all sorts of persons." — Works, vol. i. p. 481.

46 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
shall be times marked by revolutions of false public
opinion : " In that day shall the deaf hear the words
of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out
of obscurity ; they also that erred in spirit shall come
to understanding." Those days shall witness signal
advances upon preceding states of society: "For
brass I will bring gold, and for iron silver, and for
wood brass, and for stones iron." The natural obsta
cles to progress shall be removed : " Every valley
shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be
made low, and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough places plain." Changes so marvellous
shall occur in the relations of conflicting races, that
they shall seem like a reversal of the laws of Nature :
" The wolf and the lamb shall feed together ; the
leopard shall lie down with the kid ; the calf and the
young lion and the fatling together."
In no deformed, degraded, brutalized types of hu
manity, then, but in the noblest and most pure, are
the nations to be given to Christ for his inheritance.
" He shall see," — He whose ideal is his own pure
consciousness of what manhood can be, — "____ shall
see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied."
Starting thus with the idea of the moral regenera
tion of the individual, the word of God conducts us,
by easy and inevitable advances, to that truth which
becomes its own witness to a Christian believer, — that
the civilization of the ftjtuke, and the triumph
of the Bible, ake identical.

I.
THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION.
ET REV. CHARLES M. MEAD, PH. D., PROFESSOR IN THE THEOIrOGICAIr SEMI
NARY, ANDOVER.
THE charge often brought against the Bible, that
it is to every one what he wishes it to be, eon-
tains an element of truth. Even a rationalistic writer
has said, " While, in our notions respecting the histo
ry " of the Jews, " we are dependent on our knowl
edge of its sources, on the other hand, our examination
of the sources will always be more or less affected by
our judgment respecting the history." 1 This princi
ple is sound and suggestive. If a man regards the
history of the Jews as having no peculiar religious
significance for the world, his opinion of the impor
tance of the Jewish Scriptures must differ from that
of one who sees in that nation a people specially
chosen of God. In order to a correct appreciation
of the books, one must have a correct impression
respecting the people. The judgment concerning the
people precedes the judgment concerning the books :
it is therefore a prejudgment, a prejudice. In truth,
every judgment which we form rests on a judgment
1 Weber, in Weber und Holtzmann's Geschichte des Fblkes Israel, p. xxxv.
47

48 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
previously formed. It is not the fact, but the wrong
character, or unjustifiable application, of such anterior
judgment, which gives to the word " prejudice " its
odious sense. When, therefore, the believer in the
Bible is charged with prejudice, bias, bigotry, because
he refuses to put the book into the same category
with all other writings of antiquity, he may be war
ranted in retorting the charge upon his accuser. For
every book ought to be estimated in reference to
what it appears or professes to be. The Bible claims
to be the record of a divine revelation ; and whether
we must admit its claim, or not, still our judgment
respecting it cannot but be affected by our opinion
about the need and the probability of there being
any revelation. If we think that one ought to have
been and has been made, we shall examine the Bi
ble with at least some expectation of finding traces
of it there : if we think that a revelation is needless
or impossible, we shall not only not expect to find, but
shall be very certain not to find, any proof of one in
the Jewish or Christian writings. There must, then,
be a bias. The absence of preconception would it
self be a preconception. To overlook the evidence
of a divine revelation is, in this connection, the same
as to deny the existence of it. But these charges and
countercharges can do little good, unless they lead
both parties to see, that, before any fair sentence can
be pronounced on the merits of the Bible, a prelimi
nary question must first be settled. To that ques
tion, then, let us turn.
I. Is it credible that a supernatural revelation
should be made ? If we deny the existence, or per
sonality, of God, this question is at once decided in

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 49
the negative. But we here confine ourselves to the
issue which is raised between believers in the Bible,
and those who, while they avow the most unqualified
belief in a God characterized by wisdom, power, and
love, yet as emphatically deny that he can ever have
supernaturally revealed himself. Let us consider the
objections which come from this source against the
credibility of a supernatural revelation.
1. It is objected, that a supernatural revelation is
needless. Thus Theodore Parker says, " To obtain a
knowledge of duty, a man is not sent away outside of
himself, to ancient documents, for the only rule of faith
and practice : the Word is very nigh him, — even in
his heart ; and by this Word he is to try all documents
whatever. Inspiration, like God's omnipresence, is
not limited to the few writers claimed by the Jews,
Christians, or Mahometans, but is co-extensive with
the race." 2 According to this, then, a special rever
lation is not to be looked for, because it is unnecesr
sary ; and it is unnecessary, because every man is in
spired. The inspiration is diffused through the race,
instead of being concentrated in a few individuals.
If, however, each man is able, by the criterion of
his own inspiration, to try all documents, and all
religious deliverances of other' men, it cannot but
strike even the superficial observer, that this divine
inspiration, which is so impartially diffused through
out mankind, must be, nevertheless, either very self-
contradictory, or very meagre ; for, in point of fact,
nothing can be more divergent than the opinions of
men in regard to what divine truth is ; and whether
this disagreement comes from the defects, or the
1 Works, vol. i. p. 139.

50 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
deficiency, of the inspiration, in either case the plain
inference would seem to be, that there is, after all, a
great lack of genuine inspiration : either we need a
better kind, or we need more of it. When, therefore,
Mr. Parker complains that man, according to the view
of ordinary Christians, " is the veriest wretch in crea
tion," because he cannot, without a miracle, " tell good
from evil, nor determine that there is a God," while
yet " he can invent the steam-engine, and calculate
the orbit of Halley's comet," 3 we are constrained to
reply, that, if man's ability to find out his relation to
God be only commensurate with his ability to calcu
late the orbit of comets, then he is a wretched being
indeed. To this fine-sounding talk about the abso
lute religion and the universal inspiration we simply
rejoin, Show it to us ; tell us where and what this
religion is, which has been held semper, ubique, et ab
omnibus. Since it is set over against the religions of
alleged revelation, as superior to them and as making
them unnecessary, let.it, at least, be clearly defined.
But, when this task is attempted, what is the result ?
To discover this absolute religion, each man must use
his own individual inspiration. He must judge for
himself, among the multitudinous forms of the re
ligion, which is entitled to the crown. But still,
when he has reached his conclusion, — itself no slight
task, one would think, — it is only his conclusion.
The next man may come to a different one ; and so
the result is, that either we have a vast multitude of
absolute religions; or, if there is only one, no man
can certainly know what it is. In order to find it out,
some one needs to be specially inspired to detect it ;
» Works, vol. 1. p. 134.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 51
and yet this cannot be allowed, for such a special in
spiration is just what the theory of the absolute re
ligion was propounded to avoid.
So much with regard to religion as a belief.
When we come to inquire what this absolute reli
gion, this universal inspiration, has done morally to
regenerate and elevate the race, we have still more
reason to be surprised to hear it called the ne plus
ultra of human hopes. When we look at the actual
condition of mankind, and consider how long and
how universally this absolute religion has been exert
ing its influence, who can help concluding, that, if the
world is what it is on account of this religion, the less
we have of it the better ? and, if the world is what it
is in spite of it, then, surely, nothing can be more
desirable than a supernatural addition to it?
2. It is objected, again, that a supernatural revela
tion would be harmful. A revealed religion would
be an authoritative religion. But such a revelation,
' it is said, would reduce men to a state of intellectual
bondage. It would compel men to surrender the
sacred right of private judgment, — the peculiarly
human prerogative of freedom. Thus, in a recent
statement of the principles of the so-called free-reli
gious movement, one of the most prominent represen
tatives of the movement, in defining Christianity,
says, " It claims absolute control over the collective
life of society and the outward and inward life of the
individual. It rests this claim on the supernatural
revelation of the will of God ; that is, on the principle
of divine authority." It is evidently, in the writer's
mind, a corollary of this, when he adds, " This sys
tem demands absolute and unreasoning submission

52 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
from the human mind. It teaches that doubt is sin,
and disbelief is damnation. It everywhere condemns
freedom of thought, and persecutes it in proportion to
its power. It is the worst enemy of liberty, science,
and civilization, because it is organized despair of
man." 4
Now, not to dwell on the strong form of some
of these statements, it is clear that the gist of
the objection is just this : That Christianity claims
control over the individual thought and life, and
therefore is tyrannical, and to be resisted. But it
excites a feeling of wonder, when, a moment later,
in a definition, from the same source, of free religion,
we are told that it too, when fully developed, " will
claim absolute control over the collective life of
society and inward life of the individual." Free re
ligion, then, is to be as much a master as Christianity
is : it will demand as complete submission. Social
and individual life are to be absolutely controlled by
it. Wherein, then, is the great difference ? Certainly
not in that the doctrines of Christianity are false,
while those of free religion are true ; for, according
to the same authority, the free-religious doctrines are
as yet " very imperfectly developed." Nobody knows
but that, when they are perfectly developed, they
will exactly coincide with the doctrines of Christian
ity ; for the number of those who, of their own free
choice, have assented to the truth of the Christian
system, is, to say the least, as great as the number of
those who have, in the same manner, been led to pro
nounce any system of free religion to be true. The
one party has just as much right as the other to
* Toledo Index, Jan. 14, 1871.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 53
prophesy that its own tenets will ultimately be uni
versally accepted. Wherein, then, is the great supe
riority of free religion ? The writer who has been
quoted evidently means to state it in the following
sentence : " It will rest this claim " of absolute con
trol " on the natural perception of truth by the uni
versal reason of the race ; that is, on the principle of
human freedom." Over against " divine authority "
is set " human freedom : " here is the grand distinc
tion. But one or two questions are here suggested.
Where is this "natural perception of truth," and
what has it been doing for the last six thousand
years, that it has made so little progress ? And, if
the new system is to claim " absolute control," of
what advantage is the " human freedom " ? If I
voluntarily allow myself to be imprisoned, am I less
imprisoned than if I am forced into prison ? Besides,
suppose it should be said (as in truth it may be said)
that Christianity, too, rests its claim to absolute con
trol no less on the principle of human freedom than
the system of free religion does ; no one is truly a
Christian who is not one freely. Where, then, after
all, is the great advantage of free religion? Is it,
that, in Christianity, divine authority comes in as
claiming control ? But suppose that, when " the
natural perception of truth " becomes fully developed,
it should lead men to believe that there is a divine
authority, and that they ought to submit to it. Is
there any more authority in this case than when men
are led freely to accept and obey the principles laid
down by Thomas Paine, Theodore Parker, or David
F. Strauss ? Is not divine authority at least as good
as human ? Does not everybody know that at least
5*

54 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
nine-tenths of those who profess to be free-religionists
have been made what they are, not by their independ
ent reflections, but by the addresses, tracts, books,
and newspapers, in which the comparatively few of
the leaders in the movement publish their opinions ?
We do not complain of this effort to quicken " the
natural perception of truth ; " but why should they
complain of tyranny and bigotry, when leaders in the
Christian Church do the same, and convince men
that the sentiments and precepts put forth by Jesus
Christ are worthy of universal acceptance, and that
Jesus himself deserves supreme trust and homage ?
The truth is, this inveighing against authority in
matters of religion grows out of a very narrow and
one-sided view of man : it ignores one of the best
instincts of humanity. Men are fitted and obliged
to live under authority. The child must be subject to
the parent ; the citizen must be subject to the state.
He who submits most cheerfully to these necessary
restraints of society shows the most manliness. Or, if
the laws of the household and of the state are some
times with reason felt to be unjust, the difficulty is
not in our relation to the laws, but in the laws them
selves. The legitimate inference is, not that govern
ment, as such, is iniquitous, but that human gov
ernment is imperfect. If we could find some one
who would be to us what the instincts of the child
lead him to expect and desire a father or mother to
be, — some one whose opinion is worthy to be law,
whose love is worthy of a life-long devotion, — we
should be doing violence to ourselves if we should
refuse to yield to him our allegiance. What means
the universal tendency to form parties founded on

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 55
adherence to this or that eminent man ? What is the
secret of the hero-worship to which all are more or
less inclined ? Whence comes the magic power, on
the field of battle, of a great general leading his
forces to the attack ? It comes from the fitness of
personal character to win enthusiasm and service
by its inherent worth; it comes from the natural
craving for concrete, rather than abstract, models of
worthy living. Virtue, to be understood, must be
seen as actual. Mere ideas of excellence, clothed in
words -ever so elegant and eloquent, are cold and
powerless compared with the incarnate virtues of a
living man. There is no virtue except as there are
virtuous beings. To be impressed by it, we need to
see it ; as much as, in order to be impressed by a beau
tiful landscape, we need to look at an actual one, not
merely imagine an ideal one. What men need, then,
is, not that this instinct be crushed, but that it be
rightly directed. If this craving for a model of holy
character can be met by presenting it with a worthy
object ; if all that can be conceived of purity, benevo
lence, loveliness, and grandeur in moral character, can
be found concentrated in a human, intelligible being ;
if this being is seen to be connected with us by ties
akin to those which bind us to father and mother,
sister and brother ; if, instead of following a vague,
abstract, ideal, self-imposed rule of action, we follow
one which is presented in a concrete form in this per
sonal embodiment of all that is excellent in thought and
in character ; if those who are enslaved by the power
of sin can be made to feel the personal sympathy
and helpful stimulus of one who does not scorn them
for their guilt, but pours on them the whole wealth

56 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of affection which a superior though sinless heart
can bestow, — then we should have just what the
exigencies of humanity seem most to require. And
this is what Christianity presents, when it gives to
us Jesus Christ as a model, as an authority, and as a
Saviour. In him " the natural perception of truth "
can detect that perfect revelation of divine truth,
that manifestation of God himself, for which the race
has always been longing. In his life
" The law appears
Drawn out in living characters."
The great power of Christianity consists in the fact
that it is regarded as a historical phenomenon; as
not the product of imagination, the idea of some
philosopher, nor even the complex of the ideas of
philosophers, but as an objective fact, which mere
idealizing thought can neither produce nor nullify.
The power of it, in short, is, and always will be, found
in the fact, that it is an authority, — something which
can be relied on as fixed, incapable of being over
turned by the changing theories of changing genera
tions. 3. But it is objected, once more, that a supernatural
revelation is impracticable. In its baldest form, the
objection is thus stated by a German : 5 " Looked at
from the human point of view, an immediate divine
revelation is an impossibility ; for, if the divine Spirit
works immediately upon the human, the activity of
the latter is suspended, and the human spirit, can be
only receptive and passive. . . . This, however, in-
5 D. F. Strauss, Christllche Glaubenslehre, dargestellt von Philalethns,
p. 14S.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 57
volves a self-contradiction." The difficulty with the
doctrine of revelation, as it is here stated, is evidently
a manufactured one. How does it appear, that, when
God makes a communication to men, human activity
is suspended, any more than when men make com
munications to one another ? Where, then, is the
self-contradiction ? It is more plausible when Theo
dore Parker says, " It seems difficult to conceive any
reason why moral and religious truth should rest for
their support on the personal authority of their re-
vealer, any more than the truths of science on that
of him who makes them known first or most clearly.
. . . The authority of Jesus, one would naturally
think, must rest on the truth of his words, and not
their truth on his authority." 6 That is, the claim
of the words of a man, or of a book, to be authorita
tive, must be tested by each man's own spiritual sense.
Whether we regard the words as a revelation from
God, must depend, therefore, on whether they seem
to us worthy to be such a revelation. If, however,
we are competent to tell what a revelation ought to
be, then nothing can really be a revelation to us.
But this objection involves two radical mistakes :
(1.) It is not true, as is here implied, that the power
to detect a divine revelation is equivalent to the
power to make one. The capacity to judge of a truth
is not identical with a capacity to discover the truth.
Our intuitive conviction of the correctness of the
demonstrations of Euclid does not involve the ability
of ourselves to originate them. Our certainty that
those are right who tell us that the earth is round does
not prove, that, without instruction, we could learn
« Works, vol. viii. p. 14.

58 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
that it is round. (2.) The other mistake involved in
this objection is, that it incorr.ectly assumes natural rer
Iigion to be, in each individual, an independent prod
uct of immediate intuition. Or, to put it in the lan
guage of Mr. Newman, " Of our moral and spiritual
God we know nothing without, every thing within." 7
The best reply to this is a direct contradiction. The
obvious fact is, that no man ever got his knowledge
of God and spiritual things by his own reflections.
Every man receives his first distinct impressions of
these things, as even of almost all things, from his
elders. They do not come from within, but from
without. Whether a man, left with no instruction in
religious subjects, would of himself ever come to a
notion of God, we cannot tell ; nor is it, for our pur
pose, of any consequence to know. We do know
that such an experiment cannot be tried. Every
man's life is intertwined with that of others, and then
most inextricably, when he is getting his first impres
sions of God and of his own conscious and responsi
ble soul. Those impressions are made so early in life,
that few can remember when or how they were first
received. But we know, from what we see daily
occurring, that every child's religious faith is an im
parted faith. His God is the being whom he hears
told of by his father and mother, his sister and
brother, his teacher and associate. If, when the child
grows older, he begins to reflect on these things, and
to speculate concerning the nature and attributes of
God ; if, in his maturer years, he even breaks loose
from the faith of his fathers, and believes in a differ
ent God, — still we must say, not that he has wrought
» Phases of Faith, p. 152.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 59
out an independent knowledge of God, but that he
has changed his view of the God made known to him
by others. Therefore, whatever result he may have
arrived at by his own meditation, he cannot call it his
own in any exclusive sense : for the very basis of all
his reasoning, the first positive contents of his mate
rial for reflection, were given him by others ; and his
later speculations, too, have been determined by his
contact with other minds. No one, in any thing, can
claim perfect originality. In thought and in feeling,
no man is an isolated individual. Each man receives
and gives. Books multiply this interaction of minds
and hearts : so that the intellectual, moral, and reli
gious world is as really a unit as is the physical and
material. Though each individual may, through his
own activity, contribute something to the fashioning
of religious thought, yet the material on which he
works is given him. At the best, he only adds a
stone or two to the building whose fashion was fixed,
and whose foundation was laid, far back in the imme
morial past. Religious faith, then,, is not a product
of individual intuition, but is something communi
cated from generation to generation.
If, now, the question is raised, from what source
the first man received his religion, we must answer,
that, aside from such testimony as is not admitted
by unbelievers in the Bible, only so much can
be certainly known, — he could not have received it
as men in general now receive it ; it could not have
been imparted by other men : it must, therefore, have
come either as an intuition, or as a direct revelation
from God. All analogy fails us here ; but, so far as
it does aid us, it favors the theory that a knowledge

60 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of God was first acquired through a supernatural reve
lation, rather than through unaided intuition ; for that
is at least like the actual method, in that the knowledge
comes by impartation. The only difference is in the
person from whom it comes ; whereas for the theory,
that the first man learned about God without any
external aid, there is no analogy whatever. What is
the probability of the case ? Whatever theory of the
origin of mankind we adopt, the fact remains, that the
knowledge of God, once acquired, has been continued
by means of personal communication. Even if we
suppose (and this is a supposition which the disbe
liever in revelation will be the last to make) that the
first man who obtained a conception of God had a
religious sense entirely different from that of his de
scendants, and superior to it, still, if he got this con
ception without external assistance, it must, at the
best, have been only a guess; for if it was more
than that, if it was such a presentation to his mind
of the knowledge of God as made him immediately
certain that God was an objective being, then that was
a supernatural revelation. If, now, there was a God
when man first began his career, a God who loved
man, and wished to be known by him ; if he made
man adapted to receive a knowledge of himself
through personal communication, — is it probable that
the first man, from whom was to descend all that
knowledge, was left only to conjecture a divine exist
ence ? Is it probable that all the knowledge of God
which his descendants have ever had has been his
guess,, transmitted, modified, corrupted, and infinitely
diversified ? Is it not probable, rather, that the abo
riginal man had a communication directly from God,

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 61
corresponding in clearness, while superior in correct
ness, to the instruction in religion which is now given
by one generation to the succeeding ? To ask the
question is to answer it, unless, indeed, at the outset
we beg the question in dispute, and assume the abso
lute impossibility of a divine revelation; unless we
deny the personality and the power of God ; unless
we assume that God is the product of religious
thought, rather than the author of it.
True, this is only a priori reasoning. The histori
cal testimony, if it were positive on the other side,
would overthrow our conclusion. But it is not on
that side : on the contrary, so far as it goes, it con
firms the theory which we have found to be ante
cedently probable. To say nothing of the Bible,
"the traditions of the nations all coincide in deriving
the knowledge of God from a primitive revelation.
When the Hindu mythology makes the first men a
race of gods, and holds to the perfect inspiration of
the Vedas ; 8 when the Buddha, notwithstanding his
own apparent atheism, is himself by .his followers glo
rified as " the absolute Buddha, . . . the god of hap
py exit," as having " acquired all knowledge regard
ing this world and the next ; " 9 when the Egyptian
Osiris is conceived as uniting in himself a divine and a
human nature,10 and the Egyptian kings are described
as first.gods, then demi-gods, and finally men ; u when
the Greek looked back on a period in which men and

8 Bhode, Religion und Philosophie der Hindus, p. 404; Max Miiller, Chips
from a German Workshop, vol. 1. p. 17.
¦> Max Muller, ibid., p. 204.
10 Sharpe, Egyptian Mythology, pp. 9, 10.
11 Hard-wick, Christ and other Masters, iv. p. 13.
6

62 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
gods had intimate intercourse with one another;12
when the Roman told of Numa Pompilius inspired by
the nymph _Egeria ; 13 when the Zoroastrian appeals to
the Zendavesta, and the Mohammedan to the Koran,
as divinely inspired, — in all this we see the uniform
tendency of men to trace back their religion to a
period when the race derived a knowledge of re
ligious truth directly and infallibly from the Deity.
Whatever may be thought as to the truth of these
legends, yet the argument remains the same : the
phenomenon before us proves it to be an instinct of
the race to desire an infallible, objective revelation,
and to believe that such a one has been made. It
shows that men generally have looked, for a full
manifestation of God, not so much to a gradual and
general advance of religious thought, to be completed
in an indefinite future, as to a limited, special reve
lation, made in a definite past.
The objections to the credibility of a supernatural
revelation, therefore, so far from being conclusive,
have led us rather to affirm it. We have found that
an authoritative revelation is needed ; that such a
revelation, if given, would not fetter, but rather aid
and stimulate, men in their efforts to attain the highest
standard in spiritual life ; and that the manner in
which men now obtain their knowledge of religious
truth creates a presumption, that, at least in .the be
ginning of human history, such a revelation was made.
The way is now prepared for a second question.
II. Is it a fact that a supernatural revelation has
been made ? To this question there is at least a pre-
M Nagclsbach, Bomerische Theologie, p. 161. » Livy, 1. 18.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 63
sumption in favor of an affirmative answer. We may
now assume that it is not candid or scientific to fore
close all investigation of the merits of any alleged
revelation by denying the possibility' of God's making
one. In view of the antecedent probability and the
general tradition and belief of a supernatural revela
tion, the only impartial attitude which can be assumed
towards pretended revelations is, to be willing to
examine their claims, and that not with the prejudg
ment that all of them must be false, but that some of
them are likely to be true. Accordingly, in pursuing
this inquiry, we remark, —
1. That no valid reason for denying that a super
natural revelation has been made is furnished by
the fact that there are many pretended revelations.
What is most prized is most apt to be counterfeited.
The fact that men have desired and expected an au
thoritative message from God would itself lead us to
anticipate that misdirected efforts would be made to
satisfy that desire. Nevertheless, the fact that spu
rious or imperfect forms of religion are current is
made by many a pretext for questioning the genuine
ness of all. Here are, it is said, besides Christianity,
Brahmanism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, the reli
gions of China, of ancient Egypt, Greece, Judaea, and
Rome, — these and many more, all claiming to be the
truth, the most of them claiming to have been divine
ly instituted. They are certainly not all infallible
and supernatural : is it not, then, reasonable to con
clude that none of them are ? They are all attempts
to fathom the ocean of divine truth : shall we not say
of them, that, while some or all are praiseworthy
attempts, yet none are absolutely trustworthy ?

64 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Certainly not, unless we assume at the outset that
the thing counterfeited has and can have no counter
part in reality; whereas, on the contrary, we have
found that there is a presumption that God has made
a revelation. The question is forced upon us : If God
has wished to reveal himself supernatural!*/, has his
desire been frustrated beyond remedy by the counter
feit revelations which are put forth in his name ? If
so, then it may well be said that he is " the veriest
wretch in creation ; " for it would be implied that
the feeble, blundering, abortive endeavors of men to
find out God have prevented him from showing him
self at all ; that, because men have tried by their own
power to learn about him, therefore he cannot tell
them about himself. In other words, the very desire
and aptitude of men to receive an authoritative com
munication of divine truth, according to this view,
stand in the way of God's making it. This, how
ever, is preposterous. But we remark, further, —
2. That no valid reason for denying that a super
natural revelation has been made can be found in
the want of an infallible criterion by which to detect
it. It seems plausible to say, that, if God has taken
pains to reveal himself authoritatively, he must have
taken equal pains to make the revelation clearly
recognizable ; otherwise he would seem to have frus
trated his own endeavors.
But (1) such a criterion as would make it abso
lutely impossible for any individual to err in his judg
ment respecting a divine revelation cannot exist
without an absolutely unmistakable and infallible
revelation made directly to every man ; that is, the
means of detecting a revelation would be itself a reve-

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 65
lation, and there would be no need of a special
revelation to which the criterion should 'be applied.
If every man had such a faculty, that faculty would
be a part of his natural endowment ; inspiration would
be universal ; and a supernatural revelation would be
superfluous. Such a universal revelation may seem
to be desirable ; but it certainly is not actual : and
the question is, whether the want of it proves that
God has not made any revelation. And the answer
must be, Certainly not. Even though God had been
remiss in not providing for the sure recognition of his
messages, that would not prove that he had made
none. It would be better to have something, even
though it may be misunderstood, than to have noth
ing. Again, it must be observed (2), that, though
men are not absolutely precluded from making mis
takes, yet they are not for that reason to be regarded
as totally incapable of distinguishing genuine from
spurious revelations. As has been already remarked,
the power to judge of a truth is not the same as the
power to originate it. All men have more or less of
ability to test the claims of one who professes to be a
special revealer of divine truth. Some are better
qualified for this than others are. But the same
thing which disqualifies a man for this task would
also disqualify him for receiving, without the inter
vention of a miracle, a direct revelation. Further
more (3), in leaving his supernatural revelations to
be communicated from one to another, and thus to be
exposed to the possibility of misconception and un
belief, God only does the same that he does respecting
all other knowledge. He communicates nothing to
men, as a general rule, without the use of interme-
6*

66 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
diate agencies. Information respecting the most
necessary things is to be obtained only through other
men. We are constantly exposed to deception in re
gard even to that which we most desire to know.
Whether or not God might have imparted all knowl
edge to us directly, he certainly has not chosen to do
so. At the same time, no one can learn without the
special activity of his own powers. Every man must
observe, and think, and compare for himself. If God,
then, has made special revelations of himself to a few
men, he would be acting in perfect conformity with
the usual order of things if he leaves it with men in
general to become acquainted with those revelations
by means of oral or written tradition. Whether
there is a supernatural revelation or not, men have to
discriminate between different religions. More or less
intelligently, every one makes his choice. He may
take his religion unmodified from his instructors ; or
he may be led to modify it by his study of books, or
by his wider acquaintance with men ; or he may ab
sorb almost unconsciously the spirit of belief or un
belief which prevails around him : still he makes his
discrimination and his election. Suppose, now, that
God has made special revelations of himself; sup
pose, too, that of these revelations he has provide^
that a written record should be made, in order thai
they may be more perfectly preserved : would he thus
be imposing on us any other or any heavier burden
than we have to bear already ? Would he thus be
making man " the veriest wretch in creation " ?
There is, then, no valid reason for doubting that a
revelation has been made. We have every reason to
expect to find one somewhere. Religions claiming

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 67
to be divinely given are thrust upon us everywhere.
We cannot avoid answering the question, Which is
the true one ? As to this point, it is not necessary
minutely to examine all the various claims. Here
and now it will hardly be deemed presumption by
any, when we affirm, —
3. That, if a supernatural revelation has been
made, the claim of Christianity to be such a revela
tion is better attested than that of any other. In
view of what we have found to be the probabilities
of the case, it is, to say the least, hardly ingenuous,
in passing judgment on the merits of Christianity, to
assume at the outset, as many deistical writers do,
that it cannot be a special revelation, and that there
fore every thing excellent in the doctrines of Jesus
is a product of the natural man, of the common in
spiration of the race. This is, in fact, a clear begging
of the question, until the impossibility of a super
natural revelation has been proved. The unfairness
in this particular becomes the more evident when we
see how it leads to unfairness in another. In order
to make good the claim that Christianity is nothing
but one phase of natural religion, such a definition of
it is given as to eliminate from it all which may not
in some form be derived from other sources. Thus
Mr. Parker says, " Christianity is a simple thing, —
very simple. It is absolute, pure morality ; the love
of man, the love of God, acting without let or hin
derance. The only creed it lays down is the great
truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy
heart, — there is a God." u It is easy to say this, and
to say that this simple doctrine is nothing but natural
» Works, vol. viii. p. 22.

68 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
religion : but the difficulty is, first, that this is not
the only creed which Christianity lays down ; and,
next, that from beginning to end Jesus claims to re
veal something more than natural religion. Turn and
twist the matter as we may, the only alternative in
the case is to assume either the supernaturamess or
the falsity of . the claims of the religion of Jesus
Christ. For it belongs to the essence of Christianity,
that in it Jesus sets himself up as being what Mr.
Parker and his followers stoutly declare that no one
can be ; viz., an authority to be unqualifiedly trusted
as divinely inspired. The simple question is, whether
this is a false claim.
It is at this point that we see the immense impor
tance of deciding where the burden of proof lies. It
is only on the assumption of the impossibility or
extreme improbability of a supernatural revelation
that any candid inquirer would be disposed to dis
pute the claim of Christianity to be such. If one
were looking for a revelator, anxious and expecting
to find him somewhere, he would assuredly find him
in Jesus. No better proof of this could be given than
the fact that even those who disbelieve in a special
revelation, who, therefore, contradict Jesus himself
in the claims which he made, yet accord to him a
pre-eminent place among the religious teachers of the
world. They resort to any and every theory of his
life and work, rather than accuse him of the impos
ture or the self-delusion which consistency would re
quire them to charge upon him. The corypheei of
modern rationalism, in their attempts to prove the
life of Christ to have been a natural product of
human development, do not pretend that it seems to

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 69
have been such, but that it must have been such.
Therefore they distort and explain away what, upon
a different view of revelation, is all perfectly in place.
With those who take this irrational position, believers
in a revelation cannot come to an understanding, and
need have no controversy. To others, the argument for
Christianity as a divine revelation may be very briefly
given: (1.) Christianity satisfies the natural and
general desire for an authoritative revelation of the
divine will. (2.) It satisfies the natural and general
desire for a well-attested, concrete, historical revela
tion of the divine will. (3.) It satisfies the natural
and general desire for a redemptive revelation of the
divine will. They who will not acknowledge any
one, not even God, to be their master ; they who
have more confidence in their individual opinion of
what ought to be than in the most overwhelming
evidence of what has been ; they who have no sense
of guilt, and feel no need of being reconciled to
God, — these cannot be convinced of the truth of
Christianity ; they cannot even understand it. Chris
tianity has no intelligible language for them ; for Jesus
came " to seek and to save that which was lost."
For others, the argument is clear and conclusive :
internal and external evidence coincide to prove
Jesus to be the Light of the world.
There has, then, been a supernatural revelation.
We find the fact most clearly proved in the institu
tion and progress of Christianity. But the religion of
Jesus Christ is comparatively modern. While for this
reason the evidence of its divine origin is the more easi
ly found, yet, inasmuch as the occasion for a revelation
existed from the first, we are driven to inquire, —

70 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
III. Was a supernatural revelation made to primi
tive man ? We have already found strong reason for
presuming one to have been made. It is not proba
ble that God left his offspring at the outset to grope
after him uncertainly. We should therefore expect
that that which is made probable by an a priori view
of the case, and which is confirmed by the uniform
traditions of men, would be raised to certainty by the
testimony of any revelation admitted to be divine.
We should expect to find, as one of the marks of the
divinity of such a revelation, that it does not claim
to be the first and only communication from God,
but rather the continuation and completion of one
already made to primeval man. We should expect it
to assert no more for itself than that it is the ripe fruit
of a tree whose roots reach down to the earliest history
of the human race. We should expect that Christ
would assert himself to be only one, though the
chief one, in a series of divinely-commissioned mes
sengers ; ¦ and his gospel to be one, though the chief
one, of the supernaturally-delivered communications
from God. And this is just what we find to be the
fact. If Jesus declared himself to be the Redeemer
of the world, he no less clearly declared himself to
be the Messiah looked for by the Jews ; and he
declared Abraham, Moses, and the prophets to be
forerunners of him, proclaiming the same essential
truths, and sent by the same God.
It is a very familiar thought among believers in the
Bible, that one mind and one plan run through the
whole. And yet perhaps the full significance of this
is not always taken in. Arguments for the existence
of God are so often drawn from the universal belief

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 71
in a divine existence, that we sometimes forget to
distinguish between the conception of a God and a
knowledge of the God. We forget that knowledge
of God can come only from an authentic communica
tion from him, not from abstract reasoning about
him. The God whose existence is only guessed at or
reasoned out can be only the reflex of the mind
which guesses or reasons. How, then, can there have
been preserved among men a knowledge of the one
God ? Only through a personal intercourse with
him, — an intercourse so palpable and mutual as to be
unmistakable, and either vouchsafed to every genera
tion and every race of men, or vouchsafed to a few,
and through them communicated to others. It does
not follow from this that there can be now no real
intercourse between men and God but such as is ex
ceptional and supernatural ; but it does follow that,
without such authentic preservation of a revealed
knowledge of God, men would lose that knowledge,
and worship, as many do, not the true God, but gods
of their own imagination. Nor does it follow that
men have not a natural tendency to believe in a God,
any more than that men have not a natural tendency
to relish food : but it does follow that they will be
likely, if left without correct information, to believe
in a false rather than a true God ; just as the natural
craving for nutriment, if not satisfied by wholesome
food, will try to sate itself on what is unsavory and
hurtful. Since, then, in point of fact, all current
views of God are such as are handed down from one
generation to another, it is of the utmost importance
that the sources of the knowledge of him be kept
uncorrupted.

72 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Here, then, we see the significance to us of the book
of Genesis. It is the record of God's primeval reve
lation of himself to man. Notice, I say it is the
record of a revelation, not the revelation itself.
Revelation is a supernatural act of God in personal
intercourse with men. The books of the Bible con
tain a history of this revelation, — a history of its
forms, its occasions, its process, and its results. They
are. a revelation to us only in a secondary and mediate
sense, — in the same sense as an oral transmission of
that original act of revelation would have been. The
chief importance of the books of Scripture does not
lie in the fact that the writers of them were inspired,
but in that the things which are written were worthy
of an inspired record. The argument for the inspi
ration of the Scriptures is not to be derived so much
from direct testimony to that effect, whether of the
writers themselves or of others, as from the necessi
ty which there was that a revelation which was
designed for the benefit of the world should be
preserved in a pure and trustworthy form. Every
description of the difficulty of securing an accurate
account even of passing events ; every emphasis laid
upon the certainty that any narrative, when passing
from lip to lip and from age to age, will become dis
torted, until at last it loses its own identity, — every
argument of this kind which is urged against the
theory of inspiration is an argument in favor of it
to one who believes in the fact of a supernatural
revelation. We may unwisely and ignorantly dispute
about the nature and the degree of inspiration ; we
may lay undue stress upon it : but that God, if he
has taken pains peculiarly to reveal himself to a few

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 73
of his creatures for the benefit of the race, should
take no pains to secure a trustworthy record of the
revelation, is beyond belief. Collateral arguments,
internal evidence, biblical testimony, — these may be
urged afterwards : but they lose much of their force,
and, for most minds, all-convincing force, unless there
is antecedently a conviction that a revelation of God
has been made ; to preserve which, inspiration was
needed. The book of Genesis, then, is the inspired history
of God's primitive intercourse with men. It tells us
of the first link in the chain of divine self-manifesta
tions which ended in the coming of Jesus Christ,
whom those who have seen have seen the Father
himself. The question concerning the authorship of this
book is, accordingly, a subordinate question. The
dissecting process to which it has been fashionable to
subject it, especially since the days of DeWette, even
if the dissectors had come to a uniform result, would
not need much to disturb us. For the evidences of
a post-Mosaic origin of the book are still, for the
most part, purely subjective. The plausible indica
tions of a late origin are confined to extremely few
passages, which may be later additions, and, if so,
do not invalidate the Mosaic authorship. The theory
of a double or triple or still more various author
ship, even if established, proves the existence of
documents written before Moses, as much as that the
composition of the book was of a later date. Even
the most unscrupulous and arbitrary of the anato
mists of the Pentateuch15 allows at least the four-
Mi Ewald, Oeschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. i. pp. 73, 401, 410.
7

74 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
teenth chapter of Genesis to be of an ante-Mosaic
date, and that on the strength of a critical feeling
which, with as good right, we can apply to other sec
tions as well. There is, therefore, not much reason
yet for alarm lest the book shall be proved to have
been the capricious invention of a later age than that
of Moses. But, even if it were demonstrated that
Moses had nothing to do with it, the value of the
book would not thereby be necessarily impaired ; for
its value does not depend on who wrote it, or even
when it was written, but upon the acts of revelation
which it records. These acts, if they took place at
all, took place before the time of Moses, and were
forerunners of his own mission.
The question concerning the relation of Genesis to
natural science is also one of subordinate importance.
The volumes written on this topic make an extended
discussion of it superfluous here. It is enough to
bear in mind, first, that the correspondences between
Genesis and the sure results of natural science are
more striking than the discrepancies ; secondly, that
the inferences respecting the past history of the
world, drawn by naturalists from present phenomena,
are always to be carefully distinguished from estab
lished facts ; and, thirdly, that the significance of the
book to us does not hinge at all upon its accuracy
in regard to what, for its purpose, is of entirely inci
dental consequence. What the book professes to
give, and what its chief value consists in, is its record
of God's acts of revelation ; and these no explora
tions of science can ever disturb.
In short, the book of Genesis (and this cannot be
too much insisted on), like every other book, should

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 75
be judged chiefly in reference to what it professes to
be. It does not come to us heralding its claim to
having been composed at such a time or by such a
man. It does not come to us claiming to be an au
thority in matters of natural or profane history. It
does come to us as a record of events through which
God made men acquainted with himself and with his
principles of government. It posseses this character,
not only by virtue of what it itself claims to be, but
by virtue of the connection of the events narrated in
it with the whole train of events which signalized the
history of the Jewish nation, and culminated in the
life and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus gave himself
out to be the completion of the divine economy ex
hibited in the lives and sayings of the kings, priests,
and prophets of the Jewish people. The Jewish
people, in their imposing ritual and their civil law,
professed to be following the divine directions given
to Moses. Moses, in undertaking to deliver the Israel
ites from bondage, and to give them a religious and
civil code of laws, professed to be merely an agent in
fulfilling the promises of God to Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. Abraham appears before us as almost alone
maintaining the worship of the one God, Jehovah,
who had saved Noah from the flood ; Noah, again, as
almost alone faithful to the same God who had cre
ated the world. The history recorded in the book of
Genesis is presupposed in all the subsequent revela
tions of God to men. One idea runs through the
whole, — the maintenance in the world of a knowl
edge and worship of the true God.
This idea, then, is the key-note of the book of Gen
esis. The idea is confessedly grand : it is carried out

76 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
with unostentatious simplicity. Is it only an idea? or
is it also history ? It is much to say in favor of the
historical character of the book, that the genuine
revelation of God which was made in Jesus Christ
was historically connected with the earlier revelations
which had been made to men. That a revelation
had been made to the early ancestors of the Jews is
rendered probable, aside from their writings, by the
pure and rigid monotheism wliich always character
ized them, and for the human origin of which, outside
of themselves, even the stoutest rationalism can give
no explanation,16 unless by the invention of a mono
theistic instinct Which is gratuitously ascribed to the
Jews.17 The leading of a special Providence in the
Jewish nation is almost demonstrated by the fact,
that notwithstanding the well-nigh universal apos
tasy into which they sometimes fell, and the ungod
liness which has always disgraced them, they yet
preserved with jealous care the books, and only the
books, which contain their religious law, the re
ligious meditations and homilies of their teachers,
together with the story of their own disobedience
and disgrace. This might be enough ; but we have
more. The books of the Old Testament, as histori
cal works, vouched for by tradition, are as well
authenticated as any of the works of ancient times.
And what is true of the Old Testament in general is
true of Genesis in particular. It is historic in its
claims, and historic in its whole tone and spirit.
The personages described in it are entirely, intensely,
18 See, e.g., Vatke, Religion des Alten Testaments, p. 700.
« On this point, see Max Miiller's masterly refutation of Kenan's theory of
Shemitic Monotheism, Chips, vol. 1.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 77
human. Unlike the early history of most peoples,
it has no stories of ancestral heroes and demi-gods.18
It does not aim to amuse or startle by stories of mar
vellous things. The miraculous element, prominent
as it is, is subordinate and tributary to the main de
sign ; which is, to exhibit the history of men in their
relation to the divine government. And the most
marvellous thing in the book, the narrative of the
deluge, — a narrative which, if found only here, would
doubtless be laughed to scorn by the votaries of nat
uralism, as it indeed is by many of the coarser
among th'em, — has to be admitted to be substantially
historical even by the most unwilling critics, on ac
count of the overwhelming evidence to that effect
wliich comes from the concurrent traditions of all
nations.19 The book has none of the characteristics
of heathen mythology, except this, that a closer re
lation of man to God is described than is common
among men in general. Why this is the case we
have already seen. And, in the very difference con
nected with this resemblance, we find a new mark of
the peculiar trustworthiness of the book of Genesis.
For the intercourse of the patriarchs with God has
everywhere, unlike that of the heathen heroes with
the gods, a rigidly ethico-religious meaning and les-
18 Unless the narrative in Gen. vi. 1-4 is akin to tbis, the " mighty men "
being offspring of fallen angels and women. But, if so, it is noticeable that
these heroes are not glorified as the ancestors of the Jews : on tbe contrary,
the generation of this progeny is rather adduced as the special reason why God
found it necessary to destroy the race by a flood. — See Delitzsch, Commentar
iiber die Genesis, p. 230 seq. ; and especially Kurtz, Bie Ehen der Sdhne Gottes
mit den Tdchtern der Menschen.
111 Cf. Knobel, Vie Genesis erkldrt, p. 75; Delitzsch, Com. uber die Genesis,
p. 242 seq. And the Chinese and Egyptians are not to be excepted, as Hedge
affirms, Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition, p. 195.— See the above, and
Gutzlaff, Geschichte des Chinesischen Reichs, p. 26 seq. ; Diodor us Siculus, 1, 10.
7»

78 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
son; while the characters of these men, faithfully
portrayed in their weakness and sinfulness, and the
details of private life, given with inimitable simpli
city and naturalness, prove the narrator to be drawing
no imaginative picture.
When, therefore, the narratives of this book are
summarily relegated to the region of myths, simply
because heathen nations have generally had their
mythologies ; 20 when it is quietly assumed that the
book gives us, instead of history, only the mature
though imaginative result of Hebrew speculations
concerning the primeval world ;21 when, at "the best,
the events narrated are allowed only to have a faint
element of truth, thickly overlaid by the legendary
accumulations of centuries of capricious tradition, —
then our reply is, that the Hebrew book of first things
is utterly different in essential character from the
myths and legends of other nations. There is here
none of that personification of the powers of Nature
which forms so vital a part of heathen mythologies :
there can be traced none of that mythopoeic process,
so graphically described by Max Miiller,22 by which a
people, through the obsolescence of the meanings of
words, come unconsciously to transform things into
personal beings. There is here everywhere a sober,
pragmatic, religious spirit, such as is utterly foreign
to the Greek and Roman legends of their gods and
heroes. The marks of myths, then, we say, are want
ing here. But, we are told, a myth is a story con
structed as a vehicle for an idea.23 In the Hebrew

20 J. L. George, Mythus und Sage, p. 27 seq.
21 Hedge, Primeval World, pp. 3, 69, 102.
22 Chips, vol. ii. p. 167, London ed.
23 J. L. George, Mythus und Sage, p. 15.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 79
account of the creation, of the fall, of the confusion
of tongues, and of the origin of the Jewish nation,
we see evident attempts to clothe ideas respecting the
causes of existing things in the garb of historic facts ;
therefore these stories are myths. Indeed ! according
to this, what important historic event would not be a
myth ? The past decade would have to be pronounced
one of the most mythical in all time. Because a
myth is an idea which has invented for itself a histori
cal setting, does it follow that every historical narra
tive which is also ideal is a myth ? Because all oaks
are trees, does it follow that all trees are oaks ? And
yet we are gravely told, in one of the most recent
German works on the history of the Jews, that a
certain incident in the life of Reuben u is to be re
garded as "an actual event, because not adapted to
have reference to the nation as a whole, nor to in
volve any other far-reaching significance." 25 In other
words, the more insignificant a narrative is, the more
likely is it to be true. Away with such absurdity !
Let it be granted that myths are most apt to have
reference to the important questions which arise con
cerning the_ beginnings of things; yet does it follow
that whatever has to do with such questions is myth
ical ? Does it follow, because men, in these specu
lations concerning past events, make wild conjectures
and invent fantastic stories, that there were no past

24 Gen. xxxv. 22.
** nitzig, Geschichte dea Volkes Israel, i. p. 47. Scarcely less preposterous
are the speculations of Ewald, Geschichte, p. 355 seq., who finds in the list of
the descendants of Cain and of Seth, Gen. ch. iv. and v., names of demigods and .
gods. Thus Enoch means " consecrator," i.e. " beginner " ( I) ; and, as he lived
365 years, it is evident (there being 365 days in a year) that Enoch was the god
of the new year 1

80 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
facts at all ? Was there no beginning of the world,
of the human race, of sin, of language ? Because
many peoples have incredible notions respecting these
things, does it follow that there can be no true
account of them ?
But it is observed that some of the stories in the
book of Genesis more or less closely resemble those
which are found in the writings of other nations of
antiquity. The Mosaic account of the creation has its
parallel, more or less striking, in the Etruscan, Baby
lonian, Phoenician, and other heathen cosmogonies.26
The tree of life,27 the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil,28 the four rivers of paradise,29 the fall of
man,30 the part played in this event by the serpent,31
the deluge,32 the confusion of tongues,33 — all these
and other features of the Hebrew history have their
counterparts in the legends of other nations. But
what shall be the inference ? Not that the Hebrew
stories are derived from the others : of this there is
not the slightest external evidence ; and the internal
evidence is decidedly the other way, inasmuch as the
stories appear in their simplest and least objectionable
form in the Hebrew book. Not necessarily, either,
that the other nations derived the stories from the
Jewish books ; for the evidence here, too, is imperfect.
Not that, because the stories vary so widely from one
*> See the references in Lange's Genesis, SchafPs ed., p. 181.
27 Sharpe, Egyptian Mythology, p. 20; Eichter, Phantasien des Alterthums,
p. 83; Hardwick, ibid., ii. p. 133.
28 Hardwick, ibid., p. 138.
22 Ibid., p. 133.
» Ibid., p. 137, iv. p. 193 seq.; Delitzsch, Genesis, p. 169.
»i Delitzsch, ibid.; Sharpe, ibid., p. 45; Hardwick, ibid., iii. p. 144 seq.
82 See p. 77.
88 Eawlinson, Bampton Lectures for 1859, p. 67.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 81
another, therefore they are all fictitious ; unless we
are ready to adopt what Tholuck calls the Castor-and-
Pollux principle of criticism, that, when two accounts
of the same event disagree, both must be false. No :
the more resemblances there are found between the
Hebrew and other sacred narratives concerning the
creation and the early history of man, the more prob
able does it become, not that all are false, nor that
any of these books is the parent of all the others,
but rather that all of them together are derived from
primeval knowledge and a traditional account of
facts, the accounts becoming more or less corrupted
according as they are removed from the original
sources of information and from the special guidance
of the Spirit of God.
Now, even if we placed no stress upon the con
nection of the events recorded in Genesis with the
subsequent acts of God in revelation and redemption,
still the book would stand forth challenging peculiar
admiration. Over against the confused, fantastic,
polytheistic, or pantheistic conceptions which other
cosmogonies present concerning the origin of. the
world, the Hebrew historian tells us of a creation
made by the one personal God, with intelligent pur
pose, — an account at once simple and sublime, philo
sophic and religious. Ages before the brotherhood of
man and a history of the whole race were dreamed of
elsewhere, the Hebrew historian, in his opening chap
ters, had sketched in bold outline the beginnings of a
universal history, deriving all the races of men from
one pair, making all history a plan of God, and point
ing forward to a re-union of all men in one common
bond of religious life. He laid down the law of mar-

82 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
riage according to its true, ideal character, as a divine
institution ; a sacred, inviolable union of one man with
one woman, — a conception of marriage worthy to be
indorsed, as it was, by Jesus himself, and startling us
by its contrast with the practice of heathendom, with
the practice even of Judaism, and by its still greater
contrast with the swinish notions of marriage which,
under the thin pretext of spiritual affinity, are to
some extent forcing their way into practice even
among us. He pictures to us primeval man, made in
God's image, sustaining a childlike, intimate relation
to God, and holding intercourse with him in a free
and objective manner, such as alone was suited to one
who could get a knowledge of God in no other way.
He gives us an account of the beginning of human
sin, which, in its substantial features, coincides with
the soundest conclusions derived from observation
and the moral sense, — an account which makes sin a
free and culpable act, committed in violation of divine
law. Yet, in the narrative of the consequent moral
corruption of the race and its punishment by the flood,
he recognizes the other great truth, that the one
ness of the race embraces the moral as well as the
physical constitution. He gives us a brief account of
the dispersion of the descendants of Noah, — a sketch
which has excited the admiration of critics for its
comprehensiveness and accuracy.34 He tells us of the
original unity and subsequent confusion of tongues, —
a narrative confirmed by Babylonian history, and
coinciding with the most mature results of modern
philology and ethnology.35 And then, having drawn
«* Knobel, Fdlkertafel der Genesis, Rawlinson, ibid., p. 68 seq.
86 Rawlinson, p. 74 seq.; Max Miiller, Science of Language, first series,
p. 329 seq., Am. ed.; Zollmann, Bibel und Natur, p. 226 seq.

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 83
this general outline as a necessary introduction to
his main object, he next gives us, with a marvellous
mingling of generalities and details, that perennially
instructive picture of the patriarchs, through whom
the worship of the true God was preserved, and all
the nations of the earth were ultimately to be
blessed. When now we find, in addition to these features
which distinguish the book considered in itself and
in contrast with all other ancient works, that this
history is indissolubly connected with what follows ;
when we find that it furnishes the indispensable his
torical basis for that series of redemptive acts and
revelations which culminated in the death and resur
rection of Christ ; when we find that the Christian
system everywhere presupposes the facts recorded
in the book of Genesis, — the essential oneness of all
the races of men, the original moral integrity of
man, his culpable and ruinous fall from that state, his
consequent need of a remedial interposition of God,
and the beginnings of this work of salvation in the
Abrahamic dispensation ; when we find Jesus Christ
not only alluding to the events narrated in the book
of Genesis merely as to something believed in by
others, but recognizing them as an integral part of
the divine plan of redemption which he had come to
fulfil, — then we not only see that the book is won
derfully superior to any of the theosophies and cos
mogonies of the heathen, but we understand why it is
so : the hand of God was in it. He whose Son was
slain from the foundation of the world planned all
things from the foundation of the world with refer
ence to that event, and provided that an imperishable

84 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
record of his plans should be made. There was the
same reason for an authentic written account of the
beginning of this work of redemption as for such an
account of the completion of it. It might be said
that no written history of redemption was absolutely
necessary. For aught we know, the work of Jesus
Christ might have proved efficacious for the salvation
of men, even if there had been only an oral tradition
of his words and deeds ; for we are not saved by the
history of Christ, but by Christ himself. But we do
know that oral transmission soon becomes inaccurate :
if an accurate knowledge of Christ was to be pre
served without a constant miracle, it could not have
been better done than by a written, unchanging his
tory. Such a record was needed, to serve as a check
upon the extravagances of tradition, to preserve pure
the fountain of information, to serve as a standard by
which to regulate the variations in religious life and
opinion, to keep forever fresh the picture of Him who
is the life of the world. But if there was needed
such a history of Christ's part in the work of salva
tion, so, in its measure, of every part of that work.
The work is one, and cannot be fully understood till
all its parts are seen as they are, and seen together.
As in Correggio's " Holy Night " the bright central
light is the radiant form of the infant Saviour, while
yet the effect of the picture is incomplete till we see
the virgin mother with her attendants about him, and
the angels above him, all reflecting his splendor ; so,
in the written picture of the work of salvation, the
light which shines out of darkness beams from the
face of Jesus Christ in his life, his death, his resur
rection. We see him chiefly : without him, the pic-

THE PRIMEVAL REVELATION. 85
ture has no meaning. Yet we do not truly compre
hend it until we also see the patriarchs, prophets,
kings, priests, and apostles, the primeval, heathen,
Jewish, and Christian world, all grouped around him
as their centre, enhancing, while they reflect, the
lustre of Him who is " the brightness of the Father's
glory, and the express image of his person."

II.
MOSES.
BY REV. .. P. THOMPSON, D.D., LL.D.
MY subject is prescribed ; but it is almost without
limit. I must, therefore, prescribe limits to
myself ; first by the law of courtesy, and next by the
law of unity. The law of courtesy precludes me
from considering Moses as an author ; for the genuine
ness of the Pentateuch, and by implication its origin
in the time of Moses, were treated in the preceding
lecture. It precludes me from considering Moses as a
legislator ; for.an analysis of the theocracy is reserved
to one of my successors.1 It precludes me also from
considering Moses as a divine worker ; since the ques
tion of miracles was discussed at length in last year's
course. Again : the law of unity directs me to adhere to
some one leading topic under the comprehensive title
of " Moses." I have chosen, accordingly, to speak of
Moses himself in his historie personality. This is, in
reality, the root of the whole question ; for it is with
Moses as with Christ, that if the person himself be
1 The lecturer had recently given in Boston a course upon Egyptology, in
which the laws of tbe Hebrews were compared with those of the Egyptians ;
aud this was an additional reason for not enlarging upon the topic here.

MOSES. 87
identified as to time and place in the main features
of his recorded life and character, the sayings and
doings being fitted to such a character must be ac
cepted almost as a matter of course. Moreover, mod
ern scepticism makes personality its main point of
attack. It seeks through the evolution and the cor
relation of physical forces to displace from the uni
verse a personal God, and by the hypothesis of myths
to displace from Christianity the personal Christ.
In arguing the personality of Moses, we start with
every presumption in its favor : the burden of proof
lies with the objector. The unvarying traditions of
a nation concerning its founder — traditions embodied
in its earliest records, and attested by monuments and
institutions — carry with them a presumption of their
substantial truth, unless inherent improbabilities, con
tradictory circumstances, or strongly exaggerated and
unnatural features, awaken a suspicion of their mythi
cal origin. All Egyptologists, for instance, now accept
Menes as the first historical king of Egypt. Whether
there was any historical ground for the preceding dy
nasties of " Gods, Heroes, and Manes," or these were
altogether fabulous, remains to be determined ; and
so many legends had clustered about Menes himself,
that scholars were once in doubt of his human person
ality. But the dry lists of Egyptian kings found upon
monuments at Abydos and in the Turin papyrus,
and the lists of Manetho and Eratosthenes compiled
under every advantage from native sources, begin
with the name of Menes. Herodotus, Diodorus, and
all classical authors who have written upon Egypt,
mention Menes as the founder of the empire: the
history of Memphis was from the beginning identified

88 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
with his name ; and the course of the great dike
which he built to deflect the channel of the Nile, and
protect the capital from overflow, may yet be traced
in the dike of Kosheish. A long line of monuments,
and the remains of gigantic works " which have left
the stamp of grandeur on the Egyptian Empire," wit
ness for the historical authenticity of a dynasty or an
epoch, which, by the concurrent testimony of the royal
lists, began with Menes. Without believing that
Menes was once saved from drowning by a crocodile,
and was finally carried out of the world by a hippo
potamus,2 we have solid grounds for accepting Menes
as the founder of the empire, who " condensed within
one focus the elements of civilization which were dis
persed among the different Egyptian provinces." 3
But how much stronger is the ground on which
rests the historic personality of Moses as the founder
of the Jewish nation ! The old Jewish proverb,
"When the tale of bricks is doubled, then comes
Moses," is one of those sayings, which, embedded in
the popular language of a nation, spring from its life-
roots. His name was identified with that deliverance
from Egypt which was the beginning of their national
life. His name was so interwoven with the laws and
institutions, the history and the hopes of the nation,
that Christ in his time cited Moses as a final authori
ty in matters of faith and obligation: "Did not
Moses give you the law ? " 4 . . . 'J Moses gave unto
you circumcision." 5 . . . " There is one that accuseth
you; even Moses, in whom ye trust." 6 As witnesses

2 The hippopotamus was a symbol of the god of the under-world.
» Bunsen, Egypt's Place, 1. 444.
* John vii. 19. » John vii. 22. « John v. 45.

MOSES. 89
for Moses, we have the unbroken tradition of a people
who still retain their separate identity of race and
language ; we have their annals, their code, their in
stitutions, their festivals, their worship, their service-
book, each and all so incorporated with his name, that
the critic who would extirpate the personality of
Moses from the Pentateuch must cut out the central
ganglion of the Jewish system, and paralyze the
whole. Yet, notwithstanding the unanimity of Jewish tes
timony to Moses as the founder of the nation, the
Hebrews as a race are never called the children of
Moses, but the " seed of Abraham." In the line of
their descent, there were historical persons before
Moses ; and he appears as a human character in his
place in history, and not as the creation of a myth out
of unknown pre-historic elements. The cumulative
proofs of this personality we will now examine some
what in detail.
Egypt and the desert, presenting the wildest con
trast in physical geography, in natural products, in his
torical associations, in monumental remains, in races
and social customs, and in institutions of government
and religion, are yet linked together by a series of
events, which, though comprised within the lifetime of
one man, and largely associated with his name, are
among the most striking and momentous in the history
of mankind. The " exceptional grandeur " of the hero
who united in himself such widely-opposite spheres
of action, and who achieved in both results to which
history affords no parallel, has kindled even the cold,
cautious, sometimes carping criticism of Ewald into
a glow of enthusiasm. His chronic doubting con-

90 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
cerning the earlier Hebrew records here gives place
to the conviction of historical reality. " We may
discover the surprising greatness of Moses from the
fact that it is not merely in this story of the gradual
rising of the Israelites and their deliverance from
Egypt that his name shines pre-eminently bright, but
also, and if possible with even greater lustre, in the
succeeding very different history of the development
of the liberated people in Asia. Thus he is the un
paralleled hero who sustains the grandeur of two
perfectly distinct yet equally exalted epochs. ... To
fathom such an actual life as that of Moses would
be one of the most difficult of historic problems, did
we even possess the most abundant materials ; . . .
yet that he was possessed of a soul of extraordinary
greatness, and that he worked, and worked with won
derful power and success, remains perfectly clear, un
less we choose to ascribe to chance whatever is most
spiritual in the world, and so to plunge ourselves into
blindness.7 . . . Our life," he adds, " moves in the
midst of those very truths which received their first
currency and acknowledgment from Moses and other
minds like his ; we are sustained and protected by
them ; we live in the hourly enjoyment of their blessed
fruits. . . . But how few are now able to appreciate
the power which first and alone grasps such truths,
and is then able also to connect them with the inner
most life of a nation, and thus permanently establish
them in the world ! "
The conviction of the historical personality of Mo
ses, to which Ewald is brought by internal evidences
in the Hebrew documents, when subjected to the most
» Hist, of Israel, i. 438, 439, 457, Martlneau's translation.

MOSES. 91
searching criticism, is shared by Lepsius, Brugsch,
Chabas, Rouge", Bunseu, Ebers, — in a word, by the
great masters of Egyptology, — from a comparison of
the Hebrew narrative with the monumental and litera
ry remains of Egypt, especially with Manetho's account
of the expulsion of the lepers.8 Brugsch speaks of
certain monuments of Rameses II. as a highly satisfac
tory commentary upon the authentic narrative of the
Exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures : 9 and Bunsen, de
termining Egypt's place in universal history, says of
this same narrative, " The Exodus is an historical fact,
which occurred in an historical age, and was governed
by notorious great events, and circumstances of
importance to general history ; " 10 and again, with
even greater emphasis, he says, " History was born in
that night when Moses, with the law of God — moral
and spiritual — in his heart, led the people of Israel
out of Egypt." u
We start, then, with this wide consent of scholars,
hardly one of whom can be classed among believers
in the inspiration of the Old Testament, to the his
torical personality of Moses. Whatever myths may
have gathered about him in what some style " the
Hebrew tradition," he himself was no myth : however
critics differ as to his period, his writings, his miracles,
his laws and institutions, they concede that this ex
traordinary man lived in Egypt, led forth his race into
the desert, and there inspired them with that organic
national life which endured through so many ages in

8 Lepsius interprets this as referring to a different event from the expulsion
of the Hyksos. — Chronologie der JEgypter, p. 325.
• Histoire d'Egypte, i. 156. 10 Egypt's Place, iii. 263.
« Egypt's Place, i. 23.

92 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Palestine. Indeed, it would be hard to make out a
clearer case of historical identity. Mr. Grote's theory 12
concerning the baseless origin of the Volks-Sage, or
popular myth, — as " the natural effusion of the unlet
tered, imaginative, and believing man," which takes
the form of historical faith, until " the multiplication
of recorded facts, the diffusion of positive science, and
the formation of a critical standard of belief, tend to
discredit its dignity," — requires to be qualified by a
class of traditions which give internal evidence of some
substantial reality at their foundation. Even in the
myths of the Greek world, where " the uselessness
of digging for a supposed basis of truth " seems al
most self-evident, there are examples of national tra
dition which argue some foregoing but forgotten his
tory as their source. Take, for instance, the Hellenic
myths of the settlement of the coast of Greece by
Heaven-sent messengers : " Notwithstanding the pride
taken by the Greeks in their autochthony, they con
stantly connect the foundation of their social life with
the arrival of highly-gifted strangers, whose super
natural power and wisdom were believed to have
brought a new order into the life of men. In short,
all the myths reach beyond the narrow limits of the
European peninsula, and point to a land beyond the
seas, whence the gods and heroes came across. So
far the meaning of the myths is clear and manifest ;
viz., a consciousness of a civilization brought over
from the East by colonization. But as to the identity
of these colonists there is naturally a much greater
obscurity of conception." 13
12 History of Greece, vol. I. passim.
13 Dr. Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, b. 1. chap. 2.

MOSES. 93
Clearly, then, we must discriminate between myths
which grow out of some subjective feeling or fancy
and those which gather about an objective and his
torical reality. Myths are often but parasitic growths
upon a character or an event whose substantial vitali
ty keeps them alive. Sometimes the parasitical plant
may envelop the supporting stock so as completely
to hide it from view ; and it may eventually absorb
the life upon which at first it only fed. Sometimes,
again, myths may spring up like mushrooms, out of
the mould of the dead past, or the refuse and rubbish
of primitive traditions, and may grow so thick and
rank as to cover the field of history : but the steel
blade of criticism, ploughing the ground, turns up
their rootless stalks ; and their bulging heads split like
punk, or collapse like puff-balls. Thus Mommsen
puffs away the " naive improvised " story of Romulus
and Remus as not having even the merit of ingenuity.14
But, on the other hand, a myth may represent some
thought or fact behind it which is greater than it can
embody or express : the imagination is brought in to
aid in bearing that which overpowers the vision,
weighs down the understanding, oppresses the sensi
bility, burdens the memory ; and the very attempt to
exaggerate upon this side or that only reveals by
glimpses the greatness of the real subject.
Both by their conception and by their contrasts, the
myths may certify a character which they did not
invent, and cannot supplant.
A thousand years after Alfred, the fancy of Tenny
son can charm us with the myths that are woven
about his name : —
11 Mommsen, History of Rome, b. i. chap. 4,

94 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
" The Lady of the Lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Who gave the king his huge cross-hilted sword,
With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt,
Bewildering heart and eye ; "
the vision of the Holy Grail ; the gatherings at the
Round Table in the noble hall ; the passing of Ar
thur, when, having hurled back the wondrous sword
into the sea, he entered the mysterious barge, " dense
with stately forms," and glided over the waters till
the black dot vanished against the verge of dawn, —
these, and a hundred other legends of Alfred, only
serve to throw into bold relief the stainless knight,
the princely warrior, the just ruler, the gentle scholar,
the true and loving man, the devout, self-sacrificing
believer. And so the myths that Josephus, Philo, the Rab
bins, and Mohammed have gathered about the name
of Moses: How, in the night when he was born, the
idols in all the temples of Egypt were dashed down :
how his mother hid him in the oven behind a heap
of wood, and when the vizier came to search the
. house, and set fire to the wood, the infant called to
his mother, " Be calm, my mother ; Allah has given
the fire no power over me : " how a huge black ser
pent fled at the voice of the babe in his little ark,
and the earth opened to swallow a sentry who had
threatened to betray his hiding-place : how, when
taken up by Pharaoh's daughter, the babe refused the
milk of Egyptian nurses, so that a Hebrew had to be
sent for : how the seven daughters of Pharaoh, who
had been ordered to bathe in the Nile to cure their
leprosy, were instantly healed at sight of Moses:

MOSES. 95
how, when the child was three years old, Pharaoh
put a crown on his head, but he dashed it to the
ground, and trampled on it ; and the monarch, dread
ing this omen, tested him with a basin filled with
jewels, and another of burning coals ; whereupon the
child, directed by an angel, put a coal into his mouth,
and thus saved himself, though he became a stam
merer for life : how his beauty attracted all passers-
by, and even laborers left their work to steal a glance
at him : how, at the University of Heliopolis, he was
taught arithmetic, geometry, Greek, Chaldee, and
Assyrian, the whole science of rhythm, harmony, and
metre, and the use of musical instruments, in which
he instructed Orpheus : how he invented hieroglyph
ics, boats, engines for building, and instruments of
war : how he led the Egyptians against the Ethiopi
ans, and first cleared the desert of serpents by send
ing out flocks of ibises to devour them ; and then
so captivated the daughter of the Ethiopian king by
his beauty, as she looked upon him from the walls,
that she opened the gates of the city to receive him,
and gave him her hand in marriage : and how, when
he was about to depart this life, in the excess of his
modesty and piety, lest the people should deify him,
he took the precaution to write beforehand in the
sacred books that he died ! 15 — these and a hundred
other legends, gathered by tradition around the name
of Moses, are but as the trees and shrubs and
flowers, and the gilded chapel-walls and pillars, that
pious Care has planted and reared at the base of
Sinai, contrasting the majestic front of rock that
18 For these and other legends, consult Josephus, Philo, the Talmud, the Ko
ran, Weil's Biblical Legends, and Lane's Selections from the Koran.

96 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
towers above, shining with the glory of Jehovah, and
giving forth his voice.16
Unlike the mythical Excalibur that rose out of the
sea to equip Alfred for his conquests, and was thrown
back into the sea as a prelude to his death, the rod
of Moses derived its virtue from his own faith in God,
and still has power both to swallow up the lying le
gends that would simulate its wonders, and to discom
fit the hordes of Amalek that would blot out Israel
from history.
When the mythical attaches itself to the heroic, its
presence may be detected in the attempt to exagger
ate the infancy of the hero to proportions corre
sponding with his after-greatness : it leaves nothing
natural. Hercules strangled two serpents in his cra
dle : while yet in his minority, he mastered all arts
and sciences, and destroyed the huge lion that was
the terror of the Thespians. Every thing he did was
on the scale of the gigantic.
In the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus,
the child is invested with supernatural powers from
his birth: the book is devoted, not to miracles of
simple attestation like the song of the angels at
Bethlehem, but to the display of the marvellous.
An old woman, laying her hand upon the infant in his
cradle, was healed of her infirmities. The wise men
received his swaddling-cloth as a keepsake ; and as
they were worshipping, after the manner of their
country, the fire seized this cloth and enveloped it,
but gave it forth again unhurt. When the child was
carried into Egypt, all the idols fell down. He opened
m Even there, tradition points to the impression made by the back of Moses
upon the rock, as he shrank from the glory of Jehovah I

MOSES. 97
a well in a sycamore-tree to wash his clothes, and the
tree ever after yielded a healing balsam. A boy pos
sessed of devils touched the infant's clothes, which
were hung out upon a post to dry, and the devils
came out of his mouth, arid flew away in the shape
of crows and serpents. A young woinan was cured
of the leprosy by the water in which the babe had
been washed. At seven years old, playing with boys
in the clay, Jesus made figures of birds, which, at his
command, would fly and eat and drink. In his father's
shop he made all manner of wooden-Ware by mere
Word of mouth, correcting the awkward carpentry
of his father, and increasing the income of the family.
In short, there was nothing strange or incredible heard
of or imagined but it was at once imputed to this
wonderful child. One has but to compare this book
of marvels with the simple story of the evangelists,
their silence touching the childhood of Jesus (with
the solitary exception of his visit to the temple), to
detect the false, and confirin the true.
Now, in the biblical story of the birth and the
training of Moses, there is no attempt to make him a
precocious child, to crowd his infancy with marvels
and prognostics of his future : on the contrary, every
incident told of him is natural ; the local descriptions
are tr tie to the life ; and the conduct of each of the
parties introduced is true to nature.
The Egypt which had welcomed Abraham with a
royal hospitality, and in which Joseph, having risen
to rank and power, was enabled to provide so munifi
cently for his brethren, was now ruled by a Pharaoh
whose policy toward the unaffiliated race of Hebrews
upon his soil, like that of Ferdinand and Isabella of

98 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Spain toward the Jews, and of the Grand Duke Con
stantine of Russia toward the Poles, was coercion,
repression, or extermination. There was a reason for
this, on the one hand, in the increase of this compact
community of foreigners ; and, on the other, in the
dangers which threatened Egypt on its eastern fron
tier. The monuments and the literature of Egypt
show how frequent were her wars with the tribes of
Syria and Arabia ; and more than one fortified post,
or migdol, was erected along the line of the Eastern
desert. There was danger that the Hebrews by and
by would outnumber the native Egyptians in the
Delta ; and inasmuch as they kept up their ancestral
traditions, and in some measure also the faith of their
fathers, with its promise of an independent nation
ality, they might become a dangerous element in the
event of war between Egypt and a foreign power.
" Come on, then," said the king to his advisers, " let
us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it
come to pass, when there falleth out any war, they
join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and
so get them up out of the land." 17 Fear begets cruelty
in the seat of power : and Pharaoh's policy was, first,
to crush the spirit of the people by servile and exacting
labors; next, to hinder their increase by cutting off
their male issue ; and so, finally, to merge them with
the Egyptians by intermarriage. Homer describes the
Egyptians as treacherous and cruel toward strangers
landing upon their coast : " Some they would put to
death ; others they led away inland alive, and there
subjected them to forced labor." 18 The king decreed
that every son born of a Hebrew mother should be
» Exod. i. 10. if Odyssey, xiv. 272.

MOSES. 99
drowned in the Nile. This ancient Bomba of inven
tive cruelty, having exhausted all other devices for
their subjection, resolved to exterminate the Hebrew
race. Bunsen argues that this audacious act must
have been preceded by a long period of oppression,
breaking the spirit of the Israelites ; but the rapid
strides of despotism in modern times — as in Hungary
thirty years ago, and more recently in France — show
that these successive measures of tyranny may all
have been crowded into one reign.
The mother of Moses, having concealed him for
three months from the Egyptian spies, cautiously pro
cured a little boat made of bulrushes coated with
bitumen and pitch,. and deposited him in this " ark "
among the flags on the bank of the Nile. The use
of the papyrus for boat-building in Egypt is often
mentioned by ancient writers, and is illustrated upon
the monuments. According to Plutarch, Isis sought
the body of Osiris " through the fenny country, in a
bark made of the papyrus." Strabo says of his visit
to Philse, " We crossed over to the island in a pacton,
which is a small boat made of rods, resembling woven
work." 19 Pliny describes the Nile-boats as " made
of papyrus, rushes, and reeds."20 Thus do the most
incidental allusions of the Hebrew narrative to the
natural history and the popular customs of Egypt
carry upon their face the evidence that the writer
was at home in that country. He is not writing a
book of travels, nor describing the peculiarities of
the country ; and therefore the accuracy of his inci
dental references to the most trivial matters is the
more striking, for this is the natural style of one
's B. xvii. c i. § 50. ™ Nat. Hist., vii. 57.

100 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
who was brought up among the scenes to which he
alludes. The place where this second ark of human destiny
was exposed cannot be identified from any reference
in the narrative itself. Mohammedan tradition locates
it upon the beautiful Island of Rhoda, opposite to old
Cairo., or Musr el AtSekeh, and near the site of ancient
Memphis. But this tradition is valuable only as
showing how the story of the infant Moses has sur
vived all the changes of dynasty and of population
upon the soil of Egypt.
" The daughter of Pharaoh went down to' bathe at
the river, and her maidens walked by the river's side."
Seeing the little ark among the flags, she sent a maid
servant to fetch it. As she opened it, the babe began
to cry ; and the princess, perceiving that it was one
of the Hebrew children, was touched with compas
sion, and resolved1 to adopt the child as her own.
The public bathing of women in the river seems
so contrary to that seclusion and reserve which
Oriental custom enjoins upon the female sex, that this
incident appears at first, and has been used by some,
to discredit the narrative. A Turk would be as
greatly scandalized at it as were the Japanese em
bassy at seeing women in the audience-chamber of
the President of the United States on their first of-
cial reception. Dean Stanley ascribes this incident
to a primitive state of manners: "The Egyptian
princess came down, after the Homeric simplicity
of the age, to bathe in the sacred river, or to play by
its side." 21 Yet the monuments of this period show,
that in point of art, society, customs, manners, Egypt
2' Smith's Bible Dictionary, art. " Moses."

MOSES. 101
was then very far removed from a state of " Homeric
simplicity : " she was at the acme of her luxurious civ
ilization. But, in ancient Egypt, women were never
restricted as in Asiatic nations. The monuments
show that in social festivities they appeared unveiled,
sharing the pleasures of the men; that they took
part in public festivals and in mourning-scenes. In
a tomb at Thebes, there is a representation of a lady
sitting in a bath, attended by four maids, who are
rubbing and anointing her person. Such a picture,
introducing the spectator to the very sanctuary of
woman's privacy, is more French than Persian. But
a princess could have commanded privacy even when
bathing in the Nile. Thus the very divergence of
Egyptian customs touching women from the customs
of Asiatic nations lends additional confirmation to
the Hebrew narrative.
• The naturalness of every incident in that narra
tive, its local and incidental verisimilitude, separate
the story of Moses from that of Semiramis and that
of Romulus and Remus, which have, in common with
it, the feature of the exposure of the infant. No
dove here comes to feed the babe, no wolf to suckle
it. It was natural that the Egyptian king, jealous of
the growing numbers of a foreign race, should seek
to cripple them by destroying their male offspring.
It was natural that the parents of Moses should se
crete him as long as possible ; and, when they could
no longer hide him, the expedient of committing him
to a floating cradle upon the reedy margin of the
river was but the natural ingenuity of maternal af
fection. The finding of the cradle by the king's
daughter was a natural incident ; and her adoption
9*

102 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of the helpless crying babe was but the natural
prompting of a woman's sympathy. Every woman
who reads the story would have done the same.
The addition of Philo,22 that she afterwards feigned
herself enceinte in order to pass off Moses as her
own child, is one of those parasitic legends, which,
by contrast, enable us the better to appreciate the
simplicity of the original story. The very name
Moses, which, however we may interpret it, is of
Egyptian derivation, connects this wonderful man
with Egypt as the land of his birth.23
How significant, now, is the omission of all mention
of Moses until he appears before us for a moment, in
his prime, the avenger of the wrongs of his breth
ren ; then disappears as suddenly, a fugitive into the
desert ! What a tempting field for romance ! — that
boyhood in the palace, that youth at the university,
that manhood at court ; the splendid prizes which Jo
seph had won inciting his ambition ; the watchful
teachings of his mother quickening his conscience;

22 Philo, Moses, i. 5.
23 Moses (Hebrew Mosheh, Septuagint Mw_ orjc, Arabic M&sa), — drawn out.
In Exod. ii. 10, this name is said to have been given because he was drawn out of
the water. Though the active participle Mosheh is there used, Gesenius under
stands it in a passive sense, meaning " drawn out." Others, using it actively,
apply it to Moses as the leader and preserver of his people. Others, again, de
rive it from an Egyptian compound, meaning saved from the water. Josephus
(Antiq., ii. ix. 6) regards the name as of Egyptian origin, and commemorative
of tbe peculiar circumstances of his exposure in the Nile : a For the Egyptians
call the water Mo; and one who ia rescued from the waves, Uses." This ac
cords with the Septuagint. Some, however, find in the name an analogy to
various Egyptian names, —Amosis, Thumosis, &c, into which the term M6s.
signifying " son," enters as a compound. The etymology of the name is dis
cussed at length by Knobel, Exegetisches Handbuch zum Alien Testament
(Exod. ii. 10); and by Lepsius, Chronologie derASgypter (p. 326, «.). Dr. Lep
sius traces the name to an Egyptian source. Brugsch regards it as wholly
Egyptian, its hieroglyphic equivalent being Mes, or Messou, which signifies
"the child.'' — Histoire d'Egypte, 1. 157.

MOSES. 103
the jealousies, the intrigues, the honors, and the perils
attending his anomalous position ; so near the throne,
yet incapable of the succession. What a margin for
the heroic and the marvellous left all unfilled ! The
briefest mention of Stephen, that Moses was learned
in all the wisdom of the Egyptians ; M and of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, that " Moses, when he was
come to years, refused to be called the son of Pha
raoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction
with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures
of sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ
greater riches than the treasures in Egypt,"25 —
these traditions, adopted, and so far authenticated, by
the apostles, are the only hints that the Bible gives
of the life of Moses in Egypt.
We cannot doubt, however, from his position, that
Moses was thoroughly trained both in the science
and in the religion of the Egyptians. The traces of
Egyptian precedents in his laws go to confirm his
personal history ; while the deviation from Egyptian
ideas and worship in his religion argues his inspira
tion from another source.
The very silence of the story regarding the youth
and early manhood of Moses is an attestation of its
truth : for there is no attempt to make of Moses a
hero ; but he comes and goes before us only as he
6tands related to the great moral purposes of Jehovah.
In this view, he was driven from Egypt into the des
ert in order to his inner spiritual development for
his great work.
In going from Egypt into the desert, one passes
immediately from the empire of man into the empire
24 Acts vii. 22. » Heb. xi. 24 seq.

104 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of God. Riding through the thronged bazaars of
Cairo, where men of every nation jostle you with
their burdens, and confuse you with their jargon;
passing by gorgeous mosques, decorated fountains,
airy balconies, and lofty ornamented houses, — you
emerge upon an avenue which conducts to a princely
palace without the walls. Rows of trees artificially
nurtured keep .up for a while the semblance of vege
tation ; but no sooner have you passed the palace,
with its elaborate gardens, than you plunge into
the open desert, where, far as the eye can reach,
you see neither tree nor shrub nor house, nor any
living thing. The huge bulk of the Pyramids beyond
the river fades from your view ; the obelisk of Heli-
opolis recedes ; the minarets of the city grow less and
less distinct : at last the rocky citadel itself disap
pears ; and, as upon the ocean, you are shut in by an
horizon that touches at every point the surface upon
which you move. No sound is heard but the soft
tread of camels, or your own unanswered voice. No
token of man is seen, — no house, no fence, no tree, no
monument, no footstep even, save the well-trodden
path of caravans. " One dead uniform silence reigns
over the whole region." The sun sinks into the
great basin of sand before you, and night shuts in
the wide circumference of desolation. The silence is
deep, is awful. No lights of city towers or village
homes relieve the gloom : only the stars look kindly
down, reminding you whose eye is; there. The sun
rises in the morning directly out of the bed of sand :
his first look is a glare, unmitigated by mists or
clouds ; and, as he mounts to the meridian, he glares
upon the sand, and the sand glares back upon the sun,

MOSES. 105
until he sinks again into its bed.26 And all is vast and
desolate and silent, — the sky above, the hard, bare
soil beneath, and God in all.
When Moses plunged into the desert, this contrast
of the human with the divine was at its highest point.
Then the monuments of Egypt, whose ruins now
amaze the traveller, were in their glory. A vast city
adjacent to the Pyramids, of which now hardly a trace
is found, was then the capital ; and where now a lone
column or obelisk juts above the sand, stood temples
and palaces in all the pride of Egyptian art. Then
the population was dense, and the government was
strong and enterprising, rearing new works as stu
pendous as those of former reigns. All this glory
Moses had known, not as the stranger who now ima
gines it from its remains, but with the familiar knowl
edge of one bred at court ; and from the luxuries of
the. palace he fled into the desert, an exile, without
attendants or provisions to solace its gloom. There
he lived forty years, at fifteen-days' remove from any
city or town, with no facilities of communication
with his brethren, a solitary shepherd, a stranger in
the tribe to which he joined himself; living where,
from year to year, he saw only the desert and the sea,
the1 narrow verdure of the wadies, and the bald, rug
ged mountains that break, the leafless waste with their
sterner desolation, — shut out from man, shut in with
God ! Given to solitude and meditation, where the
vastness of the Creator's power oppresses the senses ;
where the infinity of his being is shadowed in the

26 This description refers, of course, to the average of days during the dry
season. In December and January, the days are often diversified by rain. So,
too, the surface varies from sand to flint and gravel.

106 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
wide expanse of earth, air, and sky ;' where his omni
presence is almost a palpable reality, and the Invisi
ble is ever near ; and where, in the profusion of mere
naked power, man becomes but an atom of the sand
he treads upon, —
" So separate from the world, his breast
Might duly take and strongly keep
The print of Heaven, to be expressed
Ere long on Sion's steep." 27
There is no discipline of the soul for a great work
like communing with the thought of God in solitude.
It lives and moves in Him ; is rilled with his spirit
and his strength. Cromwell gained that moral power
which made him invincible in his earlier career by
his solitary musings upon the Bible as he worked his
own estate among the stagnant.marshes of the Ouse.
Luther was nurtured into his sublime heroism by his
solitary communings with God through that old
chained Bible in the convent of Erfurt. Paul was
not suffered to begin his apostieship with the hot zeal
of the neophyte, but was subjected to the discipline
of solitude in Arabia.28 Jesus himself went alone
into the mountain or the desert to pray.
How Moses improved the lessons of the desert we
gather from the ninetieth psalm, which ancient Jew
ish tradition, and the general consent of modern
criticism, ascribe to him,29 and which so well accords
with the deep earnestness and reverence of his spirit
and the outward conditions of his personal experi
ence. It is in unison with the conception of God
v Keble's Christian Tear, thirteenth Sunday after Trinity.
m Gal. i. 18. » See Calvin, Tholuck, Ewald, Hitzig.Hengstenberg.

MOSES. 107
which opens the Pentateuch, and with the recital of
God's dealings with Israel which closes it.30 Moses
had gazed upon those primitive rocks, whose, bald
fronts, towering in the Desert of Sinai, are the most
startling monuments of almighty power, showing how
the worlds were made ; he had seen the fierce winter
torrents sweep through the gullies, with masses of
sand and stone, heaping up destruction ; he had seen
the rapid but transitory vegetation that springs up
after the rains ; and seeing in all this God's power,
and man's nothingness, he sang, " Lord, thou hast
been our dwelling-place in all generations : before the
mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst
formed the earth and the world, even from everlast
ing to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man
to destruction: thou earnest them away as with a
flood : they are like grass, which in the morning
flourisheth and groweth up ; in the evening it is cut
down, and withereth." This sublime composition
was both the fruit and the exponent of the discipline
of Moses in the desert.
But Moses was not sent into the desert merely for
the culture of his own heart in piety. God has no
place in his providence for a perpetual hermit. The
use of solitary communing with God is to prepare
the soul for public action for God among men.
Moses was sent into the desert to become qualified
for that work which his departure from Egypt
seemed to frustrate. While faith in God was
strengthened, and" the feeling of dependence on his
power was cherished in the soul, all unruly passions
were tamed; all self-reliance upon name, position,
» Deut. xxxii. 7, 15, 36.

108 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
energy, wisdom, was. destroyed ; all extravagant
schemes of personal effort were abandoned ; and the
mind 'was brought to a simple, constant trust in
Jehovah. In Egypt> in a self-appointing enthusiasm,
he had thought of delivering the people, and had
said,, " I will : " now he heard the voice of the I AM
say, "G-o,"
The scenes of desert-life that group themselves about
the person of Moses, coming in direct contrast with
the incidents of his Egyptian birth, are another confir
mation of the narrative. Every line is true to nature.
The maidens at the well watering their flocks, driven
away by the rough shepherds, who treated women
as inferiors ; the welcome of Moses to the tents of
the sheik, their father; his marriage to one of the
daughters; and, seeing that he brought no dowry,
his consequent subordination to Jethro, — all this
was properly and distinctively Arabian. In Egypt,
where water was drawn from the river and its canals,
and whexe the people were not nomadic, but agricul
tural, the opening incident could hardly have been
conceived ; but in the desert, dotted here and there
with wells, and roamed by pastoral tribes, it might
ha,ve happened any day. So of the shifting of en
campments, according to the transient, . fluctuating
supply of water, upon which the life of the flocks
depended : that this should have led Moses to some
spring-clad wady near Horeb was an incident that
might repeat itself there to-day. And this minute
correspondence with {.he physical conditions of two
such widely -contrasted countries as Egypt and Ara
bia gives reality to the story. These pictures of
desert-life are like the photographs of the Sinaitic
peninsula taken by the ordnance-survey.

MOSES. 109
Though the mountains of that region are bare of
vegetation, their wash, accumulating in the wadies
scooped out by the winter torrents, forms a soil in
which here and there a palm-tree strikes its roots, and
a scanty herbage springs up. To these little Edens,
of which the Wady Feiran is the most inviting, the
roving tribes of the desert resort when the rain fills
the pools, or when the dates cluster upon the trees.
Here, under their rude tents of skins, or in huts of
stone covered with branches of the palm, safe from
intrusion, skeltered from the heat, beside a purling
brook that seems to issue from the sand and to lose
itself in the sand again, or a well in which the win
ter rains, percolated through the sand, remain se
cure from the drought of summer, surrounded by
their sheep, goats, and camels, their all of this
world's good, this simple people enjoy a paradise
which they would not exchange for the palaces of
the city.
But Moses was not a Bedouin ; and, though he
adapted himself uncomplainingly to his position, he
could not stifle memory or hope. How wide the con
trast of his position with that which he forsook in
Egypt! The adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter,
bred in the court, learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians, familiar with the great, accustomed to the
arts and luxuries of civilized life, capable of legisla
tion, of martial deeds, of whatever is demanded in
the founder of a State, is living in concealment among
the mountains of the desert, married to the daughter
of a Bedouin sheik, and tending the flocks . of her
father for the sake of his daily bread and of a tent to
cover him. But more than this contrast of outward
10

110 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
circumstances is the contrast of his powerless and
almost useless life with the hopes he had cherished for
the deliverance of Israel. How like a dream ap
pears his own deliverance from the Nile ; his cottage-
life with his mother ; his adoption at the court ; his
grand scheme of emancipation; his renunciation of
personal hopes for the good of his brethren; his
hasty interference, misconstrued even by those he
meant to succor, and, instead of the signal of revolt,
becoming the opprobrium of the slaves, exciting the
ire of the king, and putting his own life in jeopardy !
Often as he sat upon the rocks, with the sheep of
Jethro browsing around him, would he start as' at the
cry of his brethren groaning in bondage, and, his blood
tingling through his veins, rouse himself for their de
liverance ; then remembering the price set upon his
head, and the absurdity of a disowned fugitive ap
pearing for the rescue of two millions of people un
armed and dispirited by oppression, he would sink
down in perplexity, questioning his violence to
ward the Egyptian, questioning his call from God,
questioning the possibility of the deliverance that
Joseph had predicted, and his mother had looked for
through himself.
But never could he lose his solicitude for his breth
ren in bonds. As the exiled patriot, once the leader
of armies and the head of a revolutionized nation,
living in obscurity and want, baffled, disowned, tra
duced, a price upon his head, still adds to his personal
sufferings the deeper woes of his country, and
watches for the signal that shall call him to her aid ;
so did Moses, pasturing his flocks along the Elanitic
gulf, look wistfully across the desert to the land of

MOSES. Ill
Goshen, not longing for the lost pleasures of the
court, nor regretting his self-sacrifice, but sighing for
his brethren there sweltering in the clay-pits under
the lash.
With a yet deeper significance may we say con
cerning this solitariness of Moses, what Ferdinand
Hiller has so finely said concerning the deafness of
Beethoven : " How can we speak of solitude in the
case of a man who really and truly was at home in
a different world from that which surrounded him ?
The man who, with his inward ear, could hear the
adagio of the Ninth Symphony and the benedictus
of the Missa Solemnis, required no excitement of
the senses. It is a great question whether his in
ability to hear did not contribute to make his nature
more profound."
So the seclusion of Moses from the schools of in
tellectual life, from the pomp and glare of royal
power, from the magnificence of religious pageants,
from the wealth of palaces and temples, from the din
of commerce and of arms, in a word, his seclusion
from the excitements of that artificial world which
is the product of human civilization, turning his con
sciousness more profoundly within itself, opened his
inward ear to the voice of God. And, like the most
soulful master of the most soulful art, Moses showed
bis greatness in that he was able to express in works
that live "the lofty emotions and views that lived
within him." The rugged grandeur of the decalogue
towers above the well-compacted empire of Egypt,
like Sinai itself above the Pyramids.
The discipline of Moses in the desert was pre
paring the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. Be-

112 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
sides his subjective preparation for the heroic
work of leadership, the. practical knowledge he
gained of the desert itself qualified him to conduct
the march of so vast a multitude with due regard to
safety, order, and comfort. He knew every well,
every fountain, every wady, the best route of march,
the best places of encampment. His shepherd-life in
ured him to exposure, and made of him a practical sur
veyor. It was like the discipline of frontier-life to the
youthful Washington contrasted with the refinement
of the Fairfax family. And here comes up a feature
wliich stamps this narrative not only with the gen
uineness of history, but with the token of divinity, —
the thorough humanity of the hero. That mysterious
border-line between the hero and the god, which the
traditions of other ancient nations have peopled with
demigods and with demiurgic powers, is not once
crossed, is not even approached, in the history of
Moses. He remains throughout a man, and betrays
the infirmities of a man.
His training at the court of Pharaoh, acquainting
him with the laws and institutions, the science, phi
losophy, and religion, of the foremost nation of
antiquity, qualified him to discriminate as to the ele
ments of a civil polity for a new national life ; but
this high training apart from his people had also de
veloped in him an impetuosity of will, a forwardness
of self-assertion, that required to be tamed before
he could attempt his majestic rdle of leadership.
While his retaliation upon the Egyptian whom he
spied smiting a Hebrew argues a nobility of nature
that would risk its condition of privilege through
sympathy with the oppressed, yet his quick dealing

MOSES. 113
of death shows hot blood as well ; 31 and there was
probably an imperiousness of manner that led the
wrangling Hebrews next day to demand, " Who made
thee a prince and a judge over us ? "
Fleeing from the danger that threatened his too
sanguine temperament, he at once takes up the cud
gel for the maidens at the well against the unman
nerly shepherds. But the discipline of exile in the
desert wrought out the further discipline of humilia
tion and dependence ; and. both are touchingly ex
pressed in the names of his children, — Grer&kom,
" I am a stranger in a strange land ; " and Eliezer,
" the God of my father was my help." The tone of
his mind was even changed from an impetuosity that
bordered upon presumption to a self-distrust that bor
dered upon timidity ; and he needed now that con
sciousness of a divine call, which for the rashness
of zeal should give him the courage of faith, and for.
the impetuous daring of self-confidence the calm,
measured, enduring strength of : dependence upon
God. This was the lesson of the burning bush ; at
which Moses was as anxious to excuse himself from

31 Augustine condemns this deed of Moses as unjustifiable violence. The
Koran represents it as a work of Satan, of which Moses repented ; but Philo
(Vit. Mos., i. viii.) regards it as " a pious action to destroy one who only lived for
the destruction of others." Moses never afterward alluded to it with remorse ;
and in his own code he makes a wide distinction between killing by guile, and
killing through sudden heat, to avenge an injury or injustice. Whatever judg
ment Christian ethics may pronounce upon the act, the motive that prompted it
commands our respect. A quick sympathy with the suffering and the oppressed
marks a noble nature. Stephen, intimates that the act was symbolical and pro
phetic, — a signal to prepare the Hebrews for revolt. " He supposed bis brethren
would have understood how that Ood by his hand would deliver them." If
Moses had al ready received some intimation from Ood of the part that he should
act in the deliverance of the Israelites, there is no mention of this in the book
of Exodus ; and the subsequent narrative would rather show that Moses had
mistaken the time or the method appointed of Ood for the emancipation of his
people. 10*

114 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the office of deliverer, as in Egypt he had been for
ward to assume it. This fidelity of the record to his
weakness as well as to his humility ; this touch of
nature in the shrinking of an old man from responsi
bilities he had invited in his prime ; this distrust of
his own presence, speech, and influence, induced by
long seclusion from affairs, and even from civilized
life ; this subsidence of personal ambition ; this dis
trust of his fellows ; this almost despair of his times
and his mission, — once more place, this narrative at
the farthest remove from the mythical and legendary,
and attest its historic truth. There could hardly be a
more disparaging treatment of a hero than this, which,
so far from investing him with divine attributes, or
bringing him upon the stage full-panoplied with
heavenly armor, represents him as provoking the
anger of the Lord by an almost cowardly hesitation,
an almost stubborn distrust ; and, if we accept it as
coming from Moses himself, the narrative bears in
trinsic evidence of truth, and testifies to the sincerity
of his character.
Of miracles in a philosophical point of view it is
not my province to speak ; 32 but one or two peculiari
ties in the miracles of the Exodus here arrest atten
tion. The phenomenon of the burning bush rests upon
the testimony of Moses as its solitary witness ; and
hence some would class this with the night-vision of
Mohammed. Ewald resolves it into a subjective ex
perience conveying the profound truth that the mind
of the prophet was suddenly penetrated with the
22 The question of miracles was very fully discussed In the course of lectures
for 1869-70.

MOSES. 115
divine light, and absorbed into the mind and will of
God. The supposed analogy with Mohammed's vis
ion fails, however, in the two vital points of the
intrinsic worth of the things revealed, and of sub
sequent acts or events attesting its reality, and con
firming the witness.
In the twelfth year of his mission, Mohammed
gave out that he was carried by night from Mecca
to Jerusalem, and thence ascended into heaven.
Devout Mussulmans still believe that an indentation
in the rock on the summit of the Mount of Olives is
the mark of his camel's foot as he spurned the earth
for his aerial excursion.
Some time after, being pursued by his . enemies,
Mohammed hid in a cave : as soon as he had entered,
two doves laid their eggs at the entrance, and a spi
der covered the mouth of the cave with her web;
which so deceived the pursuers, that they gave over
the hunt. It was in such marvels as these that he
rested the supernatural evidences of his call. But,
in all his career as prophet, Mohammed never at
tempted an open miracle : indeed, he disclaimed mi
raculous power, though he claimed supernatural
illumination, and appealed to the Koran as the great
est of miracles. It is said that the original of this
remarkable production, the marvel of Arabian litera
ture, is beside the throne of God, written on a tablet
of vast size. A copy from this tablet, in one volume,
on paper, was sent down to the lowest heaven in
charge of the angel Gabriel, who thence revealed it
to Mohammed, by sections, in the course of twenty-
three years. Gabriel's complete copy, which was
bound in silk, and adorned with gold and precious

116 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
stones of paradise, was shown to Mohammed for his
consolation once a year ; and in the year of his death
he was privileged to see it twice. But though the
Koran, in the elegance and purity of its style, and
the felicity and finish of that rhjrming prose in which
the Arabian ear delights, is the standard and glory
of the Arabic tongue, in its conception and subject-
matter it lacks originality, being founded upon the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures as the general basis
of its historical and ethical ideas, while it adds to
these puerilities, extravagances, and sensuous immo
ralities, that everywhere mark the tampering of the
human with the divine. Moreover, next to the res
toration of faith in the unity of God by a vigorous
protest against both idolatry and unbelief, the main
object; of the book is the exaltation of Mohammed
himself as the greatest and last of prophets.
We have seen, on the contrary, the self-deprecia
tion of Moses in the account of his divine call, — a
feature which thoroughly distinguishes this narrative
from the work of myth-makers and hero-worshippers,
and marks it as a genuine narrative, and therefore
as having come from himself. But, while he makes
such a sorry hero or prophet of himself, - — for a pre
tender, — he comes forward and proves his divine
call by works of divine power. Whereas Mohammed
told marvellous stories of divine revelations, but
did no miracles, Moses first wrought wonders, and
then made revelations; and both were in sublime
harmony. Using always the rod that he had at the burning
bush, Moses wrought miracles upon the grandest
scale in presence of two nations ; and this rod — un-

MOSES. 117
like the ExOalibur of King Arthur, which two hun
dred and one of the most puissant barons before him
had vainly endeavored to dislodge from its miraculous
stone — was nothing but the common shepherd's
staff which Moses chanced to have in his hand. This
rod was connected so closely with the whole series
of miracles in Egypt and in the desert, that, to dis
credit the incident of the burning bush, one must set
aside the history of the Exodus, or believe, that, by
the wonders in Egypt, the seal of divinity was set
upon a fantasy or an imposture of Moses.
But some would discredit those wonders themselves,
regarding them as exaggerations of natural phenomena
familiar to Egypt, — the periodical reddening of the
Nile ; the darkening, blinding effect of the kamsin ;
the sudden swarms of flies, of gnats, and of locusts :
all natural facts, about which the myth of the miracu
lous was woven, it is said, by priestcraft or by credu
lity. And some woidd even go farther, and class
these miracles with the clever impostures of the
Egyptian magicians.
In considering these views, we must hold the critics
of the miracles sharply to the point. Either Criticism,
to have any weight, must assume the truth of the
narrative as its oWn foundation ; for our only knowl
edge of the events under review is derived from the
book of Exodus. It is here that the "euchant-
ftients" of the "magicians" are recorded; it is here
that the analogy of the plagues to natural phenomena
is suggested : and the critic must not be perrnitted
first to argue from the enchantments and analogies
brought to 'his : knowledge bythe narrative itself,
against the miraculous character of the events that

118 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
are set in express contrast to nature and magic, and
then to turn about, and, asserting the natural or magi
cal character of all the events, argue against the his
torical character of the narrative from which he insists
upon taking his own proof that the phenomena were
not supernatural. We will meet him upon either
ground ; but logical fairness forbids that we should
concede him both at the same time.
Now, we are told expressly, that, in the three in
stances in which the magicians similated the wonders
of Moses, " they did so by their enchantments." 33 The
narrative which gives us our only information of the
partial successes of the sorcerers, states, also, that
these were feats of jugglery. The fact that Moses
himself records the successful imitations of the sor
cerers is a sign of his honesty, and of his fearlessness
of comparison. These imitations, however, were upon
a small scale, and were limited to a few phenomena in
which such trickery was possible. But the magicians
uniformly failed to undo what they themselves had
done, — much less could they reverse or counteract any
plague which Moses had produced ; and, the moment
his wonders passed beyond the narrow sphere in which
deception was possible, they were completely foiled,
and were compelled to own the superior power of
his divinity.
Compare with this straightforward narrative the
legends that Arabian fancy has gathered about it, with
the feeling that it was too unadorned, too matter-of-
fact, for the region of the supernatural : As soon as
Moses had re-entered Egypt, an angel appeared to
Aaron with a crystal cup of rare old wine ; and, bid-
fa Exod. vii. 22; viii. 7.

MOSES. 119
ding him drink it, he instantly carried him upon a
winged horse across the Nile to meet his brother.
The next day, as they stood before Pharaoh, the
angel Gabriel, bursting through the ceiling, threw over
Aaron a magnificent robe glittering with diamonds.
When Moses flung down his staff, it was changed into
a serpent as large as a, camel, which at once lifted
up the throne with Pharaoh on it, and threatened to
swallow him and all his attendants, — the throne and
the palace besides ; but, when Moses took hold of the
creature's tongue, it became a staff again. The wife
of Pharaoh confessed her faith in the God of Moses ;
whereupon Pharaoh condemned her to death : but
Gabriel appeared, and gave her a soothing antidote,
and promised that she should be the wife of Moham
med in paradise. At the Red Sea, when Pharaoh
was sinking in the waters, he began to cry out that
he believed in God ; but the angel Gabriel stopped
his mouth with a handful of mire, and then his dead
body was cast up on both shores, in turn, for a testi
mony. What a testimony are such legends for the
truth of the biblical story !
Again: the wonders wrought by Moses were not
private exhibitions in the presence of Pharaoh, but
public calamities affecting the whole land. That
they comported in part with natural phenomena, or
made use of natural agencies, frees the narrative from
the suspicion of exaggerating the supernatural, and
gives a tone of reality to this reflection, in the highest
sphere of miracle, of the physical conditions of Egypt.
But these phenomena had three peculiarities that re
moved them from the plane of nature : (1) they were
immediate and universal in their effects ; (2) each

120 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
event took place according to the word of Moses, and
at the lifting of the rod, — neither of wliich could
have been a physical cause of any such event ; and
(3) the children of Israel, though" intermingled with
the Egyptians, were always exempted from the
plagues. It is impossible to account for these charac
teristics on any other supposition than that of direct
supernatural power producing the phenomena. To
reject the phenomena is to reject the whole historical
foundation of the national existence of the Israelites,
and of their peculiar religious and commemorative
institutions. It would be like blotting from the page
of history the War of American Independence, and
then attempting to account for the commemoration
of such a myth upon the Fourth of July by the
American people !
It should further be noted respecting these mira
cles, that they were never attempted by Moses in his
own name, nor used to magnify his power, or to es
tablish his claim to hero-worship ; but were always
wrought in the name and for the glory of Jehovah,
the God of Israel. They were successively aimed,
moreover, at those objects and powers of Nature
which the Egyptians had deified. There can be no
rational explanation of the book of Exodus which
excludes from it the supernatural.
To the biblical account of the Exodus itself it has
been objected that there is no mention of it in Egyp
tian history; but Egyptian history is as yet so far
fragmentary, that the absence of any clear and posi
tive reference to such an event need excite no sur
prise. Moreover, nations are not accustomed to
record and commemorate their own disasters; and

MOSES. 121
where the history of a nation is made up almost en
tirely of pictorial and monumental chronicles of its
kings, prepared by their order or that of their imme
diate successors, it is not likely that untoward events
would find a place among the representations of vic
tories and triumphant festivals. The galleries of
Versailles exhibit the pictorial history of France in
all its points of grandeur and triumph, but not in
scenes of disaster. One sees there the coronation of
Louis XVI., but not his decapitation ; the victories
of Napoleon, his marriage, his coronation, but not his
defeat at Waterloo, nor his confinement at St. Helena ;
the coronation of Louis Philippe after the revolution
of 1830, but not his flight from the revolution of
1848. Solferino is there ; but neither the surrender
of Louis Napoleon at Sedan, nor the crowning of
William Emperor of Germany in the hall of mirrors,
will ever find place upon those walls. The absence
of any monument or record in Egyptian history,
touching the destruction of Pharaoh and his army in
the Red Sea, would be no argument against the fact
stated in the Hebrew Scriptures.
But that history is not altogether silent touch
ing the Exodus of the Israelites. The confused ac
counts of the Hyksos and the lepers given by Ma-
netho open a wide range of speculation, upon which
We cannot now enter. Those accounts, at best, are
brief and fragmentary, and come to us at second
hand, as quoted by Josephus against Apion, by Dio
dorus, and by other writers. Tacitus gives it as the
most plausible conjecture, that the Jews were the
lepers once expelled from Egypt ; and the confused
mention in Manetho of Jerusalem and Judasa, and
n

122 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of Osarsiph, priest of Heliopolis, who afterwards
took the name of Moses, shows a faint trace of the
Hebrew Exodus upon the pages of Egyptian history.
Moreover, there is a probable identification of the
Hebrews in sundry orders for rations to the apuriu, —
workmen employed in building a fortified palace for
Rameses.34 When Moses had led forth the Hebrews from
Egypt, the great task of his life had only begun : the
work of deliverance was to be followed by the work
of organization. For this he had been trained in
the school of Egypt, then the most perfect example
of organized civil society ; and the correspondences
between the Mosaic institutes and the laws and cus
toms of Egypt are so many and so close, as to leave
no doubt that the mind of Moses was " impregnated
with Egyptian memories." But though these corre
spondences show " a knowledge of Egypt so exten
sive and minute that nothing but a long residence
among that exclusive people can explain it," 35 and
so are internal proofs of the historical truth of the
narrative, yet the departures of Moses from his
Egyptian model are of a character that difference
him from all known teachers and legislators of an
tiquity. For, since the education of the Egyptians
was exclusively in the hands of the priests, " if their
*"* The following is a specimen of these orders : " Give corn to the Egyptian
soldiers, and to the apuriu, which draw stone for the great fortress of the
palace of Barneses, beloved of Ammon." Chabas (Melanges Egyptologiques,
1862, p. 42), Ebers (JEgypten und die Biicher Moses, 1. 316), and Brugsch
.Zeitschrift fur JEgypt. Sprache) agree in regarding the name apuriu as the
Egyptian equivalent for Ivree, the Hebrews. If this shall be confirmed, we then
shall have positive Egyptian testimony to the fact of the Hebrews in Egypt,
their servile employment at Barneses, and also a proximate date of the Exodus.
36 See a fine argument in the Pentateuch, by Eev. W. Smith, Ph. D. the
learned Boman-Catholic divine of Inzievar.

MOSES. 123
influence had determined the inward life of Moses,
he would necessarily have spread their idolatry
among the Jews ; and yet he at once abolished all
traces of it that had crept in among them. Just as
little as Paul became an apostle in consequence of
his Grecian education in Tarsus did Moses become
the great founder of religion in consequence of the
wisdom he had learned in Egypt." 36
The analysis of the Mosaic legislation will fall
properly to a subsequent lecture upon the Hebrew
theocracy ; but I may hint at these distinguishing
features. Moses made no provision for a king, nor
for classes, with the exception of the priesthood. He
established a virtual democracy of landholders, based
on the family ; or a tribal fraternity, bound together
by allegiance to Jehovah rs the sovereign of the na
tion ; and the stringency of certain ethical and reli
gious precepts, and the severity of their penalties,
were due to the fact that a breach of these was not
only irreligion, but treason against the supreme
authority, which all the more required to be felt be
cause it was invisible. His system was humanizing
throughout, and embodied the highest ideas of moral
equality, rectitude, and benevolence for the practical
intercourse of men. It was based upon principles
that have survived all changes of polity.
His doctrine of God was not the mere reviving of
the primitive Monotheism of Egypt ; but his concep
tion of the spirituality of God, the oneness of his
being, the holiness of his character, and the univer
sality of his dominion, was the purest and the lof
tiest that the mind of man has reached.
30 Olshausen, Comm. on Acts vii. 22.

124 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
The Rabbi Salvador, with a pardonable enthusiasm
for his race, has grouped around the standard of
Israel the banners of the various nations that were
her contemporaries at different stages of her political
existence of seventeen centuries. " Those of India
and -Ethiopia might be represented by the words
priests, castes, mysteries : to these Egypt added
science, industry ; Babylon, luxury, pleasure ; Athens
inscribed upon hers, fine arts; Sparta, patriotism;
Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage, commerce; Rome, war;
and many of these, also, elysium, paradise, tartarus,
hell. But Israel wrote upon her standard, the eternal,
the people, and the law, justice, abundance, peace.
" Solon magnified himself for having given to the
Athenians better laws than they could bear. Moses
did more : first he conceived law in its absolute
sense ; he marked out principles that belong to all
times and all nations, which have their source in
the nature of things, and which insure the satis
faction of all the real necessities of men ; next he
organized a people to conserve this law ; and finally
he dictated statutes adapted to the men who consti
tuted that people, and conformed to times, places,
and circumstances." 31
All Hebrews were equals and brethren: the
Hebrew was subjected only to the law, never to a
person. Provision was made for universal education
in laws, religion, and history ; the spirit of patriotism
was cultivated, and a horror of slavery and super
stition ; kindness to the poor and the stranger,
respept for woman, honor to parents and to the aged,
hospitality and liberality, were enjoined. Some posi-
87 J. Salvador, Hixtoire des Institutions de Moise, ii. 330.

MOSES. 125
tive institutions, and some social and moral precepts,
were adopted or adapted from Egypt ; but the Mosaic
code applies to the constitution of man and of uni
versal nature.
Moses ascribed this code either to direct divine
revelation, or to the guidance of a divine illumina
tion ; and to suppose him guilty of imposture in this
claim is to do violence to his whole character as it
appears in the history. The principles of the deca
logue, and the moral principles that underlie the
Levitical code, so far transcend the known ethics of
antiquity and the conceptions even of later philoso
phies, that a belief in the supernatural inspiration of
Moses gives the only rational solution of their origin.
The same is true of the Mosaic cosmogony. Like
the decalogue, this begins with the highest conception
of God as a pure Spirit, whose will is creative and
executive without demiurgic agencies. A conception
which Plato and Socrates barely approximated — that
of one infinite and eternal Spirit — is the very start
ing-point in the cosmogony and the theocracy traced
by Moses. In his time the religion of Egypt had de
generated, and her institutions were based upon the
belief in a plurality of gods; whereas the Mosaic
code everywhere denounces this as a sin intolerable
to the God of Israel. While the form of the Mosaic
institutes is statutory and juridical, — and therefore
they contain references to facts, usages, opinions,
with which the people had been familiar in Egypt, —
there underlie these forms certain moral principles of
permanent interest and obligation; so that, in the
Sermon on the Mount, Christ " filled out " QthjQwctou)
the law as an ethical code from God himself.
11*

126 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
The personality of Moses pervades his institutes,
as the personality of Paul pervades his letters, — a
personality which is itself pervaded, or rather in
fused, with the consciousness of the divine. The
man and the polity, the character and the code, stand
or fall together. The biography and the legislation
are woven together, warp and woof, without seam.
How grand the personality that could so embody
itself in the ideas, the laws, the institutions, the
worship, the memories, and the hopes of a nation
whose religious belief in the one Jehovah as the one
and only Deliverer has become the ineffaceable faith
of humanity itself, as its ethical code is the funda
mental law of civilized society and the concrete
utterance of the universal conscience !
To extinguish the historical personality of Moses,
one must blot out from history the Jewish nation, the
memory of its ancient capital, its hallowed temple,
its sacred rites : but these are an indestructible part
of the world's history ; and their record attests their
origin, while their existence confirms the record.
Take, for instance, that social festival, the Purim,
Which the Jews observe in the month Adar. We
find mention of this in Josephus and other Jewish
writers, and in the Talmud ; and we can trace it back
to the story of Haman and Mordecai in the time of
the captivity, when Esther the queen ordained "that
these days of Purim should not fail from among the
Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their
seed." 3S The omission of this feast from the list in
Leviticus, and from the historical and prophetic books
prior to Esther, is an incidental mark of the greater
ss Esth. ix. 26-32.

MOSES. 127
antiquity of these books. But the Passover we trace
back through the period of the kings, and find at
length, in the book of Exodus, an account of its
origin inseparable from the origin of the nation itself,
and both incorporated with the life of Moses. To
obliterate Moses, therefore, we must obliterate these
memorials of the nation in the laws and observances
of nearly four thousand years, and then obliterate
from the conscience of humanity itself the deep-
wrought traces of the ten commandments.
This character, whose individuality we have traced
through the vicissitudes of personal experience, whose
development we have studied at the court and in the
desert, whose efficiency we have marked in the diverse
offices of deliverer and leader, and of founder and
administrator, in the later scenes of the march to
Canaan appears rounded up before us in the almost
symmetrical blending of virtues and graces, with no
one quality dominant through exaggeration ; of gen
erous sympathies, feeling the wrongs of his brethren
as his own ; of quick instincts to redress the injuries
of others, careless of himself; of a humility so deep,
that it shrank from accepting the highest honors prof
fered by God ; of a courage so high, that it faced
equally the power of Pharaoh, the perils of the sea
and the wilderness, and the frenzy of the camp intox
icated with idolatry, or clamoring for food and drink ;
of a meekness that endured without retort the inso
lence of the people and the jealousy of Aaron and
Miriam ; and a self-renunciation that would forego
honor, life itself, rather than the sinning people should
be cut off; a candor, withal, that recorded his own
failings ; and a faith that triumphed over all failings

128 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
and all foes, through singleness of devotion to God.
His continuance in his work when he knew he could
not share its fruits, and his submission to the decree
that excluded him from the land of promise, together
with his humiliating record of the outburst of petu
lance and pride that provoked it, are without parallel
in history. Well may we, as did Michael Angelo, set
up this grandest figure of humanity with horns of
divine light shooting from his head, and the tablets
of the divine law clasped in his hand, and, casting
away the mean implements by which we have sought
to reproduce his image, bid him break the silence of
the marble, and speak to us of God.
But what speech could be so eloquent as the silent,
mysterious dignity of his death ? His work accom
plished, he gives his parting counsels, inaugurates his
successor, and goes up alone into Nebo to die. The
leader of three million souls has not so much as a
body-guard to attend him with honor to his grave.
Not even the faithful Joshua is with him to support
his steps. He is going up to die : but Miriam, who
watched over his little ark in the reeds of the Nile,
will not be there to spread his couch with sisterly
affection ; nor Aaron, the high priest, to succor him
with sympathy and prayer : both these he has laid to
their rest in the desert. What thronging memories,
what varying emotions, fill his mind as he turns his
back upon the camp which has been the scene of so
many wonders and trials ! He remembers the banks
of the Nile, where he grew up amid the palm-trees,
and under the shadow of the Pyramids. He remem
bers the humble cottage of his mother, and how she
charmed his childish ears with the story of Abraham

MOSES. 129
and of Joseph, and the promise made to Israel, and
whispered of his own deliverance, and of her hope in
him. He remembers the court of Pharaoh, and the
honor and wealth that were open to him as an adopted
son. He recalls his premature signal for the deliver
ance of his nation, and his own flight and exile in the
desert. He sees again the bush that burns and is not
consumed. He remembers the miracles in Egypt,
the passover, the march, the passage of the Red Sea ;
he sees again the burning presence of Sinai, and the
glory of Jehovah. The work of his life is accom
plished : the word of the Lord is fulfilled. Often he
pauses to look back upon the camp, and commend his
flock to God. Yet he is neither sad nor troubled.
He knows that God will care for them. He has noth
ing to fear for himself. His sin is forgiven, though
God's testimony against it has not been withdrawn.
What strange experiences death shall bring, he
knows not ; but he who was alone with God on
Sinai forty days does not fear to be alone with him
on Pisgah. And yet how insignificant do all the
great events of his life appear in the thought of that
vast unknown he is about to enter ! He is going up
alone to die. The people in the plain follow him with
strained vision and tearful eyes as he slowly climbs
from crag to crag. Dimmer and dimmer grows that
venerable form, till at length it is lost to view as
Moses gains the western brow of Nebo.
But now he forgets the camp in the glorious prospect
that opens before him. Northward he sees the future
inheritance of Gilead, Dan, and Naphtali, the fruitful
hills that skirt the great middle plain from the river
to the sea, the winding current of the Jordan, and per-

130 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
chance, in that translucent atmosphere, the stately
form of Hermon tipped with snow ; 39 south of these,
the vine-clad ridges of Ephraim and Manasseh, that
stretch westward to the plain of Sharon ; before him,
•all the land of Judah, with the cattle on its thousand
hills, to where the blue of the mountains merges into
the blue of the sea, or fades away into the haze of the
desert. Directly at his feet lay Jericho, the city of
palm-trees, and its well-watered plain, covered for
miles with a rich variety of fruit and grain, flowing
with milk and honey. Southward he beheld the vale "
of the Dead Sea, even unto Zoar. He looked over
upon the hill where Abraham stood to plead for
Sodom and Gomorrah. He called to remembrance
the covenant with the father of the faithful, and felt
anew the sure mercies of Jehovah.
What the Lord there said to Moses no man can
know. Alone upon the top of Pisgah, when his limbs
grew weary, and his eye grew dim, the God of his
fathers, the God of the covenant, laid him gently to
his rest. Scarce had he filled his soul with the vision
of Canaan, when the veil of sense was taken away,
and he beheld that glory which he had prayed to see
at Sinai, but which no man can see, and live ; and
while his spirit entered the fellowship of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and he joined again with Miriam in
the song of redemption, the Lord cared for the body
of his faithful servant, and laid it kindly by, though
no man knoweth the place of his sepulchre. He
knew then the meaning of his own words : " There is

39 As no explorer has ascended Nebo to identify this view, or to say how
much is actually included in the description given in Deut. xxxiv. 1-4, I have
idealized somewhat views from neighboring heights.

MOSES. 131
none like unto God, who rideth through the heaven to
thy help, and in his majesty through the clouds. The
eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the
everlasting arms."40
Centuries later, upon a mountain in Northern Pales
tine, the veil was parted for a moment, and the glori
fied Moses stood beside the transfigured Christ ; and
to him is given an honor accorded to none other, as
the redeemed stand upon the sea of glass, " having
the harps of God, and sing the song of Moses the ser
vant of God, and the song of the Lamb."
**> Deut. xxxiii. 26.

III.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES; OK, THE HEROIC AGE
OF ISRAEL.
BY REV. W. S. TYLEK, D.D.
THE history of Israel divides itself into four
periods, distinguished from each other not only
chronologically, but in part, also, by geographical
boundaries. They may be called the infancy, the
childhood, the youth, and the manhood of the nation.
The youth only comes directly within the scope of
my theme ; but it is necessary to premise something
of the infancy and childhood. Born in Mesopotamia,
and allied by blood and language to the Semitic fam
ily, Abraham was providentially called away from his
polytheistic and idolatrous countrymen into Canaan,
there to become the father of many nations, and the
father of one nation especially, in whom all the fami
lies of the earth were to be blessed with the knowl
edge of the one living and true God, and the revela
tion of Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son. For three
generations, the Hebrew patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob — sojourned as strangers in the land which
was to be the inheritance of their posterity ; living in
tents, and wandering with their immense flocks and
herds, and no inconsiderable troop of servants and
132

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 133
retainers, — very much as Arab shepherds and herds
men now roam from plain to hillside, and hillside
to mountain-top, in Syria and Mesopotamia, wherever,
according to the changing seasons, they can best find
pasturage and wells, or springs of water. Israel was
then only a great family, or clan, with its patriarchal
head ; subdivided, however, into several households,
and, with their servants and retainers, sufficiently
numerous and powerful to wage war, and recover the
prey from the hands of conquering kings and victori
ous armies. This may be called the infancy of the
Hebrew people. It was passed, as they believed,
and as the Scriptures teach, under the special gui
dance and protection of Heaven ; God himself being
their father and friend, talking with the patriarchs
face to face, and leading the people like a flock:
while they, in turn, wherever they went, set up altars
for his worship ; and these altars which they reared
to the worship of the true God, and the wells which
they dug to water their flocks, and some of which
remain to this day, beautiful symbols of their religious
faith and life, were their only title to the land in
which they sojourned.
Scarcely had the people thus passed their infancy,
when the same wise and kind Providence which had
hitherto guided and protected them, sent them to
school in Egypt, whose priests and sages were then
the teachers of Western Asia, as they afterwards
taught the Greeks and Romans, — the wisest and most
powerful European nations. Here they dwelt on the
eastern frontier, with an outlook, as it were, ever
towards the promised land ; separate, for a time at
least, from the Egyptians, so as not to be involved in
12

134 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
their polytheism and idolatry, yet near enough to be
instructed in all the wisdom of Egypt. Here, like the
Greeks and the Romans, they learned architecture
from the builders ofthe pyramids, temples, and tombs ;
so that, in after-times, the temples at Memphis and
Thebes became the models after which they planned
and built the temple at Jerusalem. Here they learned
more or less of agriculture ; so that, when they re
turned to take possession of the land of promise, they
were not only a pastoral, but also an agricultural peo
ple, and cultivated the vine and the olive, the fig
and the pomegranate, also the onions and cucumbers
of Egypt. Here they were taught the arts of carving,
engraving, embroidery, and all the arts of peace ; so
that, even in the wilderness, they could construct the
tabernacle with its handiwork, and furnish it with its
altars, tables, candlesticks, and other utensils. Here
they learned more of the art of war, of which they
were previously not ignorant, and thus were able to
gain a victory over the Amalekites soon after they
entered upon their journeyings in the desert. Here,
perhaps, they were taught the letters of the alphabet,
which they afterwards enjoyed in common with the
Phoenicians and other Canaanites ; and not only en
joyed, but improved, — making the letters, which
were before partly hieroglyphic, wholly the represen
tatives of sounds, and thus transmitting them to the
Greeks, and through them to the modern European
nations; for that the letters of the Egyptian, the
Greek, the Roman, and the modern European alpha
bets, all had a common origin, is evident from their
names and their early forms. Here they became ac
quainted with the religion of the Egyptians, and

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 135
were more or less influenced by it both in the way
of attraction and repulsion, so as, under divine direc
tion and the legislation of Moses, to appropriate what
ever was true and beautiful and good in their religious
faith and service j while at the same time they were
taught to reject their degrading superstitions, — their
worship of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping
things. The last lesson which they were taught in
Egypt — taught by the providence and word of God,
through the mouth and hand of Moses — was the in
finite superiority, the sole and supreme sovereignty,
of the true _ God, — the God that made the heavens,
— over the Nile, the sacred bull, and all the other
objects of Egyptian idolatry, — a superiority and a
sovereignty demonstrated by the visitation of the ten
plagues on these very objects one after another, and
the bringing-out of the people from this school
(which had now become a house of bondage), by
means so suitable to the country, that the same sort
of visitations constitute the plagues of Egypt to this
day, and so grafted upon the course of nature, that
they are in an important sense natural; yet so ex
traordinary in their power and time, and manner of
occurrence, that they must have been supernatural ;
and so marvellous in their results, reaching down
through the ages, that a miraculous interposition was
not only justified and deserved, but imperatively de
manded. Then the chosen people, now become a nation,
were sent to finish their education by receiving the
law at Mount Sinai, and by their wanderings in the
wilderness. Of the suitableness and impressiveness
of this school, no one can doubt who has once set

136 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
foot in the desert, — the solitude, the silence, undis
turbed by so much as the shaking of a leaf, or the
rustling of an insect's wing ; the utter absence of
life and motion ; not a sight, not a sound, not so much
as a breath of any living, moving, creature ; not a
sign of life, animal or vegetable, within the range of
one's aching, craving senses ; nothing but the breath
ing of one's own lungs and the beating of one's own
heart and pulse, till at length it seems as if these
would be suspended. It is common to find proofs of
the divine being and agency in the various forms of.
animated existence : but if you would feel the exist
ence and presence of God in every fibre of your body,
as well as every faculty of your soul, you must go
out into the solitude and silence of the desert ; it is
an awful void, which can be filled only with God.
After journeying two or three months amid such
impressive solitudes, inhabited only by God, relieved,
however, by occasional fountains and palm-groves and
oases of verdant beauty and richness, which, in con
trast, taught them no less impressively their depend
ence on his love and care, they pitched their camp in
a plain which opens as a broad rent or chasm in the very
midst of the bald, bare, precipitous, lofty, and frown
ing ridges and peaks of the mountains of Sinai, — the
Alps in their sublime and awful grandeur, but stripped
of the pastures and forests that adorn the sides of the
Swiss mountains, and from base to summit one unre
lieved, uninterrupted mass of bare, rugged, scarred
and furrowed, towering and overhanging, rocks. And
there, amid thunderings and lightnings and earth
quakes, or immediately after these had ceased, they
received those ten commandments, which they pre-

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 137
served 'ever after with religious care and reverence,
and which, transmitted by them, have been read in
the churches and taught in the families of every
nation in Christendom as an epitome of the whole
law of God and the whole duty of mankind. It re
quired forty years of special training and severe disci
pline in the wilderness to purge away the errors and
vices which they brought with them out of the
land of Egypt, and which were in part, perhaps, the
fruit of their servile condition there. Indeed, one
whole generation passed away under this discipline ;
so that, with the exception of two individuals (Joshua
and Caleb), none who came out of Egypt entered the
land of Canaan ; and a generation remained who re
tained, of course, the knowledge acquired in Egypt,
but whose characters were formed under this severe
discipline in this special divine school. Thus the
school-days of Israel drew to a close ; and their child
hood ended with their wandering in the great desert
between Egypt and Palestine.
In their youth they entered the land of Canaan,
conquered the nations and tribes whom they found
there, took possession of the greater part of their
country, and established in it their theocratic form of
government, their peculiar civil and religious institu
tions. During all the three periods which we have
called the infancy, the childhood, and the youth of
the nation, the government was a pure theocracy,
without king or president, with no sovereign but
God, and no regularly-constituted rulers or command
ers under him, except those patriarchs, chiefs of
tribes, and heads of families, who were their natural
leaders, and such lawgivers, captains, and judges as
12*

138 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
he raised up from time to time to be the organs of his
will and the instruments of their deliverance.
Under the government of the kings, the nation
passed its manhood ; displaying the fulness and fresh
ness of manly vigor, however, only under the earlier
kings ; declining, and passing into the decay of age,
in their subjection to the Assyrians, Persians, arid
Greeks ; and dying a violent but heroic death in the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.
As written in the Sacred Scriptures, the history of
the infancy is given in the book of Genesis, which
glances also at the genesis of the world and the origin
of other early nations ; the history of the childhood
is given in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy ; that of the youth, in the books
of Joshua and Judges ; and that of the manhood, in
the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles ; illu
minated as with photogenic pictures, drawn by the
light of heaven, in the books of the prophets.
My subject is Joshua and Judges ; or, the heroic
age of Israel. But the youth of a nation, as of an
individual, cannot be understood, cannot be seen in
its true light, without some reference to its childhood
and infancy, and its early training and education:
hence these preliminary remarks. The acorn from
which our oak sprang was manifestly of Semitic ori
gin ; and the tree which we are now to see trans
planted to the land of Canaan bears unequivocal
marks of having been previously rooted and nour
ished in the soil of Egypt, and amid the rocks and
sands of the Sinaitic peninsula. Egypt and Sinai
are the background on which the whole history and
life of the chosen people in the Holy Land are pro-

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 139
jected. We cannot, therefore, be surprised to find
the books of Joshua and Judges in close, vital con
nection with the Pentateuch. Indeed, the same is
more or less true of all the subsequent books of the
Old Testament ; so that there is not less of history
and palpable verity than there is of poetry and
prophecy in the language • of one of the prophets,
" Out of Egypt have I called my Son."
Joshua was born and bred in Egypt, educated and
matured in Sinai and the wilderness, and thus fitted
to conquer so grandly and rule so wisely in Palestine.
The tabernacle which Moses constructed in the wil
derness, and Joshua set up in Shiloh, was a kind of
cross between an Arab tent and an Egyptian temple,
resembling the former in its materials and general
structure, but planned and shaped also much like the
latter, and thus fitted to be the model of the temple
at Jerusalem. The ark of the covenant, which was
enshrined in the tabernacle, and which was the oracle
and guide of the people in taking possession of the
land, may be seen to this day, in its exact form and
size, on the monuments of Egypt ; and was made of
the wood of the acacia, which still grows in the Great
Desert. And so all the instruments and ceremonies of
their worship were appointed indeed of God, but not
chosen or made irrespective of their previous history
and changing circumstances. The modern traveller
who goes from Egypt by Sinai to Palestine, reading
the sacred story as he journeys, feels all the way that
he is treading in the footsteps of the chosen people ;
and as every step of his travels sheds light on the
sacred page, so he finds no guide-book like the Bible
to illustrate and illumine his own journeyings from
day to day.

140 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
So when one comes to the banks of the Jordan
over against Jericho, and swims the rapid stream, as
I myself did, and recrossee it by fording with diffi
culty a little lower down, and stretches out his hand
to save a companion who has lost his foothold and is
just ready to be swept away by the current, he finds
it all just as it is described in the book of Joshua.
Certainly an eye-witness could not describe it better.
Here, on the one hand, projected against the eastern
horizon, smooth, regular, and clean-cut as a well-
trimmed hedge, rise the mountains of Moab, from
which the people emerged, and on one of whose sum
mits their great lawgiver died in full sight of the
Canaan which he was not permitted to enter ; there,
on the other side, westward, are the rugged moun
tains and deep valleys of the goodly land, flowing
with milk and honey, in wliich the patriarchs had
sojourned, and which the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob had promised to give to their posterity in
that very generation. Here is the river, about twenty
yards wide, and now1 not more than three or four
feet deep at the ford, but hidden, for the most part,
beneath steep, overhanging banks, and rushing on
down its rapid descent towards the Dead Sea with a
current far too strong even now to be safely crossed
by a miscellaneous crowd of men, to say nothing
of women and children ; 2 and there are the higher
banks, or terraces, which will be reached by the
swollen stream when Jordan goes over all his banks,
in time of harvest ; and yonder, far away, at the

1 In the month of February, which was the time of my visit to the Jordan.
2 Pilgrims are drowned almost every year as they bathe at this ford of the
Jordan.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 141
very sources of the river, glittering in the sunlight,
towers Mount Hermon, covered with the snows, whose
melting, by the same sun which ripens the harvest in
April and May, will cause the overflow. Surely, if
that multitude of men, women, and children, who
stand waiting on the other side, are to cross the
river, thus swollen to a flood, and overflowing its
banks, in time of harvest, they need a miracle ; and,
if ever a miracle were to be performed, it would be
to let that people pass over who are intrusted with
the knowledge of" the true God and the keeping of
his law, not for themselves only, but for mankind.
The sacred writer says, " And it came to pass, when
the people removed from their tents to pass over
Jordan, and the priests bearing the ark of the cove
nant," — -that is, the tables on which were written the
ten commandments, — "as they that bare the ark were
come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare
the ark were dipped in the brim of the water (for Jor
dan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest),
that the waters which came down from above stood
and rose up upon a heap very far from the city Adam,
that is beside Zaretan ; and those that came down
toward the sea of the plain, even the Salt Sea, failed,
and were cut off : and the people passed over right
against Jericho." Thus reads our history. And I
am prepared to believe it ; for, in the first place, the
fact is well attested and corroborated by monuments.
Twelve stones taken out of the bed of the river, and
set up near its bank, were still standing, when our
history was written, to attest the miracle ; and the
history itself is expressly declared to have been writ
ten, in part at least, while some of the leading actors

142 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
in these scenes were still living.3 In the second
place, the end to be accomplished for the chosen
people and for the human race was sufficiently great
to justify and demand the necessary means; and a
miracle, provided only that it is well attested, and
imperatively demanded by some great moral and
spiritual emergency, is just as credible as any other
event. A miracle, under these conditions, demands
our belief far more than those strange and abnormal
events which are constantly occurring, and which
even the most incredulous readily believe when sup
ported by sufficient evidence, although they may be
utterly unable to comprehend either their physical
or their final causes.
Do you ask how this miracle was wrought ? I do
not know ; for the sacred writer has not told us. It
may have been wholly supernatural ; it may possibly
have been wholly natural ; or it may have been partly
natural, and partly supernatural. The effect could
have been produced by natural causes ; and therefore
is not incredible, even from the standpoint of the
rationalist. I do not believe that it was so produced.
But it could have been. An earthquake could have
produced the effect. Earthquakes have often changed
the course of rivers, and dried up streams at their
sources. An earthquake, suddenly heaving and
swelling the bed of the Jordan over against Jericho,
8 Josh. vi. 25 : " And she [Bahab] dwelleth in Israel unto this day." I have
no space to discuss the question of documents (" Elohistic," " Jehovistic," &c),
of which German rationalists and their followers, with as little taBte and good
sense as modesty and reverence, write as confidently as if they had the manu
scripts in their possession. Like those critics who would annihilate Homer,
they differ so entirely as to the number, character, and age of these documents,
that they neutralize each other. When any two of them agree on these points,
then perhaps they may be quoted as authority.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 143
would have turned back the waters above towards
their source, and sent those below rushing with un
wonted rapidity down to the Dead Sea, leaving the
channel dry. How absurd, then, to say that such an
event is impossible ! It was not impossible at any
time. At that time, and under those circumstances,
with such a people, and such interests for mankind
at stake, it was not improbable. Modest men, or,
which is the same thing, wise men well read in the
annals of history, will be slow to say that any thing
is impossible; and men who are capable of enter
ing into the history and spirit of the Israelites, and
the ends which they were raised up to accomplish
and have accomplished in the world, — and this kind
of sympathy, and capacity of appreciation, is confess
edly the first qualification of an historian and a critic,
— such men will feel in their inmost souls that such a
miracle, under such circumstances, was both possible
and probable, — possible even according to natural
laWs, and probable according to the intuitive laws of
belief and of the human mind.
Do you ask how it happened that the earthquake
(supposing for the moment that an earthquake was
the agency employed) took place just at the time
when the Israelites were waiting to pass over ? How
did it happen that a tempest arose just at the right
time to destroy the Spanish Armada ? How did it
happen that a storm at sea dispersed the powerful
French fleet bound for the capture of Louisburg,
and thus saved America to the English, and their de
scendants the people of these United States ? How
did it happen that the River Strymon, suddenly freez
ing over just as the retreating army of Xerxes reached

144 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
its banks, afforded a safe passage for a few early in
the morning, but, as suddenly thawing and breaking
up the next day, drowned whole ranks and squadrons,
— "man upon man in crowded ruin," as _3_.schylus
says in his " Persai," — and, thus completing the de
struction of the hosts of Xerxes,' saved sacred Greece
forever from the invasions of Asiatic barbarism ? How
has it happened so often in the history of wars and
battles, that the relative position of the sun or the
rising moon, or perchance an eclipse of either of
these heavenly bodies, occurring at the nick of time,
and working on the superstitious feelings of the sol
diers, has turned the scale in some decisive battle
of far-reaching influence? History is full of such
coincidences. Nothing happens in this world. God's
hand is in history. He who disbelieves in providence
— the pantheist, the atheist even — cannot deny a
kind of destiny that is just as remarkable as provi
dence. Even if things do happen, no one can deny
that they happen in marvellous ways, bringing about
what men instinctively call miracles.4
Of course, /do not feel the need of such arguments
and illustrations. I believe in God and providence
* The question now in dispute between Pantheism and Theism is essentially
the same as. that between the development theory and the commonly-received
doctrine. The gist of that question is, whether the world was made (or existed
from eternity) in some gaseous or chaotic state, which contained in itself the
germs of all actual and possible phenomena, so that they develop themselves
spontaneously, without the necessity of any divine interposition; or whether
He who made the world still pervades, directs, and controls it with an omni
present and all-wise agency. I am far from being indifferent to this question.
All my instincts and intuitions, as well as my religious faith, revolt against the
development theory and the Pantheistic theory in all its forms. But this ques
tion does not come within the scope of my subject. The whole design of the
argument in the text is, to show that our history, wonderful as it is, can be true,
according to either theory ; that, according to the lowest doctrine of" divine agency.
the book of Joshua is not an incredible narrative of events that never did hap
pen, aud never could have come to pass.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 145
and a supernatural revelation ; in a God who created
the world, presides over all creatures, and orders all
events ; who has revealed himself to us through Jesus
Christ, his Son ; and will one day, through him, raise
the de*ad, and judge the world. For myself, the argu
ment of Paul is quite sufficient, quite unanswerable :
" Why should it be thought a thing incredible with
you that God should raise the dead ? " I believe, as
we are taught by the great Teacher, that, with God,
all things are possible. He that made the world can
and will govern it. He that made the river can divide
it for his people to pass over dryshod. For the be
liever, these arguments and illustrations are quite
unnecessary. At the same time, they may possibly
help those who have not this faith. They are certain
ly sufficient to show, that to deny the possibility of
miracles is as unhistorical, uncritical, and unphilosoph-
ical as it is unbelieving and unchristian, not to say
atheistical and profane. Theologians are sometimes
sufficiently assuming : but these sciolists, who deny
the possibility of miracles, far exceed them in arro
gance ; they arrogate to themselves the knowledge
and power of which they rob the Almighty.
Thus introduced into the promised land, animated
by the voice of God, guided and strengthened by his
hand, and led on by a mysterious and usually invisi
ble personage who declares himself to be the captain
of the Lord's host, Joshua and his people now advance
by a series of rapid marches and victories to the con
quest of the country. Jericho, the city of palm-trees,
a wealthy capital and stronghold, with walls " high
and fenced up to heaven," amid magnificent palm-
groves, watered by inexhaustible fountains, the mis-
13

146 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
tress of the valley by its power, and by its situation,
" at the entrance of the two main passes into the cen
tral mountains," " the key of Western Palestine," 5 —
Jericho was necessarily the first object of their attack.
Compassed about by the priests bearing the ark of
God, and the people blowing trumpets and horns for
seven days in succession, and seven times on the
seventh' day, the walls of the city fell down flat before
their faces ; and, entering without resistance, they
took possession of the terror-stricken city : a story
which we are apt to think sufficiently marvellous, pos
sibly in its rams'-horns ; a little ludicrous, also, in our
accidental early associations. Doubtless it is ranked
by sceptics among the most incredible of the Bible
miracles. And yet it could have been the effect of
natural causes. An earthquake has often produced
similar and even greater effects. It is, therefore, not
incredible on purely naturalistic grounds ; and if we
accept in its lowest form the idea of a divine plan in
history, and a Divine Providence presiding over the
destinies of nations, what more probable than that so
peculiar a people, manifestly called to know the one
living God, and make him known among the nations,
should have been taught in this unique and striking
way, at the very beginning of their career of conquest,
the great lesson, that it was not by their own wisdom
or might, but by the power and blessing of God, that
they were to accomplish so magnificent, so truly di
vine, a mission ?
At Ai, a small town about ten miles from Jericho,
" at the head of the ravines running up from the Val
ley of the Jordan," which they expected to find an
• Stanley, Hist, of the Jewish Church.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 147
easy prey, they met with a temporary repulse, till
they were taught the great lesson of honesty towards
each other, and fidelity to God, in the use of
their spoils. Then Ai and Bethel fell into then-
hands. The battle of Beth-horon, or Gibeon, soon followed,
— a battle which Dean Stanley justly compares with
those of Marathon and Cannse, where Greek culture
and Roman civilization hung on the issue ; and those
great battles in later times, — " that of the Milvian
Bridge, which involved the fall of Paganism ; that
of Poitiers, which sealed the fall of Arianism ; that of
Tours, which checked the spread of Mahometanism
in Western Europe ; that of Lepanto, which cheeked
it in Eastern Europe ; that of Lutzen, which deter
mined the balance of power between Roman Catholi
cism and Protestantism in Germany." Nay, it might
justly be exalted above all these in the importance
of its issue ; for on it was suspended that religion of
the Bible which is now the religion of the civilized
world. Five confederate kings, or chiefs, with the
king of Jebus, or Jerusalem, at their head, combined
their forces against Joshua ; but, marching all night,
he fell suddenly upon them, put them instantly to
flight, and pursued them with great slaughter. A
storm of hail, with great hailstones, suddenly arising,
completed their discomfiture, and proved more fatal
to them than the spears and swords of the Israelites.
All day long continued the hurried flight, the hot pur
suit, and the dreadful slaughter ; and, lest the day
should not be sufficiently long for the complete de
struction of the confederate hosts, —

148 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
" Then spake Joshua to the Lord,
In the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites
Before the children of Israel ;
Then he said, in the sight of Israel,
Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon ;
And thou, Moon, in the Valley Ajalon.
And the sun stood still,
And the moon staid,
Until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies."
" Is not this written in the book of Jasher ? "
" So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven,
And hasted not to go down about a whole day.6
And there was no day like that, before or after it,
That the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man ;
For the Lord fought for Israel.
And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him,
Unto the camp, to Gilgal."
For myself, I have no intrinsic difficulty in accept
ing this as simple matter of fact, true in the fullest
and most literal sense when interpreted according to
the common laws of language. There is more than
one way in which He who made the heavens could
make the sun and moon appear to stand still without
any apparent violation of natural laws.7
o Or " after the day was finished." — Mil-man's Hist, ofthe Jems, vol. i. p. 268.
' Bishop Colenso's note on this subject (the Pentateuch, and book of Joshua,
p. 9, New- York edition) is a moBt extraordinary specimen of " the minute phi
losopher : " "If the earth's motion were suddenly stopped," he says, " a man's
feet would be arrested while his body was moving at the rate (on the equator)
of a thousand miles an hour I " As if He who had stopped the earth's motion,
and arrested his feet (for that is the supposition), could not and would not, of
course, arrest his body also I Again he says, " The arresting of the earth's mo
tion, while it might cause tbe appearance of the sun ' standing still,' would not
account for the moon ' staying.' " Why not ? Surely these must be what Paul
meant when he exhorted Timothy to avoid " oppositions of science falsely so
called."

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 149
And the Bible always describes natural phenomena
as they appear, and in the language of the people,
not according to the doctrine or the language of physi
cal science. But this passage is expressly cited from
a book of poems, the book of Jasher. The language
also is metrical, and admits of being arranged in the
form of verses. It has the parallelism and the other
characteristic marks of Hebrew poetry; and, irre
spective of their theological opinions, critics now gen
erally agree to read it as a poetical quotation. It
must therefore be interpreted, not as prose, but as
poetry ; not as a part of the narrative by the sacred
historian, but as a fragment from some Hebrew bard,
cited by way of embellishment. And, so interpreted,
it means, perhaps, no more than this : So long did the
day seem to those who were engaged in the conflict,
and so complete was the destruction of the enemies
of Israel, that, in the strong and bold language of a
contemporary poet, it might be said the sun and moon
stood still in the heavens, and the day was prolonged
far beyond its usual duration, till the confederate host
was utterly extinguished. So, in the song of Deborah,
it is said that "the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera ; " upon which no one would think of
putting any other than a poetical interpretation. And
" when Isaiah prayed to the Lord in the name of his
people, ' Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens and
come down, that the mountains might flow down at
thy presence ! ' or when David sings, ' In my distress
I called upon the Lord ; ... he heard my voice out
of his temple; ... he bowed the heavens also, and
came down ; ... he sent from above, and took me ;
he drew me out of many waters,' — who is there who
13«

150 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ever thinks of understanding their words literally, as
denoting an actual rending the heavens, or a desire
that God would actually descend from heaven, and
stretch out his hand to draw David out of the
water?"8 If any of my hearers doubt the possibility of a hail
storm producing such effects as are ascribed to that
which helped to consummate the victory at Beth-horon,
let them read Commodore Porter's account of the hail
storm which fell upon him when navigating the Bos
phorus in a caique in 1831. They raised their um
brellas for their protection, and the hailstones stripped
them to ribbons. They crawled under a bullock's
hide for shelter : still his right hand was disabled ; his
companion received a blow in the leg ; one of the oars
men had his hand literally smashed ; another was
wounded in the shoulder ; his servants were both dis
abled, and afterwards laid up with their wounds ; and
every person on board was more or less injured. A
ball of ice as large as two fists struck an oar and
split it, and the boat was terribly bruised. Reaching
home, he found that his porter, who had ventured an
instant out of doors, had been knocked down by a
hailstone ; and, had they not dragged him in by the
heels, would have been battered to death. Two boat
men were killed in the upper part of the village ; and
he heard of broken bones in abundance. "I have
been in action," says the commodore, " and seen death
and destruction around me in every shape of horror ;
8 Keil, Comm. on Joshua, p. 266, Clark's edition. Keil, Davidson Dean
Stanley, Dean Milman, and the modern critics generally, justly remark, that we
do not meet with a single reference to these verses of the book of Joshua in any
part of the Old or New Testament, — a silence quite inexplicable, if they really
relate the occurrence of a miracle the most extraordinary in the whole Bible.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 151
but I never before had the feeling of awe which seized
upon me on this occasion. . . . Imagine the heavens
suddenly frozen over, and as suddenly broken to
pieces, in irregular masses of from half a pound to a
pound weight, and precipitated to the earth! My
own servants weighed several pieces of three-quarters
of a pound, and many were found by others of up
wards of a pound." The ground was covered with
such masses of ice ; the trees were stripped of their
leaves and limbs ; windows were shattered, and roof-
tiles smashed to atoms. It is not difficult to conceive
the effect, physical and mental, of such a hailstorm as
this on an army already routed, and fleeing for their
lives. After so signal a victory, nothing could stand be
fore Joshua and the armies of Israel. The cities of
the south country now fell into his hands in rapid
succession, as fast as he could present himself before
them. Numerous kings and nations in Northern Pal
estine united their forces against him ; but Joshua and
his people of war fell upon them suddenly near the
sources of the Jordan : " And the Lord delivered them
into the hand of Israel, who smote them, and chased
them unto great Zidon, and unto Misrephoth-maim,
and unto the Valley of Mizpeh eastward ; and they
smote them till they left none remaining.""
Thirty-one kings did Joshua thus overthrow on the
west side of Jordan, besides those which had been
previously conquered on the east side ; for in Canaan
then, as later in Greece and Italy, every city was an
independent state, each petty ruler a king, — or sheik,
as he would now be called in the East, — and almost
every mountain or valley a kingdom.

152 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
After the conquest of the country, the next thing
was the distribution of it among the tribes according
to the number of their families, so that each family
might have its proper and inalienable share in the
land which the Lord their God had given them. The
whole territory was not larger than the State of Mas
sachusetts ; . and the share of each tribe scarcely so
large, upon an average, as a single county in the Old
Bay State. Voltaire, and others like him, have made
the smallness of their territory a ground of objection,
of ridicule and contempt. But like Phoenicia, Athens,
and ancient Rome, like England and Massachusetts
herself in modern history, the influence of Israel did
not depend upon its territory or its population. Small
states, and those not planted on the richest soil, have
always exerted the most potent influence on the
destinies of mankind. The conquest of England by
the Saxons, and then again by the Normans, abounds
in illustrations of the conquest and partition of Pales
tine by the Israelites ; and the latter part of the book
of Joshua has been called often the Doomsday Book
of the Land of Canaan.
The cruelty of the Israelites in the treatment of the
conquered kings, and their persistent efforts in accord
ance with the divine command to extirpate the native
inhabitants;, have, with better reason, been made a
ground of reproach. Such modes of warfare certainly
could not be justified in our day. They do not ac
cord with our standard of humanity and religion.
But the traveller who has seen the heaps of mutilated
hands and feet and ears, and the other monstrous and
gigantic barbarities, which form so conspicuous a fea
ture on the monuments of Egypt, will see that such

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 153
were the lessons which the Israelites were taught in
the school of their childhood : such everywhere were
the manners and customs of the age. In fact, so far
from going beyond, the Israelites fell short of the cruel
ties which were then commonly practised by the Egyp
tians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, and all the most
civilized nations of antiquity. In the second place,
the severities practised upon these kings were in many
cases expressly a judicial infliction ; a just retribution
on the principle common to all ancient law, of an eye
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth ; a just retribution
for the greater cruelties which they boasted that they
had themselves inflicted on others. In the third place,
the natives whom they were commanded to extirpate
offered human sacrifices, cast their children into the
fire, were false to their plighted word (like the Car
thaginians, who were of Canaanitish origin, and whose
Punic faith was a by- word), were worshippers of
Moloch, Baal, and Astarte (the Oriental Venus), and
mingled cruelty and licentiousness with their horrid
forms of idolatry. At the time of Joshua, they had
carried these crimes against human nature to such
a pitch, that, in the language of the Bible, " the
iniquity of the Canaanites was now full." Indeed,
Sodom and Gomorrah, as they were when they were
destroyed, were no exaggerated specimen of what the
whole population of the country had now become.
And after enumerating incest; sodomy, bestiality,
licentiousness in all its most unnatural forms, God by
the mouth of Moses says unto Israel, " Defile not ye
yourselves in any of these things ; for in all these the
nations are defiled which I cast out before you. And
the land is defiled : therefore I do visit the iniquity

154 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out its
inhabitants." In short, the people were not only ripe
for destruction : they were rotten to the core. Moral
ly speaking, they could not be converted. They were
past reformation. Extermination was the only alter
native. For to let them remain, was inevitably, as
human nature is, to infect the Israelites with their
idolatry and corruption, and thus to defeat the very
end which had been sought for centuries in all the
previous history of God's peculiar people. If you
ask for proof of this, you can see a demonstration of
it in the fact, that, after all their efforts to drive out
and root out the inhabitants, the portion that remained
were constantly enticing them into idolatry. And in
the language of Dr. Arnold, who was no fanatic, " It
is better that the wicked should be destroyed a hun
dred times over than that they should tempt those who
are as yet innocent to join their company. Let us
but think what might have been our fate and the fate
of every other nation under heaven, at this hour, had
the sword of the Israelites done its work more spar
ingly. . . . The Israelites' sword did a work of mercy
for all the countries of the earth to the very end of
the world. ... In these contests, on the fate of these
nations of Palestine, the happiness of the human race
depended." The religion of the Old Testament, and the same
is equally true of the religion of the New Testament,
has no fellowship with the sickly, sentimental school
of philanthropists, whose sympathies are all expended
on the wolves, or at best on the goats, let what will
become of the sheep and lambs. At the same time,
it is equally remote from that " inhumanitjr to man "

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 155
with which it has sometimes been charged by reason
of its severe, uncompromising, and exclusive spirit.
It is severe : so are truth and righteousness severe.
It is uncompromising : so is every thing that is holy,
just, and good. It is exclusive ; but it excludes noth
ing but error, falsehood, and sin. It cuts off and casts
out whoremongers, adulterers, idolaters, and all liars ;
but it never cuts off nor casts out foreigners as such,
irrespective of their character and religion. On the
contrary, in the very spirit of the golden rule,
and with a humanity as remarkable as its piety,
the law of Israel says, over and over again, " The
stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as
one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thy
self; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt : I am
the Lord your God." Beautiful logic ! well worthy
to be repeated ; for it is the very logic and ethics of
the gospel ; and it is enforced by all the authority of
Jehovah, -the God of Israel. "Thou shalt love him as
thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt :
I am the Lord your God." And the history of
Israel, so far from renouncing strangers as such, pro
nounces Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, " blessed
above women," — thus anticipating the blessedness
announced by the angel to the Virgin Mary ; and it
reckons Rahab the Canaanitish woman, and Ruth the
Moabitess, among the ancestry of David, and of the
Messiah himself.
Two scenes in the civil and religious history of
Joshua invest him with a moral grandeur transcend
ing that of his military achievements. The first was
the solemn recognition of the divine law, according
to the command of Moses, on Mounts Ebal and Geri-

156 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
zim. As soon as the way was opened by some of
his earlier conquests, Joshua led the people to that
narrow but rich and beautiful valley, perhaps the most
beautiful in all Palestine, the Valley of Shechem, en
closed on either side by lofty mountains, and replen
ished with perpetual verdure by numerous springs
of unfailing water ; and there, on the lower slopes of
Ebal and Gerizim, where the mountains approach near
est each other, with six tribes standing on Mount Ebal
to pronounce the curses, and six on Mount Gerizim to
repeat the blessings, — there Joshua read all the words
of the law, the blessings and the cursings, according to
all that is written in the book of the law of Moses ;
and all the people, with loud voices sounding across
the valley, and echoing from cliff to cliff, shouted
"Amen ! " " There was not a word of all that Moses
commanded which Joshua read not before all the
congregation of Israel, with the women and the little
ones, and the strangers that were conversant with
them." So says the sacred historian, with a simplicity
and a boldness which neither fears nor suspects criti
cism ; and I envy not the minute critics, who, like
Bishop Colenso, can stand up and deny the possibili
ty of such a transaction,vor even coolly criticise so
sacred and sublime a spectacle. By reverting to the
book of Deuteronomy, it will be seen that it is only
twelve verses of curses, and then a single chapter of
blessings and curses, which Moses commanded to be
rehearsed from these mountains in the hearing of all
the people ; not as the bishop and the like of him
would have us understand the whole Pentateuch.
This was a task which a single day would amply suf
fice to accomplish. And when the historian says,

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 157
" There was not a word of all that Moses commanded
which Joshua read not before all the congregation of
Israel, with ihe women and the little ones" common
candor and common sense dictate how the words are
to be understood ; viz., that the whole nation (men,
women, and children) were there to take part, directly
or indirectly, in person or by their representatives,
in the solemn transaction. As to the bishop's arith
metical computation how many acres and square miles
such a congregation would require to stand on, and
his inference that it was impossible for them ever to
be gathered before the tabernacle of the congrega
tion, and there instructed out of the law, — I have not
the patience to dwell on such petty and petulant cal
culations. Pray, how did the Roman commanders
ever address their vast armies, or the Athenian orators
speak to the people of Athens ? Why not demon
strate the impossibility of Daniel Webster's ever hav
ing addressed the people of Boston in Faneuil Hall,
because, forsooth, that hall is not big enough to hold
them ? Why has no one ever shown up the absurdity
of Pres. Lincoln's ever having addressed the people
of the United States in his inaugural, because they
could not find room to stand on in the whole city of
Washington ? 9 Do such critics most resemble moles
blindly burrowing in the earth, or owls that see noth
ing in the light of day, but prowl about for their prey

9 When the whole congregation is represented as appearing before the Lord
at the door of the tabernacle, it is often by their representatives, the elders ; and,
in the original Hebrew, the very word which in these passages is rendered con
gregation in the English version, properly denotes that representative body. —
See Dr. Benisch's Critical Examination of Bishop Colenso's Objections, &c.
This learned and candid Jewish rabbi shows that a large part of the bishop's
objections proceed from misapprehension and ignorance of the Hebrew Scrip
tures. •
14

158 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
in the night ? or are they most like vultures, whose
delight is to feed on dead carcasses, but they care not
if they tear the living flesh in their search for carrion ?
At length, Joshua drew near to the end of his long
and noble life. Like Washington and Wellington,
with both of whom he has been compared, the veteran
soldier had already, for several years, withdrawn from
active service to his Mount Vernon (viz., Timnath-
serah in Mount Ephraim), which a grateful people had
given him for his inheritance, after he had conquered
and divided among them their several possessions, and
where, in his retirement, they still looked up to him
as their counsellor and protector, their oracle and
guide. And now the hour of his departure was at
hand ; but he could not die without addressing some
farewell counsels and warnings to the people whom
he had so long borne, as it were, in his hand and on
his heart, and, in the spirit at once of a father, a seer,
and a sage, bringing them to renew their solemn
covenant with God.
Assembling the whole people again at Shechem, in
that same " central valley of the hills of Ephraim
which commands the view of the Jordan Valley on
the east, and the sea on the west," where, between
Ebal and Gerizim, they had some years previous re
sponded their loud amen to the blessings and curses
of the law, he gives them his farewell address. He
reviews their whole history, in which he had acted so
prominent a part. But he takes no credit to himself.
Losing sight of himself, as every truly great and good
man does, he speaks to them only in the name of the
Lord their God. He addresses no flattering words,
no idle compliments, to the people. He points out to

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 159
them faithfully all their weaknesses, their difficulties,
and their dangers. He enumerates to them the vic
tories which God had given them, — " not with thy
sword and thy bow," — and describes the goodly land
into which he had brought them, — "a land for
which ye did not labor, and cities which ye built not,
and vine-yards and olive-yards which ye did not plant.
Now, therefore," such is his legitimate and wise con
clusion, — " now, therefore, fear the Lord, and serve
him in sincerity and in truth ; and put away the gods
which your fathers served on the other side of the
flood and in Egypt, and serve ye the Lord. And if
it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord," he says, —
stating a supposition, and giving them an alternative,
which, under the circumstances, could hardly seem oth
erwise than monstrous and preposterous, — " choose
you this day whom ye will serve, whether the gods
which your fathers served that were on the other side
of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites in whose
lands ye dwell ; but as for me and my house, we will
serve the Lord. And the people answered and said,
God forbid that we should forsake the Lord to serve
other gods ! We also will serve the Lord ; for he is
our God. ... So Joshua made a covenant with the
people that day in Shechem. And Joshua wrote
these words in the book of the law of God, and took
a great stone, and set it up there under an oak that
was by the sanctuary of the Lord," — the oldest
sanctuary of the patriarchs, reaching back even to the
days of Abraham and Melchisedec.10 " And Joshua
said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a
"» Not the tabernacle ; for that was in Shiloh, while this was in Shechem. —
See Stanley 's History ofthe Jewish Church, p. 310.

160 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
witness unto us ; for it hath heard all the words of
the Lord which he spake unto us : it shall be there
fore a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God. And
it came to pass after these things, that Joshua, the
son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died, being a
hundred and ten years old. . . . And Israel served the
Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the
elders that overlived Joshua, and which had known
all the works of the Lord that he had done for Israel."
No ordinary history this, of .no ordinary people ;
and how fitly and simply it concludes with this ex
traordinary obituary of this extraordinary man !
" The servant of the Lord " ! Such was his epitaph.
Such was his true character. It was a maxim of one
of the seven wise men of Greece, " Whatever good
thing you do, ascribe it to the gods." With all his
wisdom and skill, with all his courage and strength,
Joshua was a simple, unquestioning, unhesitating
soldier and servant of the only living and true God.
From him he received all his orders ; to him he as
cribed all his achievements. The highest leaders and
benefactors of mankind have always felt that they
were but the instruments of a higher power. Great
men, like Napoleon, may have called it destiny ; but
wise and good men like Socrates, even among the
heathen, have chosen to call it Providence and God.
In driving the Canaanites before him like a tempest,
in sweeping them off the earth like the plague, Josh
ua felt himself to be only an instrument of Divine
Providence, only an executioner of the Divine Will.
" He moved amidst these scenes of blood as an
avenging angel might hover over them, — a doer of
the will of the Holy One, untainted by human pas-

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 161
sion, and full, even in his most unswerving zeal for
God, of a terrible gentleness. We read this character
in his fatherly sympathy with the offending Achan,
even whilst he condemned to be burnt with fire the
great transgressor who had brought himself and his
under the ban of his God." u Stern as a judge, and
yet loving as a mother, he pronounces sentence on
the offender like the Roman Brutus, and yet pities
him as David does his erring " son." Even so the
God of Israel cries, " How can I give thee up,
Ephraim ? " at the same time that he does give up
his apostate and rebellious people to captivity, and
their land to desolation. Gentle as a lamb, but
courageous as a lion, he resembles in character Him
who was at once " the Lamb of God " and " the Lion
of the tribe of Judah : " and as Joshua in Hebrew
is the same name with Jesus in Greek, signifying " Je
hovah's salvation ; " so this elect leader of God's chosen
people is a remarkable type — perhaps the most re
markable of all the Old-Testament types — of the
Captain of our salvation, who, victorious over all
enemies, leads his believing people over the Jordan
of death, and puts them in possession of the heavenly
Canaan. An age or reign of brilliant and heroic action is
usually, and, as human nature is, naturally and almost
necessarily, followed by a period of rest, repose, re
action, perchance relapse and apostasy, very likely
of temporary defeat and adversity. The history of
conquests, of revolutions, of wars, even holy wars, in
the cause of liberty and humanity, nay, the history
of reformations and revivals of religion, all history
11 Heroes of Hebrew History, by Samuel Wilberforce, D.D.
14*

162 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
confirms and establishes as a matter of fact, what we
might have presumed and almost assumed as an axiom
in the philosophy of history. Thus it is that the age
of Joshua is succeeded by the period of the Judges in
the history of Israel.
Compared with the age wliich preceded and in
troduced it, the period of the Judges is an age of
re-action, of relapse, of apostasy, and adversity; or
rather it is a series of actions and re-actions, of
relapses and recoveries, of apostasy punished by
adversity, and reformation rewarded by prosperity,
beginning soon after the death of Joshua, and stretch
ing on through two or three centuries. It is often
spoken of as if it were, in the main, a period of adver
sity ; and yet, on the whole, the years of prosperity
outnumber the years of adversity in the ratio of three
or four to one. One of the ablest and most popular
of our New-England preachers characterizes it as the
age of barbarism, and makes it the text of his
brilliant home-missionary sermon, entitled " Barba
rism the First Danger ; " and there are in it many
dark scenes of barbaric disorder, of a most savage
cruelty and revenge. Yet, on the other hand, read
what Ewald — no partial critic — says of poetry,
history, literature, and the arts, in this age. Look at
the Washington-like modesty, self-control, and mag
nanimity of Gideon ; and the Christ-like beauty of
character of the young Samuel, favorite subject for
the poet and the painter now ; and read the song of
Deborah, the apologue or fable of Jotham, and that
most charming of all pastorals, the book of Ruth,
which belongs to the age of the judges, and which
were alone enough to redeem it.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 163
I have called this period the youth of Israel ; and
many are the irregularities, many the follies and
vices, of the young man, and many the chastisements
which he receives at the hand of his heavenly
Father. Many a sack of wild oats does he sow,
and many a harvest does he reap of just what he
sows, during those long years in which there was no
king in Israel, and every man did what was right in
his own eyes. But, on the other hand, what heroic
deeds, what manly courage, what womanly devotion
and self-sacrifice, what knightly courtesy and generos
ity, what almost superhuman strength and prowess,
were born of this freedom, and of that faith in God,
in which the Epistle to the Hebrews so justly finds
the inspiration of these ancient worthies, and the one
secret of their strength! The age of the Judges
was what we have styled it, — the heroic age in Israel,
— just because, and just so far as, it was the age of
FAITH. The judges were not judges in the ordinary sense
of the word. The administration of justice was only
a casual and incidental function. The essential
characteristic of the office was, that they were the
reformers, the deliverers, the vindicators, in the
Greek sense the heroes, in the Roman sense the dic
tators, in the mediaeval sense the champions, perhaps
we might add in the English and American sense
the frontier and border-war leaders, of the people;
and they have the virtues and the vices which have
characterized these classes of men in every subse
quent age. But whatever may have been their
other excellences, and however great their imper
fections may have been, they all had the virtue of

164 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
faith. They were all strong in the persuasion that
they were raised up by God to vindicate his truth, to
avenge his cause, to deliver his people : and how
ever much we may shudder at Jephthah's vow, or be
shocked at Jael's killing of Sisera; however much
we may be disgusted by Samson's weaknesses, and
amused by the gigantic drolleries that run through
his prodigious achievements, — in the first place, we
should remember that just such weaknesses are found
in the heroes and demigods of ancient Greece, in the
knights and reformers of modern Europe, in the
chieftains and pioneers of early English and Ameri
can history. Hercules had all the weaknesses of
Samson, without half his wit. Hercules was a
glutton, a wine-bibber, and an adulterer: Samson
was free from all these vices. And yet Hercules,
forsooth, was a god ; while Samson was only a
man, and a poor specimen at that. This shows
how much higher the Hebrew standard is than the
Greek. In the second place, such passages in
sacred history should teach us a lesson of charity
in our judgments, and reasonableness in our ex
pectations. We should not expect perfection, even
in our leaders of revolution and reform, when God
uses such imperfect instruments to accomplish the
grandest results. In the third place, the chief lesson
which we learn from the history of the judges as
individuals is, that faith, — in other words, loyalty to
truth, duty, and God, — even though imperfectly
understood, is the beginning of wisdom, is the
essence of virtue, is the inspiration of heroism, is
the secret of courage and strength ; and the great
lesson which we learn from the history of the chosen

JOSHUA AND JUDGES.- 165
people in the book of Judges, as indeed from all the
history of the Old Testament, is, that disobedience
to the divine commands is the one cause of individ
ual suffering and national calamity, while obedience
to the law of God is the one condition of prosperity
and happiness. The key to the whole history is
found in a few verses at the opening of the book :
" The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua,
and all the days of the elders that outlived Joshua,
who had seen all the great works of the Lord that he
did for Israel. . . . But there arose another gen
eration after them which knew not the Lord, nor
yet the works which he had done for Israel. And
the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the
Lord, and served Baalim. . . . They forsook the
Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth. And the
anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he
delivered them into the hands of spoilers that
spoiled them ; . . . and they were greatly distressed.
And, when they cried unto the Lord, the Lord
raised up judges, which delivered them out of the
hand of those that spoiled them." A very peculiar
history we are apt to think it. And so it is, in
form and manner ; but, in substance and spirit, it
has been the history of all nations in all ages. The
history of Israel is a type of the history of the
Church, even unto the end of the world ; and of every
believing soul, from his new birth till he enters the
heavenly Canaan. This is a fact with which Bun-
yan's " Pilgrim's Progress " and a thousand other alle
gories, and the songs of the Christian Church, have
made us perfectly familiar. But more than this is
true. The history of Israel is substantially the his-

166 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
tory, in miniature, of every nation and of every human
being. The great lesson of that history is, " Know the
true God ; worship him in spirit and in truth ; fear him,
and keep his commandments : in short, believe and
obey, and you shall live ; disbelieve and disobey, and
you shall die." And this, I repeat, is substantially the
lesson of all history. We read the same lesson to
day, very different, indeed, in form and manner, but
just the same lesson in principle and spirit, in the lost
battles, the distracted counsels, and the beleaguered
capital, in the agony and tears and blood, of disbe
lieving, misbelieving, and ungodly France.
The history of Israel, both as it was lived' and as
it was written, was, indeed, a peculiar history. They
were a very peculiar people. They are peculiar now.
That is a plain matter of fact which no one can de
ny ; for we see it with our own eyes. And they must
always have been peculiar. There is no other phi
losophy of their history. Such a singular consequent
as we see in the Jews of our own day must have
had singular antecedents from the earliest times.
Before they entered the promised land, Balaam, the
son of Beor, prophesied of them, "Lo, the people
shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among
the nations ; " and this prophecy has been fulfilled in
all their subsequent history. This peculiar people
had a special mission. They were raised up to teach
Monotheism, — the knowledge, worship, love, and
obedience of the only living and true God, — not to
philosophers (for there have been philosophers in all
ages who have discovered that " the God of Nature
is one, while the. gods of the people are many "), but
to teach this doctrine, which philosophers have neither

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 167
propagated nor practised, as a practical thing to those
very despised and neglected people in all ages, to the
masses throughout Christendom in this our nine
teenth century. I say, they were raised up for this
purpose ; for they have accomplished it : and, when a
nation accomplishes a great work, I take it for granted
that they were raised up for this purpose, and this
was their mission. If it was the mission of Greece
to teach the world art, and of Rome to teach law, a
fortiori it was the mission of Israel to teach mankind
religion. Remember, it was a Jew — the son, as was
supposed, of a Jewish carpenter in Nazareth — who
uttered those words which have no parallel in all the
teachings of philosophers in their sublime and truth
ful significance : " God is a Spirit, and they that wor
ship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."
And he spoke those words to a woman, a woman
of the common people, a woman of Samaria, as he
sat weary on Jacob's well.12 That is a perfect image
of Christianity. That is Christianity living in the
person of its Founder. And Christianity is from
Judaea ; " salvation is of the Jews."
Now, so peculiar a people, raised up for so peculiar
a purpose, must have had a peculiar training. A
special education was indispensable for those whose
special mission it was to teach the world these sub
lime truths. And they manifestly did have special
training. They were taught to see God, the one
living and true God who made -the heavens and the
earth, everywhere, — in nature, in man, in history, in

12 And, in relation to our general subject, it is worthy of notice that this
took place in the same Valley of Shechem which was the scene of Israel's recog
nition of the law, and renewal of covenant, at the command of Joshua.

168 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
government, and in religion. The hand of God was
in all these ; and they were all sacred, all divine.
Genius was his gift. Talents were distributed by
him. Poetry was his inspiration, art his wisdom,
handicraft his skill. Heroism, personal prowess,
power to command, were all conferred by him. He
taught men's hands to war, and their fingers to fight.
Under his teaching, as well as by his appointment,
kings reigned, and princes administered justice.
There was not such a chasm between the natural and
the supernatural, in their view, as there is in ours.
The supernatural was more wonderful than the natu
ral, but not a whit more divine. Miracles were only
"signs and wonders." They never seem to have
thought of any suspension of or interference with
the laws of Nature. And in the miracles recorded
in our history, as we have seen, it is hard to tell
where the natural ends, and the supernatural begins.
The moment we come into sympathy with such a
people, standing in such relations to God and man
kind, in training for such a mission, we cannot help
feeling, that to them, in their circumstances, the su
pernatural becomes natural : it is just what they ex
pected ; and not only they, but we come to look upon
it, under the circumstances, as a matter of course.
And the natural, in turn, becomes supernatural : it is
lifted above Nature, and appears as a part of God's
moral plan, and a form of his agency.
And, after all, is not this the true view of Nature
and the supernatural ? It is the Homeric view ; it is
the Socratic doctrine ; it is the doctrine of Plutarch
and Newton. Newton declared that the laws of Na
ture are only the established ways of God's working.

JOSHUA AND JUDGES. 169
Plutarch explained omens, lots, and prodigies on the
ground of a mysterious sympathy between Nature and
man, of which God was the author. God is in Nature ;
God is also in history. Why, then, should there not
be a divine sympathy and harmony between them ?
God in every thing, according to its nature and object,
giving every thing its nature, and making every thing
accomplish its end, — this is the element of truth,
mixed up with so much error, both in Polytheism
and in Pantheism. This is not only the Christian's
creed : it is the child's instinct and woman's intuition.
It is the poet's vision and the insight of creative
genius. It is the teaching not only of inspired
prophets, but of those natural seers who seem to have
been born to see things as they are, and of whom a
writer in " The Dial " said many years ago, " These men
never mistake : you might as well say there was un
truth in the song of the wind or the light of the
sun." The earliest nations, and the earliest ages of all
nations, have always believed in miracles. It seems
like an instinct, not to say an intuition. Now, must
there not be something, sometime and somewhere, to
meet this instinctive want of mankind ? Has He who
meets every instinct of the lower animals provided
nothing to answer this demand of the human soul ?
and, if it is met anywhere, would it not be likely to
be met where it existed in its purest and strongest
form? — among that chosen people who were raised up
for the special purpose of communicating the knowl
edge and obedience of the one true God to the nations
of the earth. No wise father would train a son for
the Church as he would for farming or merchandise.

170 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
I take for granted that the nations have a wise heaven
ly Father ; and if he has selected one of these to be
" a nation of priests," and to communicate the knowl
edge of himself to the others (as unquestionable facts
prove that he has), is it unreasonable to believe that he
would give them a special education, and that by
miracles and special revelations ? No wise father will
treat a son in manhood just as he did in childhood or
infancy. Is it, then, unreasonable to believe that the
heavenly Father may have taught the Israelites in
their childhood, and through them the world in its in
fancy, by means of miracles and special revelations
which need not be repeated in these latter days ?
Perhaps, however, what we most need in these days
is to be converted, and enter into the kingdom of
heaven again in the same spirit in which Lord Bacon
says we must enter both that kingdom and " the king
dom of men founded in science," " as little children."
Certainly it would not harm any of us to carry a young
heart in vital union with an old head ; to unite the
humility and docility of childhood with the wisdom
of age ; in other words, to mix a little more faith with
our science and philosophy.

IV.
THE HEBREW THEOCRACY.
BY REV. LEONARD BACON, D.D.
MORE than three thousand years ago, the He
brew tribes went forth from Egypt to re
possess the territory which their ancestors had occu
pied in what is now called Palestine. Though they
had dwelt on the banks of the Nile through we
know not how many generations, they had not lost
their patriarchal organization by tribes and clans ;
and they still retained much of their ancient charac
ter and habits as a pastoral people. They had lived
in close contact with the Egyptians, and had been, to
some extent, interfused among them ; but they were
not of them, and had been kept distinct by a mutual
antipathy between the- races. Inhabiting chiefly a
fertile district of that fertile country, and favored,
for a while, by the government, they had become nu
merous enough and powerful enough to be regarded
with political jealousy ; and, in the later years of
their residence there, they had been treated as van
quished enemies, reduced to the condition of helots,
and compelled to labor on the public works. Trod
den down by oppression, they still cherished the tra
ditions of their race ; among which was their trust
171

172 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
in a divine promise given to Abraham, and renewed
to Isaac and to Jacob. They had not wholly forgot
ten their great ancestors ; nor had they relinquished
the expectation of becoming a great people, in whom
all the families of the earth should be blessed.
We need not, just now, inquire carefully con
cerning the events which preceded or accompanied
the going-forth of that people from Egypt. I need
not demand that you shall decide, at present, how
much or how little there is of myth and poetry in
what the old Hebrew Scriptures tell us about the
Exodus. You may assume, if you will, so far as the
subject now before us is concerned, that the Author of
Nature cannot break through the barriers of Nature
to reveal the supernatural, and that every story which
represents him as doing so must be regarded as
either poetry or fable ; for I am not intending to dis
cuss the philosophical question of miracles. But, on
the other hand, you must allow me to assume as
historically true that portion of the ancient narra
tive which no scientific scepticism can pronounce in
credible, or even improbable.
These, then, are facts which I find in the old He
brew books, and which are assumed in the proposed
inquiry. While the tribes of Israel were under op
pression in Egypt, there arose among them one of
those men whose personal influence affects all subse
quent history. Moses, a man familiar with the learn
ing and wisdom of Egypt, and brought up in the
royal household, but deliberately preferring to iden
tify himself with the race to which he belonged by
birth, rather than with that which had adopted him,
became to the Hebrews their leader and their law-

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 173
giver. Led hj him, they were in some way deliv
ered from the oppressive power of Egypt, and
brought out into the neighboring regions of Arabia.
There, reverting to the old habits of their race, they
became wanderers in that mountainous wilderness,
— a nation of Bedouins. There, during at least the
lifetime of one generation, they are under the disci
pline of desert-life, dwelling in tents, moving from one
wady or oasis to another, encamping for a while
where they can find water and temporary sustenance
for their scanty flocks and for themselves, and then
passing on to make another encampment. Trained
in the wild freedom of the desert, they are also
trained in habits of subordination. The necessity
of keeping together in a compact body, and of
carrying arms for protection against Arab enemies,
involves the necessity not only of something like
military organization and discipline, but also of laws
and magistrates to measure out justice between one
man and another, and to punish offenders -against
the common-weal. Meanwhile they are cherishing
the tradition of a good old time, when their ances
tors dwelt in a land of springs and streams, of hill
sides adorned with vine-yards and olive-yards, of
plains watered by showers, and waving with har
vests ; and, blended with that cherished memory,
there is ever in their hearts the hope of a good time
coming, when they shall repossess the land of prom
ise. At last, they emerge from the desert ; they pass
over the Jordan ; they settle themselves in Palestine,
and become an agricultural people. But they bring
with them from the desert, not only the patriarchal
traditions which theix fathers carried into Egypt,
15*

174 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
but also a body of laws and institutions which dis
tinguish them from all other nations. In their reli
gion they are distinguished by a striking peculiarity,
jealously guarded. They acknowledge one only
God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.
Him they worship only in his invisible majesty ; nor
do they even tolerate any visible representation of
him. In their government they acknowledge no
king but God, and no law that does not rest on his
authority. Him they regard as the one great force
in nature and in all the progress of events. Espe
cially do they recognize him in their own history. He
called their great ancestor from beyond the Eu
phrates. He has brought them out of the land of
Egypt and the house of bondage. The land which
they inhabit is his gift, and they hold it only under
him. He is their God, and there is no other; for
the gods of Egypt and the gods of all the nations,
whether they worship sculptured stones or the powers
of nature and the lights of heaven, are vanity and
a lie. Long afterwards, an historian of that people, writ
ing in the first century of the Christian era to vindi
cate his nation against the scoffs and reproaches of
a Greek, coined the word " theocracy " to designate
the peculiarity of their government as instituted by
Moses. " Our lawgiver," said he, " appointed our
government to be what, with some violence done to
language, may be called a theocracy." l That word,
invented by Josephus, has been singularly misunder
stood, and the great fact which it represents has been
singularly misrepresented. Let us recall its original
i Josephus, Answer to Apion, ii. 17.

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 175
meaning, and we may see whether it was fitly applied
as the peculiar designation of the Hebrew common
wealth. Separating the word from a cloud of vague associ
ations, and looking only at its strict and legitimate
meaning, we find it related to other words in common
use, — democracy, aristocracy, autocracy. In a democ
racy, the will of the Srjuog, or people, is the ultimate
authority: the laws and the government are recog
nized as proceeding from that source : magistrates
and officers are the servants of the people. In an
aristocracy, the will of a certain superior class — the
Squtzoi, or nobles — is supreme : the laws are of their
making, and magistrates are their servants. In an
autocracy, the will of an absolute monarch makes and
unmakes laws ; and all the functionaries of government
are servants of the king. What, then, is a theocracy ?
It is that state or commonwealth in which the law is
God's will, and the government is administered by
magistrates who are his servants.
Such was, in fact, the idea of the Hebrew theocracy.
The great truth, that there is One only, the living
and true God ; the truth which Abraham brought
with him from the east ; that ancient truth, of which
some tradition had been maintained in various tribes
of the great Semitic race, but which the human
mind, in its tendency to superstition, personifying and
worshipping the powers of Nature, and deifying the
memory of dead heroes, is ever prone to bury under
mythological fancies, — was brought into a just con-
spicuousness among the Hebrews at the very time
when it was fading out of the religion of all other
nations. By the mission of Moses, rousing them to

176 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
demand, and leading them forth to obtain, their lib
erty, that truth was made to them the bond of their
national unity and the vital force of their national
existence. Under oppression, they learned to abhor
the polytheism of their oppressors. In the colossal
temples of Egypt, bulls were worshipped. At the
rude altars of Hebrew worship, bulls — the objects
of Egyptian adoration — were slaughtered in sacrifice
to- the one invisible God. The first demand in behalf
of Israel was, that the entire nation might go out freely
into the rocky wilderness, there to offer sacrifices
which the Egyptians would abhor, and which could
not be offered in their presence without provoking
them to fury.2 In the conflict which ensued, every
demand which Moses made was in the name of
Israel's God ; and the effect of every refusal, and of
all the waiting and suffering, was, on the part of Is
rael, a deeper abhorrence of such gods as Egypt wor
shipped, and (what may often be seen in times of
national excitement) a more tenacious adherence to
the inspiring idea, which, more than race or language,
made Israel a distinct nation, and incapable of fusion
in the Egyptian civilization. Whatever might be the
schemes of princes and statesmen in the court of
Pharaoh, whatever the maunderings and juggleries
of priests in the temples, whatever the theories and
learned explanations set forth by wise men in the
schools, the Hebrews, according to their old way of
thinking, and inspired by the great crisis, saw God in
all the progress of that conflict. He scourged the
land with plagues. He hardened Pharaoh's heart.
They were looking on, not as students in the physical
2 Exod. v. 1; viii. 26.

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 177
sciences or in metaphysics, but with those instincts
and intuitions that recognize God, and reach into the
infinite. Their deliverer was not Moses, but God ;
and Moses was his servant. God was with them on
their sultry march. He led them through the sea.
The " strong east wind " opening a path for them was
his power. He overwhelmed the host of Pharaoh.
To them, the manna which they gathered every morn
ing was his gift, — "bread from heaven," — and the
quails that rested around their camp were his provis
ion for their need. He opened fountains for them in
the desert. The genius of their artists and the skill
of their artisans were his inspiration. So near were
they to God ; so full of God was the common thought
and speech of the nation ; so little of intermediate
causation was there in their thought, between what
they saw and experienced and the one creative and
ruling power of the universe ; so vivid was their
sense of his intervention for their deliverance from
the oppressor, — that it was natural for them to ac
knowledge God as the King of Israel, and to regard
themselves as under his protection.
It was under such an inspiration that their great
leader brought them into the mountain-fastnesses of
Horeb, — a region with which he was familiarly ac
quainted, and where, in the presence of those awful
heights pifercing the blue ether, he had first become
conscious of a divine call to a sublimer work than
man had ever before attempted. Thither he led the
emancipated tribes ; and there he was to complete the
great work of his life by giving them a revelation from
God in the form of law. By the legislation of which
he was not the author, but only the commissioned

178 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
apostle, that new nation, in its political unity and its
political independence, was to be brought into a new
relation to its divine Deliverer. God's word to them
was, " Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians,
and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you
unto myself. Now, therefore, if ye will obey my
voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be
a peculiar treasure unto me above all people ; for all
the earth is mine : and ye shall be unto me a kingdom
of priests, and a holy nation." To that message the
nation, through its constituted representatives, made
answer, "All that the Lord hath spoken we will do." 3
Then came the giving of the law, forever associated
with the veiled and thundering summit of Sinai, —
those ten commandments, summing up in their rugged
sententiousness all human duty, and compelling every
human conscience to recognize them in their spirit
and essence as the universal and immutable law of
God. All else in the Mosaic legislation, whether
civil or ritual, is auxiliary to the fundamental and
central law of those ten commandments. Those
" ten words " (the Decalogue) were the great " testi
mony " which God gave to his own Israel ; the tablets
of granite from Sinai, on which they were graven for
perpetual remembrance, were the " tables of testi
mony;" the ark or coffer in which the records, not of
perishable papyrus from Egypt, but of enduring rock,
were laid up as the most precious and venerable of
national muniments, was "the ark of the testimony."
It was also " the ark of the covenant ; " for the tables
of the law were the " tables of the covenant," and
" the testimony " of the ten awful words was itself
» Exod. xix. 4-8.

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 179
" the covenant." * The violation of those command
ments was the breaking of God's covenant ; and it was
by keeping that covenant that Israel was to be a king
dom of priests unto God, and a holy nation. The one
design running through every precept and every insti
tution of the Mosaic system is, that the chosen people,
the kingdom of priests unto God, may be guarded
against corrupting and debasing influences ; may feel
on every side and in every movement the pressure of
God's authority ; and may be trained by habits of per
sonal purity, and by all the significant ritual of the
national worship, into obedience to the immutable
and universal duties of which the ten commandments
are the revelation.
I conceive, then, that the true idea of the Hebrew
theocracy is given in the fact that the law which that
people receive is God's law ; and that, acknowledging
God's sovereignty over them, they acknowledge no
sovereignty but his. In Egypt, they had known a
king who was the fountain of all authority in govern
ment, and whose will was enforced as law ; and that
king was not their God. But when they had passed
the Red Sea, and stood free on the Arabian shore,
they had another king. Egypt had king after king, —
a Pharaoh yesterday, another Pharaoh to-morrow, —
a man whose breath was in his nostrils ; but Israel's
King was Jehovah, — King eternal, immortal, in
visible. The song of victory over vanquished Egypt
is full of the thought that Israel's God is Israel's
King : —

•Exod. xxv. 15, 21; xxxi. 18; xxxiv. 28; Ley. xxxiv. 14, 15; Deut. iv. 13;
lx. 9. 11, 15.

180 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
" Jehovah is a man of war : Jehovah is his name.
Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea.
Thy right hand, O Jehovah ! is become glorious in power.
Thy right hand, O Jehovah I hath dashed in pieces the enemy.
Jehovah shall be King for ever and ever." 5
Israel, free Israel, has no king but the Almighty,
no sovereign lawgiver but the All-Holy: Jehovah
is his name.
Let us exclude from our conception of that Hebrew
theocracy the idea of hierarchy, or government by a
priestly order. There were priests in Israel, and a
high priest ; but, as we trace their history through
the canonical books of the Old Testament, we find no
intimation of any political power pertaining directly
or indirectly to the priestly office. It can hardly be
said that they were the religious teachers of the '
people, or the official and authoritative expounders
of the law, save in matters of ceremony and ritual.
As employed continually in the offering of sacrifices,
and in other typical services of the national religion,
they were the official guardians of the tabernacle,
and of the ark of the covenant, with its treasures ;
and in that character they also held in their custody
an authentic and standard copy of the law, which
they were to read once in seven years, at the feast
of tabernacles, before all the people. They were
simply the servants of the nation, and its representa
tives, in the ritual of national worship. There was,
indeed, through the last age of Jewish independence,
a priestly government in Judaea : the high priests of
the Asmonean line were virtually Icings as well as
priests. But we do not search the books of Macca-
« Exod. xv. 3, 4, 6, 18.

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 181
bees to learn what the theocracy over Israel was, as
established by the ministry of Moses.
Let us also observe that the theocracy was not, as
may be heedlessly supposed, some peculiarity in the
form of the government. In the form of their gov
ernment, the tribes of Israel, during the period of
their wanderings, were like the other tribes that then
roamed, and that now roam, over the same territory.
Among the many incidental evidences that show the
antiquity of the Pentateuch, and its authenticity as a
description of the Hebrew commonwealth in the time
of its migration from Egypt to the land of promise,
one of the most striking is the portraiture which
those books give so artlessly — or, rather, which they
unintentionally enable the reader to make for him
self — of its political organization. We see, that, even
in Egypt, the Israelites, notwithstanding the oppres
sion that crushes them, have their elders, or sheiks,
to whom Moses brings his message ; who assemble at
his call ; and who are, in some sort, the recognized
representatives of the people. Thus it is that they
go forth into Arabia, not as a horde, or rabble, of
fugitives, but as an immense caravan of distinct yet
kindred tribes ; each tribe divided into clans and fam
ilies, with their subordinate chiefs. Such was the
form of government which Moses found already ex
isting ; and, in the changes which he introduced, the
patriarchal form of government remained unchanged.
Under the theocracy, the form of government was
essentially the same as before. That theocracy,
therefore, was something in the spirit and essence of
the Hebrew commonwealth, rather than in the form
of government.

182 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Another misleading idea must be eliminated from
our conception of the subject. While we remember
that God, by his name Jehovah, was King in Israel,
the only Sovereign over the people redeemed by him
from their bondage ; that the law was his law, and
the magistrates were his servants, — let us also remem
ber that the government of God over that people
was not a government by miraculous intervention
constantly repeated. Whatever were the miracles
by which the relation of that people to God as their
King was introduced and inaugurated (miracles of
which I may say something before closing this dis
cussion), and whatever of miraculous inspiration
there was from time to time in the great leaders and
prophets of Israel afterwards, the fact of God's king
ly authority in Israel was one thing, and the miracles
were quite another thing. The wisdom and fidelity
of magistrates, the patriotic loyalty of the people,
the thrift of virtuous and industrious households,
the sagacity of statesmen, the valor of warriors, the
influences of soil and climate on national character,
together with those concurrences and combinations
(beyond human control, and often beyond human
foresight) which enter into all history, and which
are referred by religious minds to the Divine Provi
dence, and by unthinking minds to fate or fortune,
— all such things were as necessary and as potent in
the history of Israel as in that of any other nation,
and were the means and methods by which God gov
erned and protected his own chosen people.
Summing up these views, we may describe the
theocratic element in the Hebrew commonwealth
negatively and affirmatively. Negatively, it was not

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 183
(1) a hierarchical or priestly authority in civil and
political affairs ; nor (2) any special constitution in
respect to the designation or names of magistrates,
or the distribution of their powers and duties ; nor
yet (3) a government by God's direct and miraculous
intervention constantly repeated, — a divine govern
ment, without human agency and the ordinary in
strumentality of second causes. Affirmatively, it was
the fact that Israel alone among the nations wor
shipped the true and only God; acknowledged him
as the Author of the State, and the one supreme Law
giver ; trusted in his protection ; was guided by lead
ers whom he raised up ; was taught by prophets who
were his messengers; and was the depositary of
mysterious and marvellous promises from God for
" all the families of the earth." In the unity of their
common relation to God as his people, a loose con
federacy of nomadic tribes becomes a nation, having
the knowledge and worship of the revealed though
invisible God as their chief distinction among the
nations, and their covenant of obedience to God's
law as their national constitution. Their public tent,
or tabernacle, " the tabernacle of the congregation "
(afterwards superseded by the temple), was not only
" the holy place," the national sanctuary where sac
rifices were offered and all the ceremonies of the
national religion were performed : it was also their na
tional capitol ; the senate-house ; the place of all
national assemblies, " whither the tribes went up, —
the tribes of the Lord." Their national and pohti
cal. liberty was, that they were the freed people of
Jehovah, and that he was their King : their personal
liberty was, that every Israelite was a consecrated

184 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
personage, a citizen in a kingdom of priests, — a citi
zen, therefore, whose rights, as defined by the law of
God, were to be respected and guarded, by all who
administered the government in God's name. The
State was a divine institution : its fundamental laws
were the immutable and universal moralities of the
Decalogue ; and the more particular regulations, how
ever minute, and however local or temporary in their
nature.; the details of legislation by which those fun
damental laws were to be applied and enforced, or
by which the wild freedom of Bedouin life was to be
restrained, and habits of half-savage violence or li
cense which had come down from earlier ages was to
be safely reformed ; yes, even the ceremonial rules
and prohibitions by which the nation was to be iso
lated from the contamination of unrestricted inter
course with the heathen, — were accepted and ob
served as sanctioned by divine authority.
If, now, we ask what have been the effects of that
theocracy, and what has come of it in relation to the
progress of the human race, we must needs observe,
first, what the effect was on that particular nation.
To those who are intelligently familiar with so much
as is known concerning the history of that nation, a
few words on this topic will be sufficient. What
were the Israelites as they came out of Egypt ?
What were they when they crossed the Jordan ?
What were they when David fixed his throne in
Jerusalem, and, the monarchical form of govern
ment having succeeded to the simple republic, kings
instead of judges were to administer the theocracy ?
What were they when at last they came within the
expanding circle of the Greek, and then of the Ro-

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 185
man civilization? Their own sacred books record
more of their barbarisms and their vices, more of
their lapses into idolatry, and of the noxious super
stitions with which, notwithstanding the perpetual
quarantine that guarded them, they were from time
to time infected, more of the calamities brought
upon them by their sins, than of their loyalty to
God, their fidelity to their trust, and their felicity
and progress. Yet some things in the record open to
us incidentally, here and there, a striking view of
what their law and their worship of Jehovah were do
ing for them. They came out of Egypt not entirely
uncultured, but with many traits of barbarism, and
with many superstitions acquired in that land, or
received by tradition from foregoing ages. But the
story of Ruth, a few generations after the Exodus ;
the story of Hannah, and of Samuel's birth and
childhood; the glimpses which we get of Jesse at
Bethlehem, and of his family-life, — how suggestive
are they of the changes which the theocratic system
had wrought and was working ! How charming are
those pictures of home-life and village-life, of affec
tion and devotion, of contented industry and quiet
thrift! What a contrast is there, morally and so
cially, — while the identity in other respects is equally-
striking, — between what we see of Israel delivered
from oppression, and wandering in the Arabian wil
derness, and these incidental glimpses of the same
people after a few generations under the moulding
and inspiring influence of what we have called the
theocracy! Those ages, we must remember, were
ages of conflict, and of frequent calamity, — ages full
of barbarizing influences most adverse to moral and
16*

186 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
social advancement : yet such were the privileges of
Israelites under their national covenant with God ;
such liberty had they, and with liberty a carefully-
guarded equality; such lessons of equity, of pity,
and of human charity, were continually impressed
upon them ; so effectually were they cut off from
demoralizing intercourse with other nations ; and such
was the power of their religious ideas and traditions,
— that their land, theirs at last in undisputed posses
sion, had become, not indeed a heaven on earth, nor
a Utopia such as poets and sages have dreamed of,
but a land of cultivated homesteads and vine-clad
homes, of gardens and fields and terraced hills, and,
in the estimate of its happy population, " the glory
of all lands."
We have to-day, not only in great libraries and
repositories of rare and curious learning, but in all
our dwellings, a collection of ancient writings in a
single volume, which is perfectly unique among the
remains of the earliest literature, and is at once a
record and a most remarkable product of the Hebrew
theocracy. Those Scriptures show us, that, under
the theocracy, religion was not merely a national
affair, in which the individual was concerned only as a
loyal citizen, but was also, and much more eminently,
the consciousness of a direct relation between the
individual soul and God. They show us how the
theocratic idea of God, who had revealed himself in
the ten commandments, and had said to the sons of
Israel, " I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you
to myself," — the idea of Jehovah the King and Re
deemer of his chosen people, — took hold of indi
vidual souls. In the religious consciousness of the

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 187
devout Israelite, the tutelar and covenant God was
not the God of the nation only, and related to him
simply as a member of the favored commonwealth,
but was near to him in immediate and personal rela
tions, — his King and his Deliverer. Every believing
Israelite who could say, as. one of the worshipping
nation, " Oh ! come, let us worship and bow down, let
us kneel before the Lord our Maker; for he is our
God, and we are the people of his pasture ; " 6 or, " Sing
aloud unto God our strength ; make a joyful noise unto
the God of Jacob," 7 — could also say, in the stillness
of his most solitary meditation, " Be merciful unto
me, O God ! be merciful unto me ; for my soul trusteth
in thee ; yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make
my refuge ; " 8 or, " Truly my soul waiteth upon God ;
from him cometh my salvation ; he only is my rock
and my salvation."9 The book of Psalms — that
old prayer-book and hymn-book of the theocratic
nation ; that marvellous book, as fresh and vital to
day in our own English tongue, or in the language of
Hawaii, as when its latest strain was chanted in
Hebrew, on some Judaean hillside, more than two
thousand years ago — is pre-eminently a book of indi
vidual experience and devotion, and is the conclusive
proof that the religion of the theocracy was a spirit
ual religion, the intelligent intercourse of individual
souls with God. In the prophets, too, we see the
God of the theocracy coming into immediate rela
tions of intimacy and affection with individual souls.
He who " inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy,"
and who " dwelleth in the high and holy place,"
dwells " with him also that is of a contrite and hum-
* Ps. xcv. 6, 7. » Ps. lxxxi. 1. s Ps. lvii. 1. » Ps. lxii. 1, 2.

188 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
bie spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to
revive the heart of the contrite ones." 10 The rit
ualism of that system was national : the stoled and
mitred priesthood, the bloody altar, the fragrant in
cense, all the pompous ceremonial of the tabernacle,
and afterwards of the temple, were for Israel as a
nation : and when the temple fell ; when holy Jeru
salem was trodden down of the Gentiles ; when the
Hebrew or Jewish State, prolonged through so many
ages and under so many forms of political organiza
tion, was dissolved by dispersion into all the world, —
these things passed away. But the religion of the
theocracy, easily distinguished from the national
ritualism as a religion for individual souls, had a
stronger vitality: it was spiritual, and therefore
immortal. Already that religion had brought into existence
— we know not how long ago — an institution for
religious instruction and impression, and a method of
social worship, in which there was no place for the
grandly imposing ritual of the national worship. In
the synagogue, a simply intelligent and spiritual re
ligion — a religion of faith in God, and of obedience
to his commandments — had instituted for itself a
worship which made no appeal to the senses. The
synagogue was a convenience for every neighborhood,
— a sabbath meeting of neighbors in their meeting
house ; and its services — prayer and praise, the read
ing of the holy books, and expository teaching and
exhortation, all bare" of pomp and ornament — were
impressive only in their severe simplicity. Thus the
people — not a favored class, but all — were in-
» Isa. lvii. 15.

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 189
structed in the law of God and in his promises, and
were taught to worship him.
Such, then, was the theocracy — the kingdom of
God — in its relation to the culture and training of
that secluded people. When the Greek conquerors,
Alexander, and his captains and successors, established
their dominions in Egypt and Syria, they found in
the narrow territory of Palestine .a people unique
among the nations, — a people religiously avoiding in
tercourse with foreigners, passionately patriotic in
their adherence to their distinctive institutions, fierce
in the assertion of their independence, restive and
turbulent under oppression, and honoring the very
dust of their own land as holy, but already beginning
to overflow into other lands ; a veritably human peo
ple, with all the passions of humanity, and not exempt
from the vices and the crimes which are always and
everywhere incident to human society, but with
rules of living, and a standard of social morality,
which had made them eminently thrifty and happy.
Sagacious kings vied with each other in their endeav
ors to attract Jewish communities into the cities
which they were founding, and which were to be, on
that side of the Mediterranean Sea, the centres of a
European culture, and of fusion between the conquer
ing race and the conquered. Suddenly such commu
nities were formed, sometimes with special immuni
ties and privileges, at Alexandria, at Antioch, at
every centre of commercial activity and of the inter
course of nations. In every such city there was the
synagogue, where the "sojourners," as they called
themselves, of that singular race, were wont to hold
hebdomadal assemblies for worship ; and that strange

190 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
worship attracted first the curious, then the thought
ful and serious, of other races. There thoughtful
men, — and women too, — weary of senseless super
stitions, disgusted with mythologies of gods unholy
and impure, and groping as in the dark after some
theory of the universe that might relieve the half-
conscious hunger of their souls, found worship with
out an altar or an idol, — the worship of a God unseen,
but not unknown. They heard in the cosmopolitan
Greek the story of the creation by an omnipotent
word, of which all Nature is only the articulate utter
ance ; they heard that grand confession, " Hear, O
Israel ! the Lord thy God is one Lord ; " they heard
the story of Israel's redemption and of Israel's sins
and chastisements ; they caught the idea of God's
kingdom in the world, — the law God's law, gov
ernment the administration of his justice ; and,
from exultant prophecy and chanted psalm, they
learned to expect a new and glorious coming of that
kingdom, with blessings for " all the families of the
earth." In the fulness of time, a rumor spreads abroad
from Palestine that " the kingdom of God is at
hand." Pilgrims, returning from Jerusalem, bring
strange, and doubtless confused and conflicting re
ports. The rumor grows more distinct ; the agitation
deepens. Missionaries from Jerusalem stand up in the
synagogues, and tell a marvellous story. Jesus of
Nazareth — rejected by the Jewish authorities, and
crucified by the Roman power, but risen from death
to immortality, invested with all authority on earth
and in heaven, and ever present with his followers —
is the anointed Deliverer, for whom kings and prophets

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 191
waited, and in whom " all the families of the earth
are blessed." Christianity — the new theocracy, in
which the old promises are fulfilled, and before which,
in the dawn of its glory, the old shadows fade into
light, and are lost — finds its foothold in the syna
gogues. There it finds a people prepared for its com
ing, — the enlightened and humbly religious Hebrew
waiting for the consolation of Israel ; the devout Gen
tile listening to the prophets, and worshipping at the
gate. If, in the conflict which ensues, the new
theocracy is expelled from the synagogue in one city
and another, as it had been from the temple at Jeru
salem, it forms synagogues. of its own. It adds to the
scriptures of the old covenant its gospels and the
writings of its own apostles. It fulfils the ancient
promise, and teaches men of every land and lineage
to say, " Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abra
ham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us
not : thou, O Lord ! art our Father, our Redeemer."
It goes forth to spread through all nations the knowl
edge and worship and the kingdom of a redeeming
God. Thus the new " kingdom of God," instead of being
a kingdom over one nation only, is to include all
nations. Under the reign of Him who is " King of
kings, and Lord of lords," every government is to
become a true theocracy, the government of. God,
founded on his authority, and administering his jus
tice. Shallow sciolists in politics and history sometimes
sneer at what they call the Puritan theocracy, — the
attempt of our New-England fathers to assert in
their civil institutions, and to administer by their

192 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
magistrates, the law of God. This is not the time to
enter into any historical vindication of those founders
of our commonwealths ; nor is any such vindication
needed in this place. We are all ready to acknowl
edge that they fell into some serious errors ; but let
us not forget that their principle of framing their
laws according to the mind of God, and of admin
istering at all their tribunals God's justice, is the
only principle of true liberty. In the old Pagan re
publics, — as in the ideal and impossible republics of
modern Socialism, — the individual citizen existed
only for the state ; and, though he might have rights
against foreigners and against his fellow-citizen
which the state must protect, against the state itself
he had no rights. Now, if society, or the state, is
merely a human contrivance, resting on no divine
foundation ; if rights are created by the state, and
are not at all the cause or reason of its existence, —
I have in reality no rights ; and it is of no great con
sequence to me — the difference is not essential —
whether I hold my liberty, my property, my wife and
children, at the caprice of a godless monarch, or at
the caprice of a godless democracy. But if the state
is itself a divine creation, and is so regarded and ac
knowledged ; if it can neither create nor extinguish
any human right ; if it exists only as God's institution
for the protection of rights which are his gift to his
human children ; if its legislation is to be simply the
enactment of what is intrinsically just, and therefore
according to God's mind ; if the application and exe
cution of its laws is to be simply the administration
of God's justice by the constituted ministers of his
will, — then the state is a theocracy. But this con-

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 193
ception of a state is the only conception of it which
Christianity tolerates.11
Let it not be said that such a state is a spiritual
despotism. The state will be a spiritual despotism
if you give to an infallible pontiff, or to a hierarchy,
or to the synods and ministry of an established church,
the power of deciding for the state, and without
appeal, what is the will of God. But if you reserve
and guard that first right, conservative of all rights ;
that right without which all other rights are worth
less ; that which Protestants call the right of private
judgment; the right of appealing from all human
judgments to a higher law, and of suffering and
dying, if need be, in the assertion of that appeal ; if
the people, enlightened by the word of God, are to
be, after full inquiry and discussion, the ultimate
judge on earth ; if legislation is to pronounce simply
the aggregate moral sense of a thoroughly Christian
people, — spiritual despotism and every other des
potism is impossible.
In view, then, of what the Hebrew theocracy
really was, and of the when and where of its origin ;
in view of its effects on the nation to which it was
given, and of its grand result and outcome in universal
history and in relation to the destinies of the human
race, — how shall we account for it ? Did it come by
chance, in some unintelligent, and therefore unintelli
gible, evolution ? or is it of God ? It has been and
is a power : is it of God ?
If it be of God, why should it not be introduced
into the world's history with due authentication of its
11 Rom. xiii. 1-6.
17

194 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
origin ? Shall we take it upon ourselves to say that
it shall not come, or that it cannot come, attended
with supernatural wonders ? Is there in the uni
verse nothing else than Nature ? Is universal Nature
intelligible? and is there, O muddled philosopher!
no supreme and primal Intelligence from which it
came ? no supreme and primal Will on which all its
correlated forces depend, and into which they must
be, in the last analysis, resolved ?
As I think of Moses, and of his part and place in
the great story of humanity, how can I refuse to
believe that God sent him ? I see the infant prophet
floating in his cradle on the Nile. He is saved : who
saves him ? I see him standing with unsandalled feet
before that flame at Horeb : shall I inquire into the
chemistry of the phenomenon before I acknowledge
the validity of his commission ? I see him standing
before Pharaoh with a message from God : shall I
refuse to believe till I understand all the psychology
of his inspiration ? I see him stretch forth his shep
herd's staff in prophetic commination ; and, when
plague after plague scourges the land of Misraim,
need I know or ask what second causes, and how
many, were concerned in the infliction? I stand
with the affrighted tribes by the fords of the Red Sea :
shall I ask from what cave of storms the " strong
east wind " blows " all that night," and lays bare a
path for the redeemed to pass over ? Or if I stand
before the cloud-veiled Sinai, and hear its thunders,
shall I refuse to believe that God is there ? Shall I
stand and gabble about vapors and electricity because
the cloud and the lightnings are the hiding of his
power ?

THE HEBREW THEOCRACY. 195
No ! let me acknowledge God, — God in Nature,
all its arrangements his wisdom, all its forces his
power; God in history, his love watching over hu
manity and saving it. The only explanation of uni
versal History, as of universal Nature, is the Super
natural.

V.
THE PROPHET ISAIAH.
BY REV. JOHN LORD, LL.D.
THE subject assigned to me in this course of
lectures is the prophet Isaiah, — a subject, to
me, of great difficulty ; and which, with my limited
time of preparation, I feel an incapacity to treat as
its importance demands.
A prophet was a great personage among the an
cient Jews. He was a sacred and honored seer,
whose voice, for good or evil, was seldom disregarded.
He was considered as the messenger and interpreter
of Jehovah, inspired by him to declare his purposes,
sent by him to foretell the future, to pronounce
doom, to preach righteousness, and to kindle hope
in the day of calamities. In dignity he lived, whe
ther in the desert or in kings' palaces, in poverty
or in wealth, to communicate the will of the moral
Governor of the world, the universal Father ; a God
jealous of his honor ; personal, omniscient, and om
nipresent ; interfering with human affairs ; bringing
good out of evil ; ruling in justice, yet abounding in
mercy ; the personification of all divine attributes, of
which love was the great and the crowning glory.
The vocation of so dignified a personage was dis-
196

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 197
tinct from that of the priest, who belonged to a
caste whose duties were legal and perfunctory ; a
man set apart to minister to the altar, to uphold
the ceremonials of outward religious worship.
The priest wore a pecuhar dress ; he lived apart
from men ; he was respected and honored, as belong
ing to a divine institution : but he did not declare
the occult purposes of God ; he had no grand author
ity in matters outside his sphere, no peculiar wis
dom, no inspiration. Nor was he armed, like the
prophet, with spiritual thunders : he did not rebuke
the supreme ruler of the state, nor even consult with
kings on political affairs. But the prophet was a
statesman, as well as seer; always a preacher, and
sometimes an inspired poet, by whom and through
whom the Almighty spoke on most momentous sub
jects, even as the oracle of Dodona or Delphi was
supposed to communicate the mind and will of the
heathen deities.
There is no mention of this august personage be
fore the time of Moses, although God revealed him
self to patriarchs, and made covenants with them.
Jacob may have foretold the future destiny of his
descendants, and Joseph may have promised to his
brethren the possession which God had sworn to
Abraham. But with Moses, the greatest man, on the
whole, of all antiquity, the first prophetical epoch of
the Jewish Church commenced, as seen in his mag
nificent burst of song after the passage of the Red
Sea. The book of Deuteronomy, lost from the time
of Solomon to Jeremiah, is a continued story of
God's future providences; so that its author uses
almost the same language as Isaiah himself in his
17*

198 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
thirty-second chapter. It was not, however, until
the period of the Judges that the prophetic office
became a fixed institution of the Jews. Samuel was
the founder of the order, and established " the school
of the prophets," of which he was the inspired and
venerated head. David was called the "prophet-
king," as well as the " royal psalmist " and " the sweet
singer of Israel ; " and hence he predicted the com
ing of a Messiah, the future glory of Zion, and the
triumph of the Messianic reign. When Solomon
died, the prophetic order assumed a new importance,
especially when the theocratic state had lapsed into
the idolatries of surrounding nations. Then a re
markable class of prophets arose, who endeavored to
counteract the sins of kings and people, and awaken
the nation to an acknowledgment of the only true
God ; and the deeper the degeneracy to which the
people sunk, the more jealously and earnestly did
these remarkable teachers bring to view the inevita
ble punishment in store for sin and unbelief, as well
as the ultimate glories of the restoration. Then
arose such men as Elijah and Elisha, denouncing
sternly the vengeance of the Almighty on the follies
of ruler and people, and the administration of idola
trous nations. They and others inspired a peculiar
awe. Sometimes they were men of rank, allied by
blood to princes ; and at other times they were ob
scure, and without any of the outward circum
stances which command the reverence of the people.
And yet ever were they feared and revered, even
when persecuted and slain.
They clothed themselves with the garments of hu
miliation ; were ascetic in diet and habits ; and lived a

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 199
life of severe contemplation, such as was imitated by
the original monks. They were the great preachers,
the great poets, the great statesmen, of their times,
and remind us of the combined moral and political
power which was wielded in later times by Bernard,
Anselm, and Savonarola, — austere, stern, majestic in
voice and air; respecting no persons, however high
their rank ; and even looking upon themselves as the
chosen ministers of the ever-living and ever-ruling
God. From the time of Samuel to the eighth century
before Christ, the prophets directed their preaching
chiefly to their own times, and sought to impart vigor
into the theocratic state, reeling from the sorceries of
idolatry, and tottering from the convulsions of war.
But when the prophets were, at last, compelled to
despair of the State, from the outrageous wickedness
which stared everybody in the face, and the dying-
out of the idea of the personal God whom Abraham
and Moses recognized, then they declared most awful
calamities on the Jewish nation and on surrounding
nations, until, scourged and humiliated, and nearly
ruined, a remnant should be saved, and this remnant
should form the nucleus of new moral forces, and see
a restoration of divine favor ; yea, the exaltation of
the Seed of David, and the renewed glories of Jeru
salem. Of these prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah,
Jonah, Micah, and Isaiah were the representatives,
who flourished before the Babylonian captivity, even
as Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
and Daniel prophesied during the captivity, and Hag-
gai, Zechariah, and Malachi flourished after the re
turn from Babylon. All these were men of com-

200 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
manding dignity and influence, the marked men of
their age, confirming the authority of their prede
cessors ; " the last of the series who had flourished
in continuous succession for more than a thousand
years." According to Augustine, they were the
philosophers, the divines, the teachers, of the Hebrews,
raised up to be illustrious witnesses of the presence
and will of God. Though they lived chiefly in retire
ment, clothed in skins and in sackcloth, and fed on
the wild fruits of the earth, yet they were learned,
cultivated, and revered both for piety and virtue.
They committed their precious and inspired predic
tions to writing, which are uniformly marked by great
splendor of diction, intense energy of style, ardent
poetical imagination, and transcendent loftiness of
thought ; so that no other human compositions have
ever approached them in sublimity and grandeur, or
even majestic sweetness : and the great masters of
moral wisdom from their time to ours, whether poets
or artists or philosophers or orators, have acknowl
edged their vast obligations to them, and in no small
degree have derived from them their inspiration ; hke
Dante, Michael Angelo, Pascal, and Bossuet.
But all these prophets yield in sublimity and varied
excellence, especially poetical beauty, to Isaiah, who
is more frequently quoted by Christ and his apostles
than all the rest together ; a most fruitful subject of
commentary, from Jerome to Delitzsch ; and whose
glowing exultations and beautiful tenderness, as well
as awful denunciations and grand descriptions, we
never weary in contemplating, and never feel we have
exhausted, — so rich, so varied, and so profound, is
his book, from beginning to end.

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 201
Not as a prophet merely does he loom up, the
grandest and the sternest, as well as the most inspir
ing and hopeful, of the whole series of Jewish seers ;
but as a poet he takes the highest rank. In most ex
alted language, he soars beyond the miseries of the
captivity to the restoration of Israel and the glories of
the Messiah's reign. " The wildest tribes of savages,"
says Stanley, " when converted, have chanted his
magnificent strains as belonging to their own national
songs." Great musical compositions are based on his
anticipations of a life of peace ; while the finest efforts
of the great artists of the sixteenth century may be,
in no slight degree, traced to the dignity with which
he invested his subjects. In him Hebrew poetry cul
minated. No poetry was ever more sublime and
original. It may not be artistic like the dramas of
_Eschylus or the epics of Homer; but it is more
vivid, more lofty, and more intense, than either. As
Carlyle says of the " Inferno," " it is like that of fire
in a dark night." Isaiah may not have dwelt with
dramatic effect on the career of individuals ; he may
not be opulent in descriptions of natural scenery, like
Thomson ; he may not paint mortal passion like
Shakspeare ; he may not be artificial, like Roman
artists : but he seizes on immutable truth, on moral
truth, and rises to the throne of eternal justice, where
the Almighty reigns in love and truth. He dwells
with awful power on retributive wrath ; he scorches
with the fiercest sarcasms the silly unbelievers of his
day ; and, in exalted flights, he paints the mercy which
culminates over wrath, the certainty of restored
blessings, and the transporting glories of the New
Jerusalem. In Job we hear the mighty voice of God

202 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
speaking in the whirlwind, and see his wonders in the
heavens and the clustered glories of his vast creation.
In David we are kindled by those matchless songs,
which rest in God as a supreme support ; those glori
ous chants, which neither Ambrose nor Gregory has
reached ; glowing with warmth and faith, reverential
in tone, catholic in breadth, lofty in a subhme theism,
deep in feeling, reflective, pensive, resplendent with
the radiance of genius and piety. In Solomon we
admire the charms of Nature and the tenderness of
conjugal delights, and those primeval joys which ex
isted in the garden of innocence and beauty ; that
matchless song of love, so tender and mystical and
elegant, that it is accepted as inspiration. But in
Isaiah we are carried to still loftier heights, — to the
ultimate reign of peace and love, never dreamed of
by classical poets, who looked backward, and not for
ward; we have revealed, more distinctly than in any
other Hebrew writer, the hope of immortality, so
dimly shadowed to the wisest of the pagan sages.
Not merely the bright hopes of future redemption are
presented in glowing strains, but also the glories of
the reign of Him who brought immortality to light
through the gospel, — that promised Messiah, around
whom clusters what is most inspiring in the exalted
visions of the prophets. Not only is he rich in varied
imagery, but bis exalted strains are adapted to both
the services of the old temple-worship and the trans
porting music of the Christian Church; and all the
utterances of the poet are in harmony with the the
ology of the New Testament, and the reign of love
which Christ came to establish.
Such was Isaiah, poet as well as prophet : the

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 203
grandest, too, of all the poets in a land to which
poetry was indigenous ; for Palestine was as favor
able to this peculiar development of genius as an
cient Greece herself. That fertile country, at once
European and Asiatic as it then was, was variegated
with hills and valleys and plains, all cultivated to
the uttermost extent, capable of supporting millions,
though no larger than one of our smaller States ; the
hills crested with castles and cities, and abounding
in rich olive-groves and vineyards and gardens ; a
" museum country," as Taylor calls it, with contrasts
the most extreme ; where trees and shrubs and flowers
diversified the landscape, and where the warbling of
birds and the music of sparkling streams invited to
luxury and rest ; where the climate was genial and
the atmosphere was clear, and Nature was wild as
well as cultivated, and the night more glorious than
the day with its blazing orbs ; and where shepherds
and husbandmen, and flocks and herds, gave life to
every landscape. It was in such a beautiful land,
flowing with milk and honey, and abounding in
streams of the purest water, shaded with all the
trees of the forest, picturesque in its wildness, ¦ but
enriched by labor, that the poet, alive to every thing
beautiful and impressive, clothed his predictions in
the sweetest and loftiest language that ever painted
the creation which should succeed destruction.
The writings of Isaiah show that he was a poet, a
preacher of righteousness, a statesman, and historian,
as well as a prophet. His history was probably
written before the book of Kings or Chronicles,
since reference is made in those books to him as an
original authority. But on this point I cannot

204 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
dwell ; and I can only glance at his personal history,
and the great events with which he was contempo
rary. In fact, we know but little of him as a man :
we are told simply that he was the son of Amos, and
saw a vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the
days of Uzziah, Jothan, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. How
old he was when he died we can only conjecture, —
probably about eighty-four. His prophetic ministry
extended over a period of about fifty years. He
was contemporary with Hosea, Amos, and Jonah,
and with the later Assyrian kings before the seat
of empire was removed to Babylon. He was a co
worker with the prophet Micah. He lived in Jeru
salem, not far from the temple ; and was probably
allied by blood with the royal house of David. He
had a wife and two sons, but led an ascetic life, and
wore a garment of haircloth. Yet he was continu
ally consulted by the king in all matters of impor
tance, and seems to have had a commanding influence
at court. His age, his talents, and his experience,
gave force to what he said. There was a " royal air "
about him in all his movements ; and his high social
position is unquestioned. He was a favorite with
Hezekiah, probably his frequent companion ; but it
is supposed he suffered martyrdom under his succes
sor, Manasseh.
It is the fate of prophets to be stoned when they
are in antagonism with men in power. As a whole,
however, his days were honorably passed in familiar
intercourse with the great ; and he wrote Uzziah's
life, and was the leading counsellor of the king.
The most memorable events which occurred dur
ing his ministry were the invasion of Judah by the

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 205
combined forces of Syria and Israel in the reign of
Ahaz, and the great Assyrian invasion in the eigh
teenth year of the reign of Hezekiah.
In regard to the first, it was disastrous to Judah.
The king, the twelfth from David, was weak, timid,
and inclined to the idolatries of the surrounding na
tions, but was not signally a bad man. Israel had
always, except at intervals, been hostile to Judah
since the great rebellion under Jeroboam. The king
of Israel was Pekah ; and he formed an alliance with
Rezin, king of Syria, for the invasion of the territories
of Ahaz. The combined enemies of Judah were so
far successful, that they slew a hundred and twenty
thousand of the subjects of Ahaz in one day, and
carried away captive to Samaria two hundred thou
sand women and children besides, with great spoil,
but were induced to return the captives at the ex
postulations of the prophet Obed and the chief
princes of Israel. The conquerors then advanced to
the siege of Jerusalem. In his distress, Ahaz in
voked the aid of Tilgath-pilneser, king of Assyria,
then the mightiest monarch of the world, whose cap
ital Nineveh, sixty miles in circuit, founded by Nimrod
or Asshur, dominated from the Armenian mountains
on the north, the Zagros chain on the east, to Bagdad
on the south, and the Euphrates on the west. It was
natural that the desponding king of Judah should
seek assistance from some quarter : but he looked to
the wrong quarter, against the advice of Isaiah, who
enjoined him to put his trust in the God of his
fathers, and not in the king of Assyria ; at the same
time promising the divine aid. But Ahaz had not
faith, and was blinded, and would not listen to the
18

206 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
voice of the prophet, nor accept even a sign from the
Lord. Earnestly did the prophet-statesman expos
tulate with Ahaz, telhng him that the king of Nine
veh would prove a razor to shave but too clean his
desolated land, and that there was no one to fear but
Jehovah himself. The inspired advice was rejected ;
and the result of the alliance was, that Judah became
tributary to Nineveh, and Ahaz a mere vassal of
Tilgath-pilneser. He was even forced or induced to
practise the abominable rites of the worship of Bel,
the chief deity of the Assyrians, the Baal of the
Philistines ; and the whole of Palestine became the
border-land of the Assyrian Empire, easy to be in
vaded, and liable to be overcome and conquered.
No pohtical error was ever made by the Jewish kings
more pregnant with evil.
The consequences which Isaiah feared soon took
place, — the actual invasion of Judah by the As
syrian hosts in the time of Hezekiah ; the second
great event which happened during the ministry
of the prophet. Not all the splendid prosperity of
Hezekiah, under whom the Jewish monarchy cul
minated, not his uniform allegiance to his God, not
his grand reforms, and solemn sacrifices, and magnifi
cent feasts, such as had not been since the days
of Solomon, averted the calamities which followed
legitimately from the blindness of his father Ahaz.
Sennacherib, the most powerful of all the Assyrian
kings, after suppressing a revolt in Babylon and
conquering various other Eastern States, turned his
eyes and steps to Palestine, which had revolted, with
the intention of reducing Jerusalem. Hezekiah was
compelled to make humble submission, and consented

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 207
to a tribute of three hundred talents of silver and
thirty of gold, besides a cession of part of his terri
tory, and the loss of two hundred thousand of his
people as captives, — a great and humiliating disaster,
perhaps as great as Prussia suffered from the invasion
of the first Napoleon. Again Hezekiah revolted, and
again was his country invaded with a still greater
Assyrian host. . But the king of Judah this time
evinced remarkable energy ; stopped the supply of
water outside his capital ; strengthened the defences ;
gathered together his fighting-men, and encouraged
them with the assurance that help would come from
the Lord, in whom he trusted, and whom Sennacherib
boastfully defied. And help came, as Isaiah predicted
and Hezekiah believed, in that marvellous pestilence
which destroyed in one night a hundred and eighty-
five thousand of the Assyrian warriors ; the most
signal overthrow by the angel of the Lord since
Pharaoh and his host were swallowed up by the
waters of the Red Sea ; a disaster which spread such
rapid and dreadful demoralization among the invad
ers, that the over-confident monarch retired to his
own country with the utter loss of prestige, and soon
after was assassinated by his own sons.
Such were the great outward events connected
with Isaiah's ministry. But, during that ministry, a
change had been going on in the habits and manners
of his nation, which filled him with alarm, disgust, in
dignation, and sadness. The general prosperity which
prevailed, especially during the reign of Hezekiah, led
to luxury, to vanity, to self-confidence, to pharisee-
ism, and a forgetfulness of God as the actual and
only Sovereign of the world. As a profound ob-

208 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
server of society, he felt that great woes and calami
ties impended. He saw the people stricken as with
judicial blindness, insensible to the operation of
those unchanging laws by which even the moral world
is governed. He knew that the hour of retribution
approached unless the people repented of their follies
and sins. He clothed himself in sackcloth, and cried
aloud, and with fervid eloquence, on the guilty nation
to seek the Lord while he might be found. He first
appears as the stern preacher, indignant in view of
private and pubhc sins, and even intensely scornful
in his reproofs, especially those aimed at vain obla
tions and pharisaic ceremonies. He denounces the
women in still more sarcastic language for those vani
ties of dress and ornament which in no age or country
they have ever despised, and to which everywhere
they still cling. Still more contemptuously does he
speak of the men over whom the women rule, and
whom chfidren oppress. He is severe on all corrupt
judges ; on usurers ; on all who are conceited, and
wise in their own eyes ; on those that are mighty to
drink wine ; on those that join house to house, and
lay field to field ; on those that draw iniquity with
cords of vanity ; on those whose glorious beauty is a
fading flower. His language, so stern and terrible,
is full of woes on rebellious people and rebellious
nations, showing that there is no escape from the
hand of an incensed God.
We do not know how the awful preacher spoke or
looked, with what voice or what gestures, except that
he was clad in the habiliments of the desert, — in the
sackcloth of penitence and grief ; but nowhere in
the Scriptures are more terrible denunciations against

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 209
sin and against sinners. He does not invoke the
vengeance of the Almighty, as David did, upon his
enemies ; but he shows, that, without sincere repent
ance, this vengeance is coming, is near, is overwhelm
ing. He does not glory in this vengeance : he is
oppressed ; he is sad ; he is filled with grief, and es
pecially because the people were infatuated, did not
know, did not consider, blinded by their exceeding
wickedness ; so that, like the old antediluvians, they
were inclined to mock and deride and to ignore Him
who still held out the arms of mercy.
But, great as was Isaiah in almost any respect we
choose to view him as poet, statesman, or preacher,
it is as a prophet that he is most renowned and most
frequently mentioned. But his prophecies are not to
us altogether disassociated with his great meditations
as a sage ; since from these are to be deduced, as from
the prophecies themselves, certain fundamental prin
ciples ever seen in the moral government of God
and in the history of our race, and which have an
everlasting application. Isaiah was not a philosopher
in the narrow and technical sense in which that word
is ordinarily used ; nor was he an artist in the arrange
ment of his writings. History, woes, promises, hopes,
aspirations, and exultations are all mingled together in
scarcely logical sequence. He exhorts, he threatens,
he reproaches, he promises, often in the same chap
ter ; and then he rapidly turns to Messianic triumphs
and the restoration of the glory of Zion, and even
leaps over to the period of the new heavens and the
new earth. Repentance, faith, forgiveness, rapturous
views of the glory of the Lord, are mingled in too
close proximity to suit the literary taste of a Grecian
18*

210 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
critic. But he has definite views, which are never
lost sight of, and they are of startling force and im
pressive apphcation ; and it is these great principles
unfolded in the writings of Isaiah on which I propose
to dwell in the remaining part of this lecture.
And the first one which strikes me as underlying
all the others, and of most majestic force and gran
deur, is the constant presence and direct agency of
a supreme and personal God. This grand and funda
mental truth is not, indeed, original with him. Here
he takes no new ground from the prophets and sages
and patriarchs of the Bible, from Abraham to Mal
achi. He only reiterates with more impressive
force. Abraham when he interceded for Sodom,
Jacob when he wrestled with the angel, Moses
when hidden amid the thunders of Sinai, Samuel
when he declared to Eli the ruin of his house,
David in his reproaches of Michal, and still more in
his triumphal songs of deliverance. Job in the midst
of his sufferings and misery, Elijah before the idola
trous king, Daniel at the court of the Babylonian
monarch, — all, and others, recognized this personal
Jehovah, directing human affairs, as the moral Gov
ernor of the world. " The biblical representation of
the Deity," as Dr. Shedd so forcibly has written,
" not merely excludes all those conceptions of him
which convert him into a Gnostic abyss, and place
him in such unrevealed depths that he ceases to be
an object of either love or fear, but it clothes him
with what may be called individuahty of emotion
and feeling. When the Bible denominates the Su
preme Being ' the living God,' it has in view that
blending of thought with emotion, that fusion of

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 211
intellect with feeling, which renders the Divine Es
sence a throbbing centre of self-consciousness. For,
subtract emotion from the Godhead, and there re
mains an abstract system of laws and truths ; sub
tract the intellect, and there remains the mystic and
dreary deity of sentimentalism. In the Scriptures
we find the union of both elements. According to
the Bible, God possesses emotions ; he loves, he ab
hors. The Old and the New Testaments are vivid
as lightning with the feelings of the Deity : and these
feelings flash in the direct statements of the Psalmist,
— ' God loveth the righteous, God is angry with the
wicked every day ; ' or in the terrible accents of
Paul, — ' Our God is a consuming fire.' " The per
sonality of the infinite and incomprehensible and
supreme God, who reigns over the universe he has
made, is the fundamental idea of the religion of the
Jews, and antagonistic to the prevailing views of
the surrounding nations, who worshipped the stars,
the elements, Nature, even beasts and birds, and, still
worse, the idols which their own hands had made.
All the nations but the Jews were polytheists or
pantheists or atheists ; worshipping, whenever they
worshipped at all, deities without the attributes of
Jehovah. How permeated is the book of Job, that
sublimest of all poems, with the idea of the majesty
of God, and the consequent littleness of man ! — this
sublime Power, " who garnisheth the heavens by his
Spirit, who laid the foundation of the earth, who
shutteth up the sea with doors, who provideth the
ravens with food, who ruleth over all the children of
pride." Not less emphatic is David in almost every
psalm, but with more tender sensibilities, and a live-

212 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Her sense of divine protection, revealing the God
" who rescues out of trouble, who has been our dwell
ing-place in all generations, who is the strength and
hope of those who fear him, and whose name shall
endure forever, reigning from everlasting to ever
lasting in righteousness and glory." So Isaiah follows
in the same strain, adoring, fearing, and jubilant, full
of the majesty and benevolence of this Holy One,
" who meted out the heavens with a span, and com
prehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and
weighed the mountains in scales, and who sitteth in
the circle of the earth, for whom Lebanon is not suf
ficient to burn." Who is this mighty God ? To whom
will ye liken him ? It is He " who giveth power to
the faint, who judgeth among the nations, who taketh
away from Jerusalem and Judah the stay and the
staff of bread and water, who purgeth the blood
of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of
judgment, who shall punish the wicked for their
iniquity, who shall destroy the beauty of the Chal
dean excellency, yet who will have mercy on Jacob
whom he hath chosen."
Yea, it is this Lord who giveth the bread of adver
sity and the water of affliction; who exalteth the
humble, and putteth down the proud ; who sent con
fusion into the camp of Assyrians, and gave a sign in
the sun-dial to Hezekiah that his life should be pro
longed, — everywhere a comforting, a consoling pres
ence, hearing and answering prayer, giving power to
the faint and weary ; so that he who waits upon this
God shall renew his strength, and mount up with
wings as eagles. But why dwell on what is obvious
to every reader of the Bible, and which was not only

THE PROPHET I&AIAH. 213
recognized as a fundamental truth of Isaiah, aud all
the prophets, and all the patriarchs, and all the sages,
and all the good of the Jewish nation, but also by all
the lofty characters who have since lived under the
gospel dispensation ? There can be nothing profound
in philosophy or religion which does not accept this
cardinal truth, or which in any way conflicts with it.
It is the essence of idolatry to repudiate it. Luther
embodied the whole soul of Isaiah in his immortal
hymn, beginning with, "A mighty fortress is our God."
Can it be that those Israelitish sages were mistaken
in their conception of God and his government ? or
that any age in this respect, or any people, can be
wiser or more profound than they ? Has not the
Church indorsed their views, when pure, in psalms, in
songs, in hymns, in prayers, in the dissertations of
divines ? Do not our hearts and minds respond to this
truth, especially in the day of our calamity ? But
you say, " Who denies such a truth as this ? why deal
in platitudes ? " Ah ! there are still many who say,
" There is no God," even in these times of advanced
and hberal Christianity : I mean, no such God as
Abraham and the prophets recognized, or even Pascal
and Edwards.
The great question of this age, said a profound and
learned man to me lately, is, " not whether there is a
Christ, but whether there is a God." The spirit of
the ancient idolaters is hovering over us in mystic
theogonies, in pantheistic dreams, in transcendental
vagaries, even in scientific speculations, which reduce
the God of Isaiah to systems and to laws and influ
ences, — to any thing but a Being ever active in this
world's affairs. Do " the more advanced " believe his

214 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
miracles ? do they acknowledge his special provi
dences ? do they pray to him as one who will answer
their supplications ? Would they not rather explain
away all his mighty wonders and constant agency by
their philosophical theories ? Do they practically be
heve in him as a God who punishes their sins, and
rewards their virtues ? Do they not live without fear
of him, absorbed in their speculations, their vanities,
their pleasures, and their idolatries ? And thus is not
faith undermined, and God ignored, and the very
superstitions which the prophets abhorred and con
demned virtually revived, and made idols of, although
baptized with high-sounding names of progress and
enlightened reason ? Doubtless the progressive party
of the false prophets of the age of Ahaz looked upon
the teaching of Isaiah as little else than rhapsodies
and declamation, and no more believed in his God
than the Assyrian monarch himself when encamped
near Jerusalem. But this unbelief is not wisdom ; it
is not true philosophy ; and is as worthless as the old
civilization itself, with its Babel towers, and its sorce
ries and pretensions, — rebuked by God, overthrown,
as all idols are destined to be, whether Grecian or
Babylonian, by bis awful power.
With such views of God, especially in view of his
holiness and justice, Isaiah brings out another great
principle, founded on the first, — the inevitable pun
ishment of sin ; not a new view, but one which he
enforces with startling emphasis.
If Isaiah had lived in these times of science, some
might conjecture that he would present this 'truth
in the spirit of a philosopher, — in view of his
broad and profound observations of society. We

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 215
love to show this truth in the working of second
causes. We talk of the natural consequences of vio
lated law, — that evil necessarily follows its derange
ment in the moral world ; that there is no escape
from transgression; that laws are uniform in their
operation ; that as water will run down the moun
tain-side, as poison will destroy the body, as he who
jumpeth from a precipice will be killed, as he that
putteth fire in his bosom will be burned, as strong
drink will undermine the system, so he that pursueth
evil pursueth it to his death. As love will call forth
love, as hatred will produce wrath, so will obedience
to divine laws, which are immutable and invariable
in their operation, create peace and happiness, and
disobedience end in the whole disarrangement of
our moral system. Modern philosophy merely says,
" Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap ; "
that the indulgence of wicked passions will cause
these passions to prey upon the soul and body, and
thus produce a necessary penalty. All this is true
and important. But Isaiah did not write in the spirit
of Melville or Combe or Buckle. He had before
his eyes the personal God, who made the laws, and
was ever present to enforce them. He soared alto
gether beyond second causes to the great First Cause,
who took a personal and constant interest in the
world which he had made, and did not retire from it,
leaving it to the force of his communicated power.
He was not supposed by Isaiah to wind up the uni
verse like a clock, and then to leave it to go round in
endless circles, but rather to be always on hand to su
perintend its working. In accordance with this view
of moral government, he beheld in God a stern and

216 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
awful chastiser, from whose hand and eye there was
no escape, even should one " take the wings of the
morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth."
And one thing very noticeable in the mode of chastise-
ment was the infliction of judicial blindness, by which
men are led on to pursue the very course, which, in ac
cordance with natural law, would end in their humili
ation and ruin, even as God is said to have hardened
the heart of Pharaoh. " Wherefore the Lord poured
upon them the spirit of a deep sleep, and closed their
eyes, — the eyes even of prophets and seers." Upon
all sins he inflicts punishment. It is because " princes
are rebellious, and companions of thieves," because
" they do not judge righteously the cause of the widow
and the fatherless," because " the daughters of Zion
are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and
mincing eyes, because evil is called good, and good
evil, because the people cast away the law of the
Lord of hosts, and despise the word of the Holy
One of Israel," that the anger of the Lord is kindled,
and his hand is stretched out in judgment. And es
pecially is the judgment sent because of idolatry, —
the crowning sin, since it is both forgetfulness of God,
and rebellion against his government. For this most
heinous offence the Jews were most signally punished
ever since they had a history ; for this they were
delivered into the hands of their enemies ; for this
they expiated their folly by a seventy-years' captivity.
And closely allied to this was the punishment for
trusting in the day of calamity to any other power,
whether Egypt or Assyria, than to Him. And not
only upon the Jews, but upon all nations, are judg
ments sent for iniquities which cry to Heaven for ven-

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 217
geance, since all alike are under his government. To
them there is no peace. After declaring the divine
judgment in general upon all transgressions, and
with the most impressive solemnity, — thus evolving
the great principle of retribution wliich no one ques
tions, and from which there is no relief, even though
it may be explained by the operation of natural
causes, — Isaiah soars into the realm of prophecy, and
predicts special judgment on various nations ; all of
which came to pass. These are in the form of woes.
Palestina, or Philistia, shall be smitten more griev
ously than by David or Uzziah. Tyre, the city of
merchant-princes, shall be forgotten seventy years,
and the pride of her glory shall be stained; "for
out of the serpent's root" — that is, the house of
David — " shall come forth a basilisk, and her fruit
shall be a flying serpent, a winged dragon:" there
by indicating even more severe chastisement from
Judah than what had already been inflicted. Moab,
originally subdued by David, so proud and fruitful,
should be again conquered ; and, even within three
years of the prophecy, its glory should pass away
as it did before the armies of Assyria. Damascus
too, one of the oldest and most beautiful cities of
the world, should be reduced to a heap of ruins.
Ethiopia, or Nubia, shall be scattered and peeled as it
was overrun by Asshur. And the earliest and the
most civilized of all heathen kingdoms, Egypt, shall
be given over to the hand of a cruel lord, who shall
rule fiercely : it shall be smitten and be conquered,
and its people shall be led away captives, with every
indignity that Sargon and the Assyrians could employ.
Arabia also shall be smitten, and the glory of Kedah
19

218 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
shall fail. But the severest woe is denounced upon
Babylon, the mightiest city of the world, the beauty
of the Chaldean excellency. This city shall be
utterly destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah, and
so completely, that " neither the Arabian shall pitch
tent there, neither shall the shepherds make their fold
there, after it is destroyed ; only wild beasts of the
desert shall lie there, and owls and satyrs and drag
ons." And wherefore ? Because she trusted in her
wickedness, and was perverted by her knowledge,
and " said in her heart, There is none else beside me ;
I will exalt my throne above the stars; " and therefore
desolation should come upon her suddenly, in spite
bf her high walls and proud towers, her sorcerers
and astrologers, her armies and her wise men. The
prophet even tells the name of him by whose hand the
punishment should come, — even Cyrus ; although
the woe was denounced nearly three hundred years
before Cyrus was born : a most marvellous revelation
of prophetic power, seen not only in the fall of Baby-
lom, but in the predicted restoration of the Jews
themselves by this Persian conqueror.
I am well aware that many respectable men of the
neologistic party get over this astounding prophecy
by calling it an interpolation. But it seems it exist
ed in the writings of Isaiah in the time of Cyrus ; so
that Josephus affirms that this remarkable passage
induced Cyrus to send back the Jews to their native
land. If there were reasonable grounds that this was
an interpolation, I think that so great a commenta
tor, so learned and profound, as Delitzsch, would have
replied to it. But he accepted it, and gives his
reasons, and shows how and why he was the Lord's

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 219
anointed to loose the loins of kings, and open the
gates of brass, and seize the hidden treasure, amount
ing, according to Brerewood, to 1631,120,000, — more
than the Prussian Empire exacts from conquered
France, if the relative value of gold is considered, —
conquered as completely as Assyria was by Cyrus.
But the Jews were not to be restored until they
should suffer the most grievous calamity ever inflicted
on a conquered people, — so grievous, that the miser
able Jews should sit down by the rivers of Babylon,
and weep when they remembered Zion. Nothing can
be more definite than the predictions against Ariel,
the city where David dwelt : " I will camp against
thee round about, and will lay siege against thee "
(not the Assyrian, but God Almighty) ; " I will raise
forts against thee ; and thou shalt be brought down,
and thy speech shall whisper out of the ground, and
thou shalt be visited with the flame of devouring fire."
And as for Ephraim, " his crown of pride shall be
trodden under foot, and his glorious beauty shall be a
fading flower." All these stern punishments are rep
resented by Isaiah as the direct visitation of God, —
he who formed the light and created the darkness,
and against whom it is as vain to strive as the clay
itself against the hand of the potter.
But, if God ruleth in justice, he also ruleth in mer
cy, which is as strikingly a divine attribute. And
hence Isaiah, with his conceptions of God, is filled
with hope and exultation as well as fear, and brings
out a third great principle, — that chastisement is sent
in order to bring men into subjection to God's moral
government, and to a consequent enjoyment of his favor.
With all the sadness or fierceness with which he

220 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
denounces woes, he never loses sight of forgiveness
and reconciliation. In regard to Judah, he is full of
joy in view of the few that shall be saved ; and this
idea is so prominent in his mind, that he names his
own son Shear-jashub, — "a remnant shall return."
This was his watchword. Ever is there a highway
for the remnant which shall return to Zion. Certain
is it that the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, whom
he hath chosen. Upon all the world, too, is the divine
blessing poured, provided there be a return to God.
The forgiveness is unbounded, and for any sin, even
though it be as scarlet. What a consolation to thieves,
murderers, and idolaters ! What, a comfort to fallen
women, and men under the torture and bondage of
destructive passions ! What a great system of grace
is here unfolded, as if mercy overshadowed and over
mastered justice ! What an anticipation of the pe
culiar blessings of the New Testament, which reveals
so distinctly salvation without expiation by the sin
ner himself, like that of the thief on the cross, and
the adulterous woman who washed the feet of Jesus
with her tears ! The prophet proclaims redemption
fully, boundlessly: "Ho, every one that thirsteth,
come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money ;
come ye, buy and eat ; yea, come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price," — unbounded
forgiveness, if the wicked will but forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts ; not accord
ing to our notion of forgiveness, — for we would nat
urally execute vengeance to the bitter end on those
who have injured us, — but according to His everlast
ing love, as mysterious as his justice itself. " For
my thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord."

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 221
His love goeth out so boundlessly, " that the moun
tains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and
the trees of the fields shall clap their hands." Thus
is the sternness of the prophet, in view of retribution,
relieved by his exultant soul in view of a love which
averts retribution itself : " For the Lord's hand is not
shortened that it cannot save." And here he soars
beyond the Jew ; here he is as cheerful as Jeremiah
is sad. He is filled with hope. Not only shall Judah
repent, — that is, a remnant, — but, for the sake of this
remnant, mercies are to be bestowed upon the whole
nation. Judah is carried captive to Babylon as a
chastisement; but Judah shall return purified and
wiser, and again flourish as a nation. The prophet
not only lays down a sublime law of divine benevo-
ence, but sees with far-reaching vision the glory of
the redeemed.
Thus far, Isaiah appears to us more like a sage
than like a prophet. He lays down laws of moral
government. He dwells on the mercies of God, in
spite of sin. He takes the broadest views of for
giveness. He embraces the whole world in his man
tle of promises. He comforts all good people under
chastisement. He speaks of God as a father as
well as a judge, more mindful of his children than
Abraham or Jacob. But he now sings another song,
so rapturous, so full of hope, so exultant, that many
commentators suppose that another man wrote the
second part of the book ; and even Dean Stanley in
dorses the view : but Delitzsch (I believe, a Jew, and
a severe critic) brings conclusive reasons that the
same man penned all parts of the prophecy. It is
here, from the fifty-second chapter, that the prophetic
19*

222 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
mission of Isaiah is most distinctly unfolded, and
where he looms up above all other prophets ; for, in
the concluding chapter, he speaks of the redemption
of both Jew and Gentile, which shall take place
through a Messiah. Here he blends the forgiveness
of sins, based on God's mercy, with the promised
Deliverer who shall bear their penalty. From the
expulsion of Adam from Paradise, God promised that
the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's
head; and he repeated this promise to Noah, and
more impressingly to the "father of the faithful,"
from whose descendants this Deliverer should arise.
For this purpose the Jews ever remained a chosen and
favorite people, because the Messiah should come from
their nation and from the house of David. This was
their exalted privilege, according to the purposes of
God, and for the sake of those who ever acknowledged
him. And blessing is typified and foreshadowed in
all the sacrifices of the temple- wor ship. The devout
Jews were even consoled in calamity by the hope of
future deliverance in the person of the promised
Messiah. But Isaiah foretells in what form he shall
come ; yea, he predicts all the facts of his personal
history. Had he lived in the apostolic age, he could
not be more minute in his descriptions of the Messiah.
Not only " shall there come forth a rod out of the
stem of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots, with the
Spirit of the Lord upon him, to judge the poor with
righteousness, and reprove with equity for the meek
of the earth ; " but he shall be " a man despised and
rejected ; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief; who shall be wounded for our transgressions,
and bruised for our iniquities ; oppressed and afflicted ;

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 223
brought as a lamb to the slaughter; taken from
prison and from judgment; cut off from the living;
making his grave with the wicked, and with the rich
in his death; yet bruised, because it pleased the
Lord, and because he made his soul an offering for
sin, and made intercession for the transgressors."
Who is this stricken, persecuted, martyred personage,
thus bearing the iniquity of others? Isaiah, with
transcendent majesty of style, declares that this
child which is to be born, this light which should
appear beyond Jordan in Galilee, is no less than He
on whose shoulders shall be the government, and
whose name " shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince
of peace ; of the increase of whose kingdom and
peace there should be no end, upon the throne of
David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to es
tablish it with judgment and justice forever."
And having announced this grand prophecy by
which justice and mercy shall meet together, and the
sins of the race atoned for by a divine being incar
nated from the seed of David, a Saviour sent "to
preach good tidings, to bind up the broken-hearted,
and proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening
of the prison to those that are bound," — which ac
tually took place seven hundred years after the
prophecy was declared, — the prophet-poet sings a
yet higher song, and soars to still grander heights.
He breaks forth in rhapsodies. He cannot contain his
exultations. He sings as sweetly as he does majes
tically. His whole soul is ravished with the view.
For this deliverer from sin, this Messianic Saviour,
shall reign as a personal King over all nations in

224 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
peace and righteousness, so that the people " shall
beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears
into pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the
leopard shall lie down with the kid ; and the earth
shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the
waters cover the seas. The wflderness and the soli
tary place shall be glad ; and the desert shall rejoice,
and blossom as the rose. Every valley shall be ex
alted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low ;
and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all
flesh shall see it." In view of such a reign, whose
seat was Jerusalem, Isaiah calls upon the earth to be
joyful, and all the mountains to break forth in sing
ing, and Zion to awaken, and Jerusalem to put on
her beautiful garments, and all waste places to break
forth in joy ; for the glory of the Lord is risen upon
the renewed land and the city of David, to which the
glory of Solomon shall come, and kings and Gentiles
also with songs and everlasting joy.
And here I must bring my lecture to a close, not
without regret that commentators shed no more light
on Isaiah's meaning in reference to the renewed glories
of Jerusalem which are associated with the Messiah's
triumphs. For the prophet still lingers over Zion, the
holy city, to which the redeemed of the Lord shall
return with songs and thanksgiving and praise, no
more to be called " forsaken," but a city in which
the Lord delights. All Christians accept the belief
that a reign of peace and love shall be established on
the earth when the Messiah shall reign from sea to
sea, and from shore to shore. The hymns and melo-

THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 225
dies of the Church are inspired with this cheering
anticipation of millennial glories. And as good
men in their prayers ever utter a sound theology,
whatever may be their technical creeds ; so does the
psalmody of the Church break forth into the very
spirit of the prophets, and is rapturous over the re
stored glories of the New Jerusalem and the peaceful
and triumphant reign of Christ. The commentators
on this interesting point are utterly unsatisfactory,
sometimes pedantic, often narrow, and even uncan-
did ; stretching the prophecies on their theories, not
their theories on the prophecies; sceptical of what
they cannot reconcile with accepted doctrines, and
abandoning the higher realm of faith in the encroach
ments of the reason. They are learned in words ;
they overload their explanations with pedantic and
ostentatious research: but they do not go where
inspired declarations lead. They have not even the
faith of the poets, who more often accept the literal
word of inspiration, and therefore, unfettered, soar
into the realms which Isaiah and other prophets
reveal for the consolation of Israel. It is the great
lyric poets who sustain our faith and warm our souls
with their hallowed glow. They are the most im
mortal of men, since they touch the heart of all the
ages, and, in their fervid piety, overlook all the shib
boleths and parties which criticism and rationalism
seek to perpetuate. It is from them, outside the
prophets, that we catch the brightest glimpses of
the reign of Jesus, whose throne shall be estabhshed
on the top of the mountain; of the glory of Zion,
and the restoration of Jerusalem ; coming for a
certainty, and sooner, perhaps, than we dream. In

226 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the temporal ruin of the Papal Empire, in the
fall of cities and kingdoms, in the light which is
penetrating into all lands, in the shaking of Mo
hammedan thrones, in the opening of the East, in
Ethiopia stretching forth her hands unto God, in
the renewed interest in Palestine, in the cultivation
of the now barren hills, which could be made as
fertile as in the time of Solomon, we feel like utter
ing the inspired words of Isaiah : " Arise, O captive
daughter ! for thou shalt suck the milk of the Gen
tiles; and they shall call thee the city of the Lord,
the Zion of the Holy One of Israel, when all
flesh shall come to worship before me, saith the
Lord." In the language of a great poet, we again
repeat the promised joy : —
" Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise I
Exalt thy towery head, and lift thine eyes I
See a long race thy spacious courts adorn 1
See future sons and daughters yet unborn ! . . .
See barbarous nations at thy gates attend,
Walk in thy light, and in thy temple bend !
See thy bright altars thronged with prostrate kings,
And heaped with products of Sabaean springs 1 . . .
No more the rising sun shall gild the morn,
Nor evening Cynthia fill her silver horn ;
But lost, dissolved, in thy superior rays,
One tide of glory, one unclouded blaze,
O'erflow thy courts : the Light himself shall shine
Revealed, and God's eternal day be thine.
The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay,
Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away ;
But, fixed His word, his saving power remains :
Thy realm forever lasts ; thy own Messiah reigns."

VI.
THE GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS.
BT REV. GEORGE B. CHEEVER, D.D.
THE Hebrew prophets stand out among all races
of men, and forms of vaticination, foremost and
sublime. They appear in a superiority as striking
above all common personifications of eloquence, and
sublimities of action, as the volcano, the earthquake,
the cataract, and the mountain-avalanche, above all
natural phenomena. There is nothing ordinary or
borrowed : every thing is original, and on a mighty
scale. Their entrance on the stage, their parts, their
exit, are unexpected, startling, comet-like. They
shoot athwart the troubled evening sky of the Hebrew
kingdoms, rendering the darkness and terror of the
night of tempest and desolation more terrible. They
appear and vanish like intensest lightnings in mid
night storms, revealing the whole horizon in a
ghastly vividness, and then leaving it in gloom.
Their number and grandeur increase up to the ful
filling of the destiny of the race and kingdom ; and
though they are charged with God's thunders, the
tremendous denunciation of his vengeance against
national and individual sins, yet are they plaintive,
persuasive, and full of regretful, weeping patriotism :
227

228 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
they touch the deepest chords of sympathy with their
exquisitely tender and affecting appeals. No poetry
ever was so full of unaffected passion, none more
completely Ihe creation of the heart and of purely
original genius.
This, indeed, is the effect of divine inspiration, a
separation, a detachment from other minds, a pos
session by the Spirit of God, and the consequently
unembarrassed and completely natural action of all
the faculties of judgment and of genius. Each
mind is, as it were, islanded in the ocean of divine
thought, and presents a perfect circumference of
native fruits and flowers. Under the most absorbing
influence and possession of the divine inspiring Spirit,
the mind acts with the most perfect freedom, and
native, original power; the celestial influence not
overbearing and repressing, but lightening, rarefying,
elevating, the natural faculties, never before so free,
never so powerful ; that which, in uninspired minds,
would be labor and art, being wholly the action of
nature, transfigured, transported, spontaneous, more
perfectly natural, because divinely inspired.
Besides the grand, continuous, olamic strain of yes
terday, to-day, and forever, ever and anon thunder
ing in the hallelujah-chorus of Messianic prophecy,
they always had a particular mission for their own
age, a definite design and sphere, a fire infolding
itself, and a wheel in the middle of a wheel. Hence
no unmeaning generalities, or sermons in the shape
of essays, ever found place in their deliverances.
Every thing is of purpose, has an aim, and goes to it
as direct and swift as a cannon-ball. There are no
palliatives, no courteous disguises or court-dresses,

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 229
for rude and bitter truths. God's message, whatever
it was, sometimes individual and personal, sometimes
national, to kings, princes, priests, or people, was
announced without circumlocution, without apology,
without any pleading for a kind reception, without
the least regard to criticism or human opinion, custom
or convenience. No shadow of fear ever fell upon
the dial of God's truth in their hearts, or caused any
hesitation in its utterance. The fiercest invectives
struck like the lightning, with no more question as to
consequences than Nature asks when God's voice
breaks the cedars of Lebanon. " The prophet that
hath a dream, let him tell a dream ; but he that hath
my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What
is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord ? Is not my
word like the fire, saith the Lord ? and like the ham
mer, that breaketh the rock in pieces ? "
But with all this particularity and vehemence, this
closeness and yet carelessness as to application, this
grim, stern, exulting heedlessness as to whomsoever
might be shot through the heart or offended, there
was the widest compass of thought and variety of
illustration, always simple and forcible, often homely
to the last degree, and inadmissible for rudeness, ac
cording to the rules of modern rhetoric. The grand
est truths, the most comprehensive principles, are shot
forth in the proclamation of local messages. They
are hke chariots with wheels of fire-works, taking fire
with their own velocity, and rolling on, enveloped in
smoke and flames. " Clouds and darkness are round
about Him; righteousness and judgment are the
habitation of His throne. His lightnings enlightened
the world : the earth saw, and trembled."
20

230 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Gray's description of the minstrel answers to the
ideal of a Hebrew prophet as the imagination might
present him under the force of a sudden inspira
tion: — " Loose his beard and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air."
Washington Allston's painting of the prophet Jere
miah is an equally grand conception. But no set of
men has ever been known among the poets or priests
of any nation or generation at all corresponding with
the prophetic minstrels of the Jews. And for a very
plain reason : because on the globe there has never
been any other class of divinely-inspired orators or
poets. The library of the nation (and it was a cir
culating-library) was appointed and prepared of God,
not only with reference to future ages, not only as
predicting and preparing the redemption of mankind,
but with reference to the immediate intellectual and
spiritual wants of the subjects of the old dispensa
tion. The individuality and originality in the volumes
of this Hebrew library are such, and the profoundness
and comprehensiveness of the views and principles
enunciated so grand and so transfiguring to the mind
that receives them and ponders upon them, that, small
as this library was (though, from incidental notices,
known to have been much larger than most persons
suppose), it was more disciplining, invigorating, ele
vating, than all the productions of Greek and Roman
genius. It appealed to and awakened the mind's
spiritual energies : "deep calleth unto deep;" a pene
trating voice from heaven went through the heart
and soul of all earnest listeners. Not as a luxury,

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 231
not for an amusement, not to beguile the time or
win the . admiration and applause bestowed on the
development of genius, but under the guidance of
God, in solemn and eternal earnestness, did these
men address the nation, as they do now, through this
library, address the world.
Their individual characteristics are as marked and
unmistakable as the qualities of the whole class.
Being raised up and inspired for particular emer
gencies, they have the sharp, rugged outlines and
prominences belonging to such natures, developed by
and for such heroic necessities. Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Joel, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Daniel, Ezekiel, while their
ministrations all ran on converging to one and the
same great consummation, are as separate and inde
pendent as if they belonged to different ages and
nations. This spiritual unity from Moses to Malachi,
the harmony of instruments so isolated and diverse
across so many centuries, is one of the multiplied
proofs of an unerring inspiration, completed in
Christ. These records of the elements of priesthood, proph
ecy, moral and ceremonial law, practical piety, provi
dential history in the conduct of man, and the
interpositions of God, are before us, reaching through
a period of near four thousand years. The impreg
nable foundation of our faith is this, — that what was
in times past spoken to the fathers by the Hebrew
prophets was as certainly and directly spoken by
God, and is as authoritative a divine revelation, as
that which, being spoken in the last days by Jesus
Christ, is called the gospel of his Son. The one and
the other are equally the gospel of the grace of God.

232 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
A consideration of some of the following points, at
much greater length than is possible in any one of
these lectures, would be of use in the elucidation of
the argument : —
1. The spiritual, prophetic, and historic unity of
the Old Testament, from Moses to Malachi.
2. The estabhshment of prophetic schools, and
God's covenant of a baptism of his prophets by the
Holy Spirit in conjunction with the truth.
3. A comparison of the prophetical and priestly
functions and their relations.
4. The causes and occasions of the multiplication
of false prophets.
5. The relation between particular prophetic mis
sions, and the central successive and permanent pre
dictions of the great coming salvation.
6. The necessity of a close comparative scrutiny of
the historical and prophetic books with contempora
neous fragments, whether in monuments or historic
records, and equally of their examination in the hght
of the New-Testament revelation.
7. The combined moral and historical argument of
divine inspiration in the nature of the personal piety
developed in the Old Testament.
8. The records of the elements of such personal
religion in the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
and the Psalms.
9. The authority of Christ, final and absolute, as
to the inspiration and interpretation of the Old-Tes
tament Scriptures.
We can but glance at some of these topics, and
combine others, noting inevitable conclusions or dem
onstrations as we pass.

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 233
I.  THE PRIESTHOOD AND THE PEOPHETS.
Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, our
Lord expounded to his disciples in all the Scriptures
the things concerning himself. Here we have an
emphatic testimony as to the unity of the whole Old
Testament in Christ, and the purpose for which, from
the beginning, the revelation was founded and in
creased. Successive prophets received the torch of
revealed truth from the hands of Moses, applying
and interpreting the moral law ; at the same time that
a succession of priests ministered at the altar, serving
God and the people in the ceremonial law, unto the
example and shadow of heavenly things, the shadow
of the great coming salvation. Thus, while it was
not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should
take away sin, — and the people knew it, for God's
benevolence and truth would never have permitted
them to suppose that it could, — the sacrificial offer
ings were a means of the conviction of guilt and the
need of pardon. And so priests and prophets together
ministered God's truth to the conscience, until the
unfaithfulness of the priests, and iniquities of the peo
ple, required a separate independent class.
The appointment of the Levitical priesthood, as
described in Malachi, was originally that of a compre
hensive gospel ministry of life and peace : " My
covenant was with him of life and peace ; and I gave
them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, and
was afraid before my name. The law of truth was
in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips :
he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn
many away from iniquity. For the priest's lips
20*

234 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
should keep knowledge, and they should seek the
law at his mouth ; for he is the messenger of the Lord
of hosts."
But the priestly service might easily become a mere
formalism, without life, kept up by men who were
ignorant of the spiritual meaning of their own ser
vices. And so, in fact, the service and the priests did
degenerate and become debased, till life and truth
were left with the prophets almost solely, and the
temple-service was either interrupted and neglected,
or perverted and defiled. Because the sons of Eli
made themselves vile, and knew not the Lord, but
profaned his service and sacrifices, therefore God cut
them off; and Samuel judged Israel both as priest and
prophet. Through individual ambition, carelessness, and for-
getfulness of God, the priesthood tended from the first
to the formalism and corruption of an ecclesiastical
oligarchy. The process is described in Jer. ii. 8 : " The
priests said not, Where is the Lord ? and they that
handle the law knew me not." Then and there began
the corruption ; and immediately follows another step :
" The pastors also transgressed against me, and the
prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things
that do not profit ; " kings, princes, priests, prophets,
saying to a stock, " Thou art my father," till their
gods were carved as many as their cities.
Thenceforward prophets were needed like the Wick-
liffes, Luthers, and faithful preachers raised up from
time to time in the middle ages to testify against the
apostasies and corruptions of the Church of Rome;
and therefore they had the perilous burthen of a
revelation and rebuke against priests, rulers, and
people.

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 235
In reference to this commission, God says to Hosea,
one of the sharpest of these cimeters, " Therefore
have Ihewed them by the prophets ; I have slain them
by the words of my mouth : for they have transgressed
the covenant, and dealt treacherously against me."
It was not an old hereditary idolatry of men that
never knew better by any divine oracles, the heir
loom and education of Hittites and aboriginal savages,
but the idolatry of dehberate choice and knowledge ;
of the passions and their vices against reason and
God ; of men aware of their immortality and accounta
bility, but preferring evil to good ; " brutish in their
knowledge ; " shameless, unblushing, sensual ; " mad
upon their idols ; " the idolatry of conspiracy and
treason, deserting God's service to hire themselves
out to Baal. The work of God's true prophets upon
such apostasy and rebellion required rebukes as of
fire, the utmost energy of stinging sarcasm and broad
anathematizing indictments, as in Isaiah, Elijah, Jere
miah. It was to be like the work of Samuel in hew
ing Agag in pieces before the Lord. They were to
be God's broad-axes and claymores, cleaving and hew
ing by the word of God's mouth. The sensualists
that had forsaken the fountain of living waters for
broken cisterns and wine-flagons should have worm
wood, and water of gall, to drink ".Seest thou not
what they do ? " said Jeremiah. " The children gather
wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women
knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of
heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto other
gods, that they may provoke me to anger. Behold,
mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon
this place ; man, beast, trees of the field, and fruit of

236 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be
quenched." Under Samuel, the system of schools for the train
ing of the prophets was gradually developed and
perfected : " For all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba,
knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet of
the Lord. And the Lord appeared again in Shiloh ;
for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel in Shiloh by
the word of the Lord. And the word of Samuel
came to all Israel." The Spirit of God was declared
to be always in and with the revelation : " Thou
gavest them right judgments and true laws, good
statutes and commandments, and madest known unto
them thy holy sabbath, and commandedst them pre
cepts, statutes, and laws, by the hand of thy servant
Moses. Thou gavest them also thy good Spirit to
instruct them, and testifiedst against them by thy
Spirit in thy prophets."
Thus all additions to the revelation were made by
the Spirit, through men appointed or called of God,
endowed by his Spirit, and sent upon their mission
to the people and the nation, as directly and expli
citly in every case, as if, as in that of the prophet
Isaiah, there had been an ordination-service by the
laying-on of the hands of seraphim, and the applica
tion of a living coal to the lips from God's altar, and
the command of the Almighty heard by listening
angels, " Go and tell this people, Thus saith the
Lord." It was a well-known canon of revelation, that
the word of God never came but by the Spirit of
God : it was also announced and covenanted of God
that the gift not only of his inspiring but abiding
Spirit went with the word, for the interpretation of it

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 237
in the heart ; for the guidance and benefit of the pro
phets themselves in speaking it, and the instruction
and life of all sincere souls seeking it. Repeatedly
and emphatically it is asserted, as in Isa. lix. 21 and
lv. 8-13, " This is my covenant, saith the Lord : My
Spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have
put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth,
nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the
mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the Lord, from hence
forth and forever." On this ground they were made
certain, as in Isa. viii. 19, 20, that, in seeking to the
law and the testimony, — the written, unchangeable,
well-known, infallible revelation, — they sought unto
the Lord their God ; and, whatever or whoever it
might be that spake not according to that testimony,
there was no light in them.
So important it was that the inviolability and full
meaning of this assurance and authority should be
guarded, because the whole salvation of the nation
and of the soul depended on the certainty of a divine
revelation, that, in the primal organization and pro
tection of the system by law, the penalty of death
was settled against the interpolator or pretender. He
might as well attempt to grasp God's lightnings.
" The prophet which shall presume to speak a word
in my name which I have not commanded him to
speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods,
that prophet shall die" (Deut. xiii. 1-5, and xviii.
18-22.) It was thus that the prophet Elijah restored and
vindicated the authority of God's law, acting by it
to the letter, when he slew in one day the four
hundred and fifty prophets of Baal who had been

238 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
destroying the souls of the people by their pretended
divination. The schools of the Hebrew prophets were, beyond
doubt, educational gymnasiums on this foundation, for
discipline and use in the study and knowledge of the
word and will of God by his Spirit. In the case of
all sincere students seeking God's Spirit by prayer,
it was a preparation for the consecration of their
whole life and being to the spiritual work and king
dom of God ; and it was the known presence of the
Spirit of God that went far to maintain always for
them such an almost despotic authority in every tribe
and court, whenever they were called to convey the
message of a " Thus saith the Lord."
The penalty of death against every pretender must
have invested the preparatory work with great solem
nity, and must have led to great searching of the
heart, and spiritual wrestling for the true witness of
the Spirit in their studies. And so the system grew
according to the needs of a true spiritual life. At
first, in the blade, and not in the full ear, as all God's
and man's best things are a gradual growth of life, it
was more under the law of eminent individual example
and character, as in the case of Samuel. It was like
the spontaneous growth of students for the ministry,
before theological seminaries had been endowed and
established with a body of instructors : they at first
set themselves as pupils and under-workers at the feet
of some master in Israel. At length came the organi
zation of colleges, teachers, classes ; though the par
ticular system seems not to have been developed and
settled till the time of Samuel.
Under his administration, Bethel was one of the

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 239
three places in Samuel's circuit as the judge of Israel,
and became the seat of the earliest of these establish
ments. Saul himself met a company of the prophets
coming down from the hill of God, with a psaltery, a
pipe, and a harp before them ; and the Spirit of the
Lord came upon him, and he prophesied along with
them. His case, and more emphatically that of Ba
laam, evidently shows that a man might be an actual
prophet, inspired of God to utter what it pleased
God that he should utter, and not otherwise, and yet
not a regenerated man ; the mind, but not the heart,
being under God's control for God's utterance, and
the word so uttered God's own word, infallible.
But if so when only half the being was under infalli
ble inspiration, and the other half merely compelled
to submission, how much more infallible when the
mind, heart, affections, prayerful sensibilities and sin
cerities, were all combined and fused under one and
, , the same flame of truth and love, as the whole sub
stance of a diamond burns under a compound blow
pipe ! and the whole immortal being, in that consum
ing and yet hght-and-life-sustaining inspiration, was
all at once human, natural, and divine. God's word,
when it came through the soul of a prophet thus
spiritually new-created, and filled with God's love,
and every part and manifestation of the character
drawn into a living unity, came with a glory and a
power irresistible, and sometimes, if need were,
sweeping as a divine whirlwind.
The instance of Balaam, as well as passages in the
life of Abraham, Melchisedec, and Job, show how
widely spread was the knowledge of the fact of pro
phetic inspiration, and how authoritative the influence

240 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of it, the infallibility attached to it, even outside the
border-lands covered by the records of Scripture.
Indeed, the transit of such men across the firmament,
and the apparition of so vast a circle of minds as
they must have taught and influenced, are as windows
opening out into regions of mystery, yet reality, where
a heavenly intercourse between God and men, by the
Spirit and the Word, is suggested, to an extent, the
record of which, and of God's goodness in it, it never
pleased him should be written down in our Scriptures.
II.  DISTINCTION OF PROPHETICAL AND PRIESTLY
FUNCTIONS.
In a comparison of the prophetical and priestly
functions, it is manifest, that, while the latter depended
upon the system and fixtures of the ceremonial law,
the former depended immediately upon God, and upon
the personal inspiration of the individual by his Spirit.
The priestly function in the way of teaching was like
an engraving with an explanatory key : the prophetic
function was a fresh revelation, with new warnings
and commands. The functions of the prophets were,
first, prophetic in our limited sense of the term, —
predicting things to come ; second, preceptive, — in
structing men as to God's will and their own duty ;
and, third, calling men to repentance, and announcing
the retributive wrath of God against sin persisted in.
It was this last function, and the necessity of faithful
ness, boldness, and unsparing pungency in it, that
exposed the prophets to so much danger, both from
governmental and sometimes popular fury. The pro
fession of a true prophet came at length to be well
known as a perilous, self-denying, self-renouncing

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 241
work. Seldom were they carried on the wings of
popular applause ; much oftener their eloquence was
rewarded on the spot with violence and death.
"Which of the prophets," asked our blessed Lord,
" have not your fathers persecuted ? " The priests,
being ordinary fixtures of the law, were under no
such pressures, either of responsibility or danger, if
they chose to shirk them ; but the prophets were
preachers, who drew forth the coals of living truth
from the ashes of formalism raked over them by the
indifference and unbelief of the priesthood, and ap
plied them to kindle fires in men's consciences.
Through them the word of God came with present,
pointed, new applications to present sins.
They took God at his word, and the word at God's
mouth, and proclaimed it. There was in . their mes
sages a most amazing mixture of light and darkness,
unaccountable to themselves ; but they never with
held an unwelcome truth, nor doubted nor refused a
glory because of its mystery. It was not to please
men that the true prophets came ; and they would
not, in order to please men, consent to prophesy
smooth things instead of right ones, or to withhold
the messages of the Lord of hosts against a popular
wickedness. They would not suffer men to dictate
to them what part they should present, and what
withhold : they were not as merchants, opening their
wares for the people to toss over their goods, and
select what pleased themselves, according to color
and fashion ; nor commission-merchants, ordered by
the people to get for them goods of a particular
stamp and texture. What God ordered they brought,
and not what the people ordered or preferred. In
21

242 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
direct contrast with those who " divined for money
and taught for hire," who prophesied " the liberty of
wine and strong drink, falsehood and peace," forge
ries of visions with a " Thus saith the Lord," " vanity
and lying divinations," the prophet Micah is com
missioned with a pall of night and wrath and dark
ness upon them, sentenced to judicial dumbness, and
hps sealed in silent shame. " But truly I am full of
power by the Spirit of the Lord, and of judgment and
of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression,
and to Israel his sin." And then he lets loose a bat
tery of God's thunderbolts, ploughing Zion and Je
rusalem in heaps ; and then suddenly there bursts
forth a sunlike promise of the Saviour, and the very
mention of his birthplace in Bethlehem-Ephratah, his
goings-forth from everlasting, and his saving majesty
and greatness unto the ends of the earth.
For it was never the men that prophesied peace,
crying, " Is not the Lord among us ? no evil can befall
us," and that forbade the denunciation of reigning
sins, to whom God gave the privilege of announcing
Christ ; but it was those who were most faithful, even
unto death, in the application of God's law to the
conscience. While Isaiah himself was proclaiming
the coming of Him who should turn away ungodli
ness from Jacob, and by his knowledge should justify
many, it was equally necessary that he should preach
in thunder-tones against the vast and reigning iniqui
ties of king, court, priest, and people. And so we find
in him and in all the prophets the most astonishing
and awful contrasts, — gloomy black thunder-clouds
and hurricanes, lightnings and tempests, succeeded
by clear shining skies, balmy airs, and the softest

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 243
breezes ; we have terrific jagged mountain-gorges,
precipices, volcanoes, and then the fairest landscapes
of exquisite and ineffable beauty in the colors of
heaven. And, in fact, it is comparatively seldom that
we are led up and down in green pastures and beside
still waters : even in the Psalms, a great portion is
dark and terrible with woes and wailings because of
iniquity, and divine rebukes against sin. So that
sometimes it seems to be the very business of those
angels of God that wait at this Bethesda for our guilt
and misery to trouble the waters, and our own souls
also, before we ourselves can with any avail step down
into them. We must be troubled and distressed, we
must see our burdens and our evils and mourn over
them, before we shall seek deliverance from them;
and meantime, if we are not made to feel them, we
shall be ruined by them.
If this necessity compelled them often to be men of
contention and strife, finding Jeremiah's woe in their
own experience, and the word of God itself a con
suming fire, theirs was also the great burden of glory
and joy in the work of manifesting beforehand the
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow.
Hence it is that the prophets are so often referred to
in the New Testament, the priests so rarely. The
spirit of Christ which was in them did testify before
hand concerning him ; but, besides this, they had a
vocation that still continues. The prophets were in
spired for particular occasions, and preached to the
times, by the Spirit of God, and thus, through the
times, to the ages. Upon all the iniquities of their
own age and generation they turned the lightning of
God's truth, and so have preserved for the world, as

244 CHRISTIANITY A ND SCEPTICISM.
long as the world stands, a record of God's judgments,
a series of divine precedents of infinite importance
and of universal application. The prophets are wit
nessing and so acting at this very day, perhaps with
greater power, for God, for humanity, for righteous
ness and justice, than in any age before. Their tes
timony is for bold, hardened, obstinate, stout-hearted
transgressors ; for tyrants and oppressors ; for covet
ousness, slander, slavery, over-reaching, land-monopo
lizing, and extortion ; for corporate and intrenched
villanies ; and for nations in their unbelief and pride.
They speak to the conscience ; they reveal the justice
of God. They take up the strong and popular sins
of men and communities in detail, and thus join with
the law in preparing the world for the gospel. They
are for this purpose, to all ages and equally, the sword
of the Spirit, and a discerner of the thoughts and in
tents of the heart. They are profitable for reproof,
correction, and instruction in righteousness, that the
man of God may be thoroughly furnished unto all
good works.
III.  MULTIPLICATION OF FALSE PROPHETS.
From the time when the prophetic class were or
ganized into something hke a profession, with its uni
versity, there began to be false prophets, not called
of God. That may have been the way in which they
sprang up, taking the letter instead of the spirit, and
assuming to themselves a call from God, and the au
thority of that call, on the ground of having studied
for the ministry ; mistaking mere knowledge for re
ligion, and mere theology for divine knowledge.
Such persons would be easily drawn away by tempta-

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 245
tion, brought into bondage under wicked kings, per
suaded to lend their sanction to unrighteous laws,
and at length to sustain even the abominations of
idolatry. While none assumed the prophetic office
and work but such as were called of God, we meet
with few or no instances of falsehood and hypocrisy :
but, when the prophetic function became a profession
and a college-life, then there were many in it not
baptized by the Holy Spirit ; and the yielding of
such to the will and wickedness of despotic rulers
always put those who were faithful to God in greater
difficulty and danger.
On the disruption of the Jewish kingdom at Solo
mon's death, and in consequence of his wickedness,
there was suddenly developed, through the satanic
policy of Jeroboam setting up the golden calves in
Dan and Bethel, and inviting the people to a more
convenient, sensually attractive, and accommodating
religion, a school of false priests and prophets for the
worship of Baal, audaciously and insultingly flaunt
ing their demoniac ceremonial full in the face of
God's own estabhshed prophetic school at Bethel. It
was an antique infidel French revolutionary caldron
of government, with harlots for prophets, and butch
ers for statesmen and prime-ministers. Thenceforth
false prophets roamed by hundreds over the country,
scattering lies and death. It was a characteristic
description thenceforward of the worst successive
kings, that they followed Jeroboam the son of Nebat,
who taught Israel to sin. The besotted people willing
ly walked after the pagan State commandment, and
permitted an idolatrous religion to be ordered and im
posed upon them by the State ; and so the opposing
21*

246 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
schemes of heaven and hell became more and more
pronounced and hostile till the climax under Ahab
and Elijah. Ahab, Jezebel, and Israel maintained a
crowd of false prophets and priests for Baal's worship
of ferocity and lust ; Judah and Benjamin retained
the true Levitical priesthood : and so there were wars
to the death between the companies of incarnate de
mons and the prophets of the true God.
A vivid illustration of the terrible enmities and
riots ensuing is found in the life of the prophet Elisha
on the occasion of his assuming the regency of God's
prophetic school at Bethel : for God had maintained
that seminary and its system of teaching and of dis
cipline in the teeth and eyes of Jeroboam's devils;
and doubtless both the professors and students
(speaking of them in modern phrase) had much to
endure from the scorn and opposition of the imperial,
proud, idolatrous court and rabble that had possession
of the city. Immediately after receiving the mantle,
the spirit, and the authority of Elijah, Elisha went
up to Bethel, assuming the government of the sons
of the prophets there. Just before the prophet Eli
jah's translation, the two had passed from Gilgal to
Bethel, and thence to Jericho, where there was an
other division of the sons of the prophets pursuing
their appointed work : so that the last thing Elijah
did on earth was to commune with the students at
both these schools, informing them, that, on his depart
ure from them, Elisha was to be their prophetic mas
ter and guide. So they passed on ; and Ehjah, in the
chariot of fire, ascended to heaven.
When Elisha returned without him, fifty of the
sons of the prophets came forth to meet him ; and at

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 247
Jericho there was no disturbance nor contempt of his
authority, nor insult from devil-worshippers. But these
last had their headquarters at Bethel ; and, though
they had been restrained by the terror of Elijah's
supernatural power, they thought they might safely
insult Elisha in Elijah's absence, and perhaps revolu
tionize the school. So when Elisha, proceeding on
his mission, went up to Bethel, the seat of the wor
ship of the golden calves, then and there a company
of blaspheming and idolatrous young men, fresh from
the orgies of the demon-temple, and bent on the high
est defiance of God, and his chief prophet, who they
knew was coming to pursue the same course that
Elijah had taken before him, cried out in scorn, " Go
up, thou bald-head ! go up, thou bald-head ! " and they
would have continued their hootings, cheered on by
the vile rabble, as of Sodom, into the city, had not
God's vengeance interposed. But God converted
what they intended should be a procession of demo
niac yellings and opprobrium into such retributive
wrath and wailing as shot terror into the hearts of
all the inhabitants. It would be a long time from
that day forward before the young men, or the priests,
or the prophets of Baal, would dare attempt another
mob, or another insolent defiance of the school of
God's preachers and seers, protected by the ven
geance of such miracles. The prophet turned, and
looked upon the raving crowd of idolaters, and cursed
them in the name of the Lord ; and God's justice fell
upon them. She-bears from the wilderness, fit sym
bols of Jezebel's cruelty, who had slain so many of
God's prophets, tore forty and two of them in pieces.
It was by such means, in a period of insolence and

248 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
raging impiety, that God sustained his prophets, and
caused the terror of his judgments to surround them
in the presence of their enemies.
An unfortunate translation of this passage, as if it
were a troop of little children that were eaten by the
bears, has injured the record, and misinterpreted the
meaning of this wrathful providence.
There is no question as to the right interpretation.
It is young men, not boys and girls, who are in
tended. Comparing 1 Kings iii. 7 and Jer. i. 6, we
find that Solomon when anointed king, and Jere
miah when appointed prophet, were denominated
" children," and a " little child," by the same
Hebrew words here employed. They do not mean
what the English idiom represents. Well do we
remember when, in pictures and verses in some of
the primers of our childhood, we used to be horrified
at the fate of these little boys and girls, as represented
in the lesson and the cuts, running from the fury of
the beais. It was very strange and awful, such a
ghastly judgment on a troop of careless children, when
so many worse sins in older people were left unpun
ished. It was not upon little chddren, who could
scarcely be supposed to know what they were doing,
that the judgment fell, but upon a mob of riotous,
profane, blaspheming young devils, the worshippers
of Baal and of the golden calves of Jeroboam. The
city of Bethel continued the headquarters of this great
wickedness, sacred to royal idolatry, at least- a hun
dred years after this transaction. It became a sar
castic proverb, " Go up to Bethel and transgress."
The prophetical and priestly functions being so in
timately allied, and sometimes combined in one and

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 249
the same person, if these two classes could be united
in misleading the people, and had the government with
them, it became a dreadful despotism. " A wonder
ful and horrible thing," said Jeremiah in such an
emergency, " is committed in the land : the people
prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their
means ; and my people love to have it so : and what
will ye do in the end thereof ? " In this case, Jere
miah had been appointed of God — uniting the office
and authority both of priest and prophet, being him
self the son of Hilkiah, in the line of the priests in
Anathoth — to proclaim God's word "against the
kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the
priests thereof, and against the people of the land."
" Ignorant priests," " brutish pastors," and " prophets
prophesying by Baal," were indicted as guilty of a
conspiracy against God ; and Jeremiah had to confront
all these classes along with the king in a conflict by
the word of God unto the death. It was a priest and
governor of the Lord's house that first put Jeremiah
in the stocks ; a priest and false prophet that accused
him to the king ; priests, false prophets, and princes
that demanded the putting of him to death : for the
word of God came out of his lips by the Spirit of
God against every one of them ; and, of all the heroic
preachers whose career is recorded, not one was ever
more faithful and intrepid than he.
IV.  RELATION BETWEEN PARTICULAR LOCAL PROPHETIC
MISSIONS AND THE LINE OF MESSIANIC PROPHECIES.
The particular purposes and charges of prophecy
never interfered with the grand, redemptive, Messi
anic tide: in fact, all these rebukes and judgments

250 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
for the support and purity of a divine revelation
grew out of the certainty and everlastingness of re
demption, which was the only ground and object of
a revelation at all ; and they were ministered because
they were the instruments of redeeming love, — the
blows and searchings of the schoolmaster along the
highways and hedges, gathering scholars, and disci
plining a guilty world for Christ's own teachings.
The relation is, therefore, very necessary to be marked
between the great loving burthen of prophecy con
tinuous through successive eras, and the particular
prophetic missions of instruction, warning, and cor
rection in righteousness.
The grand prophetic purpose and idea in the work
of redemption were becoming more and more fully
developed as it drew towards its fulfilment in Christ.
The prophets prophesied of a kingdom of universal
righteousness, of the knowledge of the Lord to fill
the whole earth, through the sufferings of Christ, and
the glory that should follow. These revelations are
integral parts of the system of redemption from the
beginning of the world. They crop out continually,
as the primeval granite formation that is at the bottom
of all things ; and now and then they tower as mighty
mountain-summits, or whole colossal ranges, above
every other development. Isaiah, for example, is the
Mont Blanc or the Himmaleh range in comparison
with all other elevations.
Our Lord Jesus, when on earth, took his disciples
on this survey, over all these ranges, from mountain-
top to mountain-top, beginning at Moses and the pro
phets, and showed them in all the Scriptures the
things concerning himself. He did not, at that celes-

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 251
tial interview, stay upon other instructions ; but he did
point out for their absolute certainty and guidance
the things concerning himself. It was not that other
things were not important ; for he was continually
adverting to those other things, and illustrating and
transfiguring the moral lessons of the Old Testament
in his preaching : but the things concerning himself
could be best taught, and most lovingly, by himself in
person ; and, being so secured, they could then study
all other things at leisure in that light. Indeed, the
other things, so many of them having been demon
strated in statutes and precedents, in incessant pre
cepts, and in the blaze of God's judgments, " which
are as the light that goeth forth," were quite plain.
But the things concerning the Saviour needed himself
to interpret and fulfil them, being some of them mys
teries from eternity, as unvisited as " the tops of tho
snow-shining mountains." But the things of common
righteousness, and the human society that should
grow out of redemption, — because redemption is the
groundwork of Providence, and bears up the whole
of human existence in a probationary state, — were
as the valleys, plains, and table-lands familiarly in
habited and traversed. The streams that come down
are mountain-streams, and the laws that govern are
mountain-laws. The interposition of God's provi
dence all along the lines of sacred history, and the
particular prophetic missions, were as the stepping-
down of angels from these mountain-heights to carry
God's great ruling principles into action.
And out of the very midst of present passing iniqui
ties, rebukes, and judgments, with which the pro
phetic pages are sometimes filled, as in the case of

252 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Jeremiah, there suddenly shoots towards heaven a
pyramid, a pinnacle ; and a burning beacon blazes
from it, and a flaming standard floats in the upper air
in the sight of all nations. Such are the glorious
mountain-heights in the twenty-third, thirty-first, and
thirty-third chapters of Jeremiah, — summits where
our Lord stood with his loved disciples as they jour
neyed from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and pointed out
to them the glory of the Lord our righteousness, and
of the new covenant, and of the name of joy before
all the nations of the earth.
Thus, although the Hebrew people were so early
divided into two kingdoms, — of which that of the ten
revolting tribes was, for the most part, under the wor
ship and despotism of demons, while that of Judah
and Benjamin retained the temple, the altar, and
the priests of God, — the lines of priestly observance
and instruction according to Moses, and of prophecy
according to Samuel and the prophets, ran on unin
terrupted through all emergencies, wars, convulsions.
As long as the temple-services were kept up, the
law and the prophets ministered the same gospel of
salvation. The Levitical priesthood were attendant
on an altar of sacrifices disclosing the mercy of God in
the forgiveness of sins on the confession of the peni
tent ; and the meaning and efficacy of those sacrifices,
through prayer and faith in " the comers thereunto,"
had been subhmely, and with fire of practical devotion,
taught in the grand prayer of Solomon at the dedica
tion of the temple as a house of prayer for all nations,
the stranger as well as the native. In those supplica
tions and confessions, rites and ordinances, the teach
ings of prophecy and sacrifice, combined in one foun
tain of light and life, for the soul, for eternity.

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 2.")3
The system of types and figures in the law, as well
as the precepts of the Decalogue, constituted a fixture
of divine inspiration, where the priests, serving at
the altar, kept up the fire and the light ; but the
prophets and their messages were, as often as they
occurred, a new creation. The whole scheme of in
struction was, like that of the ordinary course of
Nature, interspersed with miraculous demonstrations.
The service of the temple, with its incessant lessons
of sin and redemption, foreshadowed the forgiveness
of guilt through a Saviour to come. The need and
assurance of God's forgiving mercy were written in
the propitiatory sacrifices from the beginning. When
we read in Leviticus, or in Numbers and Deuteron
omy, the arrangement of types and typical services
foreshadowing the great "redemption for mankind,
and note the part that each individual Hebrew had
to perform with them, — priest, ruler, and all the com
mon congregation alike required to lay their hand on
the head of the sin-offering, confessing their guilt;
and, in ordinary cases, each man bringing an offering
or a sacrifice required to lay his hand on the head of
the victim, confessing his sin, — it is as if we heard
the sweet hymn of Watts rising on the air of the
desert : — " My faith would lay her hand
On that dear head of Thine,
While like a penitent I stand,
And there confess my sin."
They brought their own offerings, and slew the
victims with their own hands, acknowledging their
guilt, and casting themselves on God's forgiving
mercy. 22

254 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
The priests themselves became prophets, teachers,
preachers to the conscience, as they ministered those
services of perpetual prophetic fire. The instruction,
in that case, did not depend on a personal piety or
inspiration ; for the priests, in their courses, might be
like those who conduct and serve the operations of
the electric-telegraph, — keeping its services in order,
attendant on its stations, writing down its messages.
But they were not themselves necessarily inspired
because the law was. They waited on the people
as at a perpetual Bethesda, with its waters open unto
all. They drew for the people from the great urn of
light, as from the fountain of life, in its revelations
of the coming Saviour, — a light which they kept re
volving as an imperishable beacon, as a north star to
the mariner before the invention of the compass.
In their appointed place, they were expounders
and preachers of the law, but not prophets sent of
God with a new and immediate inspiration. But
God would have such a class. He would not only
have an ordinary priesthood of the form, as estab
hshed as the temple itself, but a special priesthood of
the Spirit, holy men of God, speaking as they were
moved by the Holy Ghost, through whom came con
tinually new manifestations of the truth, which ex
celled in glory. The priests were attendant and
dependent on the law : the prophets were attendant
immediately on God.
The priest had come first, because the sin-offering
by blood had been the first revelation of God's mercy
after man's fall, foretelling a Saviour. Abel was
priest ; Enoch, priest and prophet ; Noah, priest and
prophet; Melchisedec, priest and king; Abraham,

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 255
priest and prophet ; Moses, priest and prophet ;
David, prophet and king ; Samuel, prophet and
priest. But the prophets, by their direct inspiration,
were invested with an authority direct from God, —
God, who at sundry times, and in divers manners,
spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets ;
and they were not, in any respect, dependent on
the priests or satellites of the ecclesiastical system.
They were the boldest, freest, most independent,
most entirely unshackled set of men that ever ap
peared in the world.
Take, at the outset of the system, the appearance
of a man of God recorded in the book of Judges, in
the old age of Eh, just before the calling of Samuel.
There came a man of God unto Eh ; and, though his
name is not given, his message from God is recorded,
bold, sharp, decisive, concentrated, bearing a distinct
prophecy, rapidly to be fulfilled, and burning like the
lightning attendant on the thunderbolt. Not a word
more do we hear from that prophet. He appears and
vanishes, as if an angel with a drawn sword stood in
the air and uttered his voice, and poured out his vial,
and then withdrew forever into the bosom of eternity.
Then comes the intimation in 1 Sam. iii. 1, that " the
word of the Lord was precious in those days, and
there was no open vision."
But now, when the priesthood was corrupted in
the personal vices of its incumbents, and darkness
was settling down upon the nation, the prophetic
function was suddenly elevated, in the person of
Samuel, to an instrumentality of great hght and
glory; and under his administration, and unques
tionably by revelation and appointment from God,

256 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the powerful prophetic institute was developed,
which, two or three centuries later, we find disclosed
with so great definiteness under the ministry of the
prophet Elisha.
From Eli's priesthood, a sunset tragedy in storm
and blood, to Samuel, Saul, and David, and from
Samuel and David to Solomon and Rehoboam, the
period of five generations is crowded with contrasted
spectacles of shame and glory, — the passions of re
morseful crime, the splendors of a pure devotion, the
grandeurs of unexampled prosperity, the ingratitude
of vast depravities, and the retributions of divine jus
tice. The almost superhuman apostasy and wicked
ness of Solomon; the profligacy, tyranny, and cor
ruption of a court of such boundless wealth and
luxury, that the royal harem contained seven hundred
wives and three hundred concubines, many of them
the flower and pride of heathenism ; therewith, the
audacious violation of the divine law, so that high
places were budt under the shadow of the temple for
the worship of the most cruel and horrid demons of
paganism, and gorgeous idolatrous chapels reared for
the convenience of the monarch's voluptuous house
hold, — introduced a reign of sin and pride, oppression,
covetousness, debauchery, and impiety, requiring pro
phetic angels, as in Sodom, with a ministry of aven
ging fire. Thenceforth there was need of prophets
of wrath and revolution, — prophets of denunciation
against kings, princes, priests, and people ; and equal
need of prophets of encouragement to those who kept
God's statutes in the face of governmental wicked
ness. And we have examples of such faithfulness in the

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 257
history of Abijah, of Shemaiah, of that man of God
who confronted Jeroboam, of Azariah the son of
Oded, and Hanani the seer against Asa and Baasha,
and Jehu the son of Hanani, the heir of his father's
boldness and prophetic gifts. Then, in the life of
Ehjah the Tishbite, we have the concentration and
culmination of all prophetic endowments, miracles,
authority, majesty, power, faith, and intrepidity, in
conflict against the incarnation, in Ahab and Jezebel,
of the most ferocious and furious impiety against God
and man. He appears Hke a comet at midnight, like
a sun shot into chaos ; and the great, blazing judg
ments of God flash suddenly and mightily amidst the
darkness. Nothing else could have withstood the
tyrant but God's power and wrath thus manifested.
In this history we find indications of a multitude of
prophets both true and false, — many hundreds on
both sides. We have the record of Jezebel's slaugh
ter of the prophets of the Lord by hundreds ; and of
faithful Obadiah hiding a hundred of them by fifties
in a cave, and saving them from destruction. Then
came the counter-slaughter of the prophets of Baal at
the command of Elijah, — a most just and righteous
retribution, since it was with their counsel and aid
that Jezebel had accomplished the murder of God's
true witnesses.
In the twenty-second chapter of this history, we
have the vivid and instructive scene of the conflict
between Micaiah, the son of Imlah, standing entirely
alone in the word of the Lord, and the four hundred
prophets of Ahab and of Baal contradicting and in
sulting him. Then we have the sublime transactions
between Elijah and Elisha, and the ministry of both,
22*

258 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
and the schools of the prophets, and the sons of the
prophets at them, and rapid and multiplied miracles
of God in this time of guilt, idolatry, and violence.
We come down from reign to reign of wickedness,
every third wave as a mountain, till the ten tribes of
Israel are swept from the kingdom into Assyria for
their iniquity, and Judah only remains, under the gift
and guidance of that noble, generous, and believing
monarch, Hezekiah, the illustrious friend and pupil
of the prophet Isaiah, whose long and glorious pro
phetic career began more than thirty years before,
and whose counsels and prayers carried Hezekiah
through the perils of Sennacherib's invasion and the
valley of the shadow of death.
Nearly contemporary with Isaiah were the proph
ets Hosea, Amos, and Micah : so that this period
was by far the most brilliant epoch of all Hebrew
prophecy ; at least, so far as the written revelation is
concerned. Then, within a brief period, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah appear,
and within the same cycle, — the first part of the life
and prophesyings of Daniel. Then come Daniel,
Haggai, and Zechariah ; and last of all, after the
epoch of Ezra the priest, and Nehemiah the governor,
and the restoration of the captivity under them,
comes the prophecy of Malachi.
V.  AN INFALLIBLE INSPIRATION AND REVELATION
INEVITABLE.
All these books of historic chronicles and prophetic
records are enshrinements of the word of God : the
histories are commentaries on the prophets, and the
prophets are God in the history. The whole is a

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 259
divine picture in its frame ; but the frame is intended
and arranged with such skill and effect of shadows
and cross lights as to be an essential part of the pic
ture, having been contrived, carved, and put together
by the artist himself for that very purpose. It is an
inspired unity, divine, infallible.
Now, at this point between the old revelation
and the new, we strike the central hinge and key-
principle of both ; namely, -the necessity and reality
of an infallible revelation. Taking the old, even
alone by itself, we cannot release ourselves from this
conviction. From the nature of the conflict between
light and darkness, idolatry and God, in which these
men were engaged, we conclude that they must have
had the known certainty of a '¦'¦Thus saith the Lord "
to stand upon. They needed to see light in God, —
light, and not doubt and darkness. They must have
had a sword of the Spirit and a shield of faith. Not
a step into such a battle could have been taken with
out it.
Comte supposes, in defence and praise of positiv
ism, that the knowledge and firm belief once wrought
among men, of there being no future life, no eternity,
no God, would issue in a great advancement of
human civilization and happiness, making men much
more careful of hfe and time in order to prolong it as
much as possible, and make the most of it by all the
appliances of art and refinement in social education.
Apply the hardihood of this argument to the other
side. Even so, to make men willing spendthrifts of
life and time for God and religion, willing to throw
away a possession so priceless and irrecoverable for
a principle, willing any time to die for God, there

260 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
must have been an infallible revelation of God and
salvation. We want no more inspiration and infallibility than
are necessary for salvation ; we insist on no more :
but the attributes of God and the necessities of man
claim that. So much we must have, or there is no
reliable revelation at all ; none proving itself to have
come from God. It must be a revelation in regard
to sin and redemption, if at all ; a revelation in re
gard to a future life, if any thing ; and therefore a
revelation infallible, if at all, the stakes being of
eternal life and death.
There is no gospel at all, either of prophets or
apostles, or of Christ commanding them, nor aught
that can be called such, but only that of eternal life
in the redemption of the soul from sin and death.
Therefore no material error is endurable. If we can
affirm the probability that God would give a revela
tion, we can equally affirm the certainty that it would
be free from falsehood, from any hurtful mistake.
All the presentations of God that come from God
must be pure truth. He gives those revelations as
the bread of life ; and he would no more permit a
demon or a man to change them into poisou, so that
the villany could not be detected, than a father or
mother would look quietly on, and let an assassin
mingle a pound of arsenic in the white loaves they
had set before their children.
If God had permitted the uncertainties of human
ignorance, the mistakes of philosophers, the fables of
story-tellers, the inventions of poets, or the fabrica
tions of priests seeking a despotism of their own, and
teaching for doctrines the commandments of men, to

GOSPEL OF TBE HEBREW PROPHETS. 261
be mingled with the sources or turned into the chan
nels of pure celestial truth, it would have destroyed
the essence and the possibility of a divine revelation,
and changed its beneficent influence into death, mak
ing what should have been the water of life a poison.
If there is irregularity in a timepiece, it is the ir
regularity that rules, and not the true time. If your
watch marks five minutes after twelve, and the train
starts at twelve, your watch will carry you, but not
the train. If you regulate the train by your watch,
irregularity regulates it, and there will be destruc
tion, — a collision with some other train running by
the true time ; and, if the irregularity of your watch
came from your carelessness, yours will be the blame
of all the mischief, all the lives lost, all the property
damaged. Just so, if falsehood be let in to a divine
revelation, it is the falsehood that rules.
If a ship's chronometer is constructed with a
deviation of one hour, twenty-three hours' right time
may avail nothing against the one hour wrong. The
ship may run safely twenty days, and then strike a
rock, into the line of which the very first hour
directed the ship's course ; and the man that made
that chronometer, and put that variation in it, is
chargeable with the whole destruction that is all but
certain to ensue.
What shall we say as to any similar deviation from
truth in the qualities of a timekeeper by which the
course of the soul is to be run for eternity ? If there
are no dangers, no sunken rocks, no reefs, no shore
where there is not a perfectly safe harbor, then it is
of no consequence what kind of timepiece we use, —
whether, indeed, we have any at all. If all souls are

262 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
sure to arrive at heaven in the long-run, revelation
or no revelation, then error or certainty in the reve
lation is matter of indifference ; but if there are
dangers, and the timepiece is given you for a guide,
so that you may avoid those dangers, and follow your
course safely, then it is infinitely important that your
timepiece be infallibly correct.
The perfection of a chronometer does not require
that it infallibly instruct the supercargo with what
kinds of merchandise he should load his vessel, nor to
what cities he had best carry his freights ; the per
fection of a chart does not necessitate information
as to a science of the wind, or the mathematics of
astronomy : but all that goes into the idea, and be
longs to the reality, of a perfect timepiece, and a
perfectly safe and accurate map, must be found re
spectively in those articles. They must not teach
errors of time and place, since either would be the
insurance of shipwrecks. Even so, whfle the per
fection of the Scriptures as a divine revelation does
not require that they be an encyclopaedia of science,
yet they must teach eternal and infallible spiritual
truth. VI.  THE WHOLE TO BE JUDGED BY THE PARTS.
Now, upon a survey of the characteristics of Hebrew
prophecy, and its claims to the authority of a divine
revelation, it is obvious, first of all, that neither its
meaning nor its merits can be comprehended without
a knowledge of the history and of the methods and
occasions on which these prophetic inspirations grow
out of and play upon the epochs and the kingdoms,
the laws, manners, and characters, the knowledge and

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 263
ignorance, the moral duties and immoral habits, of
the people. The vast sweep of time, the succession
of reigns and revolutions, the development, growth,
and accumulation of successive forms and habits of
iniquity, need to be traced out, separated, mathemati
cally surveyed ; and only thus can the student of the
Old-Testament history and prophecy understand the
region where he is travelling. With such an investi
gation, the history is a key to the prophecies ; and the
prophecies, in their turn, are a key to the history. If
you go through the history without the prophecies,
you are as those who travel only through the valleys
of a region of mountains, or along the course of the
torrents, but never ascend the mountain-ranges, nor
obtain an extended or connected view. Or you are
like those who travel through a region of Alpine sub
limities, shut up in carriages, along the beaten roads,
lost to the glory of the landscape, and the landscape
to them ; whde those who take the mountain-passages
on foot scale their summits in the open air, command
the heights and depths, and become intimate with the
beauty and grandeur of the country. You must foot
it from the history to the prophecies, and from the
prophecies to the history, and thus you will know
the intricacies of the whole region ; which is, of a
truth, interlocked with mountain-passes that can be
crossed only on foot. For want of such an analytical
and comparative study and survey, the history and
prophecy of the Old Testament are a confused and
heterogeneous mass and mixture in most men's minds.
The distinct and separate prophecies and their eras
he in a compact whole before us ; and they are not to
be confounded, but must be drawn out like the slides

264 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of a telescope. The range of forty centuries is here ;
and the perspectives seem to be shut together as on a
plain surface, with neither background nor foreground
distinguishable. Now, if one should take a telescope,
and attempt to see through it without drawing out
the tubes, it would be no better than a common eye
glass, — not so good. And just so the reading of the
Old Testament straight through, whether you begin
at Genesis and go forward, or at Malachi and read
backward, is just a shutting-in upon one another of
epochs, eras, and perspectives in confusion, that need
to be drawn out in their proper relations and connec
tions. As the formative eras of our globe are in one
solid mass of layers, epochs of history written in
stone, so with the records of the dealings of God with
his people, and the history of their iniquities and
revolutions, and the accompanying interventions and
intermixture of prophecies. It is a mass of history,
condensed and crowded with an unexampled combi
nation of minuteness and comprehensiveness. Hence
it needs a patience, perseverance, and industry such
as the geologist must exercise in digging, comparing,
tracing ; but great and fruitful is the result from
such studies, and the reward is great.
Only three things are needed, — (1) a thorough
knowledge of Hebrew, with the reading of these
books in the original, (2) a knowledge of what is
authentic in contemporaneous profane history, and
(3) a knowledge of the combination and correspond
ence of sacred history and prophecy, — and the tour
naments of infidelity against the Old Testament will
cease. The Hebrew language ought to be as thor
oughly studied and mastered as the Greek in all our

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 265
theological seminaries. Most of the difficulties would
be removed, and the apparent ground or arguments
or assumptions of scepticism quite cut away, if the
Hebrew text, and the histories and prophecies con
tained in it, were thoroughly'studied and understood,
the dialects compared, and the books of history and
prophecy accurately traced in their interlockings of
eras and occasions, their correspondences and cross
lights and witnessings, along with the simultaneous
epochs and events of profane history, in the records
in monuments and books, such as they are, of Assyr
ian, Babylonian, Persian, Alexandrian conquests and
empires. When the parts are no longer rudely torn
from their connections, but viewed under the light
of the demonstrated unity and integrity of the whole,
and when men cease to suppose or assume false eras,
endeavoring to cut and square the text according to
their assumptions, the fidelity and correctness of the
Old-Testament Scriptures will be so established and
well known beyond contradiction, that no reckless
preacher or author will hazard his reputation as a
scholar by assertions to the contrary.
VII.  THE PARTS BY THE WHOLE AND BY THE WORDS
OF CHRIST.
Again : we are properly required to look at the
whole system of revelation through its fulfilment, to
determine its light by its purpose, and its purpose by
its light, and both by their demonstration in Christ,
with the object of his coming ; namely, to save men
from their sins. We are bound to look at the parts
in the light of the whole, and to measure the meaning
of the parts by what the whole demonstrates. This
23

266 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
applies with special force to the foundation and intro-
duction of the system of revealed religion. Let any
man read Havernick's section on the positive evidence
of the unity of the Pentateuch, and he will see, not
only how objections disappear, but demonstration is
manifest, and how great a hght is turned on every
part by a contemplation of the whole in its integrity.
Certainly the inspirer and author of such a work has
a right to require the examination of it as a whole,
and also in its connection with that after-revelation
of which it is the first and introductory part.
But in that after-revelation, and in the instructions
of the author of it, the first and fundamental thing
was the assertion of the former revelation as being alto
gether the infallible word of God. The claims of the
after-revelation were built on that. acknowledged fact.
The second thing was the assertion of that revela
tion as a standard of judgment and condemnation for
mankind, because it revealed the realities of immor
tality and a future retribution so clearly, that the
proof could not be more convincing even if one came
to them from the dead. Christ encountered the
Sadducees on that ground on two occasions ; and so
afterwards did Paul, reasoning always with them out
OF THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS. On- the first OCCa-
sion, Christ took them in the books of Moses, because
they refused the appeal to any other scriptures, and
proceeded to demonstrate the great article of a future
life from the Pentateuch. " That the dead are raised,
even Moses showed at the bush, when God said, I
am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For
God is not the God of the dead, but of the living ; for
all live unto him."

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 267
On the second occasion, a Sadducee was presented
in vision on the other side the grave, in the world of
spirits, suffering the consequences of his own unbelief
of the future state of rewards and punishments, and
desiring to present to his five brethren still on earth
the same evidence that was now convincing him, in
order that they might be prevented from coming, as
he had done, through the same unbelief into his
sphere of torment. Abraham said, " They have Moses
and the prophets : let them hear them. They speak
plainly what you find to be true." — " Nay, father
Abraham ; but, if one went to them from the dead,
they will repent. And he said unto him, If they
hear not Moses and the prophets, neither wfll they
be persuaded though one rose from the dead."
THE CONSEQUENCES INVOLVED.
Now, there is no concealing the logic of this pas
sage. It stakes the justice of God and the truth of
Christ in the New Testament on the fact of there
being a distinct revelation of future rewards and pun
ishments in the Old Testament. It affirms the truth
of that revelation, its necessity, and its adequacy for
the salvation of the soul. It was given for that pur
pose. It revealed a Saviour sufficiently for that pur
pose, had there been a lowly, contrite, and believing
spirit, instead of the veil of unbelief upon the heart.
Here, then, we find ourselves standing with Christ
between the Old Testament and the New, in the very
centre of the evidences for the divineness of Chris
tianity, himself that centre. We are on the key
stone of a bridge, whose arch rises into the heavens,
and commands the whole vision of both continents of

268 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the divine dispensations, spanned from pier to pier by
the incarnation. We look back with him over the
whole reach of the ages of revealed truth, from the
book of Genesis, the first of the books of Moses, down
to Malachi, the last and closing book of the Hebrew
prophets before Christ's coming. The appeal of
Christ is to all those books, as containing, in the law,
the prophets, and the psalms, the whole truth re
ceived from God concerning the future state and the
means of salvation.
The affirmation of Christ is, not only that it is all
there, but that it is there from God ; and that he himself,
sent by God, receives it from no other testimony than
that of God's word ; never submitting himself or his
doctrine or his claims to the testimony of man, but of
God only. " The words which I speak unto you are
not mine, but the Father's which sent me. I speak
to the world those things which I have heard of him.
As my Father hath taught me, I speak these things."
Now, then, it is impossible not to be aware of the
consequences to the New Testament, and so to all
revelation, of denying that the truths of immortality
and a future retribution are taught in the Old. Some
men seem carelessly to imagine that this exalts the
New, as being the only revelation of life and immor
tality ; whereas it evidently destroys the credit of the
New, as not being any credible revelation at all.
Attempting to exalt the latter at the expense of the
former, we ruin both : for it is beyond question that
Christ drew forth those truths from the Old-Testa
ment Scriptures, and declared them to be there ; and
the apostles, instructed by him, made the same affir
mations. What, then, is the treatment given to his

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 269
words and character by those who affirm that the
Hebrew Scriptures never contained any such truths,
and that they were not revealed to the readers of
those Scriptures, except through the Persian idolatries,
till Christ came ? Are the teachings of Christ in any
respect trustworthy, if they are not true in regard to
what is contained in the Old Testament ?
The Old Testament and the New stand or fall
together in the veracity of Christ. They are both
inspired, or both an imposture. Is it lawful to reason
from the New to the Old, from Christ to Moses, and
from Christ to the apostles, and from them to Moses?
If it be, then the revelation of immortality and the
future life is established beyond all possibility of
question ; if it be not, then the truth of Christ is
destroyed, and there is no possibility of believing
either in the Old or the New. There is no revelation
at all from God, if it be not, in the Old Testament, a
revelation of immortality ; and that was the ground
taken by Paul, that, if Christ be not raised, there is
no resurrection, and those who have fallen asleep in
Christ are perished, and all the pretended revelation
is a false witness for God. So, if the dead rise not,
inasmuch as that is a part of the only revelation ever
pretended to have come from God, it leaves us to
atheism ; for a God worth believing in would never
have left his creatures without any knowledge of
himself, nor could ever have promised what he doth
not fulfil.
But now we are meeting continually with men who
reject even scornfully all claim of an infallible divine
inspiration in the Old-Testament Scriptures, who
nevertheless profess the highest veneration for the
23*

270 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
character of Christ, and declare that they regard the
words of Jesus as truly divine and infalhble. It is
impossible adequately to illustrate the greatness of
this inconsistency.
For example, I have a friend whom I have all but
worshipped, always assuring both himself and others
that I perfectly believe in him, and respect and trust
him as a person of incorruptible integrity, and unri
valled knowledge, skill, and ability in his own busi
ness. He is the owner of a patent of great utility
and value in India-rubber ; and he affirms that the
property in this patent descended to him from a
hneal ancestor four hundred years ago, by whom the
patent was first invented, although it has ever since
become more perfect by additional repeated improve
ments. I boldly deny the whole thing, and assure
my friend that there was not only no such invention
then in existence, but no such vegetable production
was then known. There was not even the concep
tion of it ; but the very first notice and idea of it ¦
came in at least three hundred years later, being intro
duced by some persons who had been captured and
long held as slaves by the savages in a country where
the India-rubber tree was growing, and who, having
got free, and found their way back to England,
brought with them the first knowledge ever possessed
of that wonderful production.
My friend repeats and demonstrates his case, and
stakes his whole claim to be trusted as a man of
veracity and integrity upon the truth of the demon
stration ; but I flatly deny the whole thing as an
impossibility, — an invention greater than the patent.
Yet I profess undiminished confidence in the words

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 271
of my dear friend ; and claim him for my friend, with
a greater knowledge, understanding, admiration, and
love of his truth, purity, and powerful intelligence,
than any other man living can pretend to exercise.
This is but a moderate statement of the case be
tween Christ Jesus and those who deny that the
immortality and future accountability of the soul are
taught in the Old-Testament Scriptures, or who
contend that these truths were first found by Hebrew
captives growing out of and upon the wp as-trees of
Persian idolatry and phflosophy, and by them first
brought into Judaea. Christ affirms that they were
written and taught in the law, the prophets, and the
psalms. It is impossible at one and the same time to
deny that they are there, and yet believe in the truth
of the words of Christ.
But now, of all these records of God and man, it is
affirmed that these innumerable actors and spectators,
in all the ages covered by the Old Testament, knew
nothing about the immortality of the soul and a
future state of retribution ; and, of course, that all
this drama of human life has nothing to do with reli
gion ; that there was never a pious man in all the
Hebrew commonwealth or kingdom, — not one that
knew God or true piety, or aspired after heaven, or
lived for God and eternity. So that all these mighty
events and warring elements of heaven and earth,
with interpositions of God, angels, miracles, dwindle
down to a fermentation of mere materialism, — the
rush and struggle of intellectual and sensual passion
and force in a progressive temporal civilization.
On the basis of such an assumption, the conclusion
is inevitable that these books are forgeries, and not

272 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
one reliable word in them ; and thence the mine runs
under the New Testament, and the Gospels and
Epistles are exploded in like manner. It is the fatal
ism of unbelief, — English, German, French, — Co
lenso, Strauss, Renan, — beginning with, the position
that Moses was a. forger, affixing a "Thus saith the
Lord" to what he knew to have been the product
of his own brain only ; and that Jeremiah was a forger,
composing the book of Deuteronomy, and then reveal
ing it to the Jews as belonging to the Pentateuch, in
order to gain credit for bis own impostures. The
process of such destructive scepticism cannot rest,
but involves the whole of Christianity.
VIII.  THE GRANDEUR OF PERSONAL CHARACTER IS TO
BE ACCOUNTED FOR.
The moral argument of divine revelation is com
bined with the historical in the demonstrated impos
sibility of a life of faith without the knowledge of
God and eternity. The piety of these men never
could have been produced by the errors of heathen
ism, nor by any truth that did not anchor them in the
eternal world ; that did not hft them above the fear
of man by a confidence in God, — the result of the
assurance of his everlasting protection, and that in
volved to them the revelation of his forgiving mercy
unto hfe eternal. The elements of piety in Abraham,
Melchisedec, Moses, and Job, demonstrate this knowl
edge as an experience given to them of God. The
interviews of Abraham with God, the designation of
Melchisedec as King of Salem and Priest of the most
high God, the bestowal of his blessing upon Abra
ham, aud the majesty of their intercourse with kings

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 273
and their subjects, manifest the possession of a divine
friendship, and the practice of a sublime spiritual wor
ship. The same grand and elevated piety appears in
Moses and Job. What gave these men the port of
angels among men ? What gave them their mental
and> moral superiority? It was no call inherent in
idolatry that brought Abraham out of Mesopotamia.
But what element did the religion revealed to Abra
ham possess superior to that of Chaldean shepherds,
if it did not teach immortality and an eternal retribu
tion ? Accordingly, Paul's conclusion, thinking upon
this phenomenon of character, is, that God must have
promised a heavenly inheritance. What else should
or could be at the foundation of the supernatural
heroism and endurance of any of those worthies?
If heathenism had ever produced its Abraham, -¦— if
only a mythical tradition in the idolatrous wilderness,
— he would have been apotheosized : we should have
found him among the stars or local mountain deities,
an object of belief and worship. In the true record
he is simply and only a man, the friend of God.
But that he should be such a worshipper and friend,
living by faith, is an impossibility and a contradiction,
without the knowledge of God and the future life.
Such a moral character could have no possible exist
ence otherwise, nor could it ever have been imagined.
The very idea of a moral being, the record of such an
existence, implies and necessitates acquaintance with
such truth ; nor is there any moral instrument for the
Divine Spirit to employ upon human character with
out such truth.
Not only the character and teachings of Abraham
and Moses, but the experience of Job, must have had

274 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
that spiritual knowledge in it, or there could have
been no life unto God, no reasonings nor conclusions
concerning his moral government, no knowledge of
his will and providential purposes, no sense of respon
sibility to him. The same may be said of Samuel,
David, Jeremiah, and all the prophets. They could
not one of them have lived a holy hfe ; they could not
have known in what holiness of life consisted, nor
what elements of habit in the soul were agreeable to
God's will, nor how to seek or gain his approbation,
nor what such approbation was worth, nor why it
was necessary, but by the knowledge of God's eter
nity and their own immortality. Without this, the
records of any thing imposed as a divine revelation
could have produced nothing in the shape of moral
character ; and the Scriptures, destitute of all nour
ishment and guidance for the virtue and strength of
spiritual beings, must have been, in the graphic image
of Coleridge, no better than a sun-dial by moonlight,
— a revelation merely for men's midnight and sleep.
Indeed, what is revelation but moonshine, and the
basking of the soul in it but a lunacy, if it do not
teach immortality and God ? And if men themselves
blind their own inward vision by a cloud and curtain
proceeding from themselves, woven from the steaming
mists of their own passions, so much the deeper is
their darkness.
The common sense, integrity, practical justice,
sound, frank, and open views of right and wrong,
freedom from cant and ostentation, the dignity and
impartiahty, the purification of their messages from all
tincture of side self-issues, — no axes to grind, no neph
ews to be salaried, — all these characteristics are wor-

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 275
thy of note in examining the stuff of these religious
documents. There never was a set of men so free from
the extremes of legalism and antinomianism ; so firm
and definite, on the one side, in the proclamation of
duty as the way of hfe, under faith as its principle,
and the worthlessness of mere feeling without obe
dience ; and, on the other, of the proclamation of
love to God and man as the way of life, and the
worthlessness of mere external observances. " Offer
unto God thanksgiving ; but, unto the wicked, God
saith, What hast thou to do to declare my statutes ?
He that sacrificeth a lamb without the contrite and
obedient spirit is as if he cut off a dog's neck ; and
he that killeth an ox, as if he slew a man."
And they proclaimed in the same breath the wrath
and the mercy of God to the very same sinners. It
was tropical storm and sunhght, rain, lightning, and
thunder, in one verse ; and in the next, for the very
same trembling and affrighted fugitives from justice,
the refuge of the yearning heart of God's love thrown
wide open : " Come, now, and let us reason together,
saith the Lord : though your sins be as scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow ; though they be red like
crimson, they shall be as wool."
Now, whatever be the difficulties that any mind
feels from the scantiness of definite expressions in re
gard to immortality and the future life in the writings
of Moses, or the absence of a creed proclaiming it, —
though what believer in Christ can experience any
such difficulty after his words ? — yet they are ten
fold greater, nay, absolutely insurmountable, on the
theory that immortality and a future retribution were
not revealed nor taught. That theory is proposed as

276 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
an article of critical assumption and behef in the
assertion, " that the Hebrews, during the time covered
by their sacred records, had no conception of a retribu
tive hfe beyond the present, and knew nothing of a
blessed immortality ; " and this is coupled with the
presumptuous affirmation, that, if there be any expres
sions in the Old Testament that seem like a knowl
edge of a heavenly life, " they were the product of a
late period, and reflect a faith not native to the He
brews, but first known to them after their intercourse
with the Persians."
Now, to say nothing of the historic and demon
strated falsehood of this assumption, its distortion of
the character of God, and destruction of the truthful
ness of Christ, are such as would prevent the possi
bility of any belief in Christianity. It supposes God
holding men to a moral and eternal accountability to
himself, and yet concealing from them the reality and
the grounds of it ; shutting them up in ignorance of
it, and yet holding them guilty, and condemning them
to punishment, for the disregard of it. It presents
God as selecting a people to be holy, and giving them
a law for such holiness, and yet concealing from them
the nature and worth of the soul, and the possibility
of even knowing what holiness was ; commanding
them to love him, and preventing them from knowing
how to love him ; appointing for them a Newton for
their teacher, and at the same time taking from them
all knowledge of the prism and tbe rainbow, and com
manding their teacher to compel their attendance on
a routine of daily phantasmagoria, the moral meaning
of which he was not permitted to reveal, and which
they, consequently, were not permitted to understand,

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 277
and yet were punished for not understanding and
obeying. Out of what depths of confusion or malignity could
ever so monstrous a supposition arise ? If there be
any thing worse than this in any caricature of the
gospel as a system bigoted and cruel, any thing more
subversive of all the voices of our natural conscience
respecting the Deity, any thing more absurd to be
imposed upon men in place of a revelation, or as a
revelation of good-will to men, peace on earth, and
glory to God in the highest, we never met with it.
Nothing can ever rise higher than its fountain. If
there ever was in the world a true love of God, it was
because there was a true revelation of God. If there
ever was in any human soul peace and joy in the for
giveness of sin, or in the hope of forgiveness through
the medium of God's teachings by the old appointed
sacrifices, and instructions for his worship, it was be
cause the good and eternal foundation and assurance
of such a hope were made known through such a
divine revelation ; but they never were made known
except. where a future life was revealed, and could
never possibly become known without such a revela
tion. ".
And if God has withheld from any race, genera
tion, or era of mankind, in what they are commanded
to receive as a divine revelation, all knowledge of im
mortality and a future retribution, and all appeals to
the soul as immortal, he has made provision and laid
foundation for nothing but the carnal mind, which is
enmity against God. Nothing better than a carnal
civilization and a carnalnature could have followed
and sprung out of a religion without an eternity to
24

278 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
play into, a religion with nothing but temporal re
wards and punishments, or a rehgion that provided
and promised in the eternal world nothing but a re
newal of the pleasures and pains experienced in this
world. Did God give to his people, for their training,
smaller motives than they could get from nature,
paganism, and their own conscience ? Did God shut
them up to this world ? Such is the ruthless theory
which sweeps the Old-Testament Scriptures as a ty
phoon, sending down bodily into the deep every ship
freighted for eternity, every idea but of a gross
materialism. If God could have saved and did save
men in the old world, Jews and Gentiles, without
faith, hope, belief of a future judgment, and trust in
a divine Redeemer for pardon, he can now. If he did
then, why not now ? If he had a Church in the wil
derness, marching to the heavenly Canaan without
knowing it, without wishing it, without making any
arrangements for it, why not now ? If they, without
us, and without the revelation of a Saviour from sin,
and of an eternal redemption, could be made perfect,
and could receive the promises without any promise
at all, what need of any other promise, or any other
discipline, or any other trial of our faith, than theirs ?
But what an absurdity to call that a revelation from
God which shut up the whole human race for four
thousand years to less than the hght of Nature ! which
the Old-Testament revelation did, if it concealed
from the world the knowledge of the immortality of
the soul and of a future state of rewards and punish
ments : and it did conceal if it did not reveal ; and, if
not reveahng a future state and the evil of sin, could

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 279
not have revealed a Saviour. So that the whole
human race, before Christ came, had no offer of
pardon and eternal life, no presentation of any ade
quate motive to goodness, no hope except in this
world, no offers of blessings but for this world, no
possibility of communion with God as the father of
spirits, but only as the framer of bodies ; the inventor
of an animal whose whole aim of existence must be
to eat and drink, for to-morrow we die, — the admitted
deduction by Paul of a true animal logic, if the dead
rise not ; and of course a right logic, if men are not
informed of their immortality, and resurrection for a
life to come. If we are only animals, it is right to
follow out the law of a true animal existence ; " and
the far-sighted prudence of man, and the more nar
row, but at the same time far less fallible, cunning of
the fox, are both no other than a nobler substitute for
salt, in order," in the strong language of Coleridge,
" that the hog may not putrefy before the destined
hour." All the moral elements of the antique world, all its
highest inspirations of passion and of taste, all the
struggles and athletic discipline of mankind, all their
mental and physical experiences, without this knowl
edge and love of God and these motives of eternity,
could no more have built up one of those grand crea
tions of genius, virtue, intrepidity, contempt of death,
faith, prayer, piety, habitual martyrdom in witnessing
for God's truth ; those souls willingly on fire, and cry
ing, " Send me ! " when they beheld the glory of God;
those Hebrew prophets that held themselves conse
crated as self-consuming beacons for the warning of
their nation, and the rebuke of great prevailing pop-

280 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ular sins, — than the ranges of the Himmaleh Moun
tains could be raised out of stacks of jelly-fishes
taken from the Indian Ocean, or the granite substance
of Mont Blanc from the pressure of the grapes of the
vineyards of Italy.
A teacher of inevitable error, such as the Scriptures
themselves must become if immortality be not learned
from their pages, would send men straggling and trem
bling amidst vague and ghostly superstitions ; would
educate men to cruelty and cowardice, but never to
a conquering faith in God.
Even amidst the terrific apostasy in the reign of
Ahab and Baal, there were seven thousand souls be
lieving in God, and faithful to his law. Had that law
given them no knowledge of eternity and immor
tality? The inward hfe of a child of God, and the
intelligent reception of God's promises, by which a
child's obedience and love could be maintained, were
impossible without a knowledge of God as the keeper
and rewarder of the faithful soul forever ; and a reve
lation of these things had, therefore, been so clearly
made for the faith of the people to rest upon in com
ing to God, that the evil of their character in disre
garding and perverting that revelation is summed up
in the description of them as moral monsters, because
they were " children in whom is no faith."
The spiritual piety taught by the law of love, and
the system of sacrifice and prayer, was that of believ
ing, loving, and obeying children. For the produc
tion of such piety there was a congeries of divine
promises, grounded upon or contained within the
sacrificial ordinances revealed and appointed of God,
as prefiguring the Lamb of God, who taketh away the

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 281
sin of the world ; promises growing thicker and
brighter in every age, and always the spiritual mean
ing clearer and more radiant, — no other salvation for
mankind than that of the redemption of the soul from
sin and death having ever been promised or made
known by any one of God's revealing prophets since
the world began ; promises having then whole life and
reality in that assured mercy, and growing out of it ;
leaves of the tree for the healing of the nations, the
blessings of the life that now is and of that which is
to come, on the same boughs of promise ; but the dis
tinctive purifying and saving element of character
wrought out only through a belief in God entering
into that within the veil of the eternal world ; a faith
in God, and a love of God, seeking God himself as
the portion of the soul. This is the only sanctifying
and sustaining faith that ever lighted up the flame of
divine love in the heart of any. human being.
These promises and this faith never came to the
Hebrews from the Persians, to the people of God
from the worshippers of Baal and Ashtaroth. The
divine revelations which the Hebrews in chains car
ried with them gave hght to all nations, but bor
rowed none. It is the most gratuitous, groundless,
unhistorical supposition, that from Zoroaster, or the
disciples of Zoroaster, was ever gathered or learned
one jot or tittle of the doctrines of a future state pos
sessed by the Hebrews, and proclaimed by Christ from
the prophetic Scriptures. Not a fragment can be pro
duced from all Oriental literature which is not sur
passed by passages of Hebrew revelation existing cen
turies before the birth of Zoroaster, and promulgated
to the Hebrews as their law of life from Jehovah.
24*

282 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
The additions pretended to have been made to
their stock of religious knowledge from Oriental
sources, or from pagan mythologies or philosophies,
were of no more value than the golden mice con
tributed by the worshippers of Dagon when they
sent back the ark of God from Ekron to Bethshemesh.
What the Hebrews did learn among the heathen
from Chaldean and Persian sources, and practised to
their own shame and misery, is found in the eighth
chapter of Ezekiel, — an indictment of their gudt, and
an appeal taken from such practices to the statutes
and judgments of God's law, with the assurance that
" the soul that sinneth, it shall die."
That lesson. they never learned from paganism, nor
how to save the soul from such a death. But they
knew well what it meant : they were not destitute
of common sense ; and the appeal struck as a barbed
dart into their consciences. Whether a man sinned
or not, he should die the death of the body. There
was never on earth an exemption from that, except
in the two cases recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures
alone, as windows suddenly flung open into immor
tality and heaven ; but this message — " The soul
that sinneth, it shall die " — proclaimed a death
of the soul over and above that of the body, even
as conveyed in the language of Christ, — " Ye shall
die in your sins."
ix.  the future life in job, proverbs, ecclesias
tes, and the psalms.
The books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, con
tain arguments and reasonings in regard to a judg
ment to come that might well give to Bishop Butler

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 283
the foundation for his " Analogy of Religion " natural
and revealed, — the most massive powerful argument
ever constructed outside the Scriptures. They also
detail a storm of doubts, questionings, struggles of
unbelief, as potent in the proof of a then present
knowledge of the distinguishing element of a divine
revelation as if it had been sworn to as a positive creed.
No man can read the book of Job, and question that
Job's doubts were a wrestling with his knowledge,
than he can read the two closing verses of Ecclesias
tes, and doubt that the Preacher there was speaking
of what he knew as clearly as we do, — a revealed
future hfe and judgment. " Let us hear the con
clusion of the whole matter : Fear God, and keep
his commandments ; for this is the whole duty of man.
For God shall bring every work into judgment, with
every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether
it be evil." The hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm is
equally conclusive ; and so are the forty-ninth, fiftieth,
seventy-third, and the ninety-fourth to the ninety-
eighth inclusive. The constraining, effective, over
mastering power of all these truths in the permanent
transformation of human character is found in their
appeal to an omniscient, heart-searching, holy God,
and a judgment to come.
In the book of Proverbs there are equally pungent
and unquestionable passages : " If thou sayest, Be
hold, we knew it not ; doth not He that pondereth
the heart consider it ? and He that keepeth thy soul,
doth not He know it ? and shall not He render to
every man according to his works ? " The questions
and the method of them demonstrate a knowledge
and conviction of their meaning and truth wherever

284 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
that revelation came. A cross-examination in a court,
under the law, " Thou shalt do no murder," could not
refer to things more palpable, and convictions more
undeniable. In the books of Job and Ecclesiastes these truths
are not only conveyed in terse and separate texts,
but drawn out into arguments of the righteousness
and equity of God's government, because he will
judge the world in righteousness, and give to every
man according to his character; there, where there
can be no more evasion nor triumph of an unjust
cause ; there, where every purpose and work wait ;
there, where God shall judge the righteous and the
wicked. The proverbs of a people are indisputable evi
dences of their opinions, their habits of thought, their
practical conclusions. Such a declaration as this —
that the wicked shall be driven away in his wicked
ness, but the righteous hath hope in his death — is
like a beacon of flame on a summit in the range of
the Alpine Mountains. Its meaning is no more to be
denied than the existence of the granite that sur
rounds it. The olive-leaf brought by Noah's dove
into the ark was no better evidence to his senses
that somewhere an olive-tree was growing, and that,
where that leaf was plucked, the waters were abated.
The moral sentiments recorded in the remnants of
Hebrew literature bring similar announcements to our
conviction. In the lower Jura formations we are told by
Humboldt that the ink-bag of the sepia has been
so wonderfully preserved, that the material, which
myriads of years ago might have served the animal

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 285
to conceal itself from its enemies, still yields the color
with which its image may be drawn. The analogical
lesson is obvious. The ink of the revelation of im
mortality is as fresh in the words of the Hebrew
proverbs as it is in the ink-horns or on the parch
ments of John and Paul ; and they are as indispu
table evidence of a knowledge and experience of
spiritual life then possessed in the soul, and spiritual
lessons acted upon.
The elements of personal religion in the book of
Psalms afford the same proof of divine inspiration.
These men are not only taught by precept and in
struction, but laid hold upon and drawn into the
steps, motions, habits of spiritual life by sympathy
and example ; their own hearts being turned inside
out, and themselves caught as with an invisible net
and constraining power, and brought to God in con
fession and prayer. Take the thirty-second Psalm,
the thirty-seventh, the forty-ninth, the seventy-first,
the seventy-third, the hundred and thirtieth, contain
ing such searchings of the heart, such confessions of
guilt, such assurances of mercy, such instruction for
man, such aspirations after God, such revelations of
the nature and end of God's providential government !
Out of all the remnants, or the boundless chaos, of
what are sometimes called the ethnic Scriptures, out
of all the remains of ancient literature, it would be
impossible to collect a sum of knowledge and ex
perience, profound, true, satisfying, self-evidencing,
and answering the depths of human consciousness as
in water face answereth to face, to be compared with
the grave, solemn, weighty record of these six Psalms.
Take these Psalms, along with the hundred and

286 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
nineteenth, and compare them with the best extracts
presented from Asiatic or Aryan fountains by the
profoundest investigators and discoverers from Sir
William Jones to Muller. The comparison is be
tween human and divine ; and no doubt remains which
ranges on the one side, and which on the other. Take
the last three verses of the hundred and nineteenth
Psalm, and suppose them to have been discovered
among the remnants of Buddhism. What an instant
change from doubt to certainty, from darkness to
hght, from the confusion of a groping soul to the
clearness of one that has an infallible compass ! That
compass, referred to, consulted, trusted, is the word
of God, the known God, the ever-living God, the
Creator, the Lawgiver, — the Word referred to as an
infalhble known quantity and quality ; not a dream,
nor an aspiration, nor a guess, nor a " Would that it
were so ! " but an absolute, eternal, all-determining
verity. Note also the profound impression, everywhere
carried and sustained, of the definiteness, infallibility,
and supreme authority, of the word of God. " For
ever, O Lord ! thy word is settled in heaven. Con
cerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that
thou hast founded them forever. The righteousness
of thy testimonies is everlasting. Give me under
standing according to thy word." What word?
Where recorded ? How known ? How made known ?
By what process so communicated to mankind, and
made the object of absolute knowledge, as that all
doubt is taken from this praying soul seeking after
God ? It is a known quantity here referred to : the
light of the sun not better established, nor his goings-

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 287
r
forth from the tabernacles of the east. Where is it ?
In what ark of revelation shrined ? With what na
tion, unto whom committed to be kept, and in what
quarter of the earth, is this Shechinah ? This star
in the east — does it rise out of Jacob, or Buddha ?
or is it in the cloudy pillar of a Zehdavesta, putting
forth such fitful gleams of light as one might show
from decaying phosphorescent nature ?
Nay, it is as clear, local, well-defined, as when God
said, " Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven
to divide between the day and the night ; and let
them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and
years." The book of Psalms, combining the prophet
ic, priestly, legislative, preceptive, instructive, educa
tional qualities of the whole revelation, in the dis
closure of an experimental life through all trials and
vicissitudes, is the central, practical fruit and light of
a great, established, long-tried system of laws, letters,
and ordained customs, the history of which, and of
the nation framed and trained out of them and by
them, is the oldest, most authentic, indisputable, and
perfectly vouched for, of all that has ever been known
or believed in history in the world; teaching and
touching all the world at more points, accompanied
by more incidental and unexpected confirmations im
possible to have been pre-ordained or arranged by
human ingenuity or knowledge, more inseparable life
threads and figures interwoven as warp and woof
with the very geography of our earth and the prog
ress of its famihes, than any and all other historic and
traditionary knowledges.
For determination of place, chronology, genealogy,
logical succession of facts, eras, characters, plans, pur-

288 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
poses, execution, marching on uninterrupted across
gulfs filled in elsewhere with myths of lost empires,
races, reigns, a unity unbroken, an accuracy challen
ging investigation, and defying contradiction, there is
nothing to be compared with it. There is the same
power of evidence in all the records of personal ex
perience ; and the Nepenthe of a divine inspiration
drops forth wherever God's trees of righteousness are
tapped, — " the planting of the Lord, that he might be
glorified." We find in the most artless confessions
and prayers of the Hebrew prophets whole trains
of thought and feeling entirely beyond the power.of
Nature, and bearing in themselves the proof that they
are from heaven. The experiences of Moses and
Isaiah, of David, Daniel, and Jeremiah, of Samuel,
Elijah, Hosea, Micah, Habakkuk, Malachi, and like
wise the records of their teachings, carry irresistible
conviction of an origin above the reach of human
genius. You know them to be meteoric masses.
There never was, and never will be, any instance of
such experience or such sentiments in the heart of
uninspired humanity, unregenerate and untaught by
divine grace. If you should see a tree in the forest
struck with hghtning, and bursting into a bright
blaze in the midst of a pouring rain-storm, that would
be no greater proof of a superhuman electric agency
than the discovery of such sentiments in the sacred
pages is demonstrative of a divine origin.
But none of the universal life-giving truths em
bodied in the progress of these records, amidst all the
local storms and conflicts of a troubled life, are mar
vellous after th'e disclosure of the creative fountain-
law by Moses, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 289
with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength,
and thy neighbor as thyself." There is nothing more
superhuman than this, nothing strange after this ;
and Love Incarnate has taught us that on these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
When the prophet Micah says, " What doth the Lord
thy God require of thee, O man ! but to do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? "
and Hosea, " I desired mercy, and not sacrifice ; "
and Isaiah, " To this man will I look, even to him
that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trem-
bleth at my word ; " and Habakkuk, " The just shall
live by his faith ; I will rejoice in the Lord, I will
joy in the God of my salvation ; " and when Job
says, " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him ;
the Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away, and
blessed be the name of the Lord ; I know, though I
die, that my Redeemer liveth," — these are all natural
and consistent products of the law of love to God,
disclosed by the Spirit of God, and ministered by the
same Spirit in the heart, but impossible to have been
the inspiration and work of the heart by itself without
that Spirit.
X.  CONCLUSION.  THE APPEAL TO CHRIST FINAL
AND DECISIVE.
The testimony and authority of Christ are final and
absolute ; and his right to interpret the Old-Testa
ment Scriptures is not to be disputed by any man
conceding the fact of a divine revelation at all from
God to men. His interpretation of those Scriptures
must be received as irreversible, infallible ; and who
ever accuses them as being an imposture, accuses him
25

290 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
as being the greatest of impostors, for deelaring them
to have been the infallible testimony of God in re
gard to himself. His claims are rejected, and all
Christianity along with him. He is not to be trusted
as a Saviour, or even an example, if he is not an
authoritative revealer to us of the will and word of
God. By the Scriptures of the prophets, there
fore (Rom. xvi. 26), and the appearing of Jesus
Christ (2 Tim. i. 10), by whom we believe in God
(1 Pet. i. 21), we have the complete and perfect
revelation. Now, if there be a revelation from God for guilty
creatures, the matter and method of it being redemp
tion from sin and the restoration of man to a divine
character, it follows that the revelation must be infal
hble as to that way of redemption, and in all respects
wherein eternal consequences are hazarded or con
cerned. But whether the infallibility be secured by the
unchangeable letter, or the ever-present accompanying
Spirit of the Revealer, or both together, guaranteeing
to the sincere seeker a right understanding of the
covenant and way of life, is of no importance. The
certainty demanded in a divine revelation is, that the
soul may rest upon it with a perfect divine security
above all conflict of opinion.
We know that the Old and New Testament Scrip
tures are such an infalhble revelation, containing one
and the same gospel from beginning to end. The
position, character, and words of the Lord Jesus prove
this, and uphold the revelation as a keystone doth
the arch which was built by the help of side buttresses
and derricks until the keystone was settled in its

GOSPEL OF THE HEBREW PROPHETS. 291
place ; but after that, all extraneous supports being
taken away, it stands alone : and though the history
of the builders, and their mechanical arrangements,
were all lost, and though it were satisfactorily proved
that every race before the known existence of the
bridge was destitute of all knowledge of the principles
of the arch and all the elements of natural philoso
phy, yet, the bridge being there, and the keystone
supporting it, it is proved to have been built, and
carries its own evidence of both sides having been
the work of one and the same architect, and with the
same design. Neither half can stand without the
keystone : both parts hang upon the keystone.
As Christ stands in person and character thus em
bracing and upholding both parts of this divine work,
with the way and law of salvation completely de
veloped in himself, and that great prediction fulfilled,
that the government should be upon his shoulders ; so
the principle of the revelation stands clear in both
Old and New Testaments as a gospel of love, order
ing all things with an eternal meaning and life, and
holding all precepts and institutions in the bond or
covenant of God's comprehensive mercy.
" Think not that I am come to destroy the law or
the prophets, but to fulfil." All being the revelation
and work of Divine Love to man, the fulfilment of all
belongs to man in his endless relation to God, made
partaker of the divine nature through the instrumen
tality of the divine revelation, — to this end consti
tuting a revelation of truth, eternal, infallible, the
very truth of God without error, in order that con
cerning it the prayer might be offered by the Son,
and with it the work accomplished, " Sanctify them

292 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
by Thy truth ; Thy word is truth : " and, for the
same purpose, the Holy Spirit always given to accom
pany, illuminate, and interpret the word in the believ
ing heart ; so that, if any man came to God at any one
point of this divine revelation, trusting in him, relying
on him for Mght, life, and guidance, he would surely
find him. " Then shall ye know, if ye follow on to
know the Lord."

VII.
THE APOSTLE PAUL.
BT PROF. G. P. FISHER."
THERE are two very different classes of persons,
who, without any abuse of terms, may be called
enemies of the Christian faith. In the one there is
a latent hostility to principles that still find a secret
approval in their own consciences. A more or less
conscious opposition of their characters to truth that
is known or surmised to exist in the Christian system
is at the bottom of their hatred of it. In the other
class, however their enmity may be traced to a wrong
bias of will, or perverse tempers of feeling, as the
ultimate source, the immediate, conscious ground of
it is quite diverse. There is no immoral practice,
no unrighteous course of conduct, that shrinks from
the rebuke uttered in the gospel. There is no guilty
fear of the light ; there is no honest conviction smoth
ered : but they hate Christianity because they miscon
ceive its doctrine, or deem it to be at war with some
thing which they hold as sacred truth. From their
education, falling in, perhaps, with their native intel
lectual tendencies, or from some other influence, they
have come to cherish, with their whole soul, beliefs
that appear to clash with the Christian system. From
25* 293

294 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
their point of view, they cannot do otherwise than
misjudge, and, it may be, detest it. Now, as one of
this class can be moved to embrace the religion which
he has hated, only by being enhghtened ; so, in case
he does embrace it, let the change be never so radi
cal, there will be a certain continuity between his life
before and his life after his conversion. His previous
position, with whatever moral fault he may charge
himself, he can justly attribute to a misapprehension.
His new views are a rectification of the old.. Under
neath the contrariety, there are some hidden threads
of unity. The old conception has proved at least a
stepping-stone to the new. Opposite as his new life
seems to his former career, there is a logical and
moral bond between the two. Paradoxical as it may
appear, a thread of consistency passes over from the
earlier to the later period of his history.
In this class of antagonists of the Christian faith
belonged Saul of Tarsus. He was, in a sense, an
intensely religious man before he believed in Jesus
of Nazareth. Religion, the relations of man to God,
was the ruling, absorbing thought of his mind. It
was not science or learning, or any purely mundane
interest or occupation, that engaged his attention.
It was rehgion, — the relation of the soul to God and
the supernatural order. And he was not less sincere
in the profession than he was earnest in the practice of
his creed. If there were many Pharisees who delight
ed in the hollow reputation of sanctity, — knaves and
impostors, all whose thoughts centred in themselves, —
Paul was at the farthest remove from all such. He
was elevated above the influence of a vulgar ambi
tion, and he was an utter stranger to insincerity.

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 295
There is no hint that he was impeded by any misgiv
ings when he was performing the part of an inquisi
tor against the disciples of Jesus. The phrase, " It
is hard for thee to kick against the pricks," refers to
no struggle in his own mind : it simply asserts the
futility of the attempt to withstand the progress of
the new faith. He had entered on an abortive under
taking ; he had plunged into a hopeless enterprise :
but he went into it with no divided mind. He verily
thought that he ought to extirpate the new sect. He
had no stifled misgivings, no scruples of conscience,
on the subject. What he did he did ignorantly, in
unbelief. He considered it afterwards a sin, but a
sin of ignorance, the responsibihty for which did not
inhere in the act itself immediately, or in the opinion
that dictated it.
Moreover, his ideal of character remained, in its
general features, the same. Righteousness formed
that ideal before he was converted, as well as after,
In the earher period, his idea of righteousness in
cluded both personal conformity to the standards of
obligation, and that unqualified citizenship in the
theocracy which involved a title to all its blessings,
and, among them, eternal life. Righteousness, in
this inward quality and outward relation, as a deter
mination of the will and a consequent privilege, was
to him the sum of all good. But now we come to
the contrast. He first thought that the way to at
tain righteousness, and the only way, was to obey the
Mosaic statutes, — the . moral and ceremonial ordi
nances at the foundation of the Hebrew theocratic
commonwealth. The Mosaic institute, in which
ethical and ritual precepts were interwoven, he con-

296 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ceived of as something permanent and eternal. That
visible form of society, which had < God for its direct
author, was to endure as long as the sun and moon.
There was no hope for mankind except in the exten
sion of this kingdom. Hence Paul joined the sect
whose zeal to bring in the heathen moved them " to
compass sea and land to make one proselyte ; " the
sect at the head of that aggressive Judaism, the
progress of which led a Roman philosopher to declare
that the conquered had given laws to the conquerors.
Hence, too, the cause of the disciples of Jesus ap
peared to Paul in the light of an impious and trea
sonable revolt against the divine order. To uphold
the theocratic state in full unity and vigor, and to
extend the sway of it abroad, was the first duty.
If, now, we look at Paul the apostle, we find him
holding a different view of the place and office of the
Mosaic system in the divine plan. That system no
longer fills his eye to the exclusion of every thing else.
It is only one link in the chain ; one stadium in the
series of revelations. He has risen to a more com
prehensive view of the divine dispensations, where
the function of the Old-Testament law-system is per
ceived to be subordinate and provisional ; as when,
from a lofty tower, one sees mountains and plains
stretching far away beyond the previous boundaries
of his vision. Abraham was before Moses ; promise
preceded law. The statutory system was an expe
dient, wholesome and necessary, not without sacred
and everlasting elements incorporated with it, yet, as
a system, destined to give place to a spiritual kingdom
founded on a different principle. This kingdom is
spiritual, the head of it being an invisible Person, to

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 297
whom we are connected by faith which takes hold of
the unseen. It is thus a free and universal religion,
in contrast with the external, local, restricted theoc
racy. The vast revolution of sentiment which Paul's
mind underwent might be termed a deeper insight
into the philosophy of history. The philosophy of
history, the science that aspires to interpret the plan
of God in the course of human affairs, has its be
ginning in the Hebrew prophets. The problem that
inspired Augustine to compose " The City of God,"
and Edwards " The History of Redemption ; " the
problem on which modern thinkers of so diverse
character — Vico and Hegel, Bossuet and Herder —
have labored, — first presented itself to the seers of
Judaea and Israel. In that old state-system, where
the little principality of the Jews was surrounded by
the mighty, conquering empires of Assyria, Babylon,
and Egypt, what chance had that feeble kingdom
against the overwhelming odds ? What chance was
there, when to the vast preponderance of force on
the side of their neighbors there was added the infec
tious example of their idolatries ? Then it was that
the prophets, called by the Spirit, sometimes from the
ploughshare, their souls filled and exalted with the
grand, idea of an indestructible kingdom of God on
earth, pointed to splendid and opulent cities, the
London and New York and Paris of that day, and
predicted their downfall. They outstripped the sa
gacity of the profoundest of statesmen. Edmund
Burke is admired with reason for anticipating events
of the French Revolution ; but Burke, in the very
work that contained these vaticinations, said also
that the military strength of France had culminated,

298 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
and was no more to be feared. And this prediction
was uttered just before the wars of Napoleon. What
is there more sublime in literature, when all the cir
cumstances are weighed, than the words of Scripture ?
— " There shall be a handful of corn in the earth
upon the top of the mountains ; the fruit thereof shall
shake hke Lebanon." If one inquires for their ful
filment, let him behold the Christendom of to-day.
The prophets themselves did not divine the full and
exact sense of their own predictions. They had
glimpses of the felicity of the kingdom in its future
developed and mature form. A more spiritual wor
ship was to characterize it ; a more unfettered and
universal character was to belong to it. Paul, after
his conversion, entered into the import of these pro
phetical pictures, and found them verified and real
ized in the society that looked to Jesus as its head.
The beginnings of this society antedated the law.
The germ of it was in the theocracy itself. But the
kingdom of believing souls, as it existed before, so
might exist now, independently of the Mosaic laws
and institutions. Regarded as a religious institute,
they had fulfilled their end.
But Paul would never have reached this view, his
conversion would have remained incomplete, had he
not been driven outside of the law-system by the force
of some inward experience. This was the painful
conviction that he had been mistaken in supposing
himself righteous. Instead of having attained that
which he sought, he had fallen far short of it. He
stood at a hopeless remove from the standard of char
acter which a deeper perception of human obligations
revealed to him. With the loss of the sense of in-

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 299
ward righteousness, his standing as a member of the
divine kingdom was gone too. Instead of being a
just or justified member of the theocratical communi
ty, he was a condemned person. Precisely how Paul
came to discern, in this new light, the deep, spiritual
demands of law, we have not the means of answer
ing. It may be, that, in the crisis of his conver
sion, teachings of Jesus were brought to his knowl
edge by some of the disciples who instructed him,
and that these gave new life to his conscience. Mr.
Matthew Arnold, in recent clever essays upon St.
Paul, is correct in asserting that it was not fear that
lay at the bottom of his distress. This, at least, was
not the chief ingredient of that sharp anguish of
spirit which he suffered : it was, rather, the sense of
unrighteousness. It was the humiliation, the piercing
self-reproach, the burden of a conscious bondage
to evil, that afflicted his soul. His self-approbation
was undermined. Instead of approving, he must
abhor, himself. But Mr. Matthew Arnold is wrong
in ignoring the element of guilt as related to God, or
the objective condemnation, that formed one part of
Paul's misery. Paul, with all the depth of his emo
tional nature, had none of the unhealthy, one-sided
subjectiveness that pertains to modern Pantheistic
tendencies of thought. He was not shut up within
the circle of his own sensibilities. He wished not
only to be right before himself, but also to stand
right before God. Besides the conscious servitude
of his will to passion, — the " video proboque meliora,
deteriora sequor," of the heathen poet, — there was
the objective verdict of the righteous, infallible judge.
Where did he get relief? Not from the law, in

300 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
whose commanding and forbidding there was no
force that could overcome the opposing propensities
of his nature. The law could condemn and threaten ;
but it could not create a principle of obedience.
There was nothing in bare law to subvert the domin
ion of sensuality and selfishness. The result was a
feeling of wretchedness, of self-despair. Paul turned
to Jesus as a Helper. Jesus had overcome in the
conflict with evil. He had died, but died victorious.
The patient, self-denying Sufferer was a victor in the
struggle. There was a lovehness in Christ that
touched the sympathies of Paul, and kindled the
desire to walk as he walked ; and this desire was a
new power in the soul, quite distinct from the influ
ence of law. But moral admiration, deepening into
sympathy, is not the whole of what the apostle
meant by faith. There was a love from Jesus to
him ; there was a compassion of God, underlying the
whole mission of Jesus. That love and compassion
Paul believed in. The Helper whom he received
was no distant hero, who exerted power only through
an inspiring example ; but he was invisibly present,
to support, by the mysterious influence of Spirit upon
spirit, the new hfe which he had awakened. Hold
what particular view one may of the Pauline doctrine
as to the significance of the death of Jesus, it is evi
dent that Paul saw" in it the means and the assurance
of forgiveness. There is a foundation in his teach
ing for the ordinary Protestant idea of forensic justi
fication. Righteousness had always to him a double
aspect: it was both an internal quality and an out
ward relation. But what the law could not do was
accomplished through the personal influence of Christ

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 301
upon the soul united to him in sympathy and depend
ence. Nothing in Renan's book upon St. Paul is
more groundless than the implication that his person
al character was little altered by his becoming a
Christian. A new spirit of love took possession of
his nature. In the room of the fierce temper of a
persecuting zealot, we find a genuine humihty, a
constant inculcation of kindness and charity. When
it is remembered that he was naturally high-spirited,
and perhaps irritable, tbis change is the more touch
ing. "Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance," — these are
the traits on which he dwells. Against these, he
says, there is no law. But they are not the fruit of
law : they are the fruit of the Spirit. They have their
springs in the relation of the soul to Christ. In this
relation there was a great liberty. In regard to
these very virtues and their opposites, the apostle
writes, " Ye are not under the law." It is the
Christian paradox of a correspondence to the law, but
from motives and impulses to the law unknown. It
was not the constraint of a statute ; but " the love of
Christ constraineth us."
Observe, now, the order in which this conversion, in
its different parts or constituent elements, took place.
It did not begin with new ideas of the spiritual char
acter of the law, and with a sense of sin ; but the
historical evidence necessitates the conclusion, that a
recognition of the truth of the claims of Jesus was
the first step. The apostle himself, in his writings,
attributes the change to a sudden revelation. Up to
a certain moment, he had thought that he ought to
put down the Christians by force. There was no in-
26

302 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
termediate process of reflection and inquiry between
this state of feeling and his acknowledgment of Jesus
as the ascended Lord and Messiah. He expressly
affirms that this primary conviction was not imparted
to him by the other apostles through the exhibition
of proofs. How, then, did he obtain it ? It was not
by reflecting on the death of Jesus ; for, apart from
the consideration that his first belief resulted from no
process of examination, the death of Jesus was, to
. his mind, one of the strongest arguments against the
verity of his pretensions. To him, as to other Jews,
the cross was a stumbling-block, — an insuperable ob
stacle in the way of faith. It is impossible, then, that
he could have believed in Jesus, except through some
disclosure of him, real or supposed, as triumphant
over death, in a higher and glorified form of existence.
Therefore the testimony of Paul on the mode of his
conversion, while it accords with the probabilities of
the case, tends to corroborate the narrative of Luke
respecting the journey to Damascus. It is remarka
ble, however, and characteristic of Paul, that, besides
the vision or revelation that formed the primary
source of his belief, he discerns the value of external
testimony. The resurrection of Jesus is verified, he
affirms, by eye-witnesses, whom he enumerates, pre
senting the evidence in a circumstantial manner.
There were a series of interviews of the risen Jesus :
first with Peter ; then with the Twelve ; then with five
hundred brethren, of whom the greater part, he says,
were then living ; after that with James ; then again
with all the apostles. It was a true and real mani
festation of Jesus, in bodily form, to the senses of the
disciples. The testimony is such, considering the

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 303
mental state of the witnesses after the crucifixion
and the outward circumstances, as to exclude the idea
of an hallucination ; but it was a manifestation to the
disciples and believers alone. The fact of the resur
rection of Jesus was an indispensable condition of the
apostle's faith in him.
Here we fall out once more with Mr. Matthew Ar
nold, who is duly impressed with the truth that Jesus,
in the might of his holy love to God and men, died
to sin and the world ; that this inward death was per
fected and shown in his death on the cross, and was
the means of a true, spiritual, eternal life, of which
all who are united to him in sympathy are enabled to
partake. This, without doubt, is a vital part of Paul's
religion ; but it is not the whole. His faith rested on
objective realities. Beyond his own subjective im
pressions and feehngs, there must be the word of God.
The resurrection of Jesus proved the acceptance of
hhn as a Redeemer : it was the counterpart, the sign
and necessary consequence, of his complete victory
over sin. Without that verifying act of God, faith had
no objective support, and was vain. The soundness
of the apostle's conception of religion, as a relation
to God, instead of a mere round of inward experi
ences, where the subjective feehng goes for every
thing, appears very strikingly at this point. The
Pantheistic drift of much of our modern speculation
gets no countenance from him ; and yet where shall
we find an equal richness and depth of spiritual ex
perience, or so profound a representation of what may
be called the subjective side of the gospel ? To die
with Christ in his death, to live to Christ, to live be
cause Christ lives in him, — these are his familiar

304 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
thoughts. But as the death of Jesus on the cross
fulfilled and expressed his inward dying to the world,
so did his resurrection express and demonstrate his
life in God.
By the resurrection of Jesus to a spiritual and
glorified form of existence, he becomes the head of a
kingdom fundamentally different from that of the
Jewish dispensation. The kingdom has shuffled off
the carnal form which it had previously worn. The
former requirements and ceremonies are something
quite heterogeneous to its present mode of being.
When Paul declares that he does not any longer know
Jesus, according to the flesh, as a Jew, the member
of a particular nation, with local and national associ
ations upon him, he sets forth in the strongest possible
manner, in a manner even startling, his consciousness
of the altered character of the kingdom. The throne
is not at Jerusalem, but in heaven. The offering is
not bulls and goats, but our body and spirit, a reason
able — that is, a spiritual, or inward — service. The
temple is not on Mount Zion, but is the soul of the
believer. The whole conception turns on the fact of
the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.
One might anticipate what attitude a man of Paul's
logical intellect and fervid spirit, who held nothing
by halves, would assume towards Judaism and Juda-
izing tendencies in the Church. A great amount of
ingenuity has been expended of late in an effort to
exhibit Paul as at variance with the other apostles on
the subject of the admission of Gentiles to the
Church, and on the whole matter of their relation to
the Old-Testament ritual. As a means to this end,
a deliberate attempt has been made to impeach the

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 305
veracity of Luke ; or, rather, of the author of the
book of Acts, whom the negative criticism denies to
have been Luke. This last attempt breaks down, not
only from the variety and weight of evidence in be
half of the genuineness and historical credibility of
the book in question, but also from the failure to es
tablish any contradiction between the general repre
sentations of Paul himself in his admitted epistles
and the testimony of the Acts. These points are
clear from Paul's own statement, — that Peter, James,
and John required of the Gentiles nothing more than
he required ; that they recognized him as an apostle ;
that they rejoiced in the conversion of the heathen
converts when it was reported to them; that they
approved of the contents of his preaching, and bade
him God speed when he went forth on his errand,
they asking and receiving at his hand charities for the
poor Christians at Jerusalem from the churches which
he planted. At the same time, it was inevitable, and
it is perfectly clear, that the original band of apostles,
the first disciples of Christ, did not have at the outset
that clear perception, and, with the exception of
John, probably never had that sharp and vivid per
ception, of the antithesis of the new system to the
old, which had seized on the convictions of Paul.
The reason is, that, under the teaching of Jesus, they
came out of the old system by a more imperceptible
transition. Their religious life was a growth, in
which their traditional ideas were gradually corrected
and supplanted. They had never entered with so in
tense . earnestness into legal Judaism as Paul had.
They had' not, like him, to renounce a definite system
to which they had committed themselves with all
26*

306 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
their hearts, and from which they were parted by a
sudden access of hght. Analogous phenomena occur
at the present day among those who -enter upon a
Christian hfe. In some cases there is a conscious,
abrupt revolution ; in other cases, Christian character
springs almost imperceptibly out of Christian training.
A diversity in the mode of looking at the gospel is
the natural consequence. The wonder is that the
Galilean apostles could so entirely emancipate them
selves from habitual, inherited impressions, as to wel
come the heathen converts who had not been circum
cised, and extend a cordial fellowship to Paul. But
he was not only ready to tolerate the Gentiles in the
acceptance of the benefits of the gospel: he would
carry these benefits to them. He would enter into
the broad field that opened itself far and wide before
him. The effect of such a course must be to excite the
mahgnant hostility of his Jewish countrymen. He
must appear to them in the hght of an apostate, and
become the object of that vindictive hatred which
partisans feel towards a renegade who has deserted
his associates and passed over into the camp of the
enemy. But the development of the Judaizing prin
ciple within the Church was destined to be still more
mischievous and annoying. Not all of the Pharisees
who were converted had Paul's clearness of percep
tion, nor had they tested by so thorough a personal
trial the legal method of salvation. Hence they held
with stubborn tenacity to the idea that the door into
the Church was through the Judaic rite of circum
cision. To concede this, as Paul saw, was to give up
the gospel as a spiritual and universal religion, to cur-

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 307
tail the office of Christ as a Saviour, and to sacrifice
the liberty of the heathen converts by subjecting them
to a burdensome ritual. To maintain his position on
this point was the battle of his life. By his instru
mentality, more than by that of any other, Christianity
was saved from sinking down into a Jewish sect.
In the encounter with Jews and Judaizers, Paul
had an objection to meet, which at first must
have perplexed his own mind, and which his oppo
nents would not fail to urge with the utmost empha
sis. Were not the Jews the people of God ? Were
they not a chosen nation ? As such, were they not
to receive the blessings of salvation ? When it was
found that comparatively few of the Jews believed
in Jesus, and when the number of Gentile converts
was rapidly increasing, these questions could not fail
to arise. " If you are right," said the unbelieving Jew
to Paul, " what becomes of election and the promis
es ? " And the Judaizing believer repeated the inquiry.
This brings the apostle to the matter of predestina
tion and election. I do not propose to discuss the
interpretation of the ninth chapter of the Epistle to
the Romans, — the field which has been trodden for so
many generations by contending armies of theological
combatants, — except to say that it was no part of the
apostle's idea to offer a metaphysical solution of the
old problem of liberty and necessity, any more than
it was his design, in the fifth chapter, to solve the
mystery of original sin. All that I propose is to
point out the historical occasion of his introducing
the subject. The actual rejection of Christ by a great
majority of the Jewish people forced him to consider
their selection by God, and what the nature of it

308 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
was. In short, it opened up what we have called the
philosophy of history, the character of the Jewish
dispensation. There had not been a strict adherence
to the hereditary principle on the part of God in
constituting the chosen people. The principle of
legitimacy, so to speak, had been set aside by his
decree. He had not, as a matter of fact, been bound,
in the past, by the mere consideration of lineage.
Isaac was not the only child of Abraham, and Jacob
was an example of a deviation from the natural order
of succession ; the reason being, in both cases, the
divine choice and appointment. Therefore the Jew
ish theory of hereditary claims and exclusive national
rights was a false one, as their own history proved.
What should prevent God, then, if he saw fit, from
giving the blessing of salvation to the Gentiles ?
There was no principle of the divine administration
that imposed any fetters upon his will in this particu
lar. Hence, if the Jews lost the gift, and the heathen
received it, no one had a right to charge the Divine
Being with inconsistency, or a disregard of lawful
claims. But Paul does not leave the discussion with
out bringing forward his usual doctrine, — that the
blessings of grace are transmitted in the hne of faith,
instead of that of carnal descent. It is not member
ship in a race, but faith, that puts one in possession
of them, as the narrative of Abraham himself proved.
The Calvinist will always point to the apostle's lan
guage about Pharaoh, and to the illustration of the
potter and the clay ; the Arminian will appeal to his
declaration, that the reason why Israel had not at
tained to righteousness is because " they sought it
not by faith," and that the rejection of Israel is tempo-

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 309
rary until the Gentiles have been gathered into the
Church. Both unite in denying salvation by works
or human merit, and in attributing all the praise to
God ; and this was the truth which the apostle had
most at heart. I have often thought, that, had I the
genius of Walter Savage Landor, I would compose
an imaginary conversation between John Calvin and
John Wesley, two men who were equals in firmness
pf conviction and energy of will, and with an ardor
that impels them to pour out abundant anathemas
against the doctrines that offend them. To Wesley,
election meant the divine authorship of sin, and insin
cerity in the invitations of the gospel; to Calvin, the
denial of election meant salvation by merit, and the
insecurity of the trembling and tempted believer.
Each fights the inferences that he deduces from the
doctrine of the other ; and each denies that the infer
ences of his opponent are fairly drawn. But how
insignificant is the real difference between them when
compared with what they hold in common ! It is one
consequence of the historical method of exegesis,
which, in connection with a more correct philosophy,
characterizes the biblical interpretation of the present
time, that a new point of view is often gained, from
which difficulties are lessened, and the rigid interpre
tation of the dogmatical school is modified, by the
infusion of a more genial, penetrative, and catholic
spirit. Even Peter did not find the style of Paul
very perspicuous. His impetuous mind does not stop
to fill out a chain of reasoning, or guard an illustra-
tration from a possible misuse. His swift mind leaves
gaps for the reader himself to supply. His thoughts,
in their hurry, jostle one another ; and parenthesis is

310 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
thrown within parenthesis to help him in the utter
ance of them. Before one idea is fully expressed, it
is overtaken by another ; as a wave flowing into the
shore is chased and overrun by the wave behind it.
Hence, of all writers, he requires breadth and insight
in the interpreter who would explore his meaning.
The Pauline type of doctrine is frequently brought
into comparison with the types of doctrine presented
in the Epistle of James and the writings of John.
It is more obvious to students of the Bible now than
formerly, that the inspiration of the apostles did not
operate to supersede, but to intensify, their native fac
ulties of mind. It was dynamic, not mechanical, in
its mode of action. The effect of it was organic, —
to elevate, to guide, to purify the powers of intellect
and feeling, but not to supplant them, and not to ex
tinguish their pecuharities, or check their free move
ment, as by an agency exerted upon them from
without. Nor did inspiration interfere with the indi
viduality of rehgious character that belonged to the
apostles. What type their piety assumed varied
with their natural traits. They were all dependent
on Christ, and moulded by his influence ; but, like
various musical instruments touched by the same
hand, — the lute, the organ, and the harp, which give
forth various tones and strains of melody, — so is
the characteristic nature of each of the apostles man
ifest. The inspiration of the apostles differs from
the inspiration that has produced the masterpieces of
literature, — first, that the former relates to religious
and ethical truth ; and, secondly, that the products
of it are verified to us, and, for this reason, endued
with authority. The divine agency here includes a

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 311
miraculous element, by which the sacred books are
set apart from all human productions ; even the lofti
est efforts of genius, though genius may handle the
themes of rehgion. But the human element, out of
which grow the individuality, naturalness, and per
sonal, living force of the apostolic writers, is not less
evident than the divine element which has imparted
to them an inexhaustible, as it is an altogether unique,
power. When we compare Paul with James, we
perceive that James puts forth no contrary doctrine
on the method of salvation. When he declares that
faith without works is dead, he shows that he con
ceives of faith as containing a seed of virtue or holy
living, so that good works are not an adjunct of faith,
but a necessary fruit. Faith has lost its vitality, it
resembles a corpse, when it no longer produces right
and benevolent conduct. This is precisely the con
ception of Paul. As to his relations to John, it is
common to designate the one as the apostle of faith,
and the other of love. There are current sayings
like that of Schelling, who marks off three periods of
the Church : the first being the age of Peter, the era
of law and ecclesiastical order ; the second, the age
of Paul, the era when faith is held in highest honor,
the age of Protestantism ; and the third, the age of
John, the coming age of love. Renan thinks to dis
parage Paul by calling him a Protestant, the forerun
ner and author of Protestantism. But turn to the
thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthi
ans: "Now abideth faith, hope, love, — these three ;
but the greatest of these is love." Without love, he
declares, all gifts are worthless, — the gift of tongues ;
the gift of prophecy, — the eloquence of the preacher;

312 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the gift of knowledge, — all intellectual superiority;
the gift of faith, by which miracles were performed ; the
habit of alms-giving without stint ; the martyr-spirit,
— all are of no account without the love, wliich in
cludes a gentle, forgiving temper ; is the opposite of
envy and jealousy, of mistrust, of rudeness and inde
corum, of pride and boasting; the love which de
lights at seeing men good, and deplores their sin;
that is patient under the burdens of life ; that leaves
no room for self-seeking. Love alone is the imper
ishable virtue : faith will give way to sight, and hope
to fruition. " On each side of this chapter," says
Dean Stanley, " the tumult of argument and remon
strance still rages ; but within it all is calm : the sen
tences move in almost rhythmical melody; the imagery
unfolds itself in almost dramatic propriety ; the lan
guage arranges itself with almost rhetorical accuracy.
We can imagine how the apostle's amanuensis must
have paused to look up in his master's face, and seen
his countenance lighted up as it had been the face of
an angel, as this vision of divine perfection passed
before him." Now turn to John ; and what do we
meet with at the beginning of his Gospel ? — "To as
many as received Him, to them gave he power to be
the sons of God; even to them that believe on his
name." Later we read : " This is the work of God,
to believe on Him whom he hath sent." The love
to Him who hath first loved us, on which John
dwells, — what is it but faith ? We believe in a love
to us that has gone before all love on our side. Re
sponsive love implies faith. Faith, in the doctrine
of Paul and John alike, is the connection of the soul
with Christ, from which love and all other parts of

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 313
goodness result. The unity of apostohc doctrine lies
in the common view of Christ as the one Source of
life. He is the Vine, sending life and fruitfulness
through the branches.
Had Paul been less pure and disinterested in char
acter, he would infallibly have been made the head
of a party; but when he heard of the attempt at
Corinth to set him in this position, and to organize a
sect to be called by his name, he repelled the project
with indignation. It was a kind of man-worship, and
a dishonor to Christ, from which his whole nature
recoiled. " Who, then," he said, " is Paul ? Who
is Paul ? Was Paul crucified for you ? Paul and
Apollos are but ministers ; and shall the servant usurp
the place of his Lord ? "
In connection with his warm utterances on this
subject, he tells us how to look upon uninspired au
thors of systems of ethics and theology. There is
only one foundation ; and that is Christ, and his work
as a Saviour. Whoever builds on this foundation is
a Christian teacher ; but he may mingle in his system,
in the superstructure which he builds up by the .effort
of his intellect, wood, hay, and stubble, or elements
of doctrine that will not endure the searching test.
Building on the true foundation, he is personally
saved ; but the system that he has erected is a human
work, is liable to imperfection, and will, at last, be
sifted. In this light the great system-makers in the
Church — as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Ed
wards — are to be regarded. Their undertaking is
legitimate : they may render a great service in the
exposition and defence of truth ; but they are not au
thoritative teachers ; and, when an undue deference is
27

314 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
paid to them, Christ loses the place that belongs to
him. If Paul was offended that his name should be
given to a party in the Church, is there not, to say the
least, an equal objection to the practice of Christians,
in later ages, of arraying themselves under the banner
of some favorite theologian ?
Turning now from the doctrine to glance at the
work of the apostle Paul, we find him, by the natu
ral bent of his mind, a missionary. After as before
his conversion, he was a propagandist. A life of con
templative devotion would have been intolerable to
him. His favorite metaphor is drawn from the race
course : athletes and soldiers are his types of Christian
manliness. There is one popular idea respecting Paul,
which, I think, is ill-founded. He is frequently
styled a learned man. It is true that he may be
called a scholar, so far as the Old-Testament Scrip
tures and the theology and casuistry of the Jewish
schools are concerned. As an intellectual man, he
is to be rated above most, and probably all, of the
apostles, who belonged to what was considered by
their countrymen the uneducated class. But there
is no sufficient ground for supposing that Paul was a
learned man in the sense in which this term is gener
ally apphed to him. It is not probable that he had
studied the Greek authors. Remember that he was
of the stock of Israel, a Hebrew of the Hebrews ; born,
not of proselytes, but of Hebrew parentage on both
sides. It is not improbable that his father or grand
father had been a captive in war, and, being emanci
pated, had acquired the right of citizenship which
descended to Paul. But his father, though living in

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 315
Tarsus, a cultivated city, was a rigid Jew. Had he
found his son reading a pagan writer, it is likely that
he would have dealt with him as one of our Puritan
ancestors would have treated a child whom he had
caught reading the tales of Boccaccio. Transferred at
an early age to Jerusalem, he sat at the feet of the
Jewish doctor, Gamaliel. Here the method of in
struction was interlocutory ; a stimulating method,
which was practised also by the masters of Greek
philosophy, and is too little in vogue in our modern
schemes of education. Gamaliel is represented in the
Jewish tradition as more tolerant in reference to
Greek wisdom than most of the rabbis of that day.
He gave advice to the Sanhedrim that might indicate
that the apostles had made some impression on him
of a favorable kind ; but, on the other hand, might
imply an expectation on his part that the new sect
would soon die a natural death. The president of the
Sanhedrim, it is not probable that he had any real
inclination towards the Christian doctrine, except as
far as it recognized the belief in a resurrection, which
the Pharisees also cherished. But, whatever was the
temper of the teacher, we know very well what were
the sentiments and spirit of the pupil. " After the
straitest sect of our religion," he says, " I lived a
Pharisee ;"..." concerning zeal, persecuting the
Church." After his conversion, and his return from
Arabia, he spent several years again at Tarsus. Here
it is reasonable to suppose that he came in contact
with disciples of the Greek philosophy ; in particular,
of the Stoic system, of which Tarsus was a flourish
ing seat. The occasional use of Stoic phraseology
and maxims, in a new and higher application, in his

316 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
writings, is certainly remarkable, and may be owing
to opportunities of personal intercourse with Stoic
teachers which he then enjoyed. His coincidences,
extending even to forms of expression, with Seneca,
are much more reasonably ascribed to that sort of
acquaintance with Stoic doctrine than to a personal
acquaintance of the two men ; a supposition which
has little evidence in its favor. But what is the
proof that he was possessed of the erudition that is
sometimes attributed to him ? A passage that occurs
in the poet Aratus, who happens to have been a na
tive of Tarsus, to the effect that we are the offspring
of God (Acts xvii. 28) ; and a hexameter hne, which
occurs in Epimenides, on the bad qualities of the
Cretans (Tit. i. 12). But these sayings, it is likely,
were scraps in general circulation, and no more indi
cate a familiarity with Greek authors than the repeti
tion of the words, " an honest man is the noblest work
of God," with the accompanying remark, that it is an
utterance of some of the English poets, proves a man
to be conversant with English literature. There is
no indication in Paul's writings, and no proof from
any quarter, that he had read _Esehylus or Homer,
Plato or Demosthenes, or any other classic writer of
heathen antiquity. Had he studied either of these
authors, it is hardly possible that distinct traces of
this fact should be missing from his writings. The
style, as well as the contents, of his letters, would
exhibit signs of a culture so diverse from that which
the rabbis afforded. The " much learning " which,
as Festus thought, had made Paul mad, was converse
with Jewish, not Gentile books ; and of this mat
ter Festus was a poor judge, learning being a source

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 317
of insanity to which he had probably taken care not
to expose himself. Perhaps the impression to which
we refer in respect to Paul's Gentile learning may
have sprung from a natural wish of some minds to
have one among the apostles who could lay claim to
this distinction. It reminds one of the lavish praise
that it was once the custom of preachers to bestow
on the scientific acquirements of the first man; as
when Robert South says that Aristotle was but the
rubbish of Adam, and Athens the ruins of Paradise.
But Paul is indebted for his eminence to sources of
power far higher than literature and science can con
fer. It was impossible that all vestiges of his rab
binical training should be cast aside ; but they serve as
a foil to set off more impressively the native vigor of
his mind. If he did not devote himself to the study
of the heathen authors, he fully comprehended hea
thenism as a religious phenomenon. The rehgious
aspiration that hes at the root of heathen wor
ship is pointed out in the discourse at Athens.
The origin of idolatry is revealed in the opening
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. The responsi
bility of those who have not been taught by a writ
ten revelation is proved by referring to the testimony
of their own consciences and the law written on the
heart. How was the declaration of the Saviour, that
" salvation is of the Jews," verified afresh when this
" Hebrew of the Hebrews " stood on Mars' Hill, and
proclaimed to an audience of Athenians Jesus and the
resurrection !
Among the qualifications of Paul for his pecuhar
work as a propagator of the gospel and a founder of
churches, the singular blending of enthusiasm with
27*

.318 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
prudence in his nature deserves attention. There
was a fire which no difficulties that stood in his path
could quench ; but along with it there was a moder
ation, the temperance or sobriety, which kept him
back from all extravagance. He unites a zeal, which
one would think would brook no restraint, with a
wonderful tact and shrewdness. A certain sagacity,
or good sense, presides over his conduct. His burning
zeal never runs into fanaticism. At the right time,
he knows how to consult expediency. When we find
these apparently incongruous quahties combined in
the champion of any cause, we may look out for great
results. These traits mingle in the character of a
statesman hke Cromwell, and in the founders of some
of the great rehgious orders in the Cathohc Church.
The history of Paul contains many examples of the
opportune exercise of this prudence and tact. He
would not yield an inch to the demand of the Juda-
izers when the principle was at stake, even though
Peter was seduced to give them his tacit support ; but
he rebuked this leading apostle in pointed terms. Yet
he would go very far in making concessions to remove
the misunderstanding and prejudice of the Jews, and
to pacify Jewish feeling that was offended by his ap
parently radical proceedings. Before the Sanhedrim
he contrived, by avowing himself a behever in one
of the doctrines of the Pharisees, to kindle a strife
between the two schools of doctors, in the smoke of
which he effected his escape. He was not afraid of
the face of man : he did not tremble before the furi
ous mob at Jerusalem, and he stood before Nero with
out quailing. But he was not the man to throw away
his hfe ; and he did not think it undignified to be let

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 319
down in a basket from the wall of Damascus. He
had no heroic moods that moved him to fling away a
reasonable caution. His courtesy to heathen magis
trates, even bad men, is in marked contrast with the
temper of a fanatic. A refinement and delicacy of
sentiment are never wanting. He considers it a
superstition to refuse to eat the meat of animals that
have been killed at the altars of Jupiter, Diana, or
Neptune; but he would drive nobody into doing
what he felt to be wrong, however unfounded his
scruples might be. He would not, like a fanatic, in
sist on the outward act before the conviction was ripe
for it. In a kind of chivalry of tenderness, as one
has called it, he would himself abstain from eating
such meat, if his example was to mislead a weak and
superstitious brother into the doing of a right thing
against his conscience. The practical wisdom, or so
briety, of Paul, is illustrated on a point where an
ignorant criticism has often condemned or sneered at
him, — in what he says of the dress and deportment
of Christian women. He paid a proper respect to
the ancient ideas of decorum, not wishing unneces
sarily to stir up a prejudice where there was already
hostility enough against the infant churches. Paul is
censured for the very things that prevented the
churches from being broken up by tumults within,
and by enmity and suspicion without. He knew just
where to draw the line between a Christian independ
ence and a reckless fanaticism. He would do more
than excite a commotion : he would organize and build
on enduring foundations. I wish that all zealots for
social reforms would spend the time which they de
vote to supercilious criticism upon Paul to the hum-

320 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
bie study of his life. Let me observe here, that no
man has given a higher honor to woman, or set a
higher dignity and sacredness upon marriage, than
the apostle who makes it the symbol of the union of
Christ with his Church.
The sympathy of Paul with his fellow-disciples,
with his countrymen, and with all men, " Greeks and
Barbarians," made self-sacrifice the habit of his life.
He clasped the httle churches as children in his
arms. In his communications to them, he poured out
his tender sohcitude and more than paternal affection.
All that he is, all that he experienced, is for them.
Whether he is afflicted or consoled, it is a divine
appointment for their benefit. Any form of spiritual
good that he may possess is not for himself, but has
been given that it might be imparted again to them.
A beautiful instance of this identification of himself
with his brethren is found in the passage (2 Cor.
i. 4) in which he speaks with gratitude of the comfort
which he had received from God, " who comforteth us
in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort
them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith
we are comforted of God." So deep is his sympathy
for his kinsmen of the race of Israel, that he would
himself willingly be cut off and cursed for their
sake ! A power in itself, the self-denying love of the
apostle called out all his energies, and kept them
directed to a single end.
The absorbing religious consecration of Paul is
the leading feature in his character. His earnest,
strenuous devotion to the work to which he had been
called by the Master had no intermission, and knew
no rest. It must not be forgotten that we have in

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 321
the book of Acts a sketch of only a fragment of
Paul's missionary career, wliich covered, in all, a period
of thirty years. In the reference that he incidentally
makes to the perils, indignities, and hardships to
which he had been subject, — how he had been
scourged and stoned; had fallen among robbers;
been exposed to the plots of hostile Jews and treach
erous disciples, to hunger and cold ; burdened with
the care of churches only just converted from pagan
ism, — he mentions that thrice he had experienced
shipwreck. This was written before the occurrence
of the shipwreck on the shore of Malta, wliich is de
scribed by Luke. There is a vast, unrecorded history
of toil, anxiety, persecution, casualty ; chapters of
biography irrecoverably lost, but all the more pathetic
for the veil that hangs over them. His life was one
long campaign. So he felt himself at the close. He
could look back and say that he had fought a good fight.
It is interesting to notice that the great idea of right
eousness, the one idea that had engaged his thoughts
from childhood, was still before his mind : " Hence
forth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me."
I must gather up, in the briefest compass, a few of
the lessons for our time, and for all time, which are
drawn from the glimpses we have taken of the char
acter and career of the Apostle to the Gentiles.
He is an eloquent witness to the supremacy that
belongs to religion, in Christian teaching, as in the
lives of men. The inculcation of justice. and charity
among men is never to be neglected ; but the hfe of

322 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ethics is in rehgion. The recovery of men to God is
the prime end of the gospel. The preaching of Paul
was a beseeching of men, in the name of Christ, to
be reconciled to God.
In all Christian ages, Paul is a witness against
ritualism, — if by ritualism is meant a dependence
upon external rites and an earthly priesthood. Im
agine a rituahst of this description thanking God
that he had baptized only Caius and Crispus and a
few other individuals, as Paul says of the Church at
Corinth, with which he stood in such intimate rela
tions ! At the Reformation, it was the voice of Paul
that called men away from human mediators to
Christ, and broke up the reign of the mediaeval sys
tem of rehgion. As long as the Epistle to the Gala
tians remains, it will be impossible for Judaizing
Christianity permanently to triumph in the Church.
How is Christ exalted when we look at the great
ness of Paul and the greatness of his influence !
Luther said that the spiritual miracles were the great
est. Paul, in all that constitutes the excellence of
his character and influence, was, as he himself felt
in his inmost soul, only one effect of Christ. The
splendor of the planet is not its own, but is derived
from the sun round which it revolves. In this de
pendent relation Paul consciously stood to Christ.
When we contemplate such a disciple, are not the
power and rank of the Master felt to be altogether
unique ? Is there not some other, transcendent dis
tinction between Paul and Christ besides that of the
degree of moral excellence that belonged to them

THE APOSTLE PAUL. 323
respectively ? The love of Christ to him was the one
great consolation and joy, from which no event, and
no power, human or superhuman, could separate him.
There is something in the bare relation of this disciple
to his Lord, apart from all specific declarations, which
impresses us with the conviction that Christ, in the
apostle's view, was more than a morally perfect man.
He stands forth as the divine author of a new spiritual
creation. The best fruit that we can gather from a view of
the life of Paul is a rebuke for the languid spirit that
belongs to our service of the Master, and a spur to a
more unselfish, earnest, courageous performance of
whatever work he has given us to do. The most
effectual defence of the Christian cause is not reason
ing, wliich ingenious men may contrive to parry, but
the irresistible argument of a holy hfe, before which
infidelity stands abashed.

VIII.
CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS.
BY REV. . . HENRY THAYER, PROF. IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMIN ARY, ANDOVER.
MODERN biblical criticism is a product of Prot
estantism. The private judgment, liberated
from bondage to tradition, could hardly fail in the
end to challenge the authority of the Scriptures them
selves. Their authority, to be sure, was not one of the
points in dispute between the reformers and the Pa
pal Church : on the contrary, both parties acknowl
edged the control of the Bible in matters of faith;
and it was merely the identification of tradition with
the word of God against which the protest was made.
It is true, that, even at the outset of the Protestant
movement, individuals — and foremost among them
was Luther himself — were disposed to abate a little
the canonical credit of here and there an inspired
book : but these criticisms were made to rest on doc
trinal grounds, rather than historic ; and for genera
tions the Protestant mind was too much occupied
with adjusting and defending the details of the faith
to pursue the subject.
But, the periods of controversy and of consohdation
being over, Protestantism was confronted with the
324

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 325
inquiry, How, in consistency, can the canon of Scrip
ture be accepted, while the authority of tradition is
repudiated? That canon has been collected and
transmitted by the Church ; and, if the dicta of the
Church may be disputed in reference to the details of
faith, why not also in reference to the foundation of
faith? Can the books admitted as the source and re
pository of Christian doctrine make good their claim
to this pre-eminence ? Disregarding for the time the
voice of tradition in their favor, — and no consistent
Protestant can refuse permission to disregard it, —
have we historic warrant for receiving them with all
their miraculous contents as authentic and harmonious
records ?
The discussion of this question was opened by the
assaults upon revealed religion made by the Deists,
particularly in England, during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries ; and, about the middle of the lat
ter century, the " Credibility of the Gospel History"
was ably defended upon historic grounds by Lardner.
A little later, the same discussion enlisted the scholars
of Germany ; and Semler, by maintaining that Jesus
and the apostles accommodated themselves to Jewish
opinions, by acknowledging a mythical element in the
Scriptures, and by attributing the origin of certain of
the Epistles to a desire to mediate between contending
parties in the early Church, anticipated in principle
the course of subsequent discussion quite down to
the present day.
It is usual to date the rise of modern criticism from
Semler and the middle of the last century ; although
the criticism which claims to be pre-eminently " his
toric " is of more recent origin. From the outset, it has
28

326 CHRISTIANITY AND -SCEPTICISM.
been the miraculous element in biblical history to
which exception has principally been taken. During
the latter part of the last century, and the first two or
three decades of this, it was the practice to get rid
of this troublesome element by some process of inter
pretation. These marvels, it was said, are not to be
regarded as essential to the narrative, but rather as
its Oriental costume : they are mere embellishments,
and must be stripped off if we would get at the naked
truth of the biblical statements. But the growth of
modern philology put an end to this exegetical vio
lence, and compelled scepticism to resort to new
weapons. Here and there, indeed, an interpreter had
already found a pretext for taking hberties with parts
of the narrative, even of the first Gospel and the
fourth, in the assumption that Matthew and John
could hardly have been eye-witnesses of the particu
lar incident under consideration; and one or two
scholars of note had already ventured to question the
genuineness of individual Gospels, when, in 1835, a
man came forward who broke completely with the
received opinion respecting their origin. Strauss's
" Life of Jesus " then made its appearance in its first
form. In this book, Strauss undertook to substitute,
in place of the supernatural view of the Gospels on
the one hand, and of the naturalistic view on the
other hand (both of which he pronounced to be anti
quated), another explanation of them; viz., the
mythical. According to him, not only has orthodoxy
been wrong in claiming that they contain miraculous
history, but rationalism itself has made a mistake in
denying the miracles, yet affirming the history ; for,
correctly understood, they contain neither miracles

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 327
nor history, but the unconscious substitution of opin
ions for facts. Just as, in the fabulous accounts given
us of the origin of the various pagan faiths, we have
rehgious ideas presented in a concrete or historical
form, which form we rend that we may get at the
kernel of truth it envelops ; so is it with the Gospels.
Jesus of Nazareth, an extraordinary man, is mistaken
by his countrymen for the expected Messiah. Their
admiring veneration attaches to him all the character
istics composing the prevalent idea of that exalted
personage. This is evident from the correspondence
existing between the traits of their portrait of him
and the ideal prefigured in the Old Testament. It is
this ideal, therefore, which combines with a personal
admiration for Jesus, and originates, in the lapse of a
century or so, our extant evangelic records. These
records are not histories ; they are not fictions : they
are, rather, a dramatic presentation of truths. Call
them historie, if you will : they exhibit a true history
of thought, not a pretended history of fact. They
consist of religious ideas that have crystallized about
a veritable personage. Underneath all, lies, indeed,
a substantial basis of fact; but just how much is
real, and how much ideal, is a question which early
faith did not ask, and which modern criticism can
hardly answer.
The hypothesis of Strauss, which summed up or
superseded nearly all preceding sceptical opinions,
was soon supplemented by the speculations of a school
of theologians receiving name from the University of
Tubingen, and having as their leader the late Prof.
Baur of that place, who died in 1860. Strauss had
occupied himself mainly with the contents of the

328 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
Gospels, and had assigned their composition to the
middle of the second century, and even later ; the re
ceived opinions respecting their date being assumed
to have originated from the spurious titles of the
books themselves. Baur urges, that, to judge correct
ly of their contents, we must understand their origin.
The credibility of the records depends on the aims
of the authors. These aims we can gather only by
considering the characteristics of the books in con
nection with the circumstances under which they
were composed. The plainest disclosure of these cir
cumstances Baur finds, as he thinks, in the Epistle to
the Galatians, — one of the four Epistles accepted by
him as genuine. From the account which Paul gives
there of his conference with the apostles at Jerusalem,
it is evident to Baur that the early believers were di
vided into two antagonistic parties, — Pauline Chris
tians, who, under the leadership of the Apostle to the
Gentiles, maintained that the privileges of the new
faith were open to heathens and to Jews without dis
crimination; and Petrine, or Judaizing Christians,
who wished to attach to the new doctrine a portion
of the ritualism inherited from their fathers. The
contest between these parties went on till the middle
of the second century, when the Judaizing faction
were constrained to seek alliance with their oppo
nents ; and from this alliance sprang catholic Christi
anity. Now, the larger part of the New Testament, the
Gospels included, originated, as Baur supposes, during
this period of compromise and conciliation. Our
present Gospel of Matthew is an imperfectly-disguised
reconstruction of an earher Judaistic Gospel ; Luke's,

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 329
on the other hand, is a conciliatory modification of a
Gospel of the Pauline type ; Mark's, again, originated
when the spirit of concession and neutrality had
degenerated into insipidity ; and the Gospel of John,
composed about the year 160, is a dogmatic treatise
in the garb of history, — a dexterous combination of
incident and discourse into an ideal drama, of which
the prologue furnishes the programme. In fact, it was
the fourth Gospel, wliich, he says,1 gave him a clew
to the structure of the rest ; and the tendency, the
determinate purpose, discoverable in that, warrant
us in ascribing corresponding aims to the other three,
beginning with Luke's.
In the endeavor to establish his theory, Baur takes
a complete survey of early Christian literature, both
canonical and uncanonical : and his followers claim,
that now for the first time have our evangelic records
received their true historical setting ; now, at length,
has the process by which received Christianity was
developed been correctly traced. The labors of pre
ceding critics, from Semler to Strauss, have been ab
stract, negative, destructive ; but, in the results arrived
at by Baur and the Tubingen school, we have some
thing positive, constructive, historic, — conclusions
which, being reached, not by speculation, but by
research, will stand. It must be confessed, that, during
the quarter of a century which has well-nigh elapsed
since Baur perfected his theory, criticism has made
no attempt to solve the problem which the origin of
Christianity presents that has not been largely in
debted to him ; unless we except the hypothesis of
Renan, who supposes that the Gospels are neither the
i Kritische Untersuchumgen, p. iv.
28*

330 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
productions of pious enthusiasts nor of reconciled
partisans, but a mixture of legend and fact.
Here we have, then, the chief positions which
hostile criticism has taken respecting the Gospels.
Into a detailed examination of the arguments ad
vanced in defence of these positions, I do not pro
pose to enter. I invite you, rather, to notice that
criticism has all this time been ministering to faith.
In and through these hostile discussions, the opinion
of believers has been receiving confirmation. In
directly, yet evidently, has this critical process been
preparing the way for the assured recognition of the
Gospels in their integrity as authentic records.
I.  CRITICISM has been tributary to faith IN THE
GOSPELS THROUGH ITS METHODS OF INTERPRETA
TION. It was natural, that, when men became sensible of
an incompatibility between their phflosophical notions
and the sacred records, attempts should be made to
reconcile the two by subjecting the records to some
kind of forced explanation. Rationalism, and a dis
belief in or a disregard of the exactness of language,
generally go together. Hence expository curtail
ments and additions, distortions and perversions, of
various sorts, found origin and reception. The va
garies which, half a century or more ago, sceptical
scholarship advanced in the name of exegesis, provoke
the derision of the humblest biblical student at the
present day. We listen to such interpreters as Paulus
when they tell us that the magi with their coffers
were merely Jewish peddlers ; that the star which
came and stood over the young child was a comet or

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 331
a passing meteor ; that the salutation of the angel was
a joyous thought ; that the vision of Zacharias was a
flash of hallucination, his dumbness a stroke of paral
ysis ; the glory of the Lord shining around the shep
herds the rays of a lantern carried by a man just com
ing over the ridge of the mountain ; and so on to the end
of the record: — when we read such pretended expo
sitions as these, we hardly know which to wonder at
most, — the ingenuity of the sacred writer in conceal
ing his thought, or of the interpreter in discovering it.
And how, pray, did the discoverer get the clew to his
discovery ? and has he alone liberty to exercise his
wits in this way ? And what shall we say to a rival
interpretation which has even more ingenuity to rec
ommend it ? Say ! — just what believer and sceptic
now unite in declaring, — that such interpretations
affront a reader's understanding ; that a man who
gives to such stuff the title of a " commentary " on
the Gospels, may be supposed, as charitably as plau
sibly, to be the victim of a false etymology, and to
understand by a commentary a tissue of inventions.
No wonder that even secular scholarship raised a
protest against such interpreters in the name of
the outraged rights of speech; no wonder that an
exegete who betrays now an inchnation to take such
liberties with an evangehst is at once marked as a
man who holds his unbelief in higher esteem than
he does his good name as a scholar : for Christen
dom, without distinction of creed, acknowledges the
correctness with which Hermann characterized such
interpreters when he said, " that, to get rid of the
evangelical miracles, they invented exegetical mira
cles."

332 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
But such lucubrations have come to be numbered
among the curiosities of bibhcal literature. Allu
sion is made to them, chiefly because they mark a
position which rationalism saw fit to take, and has
been forced to quit.. But they seem never to have
found more than an exceptional and halting accept
ance this side of the water. Among us those forms
of sceptical interpretation have met with more favor,
which involve the assumption that the aim of Chris
tianity is merely to illustrate and enforce " the rehgion
of reason." Such notions as that Jesus pre-existed are
irrational. Such doctrines as human depravity, the
atonement, the eternity of future retribution, are de
grading to man, and derogatory to God. They may be
rejected, therefore, at once, as unbiblical. It is true,
that, in excluding all traces of them from the Gospels,
the text may have to be forced a httle ; but better to
strain a point in interpretation than to admit what is
superstitious or opposed to right reason.
The day, however, for paltering and prevarication
in dealing with the Bible, has passed by. A full rec
ognition and unflinching application of the laws of
language is at length exacted even of the biblical in
terpreter. It is acknowledged to be his duty, not to
read his own opinions into the sacred text, but to
educe the author's meaning from it ; to assume that
the writer has said what he means, and means what
he says ; to add nothing ; to abate nothing ; to dis
tort nothing ; but to reproduce, so far as honest, pa
tient toil will enable him to do so, the precise thought
that lay in the writer's mind. The exegetical reform
which philology thus constrained rationalism to adopt
has already produced beneficial results. It has been

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 333
the death of half-belief. It has put a stop to the long
succession of compromises and concessions. It has
dissipated a multitude of subterfuges and equivoca
tions. Few defenders of the faith now seek to ac
complish their purpose by diminishing the number or
the significance of miracles. Few professed believ
ers now dole out their credence according to a gradu
ated standard, — conceding to Jesus sway over man,
but denying his dominion over Nature. Few con
descend to prop up their faltering faith by the as
sumption of magnetic influences, accelerated natural
processes, and the like. The race of balancing be
lievers is becoming extinct ; for exegesis leaves no
middle ground to stand upon. It excludes in this
matter an intermediate state. It says to every man,
" This is the story ; there is no ambiguity about it :
these are the doctrines ; there is no equivocation
concerning them. Accept, if you please ; reject, if
you please : but do not stultify yourself by attempt
ing both to accept and to reject at once."
The positive position, which, in obedience to this
demand, students of the Gospels have already very
generally felt themselves compelled to take in refer
ence to matters of fact, men of clear thought and frank
speech confess must be taken also in reference to
matters of faith. Among such men, Strauss is con
ceded, alike by friend and foe, to stand ; and his ad
missions on this point, therefore, are as noteworthy as
they may be supposed to be impartial. Thirty-six
years ago, he asserted the essence of the Christian
faith to be quite independent of his criticism, — " The
supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrec
tion and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever

334 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts ; "
and he appended to his work a dissertation designed
to show " that the doctrinal significance of the life of
Jesus remained inviolate." Now, however, — to re
strict ourselves to a couple of statements, — he de
clares that " a Christ, who, without being conscious
that he is the God-Man in the strict sense, had called
himseH the ' Light of the world,' would have been a
braggart. Whoever calls him so without holding him
to be the personage just described is a flatterer, or, in
case he has less regard in so doing to Christ than to
third persons, a hypocrite ; " 2 And again : " The only
genuine and honest meaning of the term ' Redeemer '
is that in which it designates the God-Man sacrificing
himself for the sins of the world. The expression is
derived from the notion of expiatory sacrifice : to use
it in any other sense is a deceptive game of words, —
a game of which I myself was once guilty, but which,
on clearer insight, I long ago abandoned." 3 Similar
admissions to this, even if not made so explicitly, may
be expected, as the more exact exposition of the doc
trinal contents of the Gospels reveals the fact, that
opinions still cherished by many are not compatible
with the plain tenor of the sacred text.
II.  CRITICISM HAS BEEN MINISTERING TO FAITH IN
THE GOSPELS BY RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM OF
CHRISTIANITY AS AN HISTORICAL PROBLEM.
With this recognition, discussions about the Gospels
advanced to a new stage. Previously, discussion had
been, to a great extent, speculative and dogmatic. The
' Der Christus des Glaubens, etc., p. 214 eeti.
" Die Balben u. die Ganzen, pp. 17, 49.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 335
relations of the first three Gospels, in particular, had
been explained by every species of far-fetched conjec
ture. Primitive gospels and Aramaic gospels and lost
gospels, oral gospels and written gospels, were talked
of in such confident ignorance, that at length the
whole inquiry was lost in inextricable confusion. The
hypotheses advanced it was alike impossible to prove,
to refute, or to beheve. The monstrous theory of
Eichhorn, according to which our present synoptical
Gospels sum up a series of twelve, serves as a monu
ment of the guesswork which passed itself off as criti
cism. The treatment to which the books themselves
were subjected, resembled that inflicted, as we have
seen, on their contents. To a generation bewildered
with such speculations, the proposal to deal with
Christianity as with any other historical phenome
non, and to account for it and its documents by
the definite and intelligible laws of historical research,
was like a celestial observation to the " mariner tossed
in thick weather on an unknown sea."
There are believers, it is true, who shrink from the
application of the historical method to the records
and facts of Christianity ; some who go so far as to
disparage the historical argument in its support, as
inadequate, and even irrelevant. But the fear is
unfounded, the disparagement undeserved ; and both
will be unavailing. The fundamental question, in
which advocate and opponent are alike interested, is
simply, whether Christianity is a fact of history. It
is contained in certain documents : are those docu
ments authentic records ? It claims to have originat
ed in a certain age and country : how does it appear
when viewed in its connections of time and place ? Is

336 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
it a supernatural fact ? or is it the necessary result
of merely natural causes ? These fundamental ques
tions can receive an unequivocal answer only after
complete and impartial investigation. The attempt,
in advance of such investigation, to satisfy an in
quirer with internal probabilities, or with ethical
excellences, is a logical anticipation which often
amounts to a begging of the question.
And, in prosecuting such investigation, we need not
allow ourselves to be intimidated by flings at the ig
norance, the credulity, the childishness, of the early
Christian writers. About such things not a httle ex
travagance has been uttered in these latter days.
We must remember that the science of history is of
recent date ; that the Fathers, like all other writers,
ought to be judged according to the standard of their
age. And when the attempt is made to invalidate,
for instance, the testimony of Eusebius, by reminding
us that he recounts 4 without apparent misgiving the
fictitious story of the correspondence between Jesus
and the Prince of Edessa ; when the statements of
Clement are dismissed as of httle account, because he
tells in good faith the fable of the phoenix ; 5 when
Irenaeus is ridiculed because he attempts to prove
from the four regions of the world, the four cardinal'
winds, the four faces of the cherubim, and the like, that
the number of the Gospels could not be greater or less
than four,6 — we may well inquire whether such treat
ment is fair. Is there any reason why these writers
should be tried by the standard of the nineteenth
century, rather than of the first, the second, or the
• H. E., b. 1. chap. 13. « Clem., 1 Ep. ad Cor., § xxv.
o Cf., for example, Schenkel's Character of Jesus portrayed, vol. 1. pp. 230 seq.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 337
third ? If Clement's belief in the phoenix is to de
stroy our faith in him, why not pronounce his con
temporary, Tacitus, a dealer in old wives' fables for
the same reason ? 7 And shall Irenseus's puerile ex
planation of a fact recoil to the overthrow of the fact ?
Nay, not less surely does the explanation attest the
pre-existence of the fact explained than the inade
quacy of the explanation proves that the fact rests
on altogether different grounds.
Nor is it to be forgotten that the inquiry relates to
religious history. The facts are also truths ; were
prized and transmitted because of their spiritual sig
nificance. Accordingly, the records of them must be
read and tested from this point of view. Critic and
apologist alike err when they assume that the evan
gelists' aim is purely, or even principally, historic, —
to narrate events in their sequence in a "purely ob
jective " way. Indeed, there are those who declare
that even the secular historian should be governed
avowedly by a didactic aim. But, however that may
be, the sacred historians, as we are wont in popular
phrase to call them, expressly tell us8 that they
wrote to produce and confirm religious faith ; and the
obvious characteristics of the Gospels — their frag-
mentariness, their unchronological arrangement, the
indifference exhibited to matters of merely historic
interest — confirm the declaration. In fact, a different
view of them is at variance with their probable origin
in the preaching of the first ministers of the Word,
and isolates them also from the body of the New-Tes
tament writings, the aim of which is confessedly
spiritual. Hence, in making up our final decision re-
' See Ann., vi. 28. » John xx. 31 ; Lnke i. 4.
29

338 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
specting the Gospels, justice requires that they should
be tried according to their claims. Their presenta-
tation of facts must be connected, in our judgment,
with the rehgious aims for which, as the writers tell
us, the presentation was made. Thus the internal
considerations supplement the external ; the religious
statements illumine and re-enforce the historic. It is
the distinction of Christianity, both as a whole and in
its parts, both as respects its events and its records,
that it unites history and character, fact and doctrine,
letter and spirit, God and man, in harmonious con
sistency ; and it is nothing but one-sidedness on our
part which attempts to put asunder what God has-
thus joined together.
It was this one-sidedness which vitiated Strauss's
book as a solution of the historic problem. Over and
above the unsatisfactoriness of that solution, — on the
score that it was essentially negative, or, as he himself
described it, " extinguished false lights, and left oth
ers to acquire, if they might, the power of discerning
something through the darkness," — the application of
the theory of myths to explain what is miraculous in
the evangelic records was, logically speaking, as really
an assumption as any of the theories of vulgar ration
alism which the author undertook to supersede. A
criticism of the contents of the books was not in
order. The books themselves, as historical phenome
na, ought first to have been considered. Especially
imperative was this preliminary discussion upon
Strauss, as he found it necessary to add half a
century or more to the received date of the origin of
the books in order to get time for the growth of his
myths. Without this antecedent demonstration of

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 339
the historic connections of Christianity, his readers
could have no logical assurance that his theory was
not a sheer speculation. The most sympathizing and
predisposed mind could not but confess that the theory
might, after all, prove to be — what the progress of
criticism is proving it to be — itself the grandest of
myths, a substitution of opinion for fact.
It is Baur's distinction, that he sought to correct
this mistake. His reiterated profession of assuming
a purely historical position, and attempting to com
prehend merely what is historically given, excites
expectations which are, nevertheless, doomed to dis
appointment : for it soon appears that he comes to
the .study of history with certain prepossessions re
specting what it must contain ; or rather with the
rooted assumption, that it cannot, in any event, con
tain a miracle. History, according to him, is pure
development ; and by development he means absolute
continuity, excluding any thing like creative interven
tion.9 He is thus, in principle, radically antagonistic
to Christianity. His theory of history precommits
him before the investigation. The case is decided
by him before trial, and the verdict made up before
the hearing. The boasted historical criticism turns
out to be as really dogmatic as any that has pre
ceded it. History becomes, under its treatment, little
more than concrete philosophy; Paulinism and Juda
ism are the Seyn and Nichtseyn of an Hegelian antith
esis. Baur had pronounced Strauss's work defective be
cause it undertakes to give a criticism of the gospel
history without a criticism of the Gospels. Strauss, in
6 Cf. Kirchengesch. der drei ersten Jahr., 3d ed. 1863, i. p. 1 seq.

340 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
turn, charges 10 Baur with idealizing facts, and clothing
them in the forms of modern speculation. Of
Strauss's " Life of Jesus," Renan again declares,11 that
" it is, at bottom, merely the philosophy of Hegel
applied to the evangelic narratives." It is this
philosophic precommitment which effectually dis
qualifies Baur, Strauss, Renan, and the rest, for im
partial historic inquiry.
In vain do their followers allege, in defence, that
this prejudgment against Christianity is offset by
the prejudices of its friends in its favor ; for these
prejudices do not bring its friends to the investigation,
resolved to find miracles, whether any are recorded
or not. There is no process of invention on their
part as a counterpoise to the process of destruction
carried on by their adversaries. Moreover, an an
tecedent bias with respect to Christianity, which
its advocates are free to confess, is avowed now
by its opponents also. Speaking of the assurances
given us so often by sceptical theologians, that
" their investigations are prompted solely by an
historic interest," Strauss has recently said,12 " With
all deference to the words of the learned gentlemen,
I hold what they assure us of to be an impossibility ;
and should esteem it to be nothing praiseworthy,
even were it possible. A man who is writing about
the rulers of Nineveh or the Egyptian Pharaohs may,
indeed, have a purely historic interest in the work ;
but Christianity is such a living power, and the ques
tion as to its origin involves such far-reaching con
sequences for the immediate present, that the inquirer
«¦> E.g., Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 108.
" Studies, etc., translated by Frothlngham, p. 184.
12 Leben Jesu, 1864, p. xiii. seq.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 341
must be a dolt to have merely an historic interest in
the decision of such a question." As respects a pre
vious bias, therefore, friend and foe are confessedly
alike. But what we charge upon these self-styled
historic critics is, that they superadd to their pre
liminary bias allegiance to a dogma which inevitably
precommits research to a foregone conclusion : for
they all concur in maintaining that it is " the task
of history to resolve what is miraculous into what
is natural ; " 13 that " history ends where miracles be
gin ; " 14 that " no supernatural account can be ad
mitted, for either credulity or deception is at the
bottom of it ; " 15 that " the recognition of the impos
sibility of a miracle is the first condition for every his
torical discussion of the evangelic history." 16 Such
assertions, which might be multiplied from their writ
ings indefinitely, warrant us in refusing to acknowl
edge their vaunted historic criticism to be worthy ofthe
name. Genuine science is always open to conviction ;
never. comes to its investigations resolved to deny or
to transform well-attested facts if they do not square
with its preformed opinions. Even M. Littre, the
pupil of Comte, and French translator of Strauss,
has said, " That man is unfitted for historic inves
tigation who would have any fact other than it is."
In the spirit of this declaration, may not the self-
styled historical criticism be impeached in the name
of historical science ?
And the conclusions which the Tubingen criticism
has reached are as improbable as its guiding principle

*" Baur, Eirchengesch., i. p. 1. « Cf. Strauss, Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 146 seq.
""• Renan's Studies, etc., Frothingham's trans., p. 221.
" Zeller, Strauss and Renan, an Essay, etc., Lond. 1866, p. 91.
29*

342 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
is unscientific. To tell us that Christianity is the
gradual and unaided development of Judaism, that
the all-embracing religion which has revolutionized
the world is the product of Jewish exclusiveness
and heathen culture, is to provoke inquiry rather than
to satisfy it ; for it represents that which has been
the origin of a new type of society — new politics,
literature, art, morals, life — as having been itself
virtually without beginning, a dawn growing brighter
and brighter to the perfect day, and all without a sun.
It is not surprising, then, that investigation should
have been so attracted to this problem as to give rise
to a new province of theological study, — the history of
New-Testament times. In such study, the friends
of Christianity may see another augury of the triumph
of the truth ; for, the more thoroughly the relics of
contemporary Jewish and Pagan thought are scru
tinized, the more thorough will be the conviction
that Christianity contains what transcends them all.
Whatever points of contact it may be shown to have
had with antecedent systems, those systems will not
be proved to be the perennial sources of the river of
the water of life. The researches of these inves
tigators will turn out to be but a comment on the in
spired statement, " when the fulness of the time was
cojne." The more clearly the preparative process is
traced out, the more sure will be the conviction, that,
after all, it was only preparative ; that the laws of
human thought and life demand inexorably an addi
tional statement, even that which is given in the full-
freighted words of the apostle, " God sent his Son,"
— one who was no culmination of Essenism, Phari-
seeism, Platonism, Stoicism, no mere compound of

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 343
Hebraism and Hellenism, but who needed not that
any man teach him. Inquiries begun for the ascer
tainment of fact wfll end, as they have ended, in the
establishment of faith. Guizot has recently stated
that his studies for the annotation of Gibbon " im
pressed him not only with the moral and social gran
deur of Christianity, but with the difficulty of ex
plaining it by purely human forces and causes." "
Thus miracles, so far from being discarded as at
variance with history, come to be defended, rather, in
the interests of historj'" ; because, otherwise, certain
indubitable facts of history cannot be satisfactorily
explained. Nor is the Tubingen theory any more satisfactory
when considered as a solution of the literary problem
which the origin of Christianity presents. Of the
twenty-seven writings composing our New Testa
ment, only five, we are told, were written by apos
tles ; of the associates and first adherents of Jesus, —
men whose zeal and eloquence and organizing skill
planted churches in three continents, — only two made
use of the pen; while from wholly unknown men
of the second century we have a series of masterly
productions. Now, why this unheard-of breach be
tween great writings and great men ? and where are
the men in the second century to whom these writ
ings can be plausibly ascribed ? We are sent in
search of a score of Juniuses, and that not tq an age
where we meet with candidates by the score, but to a
period in which, with all our searching, we can find
hardly the shadow of a mighty name.
« Revue des Deux Mondes for Sept. 1, 1869, p. 30; cf. Lenormant's similar
testimony, De la Divinity du Cltristianisme, etc., p. v. seq.

344 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
And how explain the moral incongruity between
the writings and their authors ? If these books are
the productions of a " genial set of Jesuitical religion
ists " in furtherance of a union between contending
parties, how happens it that one and all breathe so
direct, exalted, uncompromising a morality ? Can we
believe that the author of the Gospel of John, with
all its simplicity, purity, sublimity, was a man who
tried to palm off his book as the production of the
apostle, and tried to accomplish this dishonest pur
pose, not by a straightforward he, but by the con
temptible device of a series of hints and indirect sug
gestions, deluding the reader, but not unequivocally
compromising himself? 18
And by what magical arts did these anonymous
plotters succeed in getting at once a reception for
their works among all the httle scattered communi
ties of believers ? and not a reception merely, but a
reception as original productions of the apostolic age,
— productions which it was an acknowledged mark
of orthodoxy to reverence ? And if the early believers
were such an uncritical, credulous, compromising race
as these critics would have us beheve, and the num
ber of pseudonymous writings was " infinite," 1S how
came these uncritical readers to select their canon
with such marvellous and consentient skill ? — a skill
that commends itself to the critics themselves. But
we cannot pause to state all the difficulties that start.
Such critics make more work than they perform.
Instead of a solution of the question proposed, what
m Cf. Baur, die kancmischen Evangelien, pp. 378 seq. ; Kirchengesch., 1. 147.
19 Cf., e.g., Mackay, Tiibingen School, p. 335. But Irenseus's real words ara
&liv&nTOW ir*l"/-,of inenarraMHs multitudo, adv. Her., 1. 13, 1 ; Harvey's ed.,
p. 177.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 345
do they return us but a batch of problems ? — prob
lems all the product of their theory, and consequent
ly furnishing just so many presumptions against its
truth.HI.  SERVICE HAS BEEN RENDERED TO THE CAUSE OF
FAITH BY THE CONCLUSIONS WHICH INTERNAL CRITI
CISM HAS REACHED RESPECTING PARTICULAR GOSPELS.
Two or three specifications in illustration of this
statement are all for which room can here be found.
1. The mutual relations of the first three Gospels
have long furnished a perplexing problem to bibhcal
students. There is an obvious agreement among the
three as respects materials, arrangement, language
even; yet, on the other hand, as noticeable a
difference in all these respects. The conjectures
framed to account for this unparalleled combination
of agreements and differences have generally assumed,
until recently, that Mark's Gospel was largely derived
from one or both of the other two. This assumption,
which is as old at least as Augustine, who speaks
of Mark as a servile abridgment of Matthew,20 fell
in with the theory of the Tubingen theologians,
who, it will be remembered, regard Matthew's as a
modified Jewish Gospel, and Luke's as a conciliatory
Pauline Gospel. Since no traces of a partisan spirit,
either Pauhne or Jewish, are discernible in Mark,
they were content to say, in terms which seem to
the uninitiated to approximate closely to a Celtic wit
ticism, that its doctrinal tendency consisted in its
neutrality. Baur even discovers a confirmation of
*> Tanquam pedissequus et breviator ejus videtur, de Cons. Evang. , lib. i.
cap. 2; Migne, p. 1044.

346 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
his opinion in its author's choice of the name of Mark,
the " interpreter " of Peter, and attendant of Paul !
Of late, however, the first three Gospels have been
subjected to a process of microscopic scrutiny and
comparison, in wliich hardly a word has failed to be
taken into account ; and, as a result, critics have
generally abandoned the theory of the secondary and
derivative character of Mark, and now acknowledge
it to be a composition of co-ordinate rank with the
other two. Indeed, an increasing number of them,
among whom are several of very high repute for criti
cal scholarship, are decided in the conclusion, that
our second Gospel, so far from being an epitome of
the other two, is, on the contrary, the earliest and
most original of the three.
Now, without committing ourselves to any extreme
opinion, we may notice that the establishment of the
co-ordinate rank of Mark, the proof of what may be
called his distinct evangelic personahty, is of itself
well-nigh fatal to the Tubingen theory ; for the critics
of this school are unable to point out any positive
trace of a doctrinal purpose in the entire Gospel. The
conflict between Paulinism and Judaism it is utterly
ignorant of. The comparatively small proportion of
its didactic contents is one of its marked peculiarities.
It narrates, in a fresh, graphic, independent way, the
marvellous acts of Jesus. Its aim is to picture them
to the reader's eye, and thus elicit the confession, that
the very works that Jesus did bear witness of him
that the Father sent him. It does, indeed, present
traits corroborative of the ancient and uniform tradi
tion, that it embodies the preaching of Peter. But
these acknowledged indications of its connection with

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 317
Peter oidy add significance to the fact, that doctrinally
it knows neither Peter nor Paul, neither antagonism
nor conciliation, — nothing but Jesus as historically
proved to be the Son of God with power. It thus
stands forth as an independent witness for the truth,
— a witness which Baur's theory knows not what to do
with. Its mere existence is decisive ; for it is the one
irreducible fact which is logically fatal to that theory.
2. Passing mention may be made, also, of the con
clusion reached respecting the internal structure of
the Gospel of John. Shortly after the first appearance
of Strauss's book, attempts were made to revive the
opinion that the Gospel is composite. Its precise and
circumstantial narratives critics thought might be
traceable to the apostle, while the discourses were
attributable to a later hand. Baur made it the sub
ject of one of his most characteristic essays ; and, by
an analysis of its structure, — which, with all its ex
travagances, is confessed to be masterly, — showed
that it is woven throughout without seam, is unmis
takably the product of a single mind; so that the
critic must either accept it as it stands for the work
of the beloved disciple, or attribute it as a whole to
some other and far later writer. By shutting up the
critic to this unequivocal alternative, Baur, guided
by a higher wisdom than his own, has prepared the
way for the decisive triumph of the accumulating
evidence in favor of the Gospel's genuineness.
3. But the most memorable victory which internal
criticism has yielded to the truth was the result of a
controversy relative to the Gospel of Luke.
In the first half of the second century, there ap
peared at Rome a man, Marcion by name, who be-

348 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
came the leader of a sect of errorists that were called
after him, and continued to propagate his views for
many generations. Prominent among those views
was the opinion, that the religion of the New Testa
ment was antagonistic to that of the Old. To main
tain this opinion, he asserted that the current Chris
tianity of the churches was largely adulterated with
Judaism; and it is interesting to notice, that, like
Baur in modern times, he gave color to his assertion
by greatly exaggerating the affair between Paul and
Peter at Antioch, related in the Epistle to the Gala
tians. In order to rid Christianity of these Jewish
corruptions, he revised the list of sacred books, and
made for himself a canon which contained ten of
Paul's Epistles curtailed, and a single Gospel. This
Gospel, which bore no author's name in its superscrip
tion, is known to us moderns only by extracts from
it, and descriptions given by Marcion's opponents.
Two of these opponents, within about half a century
after Marcion's death, undertook to refute his errors
from his own Gospel ; and the refutation of one of
them, Tertulhan,21 has come down to us, together with
a similar work by Epiphanius, a writer of a later
date. Now, according to. the reiterated and harmonious
testimony of these early writers, Marcion's Gospel was
nothing but an alteration of our Gospel according to
Luke. This, therefore, was the settled and accepted
opinion down to the latter part of the last century.
Then, however, Semler22 broached the theory, that
Marcion's Gospel and Luke's were two different re
visions of one and the same original.. This theory
» Who wrote A.D. 208. "= In the year 1776.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 349
was taken up by subsequent writers, and ex
panded into the opinion that Marcion's Gospel
preceded Luke's, and was used by the evangelist in
composing his work. The discussion was continued
indecisively, till, in the year 1823, two theologians 23
pubhshed, in the same German town,24 works pre
pared without concert, and vindicating the originahty
of Luke so emphatically, that critics holding the con
trary view abandoned it.25 But it began, before long,
to find again a hesitating avowal here and there, and
in due time was adopted and urged by Baur and his
school. Some of his disciples, however, dissented ;
and one of them in particular26 advocated the ancient
opinion so ably as to settle the question.
In the course of this protracted controversy, the
various scattered fragments of Marcion's Gospel were,
brought together ; and, by a painstaking combination
of fact and reasoning analogous to that by which the
anatomist reconstructs an extinct animal, Marcion's
Gospel was reproduced, and confronted with the
canonical Luke. The correspondence between the
two renders it evident at once that Luke's must have
been an enlargement of Marcion's, or Marcion's an
abridgment of Luke's ; and thorough scrutiny dissi
pates all doubt that the latter statement is the truth.
The triumphant establishment of this conclusion in
volves consequences of much importance in relation
to our Gospels. For in the first place, if the canon
ical Gospel preceded Marcion's, it must have been
extant, current, at least as early as 125 A.D.2T See

s'' OlshausenandHahn. M Konigsberg.
**> E.g., De Wette, Gieseler, et al. * Volckmar.
S7 Volckmar, p. 260, says A.D. 120; cf. p. 261.
30

350 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ondly, it could hardly have been a gradual formation,
or recast, as the Tubingen school allege, in a concilia
tory spirit; for, had that been the case, how easy
would it have been for the followers of Marcion to
silence his opponents by retorting their charge, and
exposing the facts ! Again : in all probability, it was
then acknowledged to have been written by Luke,
a man of Gentile extraction, associated with the Apos
tle to the Gentiles ; and doubtless found favor with
Marcion on that account. Further : the proof of its
genuineness gives rise to a strong presumption in
favor of the genuineness of the remaining three ; for,
otherwise, how could they have established their
claims to co-equal rank with it ? Moreover, if the
statements of early Christian writers turn out to be
substantially true in a case like this, where their
spirits are evidently heated by controversy, their
cooler and more dispassionate statements, when con
current, ought not to be lightly set aside. And, finally,
the failure of this early errorist to reconstruct Chris
tianity upon an anti- Judaistic basis in the second cen
tury augurs ill for the success of those who seem
desirous of accomplishing a similar work in the
nineteenth century: then it was necessary only to
rewrite the sacred books, now to rewrite history
besides. It is not overlooked that the conclusion in this in
stance has been made to rest chiefly upon a process
of internal criticism, — a species of criticism the pre-
cariousness of whose results has been often illustrated
in the history of literature, both secular and sacred.
But, in the present case, it is the re-affirmation of a re
sult reached by successive as well as by simultaneous

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 351
and independent investigators ; a result sustained by
all extant ancient testimony bearing upon the point ;
a result resting upon grounds so convincing as to
compel the assent of the Tubingen scholars,28 who re
opened the discussion ; for they pubhcly retracted
their opinion, and acknowledged Luke's priority:
even Baur himself virtually abandoned his position.

IV.  CRITICAL RESEARCH HAS BEEN TRIBUTARY TO
FAITH BY INCREASING THE EXTERNAL EVIDENCE IN
SUPPORT OF THE GOSPELS.
This increase consists chiefly in facts and docu
ments that have come to light during the discussion.
The most conspicuous and significant of them may
here be mentioned.
And, rightly to appreciate them, we must remember
that the two most recent sceptical hypotheses of note
respecting our Gospels require the lapse of a con
siderable interval of time between the death of Jesus
and the composition of the books as we now have
them. If we assume with Baur that these books are
the products of deliberate attempts at mediation be
tween antagonistic parties, the history of similar dis
putes is enough to convince us that generations must
have elapsed before such a controversy could have
run its course, and closed in a re-united church and
the production of a body of literature of which the
New Testament contains but a portion. Or if we
adopt the theory of Strauss, and assume that the Gos
pels embody the unintentional fictions of devout im
aginations, all that we know about similar mythical
» Zeller and R'tschl.

352 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
growths proves, that for the development and recep
tion of so complete, harmonious, profound, exalted a
collection of myths, a long period of time is even more
indispensable than before. Both these theories, there
fore, while differing as to the mode in which the Gos
pels originated, agree in requiring a long period for
the process. Time is indispensable to them. Hence
both Strauss and Baur concur in fixing the date of our
extant documents at from a century to a century and
a quarter after the death of Jesus. By just as much
as this interval is diminished, by just so much is the
ground cut away upon which their theories rest. The
physical philosopher often makes room for his specu
lations by postulating an indefinite period of time ;
and such a postulate, even if made without plausible
pretext, can generally be made without fear of suc
cessful contradiction. But the deposit of Christianity
in the world of thought took place within a period
necessarily limited, and the limits of which historic
research is perpetually narrowing. The boundary, on
one side, is definitely fixed by "the death of Jesus ;
while the other extreme, the earliest historic trace of
our evangelic documents, is steadily approximating to
it, and threatening to crush the theories of sceptics
in a vise-like grasp.
1. It is allowable, perhaps, to begin the enumeration
of the recent accessions of historical evidence by allud
ing to what is known as Muratori's " Fragment on
the Canon." This document, which receives its name
from the keeper of the Ambrosian Library at Milan,
who discovered it, was first published more than a cen
tury and a quarter ago, — 1740. ' But Muratori pub
lished it chiefly to illustrate the neglect into which

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 353
letters sank in Italy after the barbaric invasion ; and
the form in which he gave it to the world was not
wholly satisfactory. Only within a comparatively re
cent period has it assumed much prominence in bibli
cal criticism; and but little more than three years
have passed since Tregelles first edited a facsimile
tracing of it. It comprises somewhat more than two
leaves of what seems to be a mutilated commonplace-
book of some monk of the seventh or eighth cen
tury, and consists of an account of the New-Testa
ment books, given, apparently, with some controver
sial or argumentative end in view. A chronologi
cal allusion it makes indicates that the original
document was written in the second half of the
second century,- — Tregelles thinks, " about A. D.
160, or earlier." It is the earliest catalogue of the
New-Testament writings which has come down to us.
In its present form, it is an illiterate translation into
rustic Latin of a Greek original ; and, although it
contains but little information that is positively new,
it is a document of great importance in its bearing
upon our discussion. Passing by what it says about
other sacred books, we are interested to notice that
it recognizes indubitably our four canonical Gospels.
For although, owing to the mutilation of the extant
manuscript, its opening words relate to Mark, it con
tinues by enumerating the Gospel according to Luke
as the third ; and, after a brief description of the au
thor, mentions the fourth Gospel as written by John
the disciple, and subjoins an account of the occasion
of its composition, resembling traditions found in
other patristical writings.
There are several particulars which give especial
30*

354 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
value to this testimony. In the first place, it is testi
mony to a collection of sacred writings. Individual
writers of an earlier date have left us evidence of
their recognition of separate books in our canon : but
here, in the third quarter of the second century, we
have our four Gospels selected, and that, too (if we
may believe the sceptical critics), from an unknown
multitude of similar fictitious compositions ; they, and
they only, selected, — although, according to Baur
and others, they were as yet only from ten to thirty
years old, — we have these, our four Gospels, asso
ciated with Paul's Epistles and other books (making in
all twenty-three out of our twenty-seven), as consti
tuting one harmonious and recognized body of litera
ture. Hence the independent attestations of particu
lar books, which present themselves here and there
during this same period, acquire new force and signifi
cance ; for it appears that they are not isolated. They
express, not private conjecture, but current "opinion.
Like the banners of a hidden army, or the peaks of a
distant mountain-range, they represent, and are sus
tained by, compact, continuous bodies below.
Further : the value of this testimony to a collection
of sacred books is enhanced by the locality which it
represents. The existence, at this time or a little
later, of a Syriac translation of the same writings, is
evidence of their general reception among Eastern
churches. Similar testimony, and perhaps more an
cient, is afforded by the Latin version prepared in
Northern Africa. But this document of Muratori's,
by the order in which it arranges the Gospels, by the
language in which it was originally written, by the
reference it makes to Rome, may fairly be taken as a

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 355
witness to the faith of the Itahan churches. By its
aid, therefore, we can furnish reasonable proof of the
reception, in the last half of the second century, of a
collection of Christian documents, substantially iden
tical with our New Testament, by the Christians of
three continents, — Europe, Asia, Africa. When we
consider the time required in those days for the mul
tiplication and distribution of books, we shall pro
nounce the notion, that these writings — thus col
lected, translated, disseminated — had originated, for
the most part anonymously, only a few years before,
to be utterly improbable.
For notice, further, that this earliest'list of the
New-Testament writings is not improperly called a
canon, — a recognized rule of Christian faith. In
reference to the Gospels, the author says express
ly, " Though various ideas are taught in each of the
Gospels, it makes no difference to the faith of believ
ers : since, in all of them, all things are declared by
one leading Spirit concerning the nativity, the passion,
the resurrection, the conversation [of our Lord] with
his disciples, and his double advent, — first in humble
guise, which has taken place ; and afterward in royal
power, which is yet future." 29 What more explicit
summary of evangelic history, what more unequivocal
assertion of its inspiration, could be desired, than
is given us thus in the third quarter of the second
century ? Subsequently, in speaking of the writings
of Paul and of John, he says, that, although nominally
addressed to particular churches, they are intended
for " the one catholic Church of the whole world."
The half-controversial aim of the document renders
*» Cf. Westcott, Canon of the N. T., 2d ed., p. 188.

356 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the significance of these confident utterances all the
more weighty.
2. The next accession of external evidence that
may be noticed occurred in connection with the
pseudo-Clementine writings. These supposititious
writings, which usurp the name of Clement, one of
the early bishops of the Church at Rome, exhibit a
half-Judaistic, half-Pantheistic type of doctrine, re
specting the origin and relations of which critics are
not yet agreed. That collection of them with which
we are concerned is in Greek, and is known as the
Homilies. It is a skilfully-constructed theological
romance, in which Clement is both the hero and the
narrator of the story. He sets out for Judaea in
search of the truth ; which he obtains at length from
Peter, whom he is privileged to accompany in his apos
tolic journeys. The work contains covert yet indubi
table references, in a hostile spirit, to the apostle Paul.
Its date critics conjecture to lie somewhere between
150 A.D. and 170.30 That these Homilies contain
references to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke has
been generally acknowledged. The apparent though
less numerous allusions to Mark, also, were generally
admitted ; but whether the homilist actually quoted
from our Gospel of John, or not, was a question on
which the critics had already come to high words,
when in 1853 the dispute was cut short by the dis
covery and publication of a new and complete manu
script of the work. The edition in use at that date
contained but nineteen and a half of the twenty
homilies included in the original work. The missing
30 So, e.g., Uhlhorn in Herzog's Eneyk., 2, 756 ; Scholten, die dlt. Zeug., p. 55 j
Volckmar, d. Ursprung, etc., pp. 63, 136.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 357
portion which was now brought to light not only
gave additional references to the first three Gospels,31
but silenced those who disputed the apparent allu
sions to John 32 by putting the following language
into the mouth of Peter : " Our Master gave to the
disciples — inquiring about the man sightless from
birth, who received sight from him, ' Whether this
man sinned, or his parents, that he was born blind ' —
this answer : ' Neither this man sinned at all, nor his
parents, but that through him should be made mani
fest the power of God healing sins of ignorance." 33
The length of this passage, and its verbal identity, in
the main, with the narrative in the Gospel, are so
cogent a proof, that even Strauss 3i acknowledges here
an undeniable reference to the ninth chapter of John.
3. In the year 1842, Mynoides Mynas, a Greek, who,
by direction of the minister of public instruction
under Louis Philippe, M. Villemain, had visited his
native country in search of ancient manuscripts,
brought to Paris, among other relics, a manuscript
obtained at a convent on Mount Athos, and entitled
" Refutation of All Heresies." After it had slumbered
nearly a decade in the Imperial Library, one of the
officers there, perceiving that it was the continuation
of a fragment called. " Philosophoumena " (i.e., "Phil
osophical Speculations "), already published in the
works of Origen, ascribed it to that Church father,
and, adopting the additional title, published the work
at Oxford in 1851. On examining it, scholars were at
once agreed that it was not written by Origen ; and,
by general consent, they have assigned it to Hippoly-
m Cf. Uhlhorn, p. 114. 32 E.g., in Horn. 3, 52, to John x. 3, 27.
sa Horn. xix. 22. » Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 69.

358 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
tus, a bishop of learning and distinction, who was
known to have written such a work in the first half
of the third century. So here is a prominent Church
father of the beginning of the third century who has
come to hfe again in the middle of the nineteenth ;
and most interesting disclosures has he made to us
about the history and polity of the early Church,
particularly at Rome, and especially about the early
errorists. What adds greatly to the value of his
work is the circumstance, that it contains copious
extracts from some fifteen or more lost writings of
these heretics ; and among these extracts we discover
indubitable confirmation of the early existence of our
canonical Gospels.
a. One of the oldest and most important represen
tatives of that compound of heathen philosophy and
Christian truth, known as Gnosticism, was Basilides,
who lived, as Baur says,35 " in the first decades of the
second century" (say A.D. 125), and pretended that
he had received esoteric instruction from the Saviour,
communicated through the apostle Matthias. Now,
in the quotations from his writings which Hippolytus
gives us are clear references to the Gospels of Mat
thew, Luke, and, most noteworthy of all, to the
Gospel of John. After quoting the words of Moses,
" Let there be hght," Basilides adds,36 " And this is
what is said in the Gospels, ' That was the true Light,
which hghteth every man that cometh into the
world.' "
In another place 37 he says, " And that every thing
has its proper season, the Saviour proves sufficiently
¦» Dogmengesch., 1. 1, p. 197.
so Hippol. vii. 22, ed. Dunck. 8c Schneid., p. 360.
»» vii. 27, ed. Dunck. & Schneid., p. 376.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 359
when he says, ' Mine hour is not yet come.' " Thus
we have obvious quotations from the prologue of the
fourth Gospel, and from the answer of Jesus to his
mother at the marriage in Cana, — quotations made
evidently as from an authoritative work,38 — in this
heretical writer of the year 125.
b. Another Gnostic leader of the same period was
Valentinus. After having propagated his views
several years at Alexandria, he came to Rome about
A.D. 140. That he lived at only a single generation's
remove from the apostolic age is evident from the
circumstance that he, too, claimed to have received
secret instructions from a disciple of Paul. From
his writings, also, this newly-discovered "Refutation"
makes copious quotations. And, in one passage,39
Valentinus repeats from Luke the words, " The Holy
Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the
Highest shall overshadow thee ; wherefore that which
shall be born of thee shall be called Holy ; " introdu
cing them by the phrase, "According to that which
was spoken," — the formula more than once used in
the New Testament to usher in a passage from the
Old. And in another passage near by 40 he is quoted
as substantiating one of his doctrines by saying, " On
this account the Saviour says, ' All that have come
before me are thieves and robbers,' " — another mani
fest quotation from the fourth Gospel as from a cur
rent authority, and yet made a generation before the
time when, according to the Tubingen critics, that
Gospel was written.
Now, the authenticity of the disclosures which this
» Cf. Miiller, Barnabas-brief, p. 127.
30 vi. 35, ed. Dunck. 8c Schneid., p. 284 seq.
» 1. c. p. 284.

360 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
resuscitated writer thus makes to us is not to be dis
puted. They bear every trace of having been drawn
from primitive sources.41 They concur with accounts
of the doctrines of these heretics given us by two or
three other early Christian writers, one of whom,42 al
luding to Valentinus's use of the New Testament,
contrasts his treatment of it with Marcion's, saying,
" Valentinus did not, like Marcion, suit the Scriptures
to his doctrine, but his doctrine to the Scriptures, . . .
robbing the words of their proper sense." And an
other, still earlier, referring to these and other error-
ists, says,43 " So great is the surety of the Gospels,
that even the very heretics bear witness to them ; and
each, making them his starting-point, endeavors by
them to maintain his own doctrine. . . . Those who
adhere to Valentinus make most abundant use of
that according to John in proof of their system of
consorts ; yet the Gospel itself exposes their teachings
as wholly erroneous. . . . Since, then, even our oppo
nents give testimony in our favor by making use of
these Gospels, our proof of them is strong and true."
4. But our review of the evidence that has come
to light in support of the Gospels would be seriously
defective without some mention of the discovery of
the celebrated biblical manuscript at the Convent of
St. Katharine, on Mount Sinai, which Tischendorf
made on the 4th of February, 1859, and has since
rendered famihar to every people of Christendom by
his captivating account of the occurrence. In this
Greek Bible, it will be remembered, the canonical
books of the New Testament are foUowed by a letter
" Of. Baur, Kirchengesch., i. 213, note ; 203, note.
42 Tertullian, de Prmscript. Hmret., 88.
43 Irenseus adv. Beer., iii. 11, 7.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 361
known as tile Epistle of Barnabas. This is an anony
mous anti-Judaistic production, not very dissimilar
in aim to our Epistle to the Hebrews, yet so in
ferior to it in treatment as to set off by contrast the
calm, broad, philosophic, spiritual views of Judaism
which pervade the inspired book. Although called
"The Epistle of Barnabas," the letter itself does not
tell us either by whom or to whom it was written ;
and it gives internal evidence of having originated at
too late a date to have been the production of the
Levite of Cyprus, the associate of the apostle Paul.
Still it is repeatedly ascribed to him by early Chris
tian writers. It became so associated with the apos
tolic epistles, that, in the third century at least, it
was read at public worship ; and at Alexandria, at
the close of the second century, it was held in such
authority by one of the most learned Church fathers,44
that he commented upon it. Hence its antiquity is
indisputable. Indeed, many critics of different schools
have supposed that it was written in the last quarter
of the first century ; and A.D. 120 seems now to be
accepted as its approximate date.45
Now, down to the year 1859, the first four and a
half chapters of this epistle were extant only in a rude
Latin translation, in which the fourth chapter closed
with these words : " Let us take heed, therefore, lest
haply we be found as it is written, Many called,
few chosen." These words are recorded only in the
Gospel according to Matthew.46 But the extraordi-

" Clement.
16 SoVolckmar, Urspruwg __r_?_a__r.,p._43; Baur, Lehrbuch der Dogmen-
gesch., ed. 2, p. 80 seq., and Dogmengesch., i. 1, p. 249 ; Muller, Barnabas-brief,
p. 18 seq., p. 335 seq.
« xx. 16; xxii. 14. 31

362 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
nary feature of the case was not that this very early
writer should have borrowed from our canonical Gos
pel of Matthew (for that he has apparently done in
other passages also), but that he should have prefaced
his quotation with the formula, "As it is. written."
For, to Christian minds, this phrase associates itself
with the authoritative use made in the New Testa
ment of the Old ; as, for example, when Satan tries
to persuade Jesus to cast himself down from the pin
nacle of the temple by saying, " It is written, He
shall give his angels charge," &c, and Jesus answers,
" It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord
thy God." Examination, it is true, shows 47 that this
formula was not rigidly restricted in early Christian
usage to canonical writings ; but it does convey a
plain intimation that the writing thus quoted is recog
nized as having authority. Such a sign of the author
itative recognition of Matthew's Gospel within the
first quarter of the second century seemed to many
critics too surprising to be credited. Accordingly,
they preferred to suppose that the formula in ques
tion had been ' prefixed to the quotation, not by the
original author, but by the translator, at a subsequent
date. But this supposition was proved to be errone
ous by Tischendorf's discovery just mentioned ; for in
the Greek text of the epistle, found in full in the
Sinaitic manuscript, the quotation appears with the
same formula prefixed. And even should we conjec
ture, as some have done,48 that this remarkable phe
nomenon originated in a failure of memory on the
« See, e.g., Miiller's Barnabas-brief, pp. 2, 126, seq.; Reuss, Gesch. d. Beil.
Schriften N. T., pp. 281, 290.
48 Scholten, Zeugnisse, etc., p. 10; Mey. on John, p. 5, note.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 363
writer's part, so that for the moment he attributed in
thought to the Old Testament this quotation from
the New, the conjecture would hardly impair the sig
nificance of the fact ; for to mistake these words for
those of the Old Testament would imply long and
reverent familiarity with them on the writer's part,
and so would offer almost as good proof of their au
thoritative currency as the intentional application to
them of this formula would give.
The early association by this writer of a Gospel with
the Old-Testament writings as of similar weight is
not an exceptional occurrence, expressive of exagger
ated or merely private views. The contemporary Ba
silides, heretic as he was, spoke repeatedly of them
in the same respectful manner ; and one specimen of
his language has already been quoted. Twenty years
ago, it used to be thought that the earliest proof of
the reception of New-Testament writings as of simi
lar authority to the Old was to be found about the
year 180 ; 49 but recent discoveries furnish indubi
table evidence that even the Gospels had acquired
such a reception more than half a century earlier.
Now, these new evidences, the chief of which have
been thus cursorily described, we must remember are
additional to what was adequate before. Notwith
standing the scantiness of the relics of the Christian
literature of the first century and a half of our era
which had come down to us, enough had survived to
satisfy the vast majority of candid and competent
inquirers that our four Gospels are trustworthy
accounts of the life of Jesus. For these extant
<¦> In Theophilus ad Autolyeum, 1. iii. \i. 12.

364 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
relics proved that myriads of men in every part
of the then civilized world accepted these Gos
pels as authentic. Upon faith in this authentici
ty, they deliberately staked their earthly welfare
and their eternal hopes. They were interested,
then, to ascertain the truth in the matter ; and
their proximity to apostolic times rendered them
as able as they were interested. Their acceptance
of them as the repositories of Christian truth gives
these books, for us, a most trustworthy indorsement ;
an attestation wholly unlike that which any other
ancient writings can show ; an attestation correspond
ing to the momentous interests which the question at
issue involves. This attestation has seemed to the
mass of believers from generation to generation to
be as satisfactory as it is ancient. But critics, in
support of their modern assertion that our Gospels
did not come into use till the second half of the
second century, have alleged chiefly negative evidence ;
viz., that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not
quoted by certain writers, who, according to these
critics, might have been expected to use them, yet
of whose works perhaps but scanty fragments have
survived. Such negative evidence must have seemed,
one would suppose, a most precarious basis to build
upon ; yet, strange to say, one elaborate theory after
another, as we have seen, has been made thus to rest
historically upon nothing. Silence added to silence,
amounts," according to the reckoning of such critics,
to positive denial.50 Now, these recent discoveries,
by carrying back for half a century the indubitable
traces of the Gospels, prove such theories to be pure
60 Of. Zeller's argument in Riggenbach, die Zeugnissefur das Evang. Johan.,
p. 107.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 365
theories ; not only without any actual, but without
any possible, foundation ; not only unsupported by
the facts, of history, but in opposition to the facts of
history. And this new evidence is not weakened by any
new evidence on the other side. The discoveries all
look one way. No counter-testimony has come to
light : on the contrary, while the new scrutiny to
which the history and literary relics of the second
century have been subjected has more than once
resulted in giving the believer assurance where
before he had a reasonable conviction, the progress
of discovery has imparted validity to many an ap
parent allusion of still earlier date, upon which a
cautious scholarship has hitherto been indisposed to
lay stress. Even in the apostolic fathers, a multitude
of coincidences with our Gospels in thought, and
sometimes in language as well, are to be met with ;
and the conviction is growing, that these coincidences
are fairly entitled to weight in the argument. Under
the influence of the accumulating evidence, writers
who are far from being chargeable with partiality
towards the evangelists have begun to insist on dis
covering traces of them in Clement and Hermas and
Ignatius.51 But, it may be asked, where are the historical
critics ? Have they all surrendered ?
When it was announced, last autumn, that pro
posals had been made for a secret treaty between
France and Prussia, the first response was a denial

n- Of., for instance, Keim, Jesu von Nazara, i. 141 seq. The correspondences
in the Shepherd of Hermas have recently been drawn out by Zahn, der Birt
des Bermas, p. 453 seq. '
31*

366 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
that any such treaty existed. Then its alleged text
was pubhshed. The answer was, " That's a fabrica
tion." But the Prussian foreign office professed to
exhibit the document. "Ah, yes!" said France:
" that's a proposal made by Bismarck, which we at once
rejected." — " But it is in Benedetti's handwriting." —
" Y-e-s ; but those are merely minutes made at Bis
marck's dictation." And so the artful dodging went
on. But secular diplomacy has no monopoly of the
game to the exclusion of sacred diplomatics : on
the contrary, if it can be played with current history,
much more can it be played with past history. If
disagreeable facts at the present day can be thus
disposed of, we may be sure that the ingenuity of
critics will not fail them when they have to do with
records nearly eighteen centuries old. According
ly, on being confronted with troublesome evidence,
they are ready with their answer. The apparent
quotation is merely an adaptation of a somewhat
similar passage in the Old Testament ; 52 or only the
expression of one of the current thoughts of the
time ; 53 or the uncanonical writing itself is not
genuine ; s* or the quoted passages are later inter
polations ; or the allegation about an earlier writer's
use of the Gospels is due to ignorance, or is even
a wilful falsification ; M or subtile differences, even
latent antagonisms of thought, are discovered to be
lurking under identity of phraseology ; 56 or the
62 E.g., of 4 Ezra viii. 3 by Barnabas; cf. Scholten, Zeugnisse, p. 11; so
Strauss, Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 55 ; Volckmar, Hilgenfeld, et al.
•» Cf. Baur, Evang., p. 349 seq.
» E.g., Polycarp's Ep., although acknowledged by his pupil Irenseus.
<* Cf. Ritachl on Tertullian's testimony about Marcion in Jahrbb. far d.
Theol., 1866. p. 855 seq.
CB E.g., Justin's doctrine of the Logos, and John's.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 367
affinities of Christianity with speculations current at
its birth are exaggerated, and its distinctive differ
ences common to the Gospels and the fathers are
overlooked ; 51 or the testifying Christian writer is
presumed to get his knowledge from some predecessor
" of weak head," and blindly to reiterate erroneous
statements ; M or something is discovered in the an
cient author's use of a Gospel which implies distrust
of it ; 59 or the reasons alleged 60 for the rejection of
a Gospel by some early heretic (the mention of whose
rejection implies general reception) are declared to
be incorrect, and the rejection to have been prompted
by the same reasons which induce modern critics to
reject it ; or, when a use of the Gospels can no longer
be denied, the admission is rendered nugatory by
altering the writer's date even almost a century,61
or by the assumption that both the evangelist and
the early writer make a common use of some anterior
document conjured into existence by the critic on the
spot.62 Truly, necessity is the mother of invention ; but
it is hard to say which is taxed most, — the invention
of these critics, or the credulity of their readers.
One cannot help asking, What would become of the
world's belief in the genuineness of ninety-nine books
out of every hundred if the evidence for them
57 E.g., that the Logos became incarnate; common to John and Justin, yet
foreign to Philo.
58 E.g., Irenseus those of Papias.
•"•> Cf. Volckmar on the Clemen. Homilies in Riggenbach, Zeugnisse, etc.,
p. 80; and on Barnabas in Ursprung der Evang., p. 66.
60 E.g., by Tertullian of Marcion.
D* E.g., Celsus made a contemporary of Origen by Volckmar, Ursprung, etc.,
p. 80. 02 Cf. Scholten on the Clementine quotation from John ix., Zeugnisse, etc.,
p. 60.

368 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
were subjected to the treatment which these men
call — probably without intending any double sense
— " critical " ? And how would they answer if we
should invite them to exchange places with us for a
time, and should demand of them proof for all their
various and often conflicting assertions about lost
writings, — pre-canonical, post-canonical, pseudony
mous, apocryphal, and the like ; about parties within
the Church and without, and the hterary fabrications
they are alleged to have produced ? These framers
of hypotheses take to themselves the light work:
the task is to prove or to believe their theories. And
yet such a storm of evidence concentrates itself upon
them sometimes, that they fly to the nearest shelter,
even though, to get out of the rain, they get under
the eaves. One of them has been driven to say that
the doctrine of John was borrowed from Justin.63
Sydney Smith, you remember, had a rural neighbor
who was persuaded that the hundred and fourth
Psalm was a plagiarism upon a devotional composition
of his own.
But, notwithstanding all these ingenious devices,
the later writers of the Tubingen school have been
compelled to fall back from the more advanced posi
tion respecting the date of the Gospels ; to shrink be
fore the grasp of the vise. One of the most promi
nent of them M even affects to make it his endeavor
" to put a stop to the excesses of modern criticism."
Matthew's Gospel, the date of which, although the
earliest of the four, fell, according to Baur, after 130,
this critic carries back to between A.D. 70 and 80 ;
and thinks that Matthew himself may have written
«s Volckmar, Urspr. d. Evang., p. 96. « Hilgenfeld.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 369
the germ of it, although our canonical book is only a
secondary, perhaps tertiary, formation of the original.
This is but a sample of the chronological changes
which the followers of Baur have felt themselves
compelled to make. Even that one whose wild opin
ion about John was just alluded to holds that the
composition of the first three Gospels began under
Titus, and ended under Trajan, — about the year 110.
And the most which a recent writer upon the history
of the New-Testament books65 can achieve for the
Tubingen views is contained in the conclusion, that,
" before the middle of the second century, history
gives no answer to the question" (the wording of
which we should notice), " ' Do the writings of the
New Testament proceed from the authors whose
names they bear ? ' except in the case of sundry epis
tles of Paul and the Revelation." And this result
he makes the basis of the cheering lesson, that
" every endeavor to arrive at a knowledge of primi
tive Christianity by the path of external evidence
must be regarded as fruitless."
V.  BUT IT IS TIME TO PASS ON AND CONSIDER A
FEW MISCELLANEOUS PARTICULARS, IN WHICH IT AP
PEARS THAT CRITICISM HAS BEEN MINISTERING TO
FAITH IN THE GOSPELS.
I 1. The opinion that the Gospels originated in the
"second century is only a part of a general theory
respecting the internal history of the early Church
and the development of Christian thought. That
theory, by its novelty, its boldness, its harmony with
the philosophy dominant in Germany at the time,
o*> Scholten, die dltesten Zeugnisse, etc., 1867, p. 182 seq.

370 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
and through the learning and skill of its authors,
found many adherents, and not a few advocates. But,
as years have rolled on, it has not exhibited the marks
of truth ; discussion has not confirmed it ; renewed
examination has not augmented the faith of believ
ers in it ; discoveries have not ministered to it fresh
support: on the contrary, historically it has been
steadily losing ground, as we have seen. There has,
indeed, been progress towards concentration of opin
ion, but a progress away from the chosen epoch ; a
concentration that is forced, and suggestive of that
of the French at Sedan.
As research does not confirm the opinion of the
Tubingen critics respecting the date of the Gospels, so
it does not sustain their theory of the forces which
gave them origin. A more careful study of extant
literary relics, a more teachable tracing-out of the cur
rents of thought in the primitive Christian world, has
convinced students that the respective influences of
Jewish and of Gentile Christianity have been greatly
overrated. Neither in intensity nor in duration was
the antagonism between the two such as it is assumed
to have been by the theory of Baur ; nor was uni
versal Christianity produced by their neutralization :
on the contrary, an impartial review of the teachings
of Paul has shown here again, what all the rest of
Christendom did not doubt, that, even in them, the
Judaistic element is to be found as well as the Paul
ine ; that they themselves afford in the first century
the " neutral basis " for the Church universal, which,
it was contended, we looked for in vain until the
second. The Tubingen criticism being thus invalidated in its

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 371
results respecting the date of the Gospels and the con
flict which moulded them, the whole question of their
characteristics and mutual relations has been re
opened ; and, in reference to it, the old saying has
found fulfilment even among writers of the Tubingen
school, — " Many men, many minds." In short, the
Tubingen school is a thing of the past ; not because
its leader is dead, and the university to which he and
his associates gave unenviable distinction for a season
has come again, like the majority of German univer
sities, under the influence of a believing scholarship,
but because the opinions which the name represents
have had their day. As a sect in biblical criticism,
the Tubingen school has perished. Its history, even,
has been written, and that in more than one tongue.
Individual scholars there are who adhere still to cer
tain of its distinctive tenets; one or two, indeed,
who have gone beyond the extravagances of Baur
himself: but they find few followers ; and the most
prominent and productive of them all66 not only
recedes half a century c*$as we have seen) from the
original opinion respecting the date of the Gospels,
not only acknowledges the genuineness of the Epistles
to the Philippians, to Philemon, and the First to the
Thessalonians, in addition to the four accepted by
Baur, but is at pains to baptize his criticism with
another name, — the " literary historical." Surely,
if the Tubingen theory was not a compound of ex
travagances and half-truths, but unveiled for the first
time the simple verity concerning early Christian his
tory, strange that it should neither steadily win nor
permanently keep converts! If true, why so defi-
« Hilgenfeld.

372 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
cient in the conquering and consolidating power of
truth? 2. But not only has the Tubingen theory proved
itself to be deficient in attractive and cohesive power :
it is, in reahty, destructive to the mythical theory with
which it has a superficial agreement. Both theories
agree, it will be remembered, in declaring that our
Gospels orignated in the middle of the second centu
ry. But Baur acknowledged the four leading Epistles
of Paul to be genuine, and to have been written be
fore A.D. 60. Now, this admission is fatal to the
sister-theory of Strauss; for these Epistles prove
that Jesus was not an ordinary man, around whose
idolized memory his disciples, in the course of a cen
tury or so, wreathed mythical fictions, not knowing
what they did ; but that the culminating facts of his
life, the leading traits of his character, as given in Our
so-called mythical Gospels, are familiar to the Chris
tian world within twenty-five yeats after his death.
In these four Epistles we meet with allusions, some
more, some less explicit, but all indubitable, to
the institution of the last supper,67 the betrayal,68 the
crucifixion,69 the resurrection on the third day.'0
Jesus is spoken of as the image of God,71 the Son
of God,72 the second Adam ; 73 his death has saving
efficacy ; 74 his character is the disciple's pattern ; 75 he

" 1 Cor. x. 16; xi. 23. os _ Cor. xi. 23.
«¦> 1 Cor. i. 13, 17; ii. 2, 8; 2 Cor. xiii. 4; Gal. iii. 1, 13; vi. 14.
"Rom. i. 4; iv. 24; vi. 9; vii. 4; viii. 11; x.9; ICor.vi. 14; rv. 4; 2 Cor.
iv. 14; Gal. 1.1.
'i 2 Cor. iv. 4.
'» Rom. i. 3; Gal. iv. 4. '"> 1 Cor. xv. 45; Rom. v. 12 seq.
'" Rom. iii. 25; iv. 25; v. 6 seq.; viii. 3, 32; 1 Cor. viii. 11; xv. 3; 2 Cor. y.
15 seq.; Gal. i. 4; ii. 20, 21; iii. 13.
»« Rom. viii. 29 ; xiii. 14.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 373
himself is source of spiritual hfe ; 76 possesses lordship
over all men ; 77 will be their Judge ; 78 is the heavenly
source of Paul's apostieship ; 79 and, associated with
the Father, is fountain of grace and blessing.80
Now, this delineation of Christ, including cardinal
facts in his history and a detailed conception of his
person and work, agrees in all its main features with
the portrait given by the evangelists ; and more es
pecially with that presented by the evangelist John,
the development of which, we are told, required the
lapse of a century or more from the crucifixion. This
conception, too, is not so much presented by Paul as
assumed. It is evidently well known to his readers
alike in Asia, in Greece, in Rome. Not merely are
cardinal facts, like the resurrection, referred to as
unquestioned, but referred to as suggestive of spiritual
lessons, — lessons familiarly associated with the facts
in the readers' habits of thought : " Know ye not that
so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ
were baptized into his death ? " The facts themselves,
therefore, which were thus associated with Christian
instruction, must have been neither recent nor
doubtful. This disproof of the mythical theory, let it be
noticed, is wholly independent of the extant Gospels.
Let them have been written when, where, by whom
you please. The value of a book depends not so much
on its date or its author as on its contents. And here
we have evidence, that, whenever and by whomso
ever our Gospels may have been written, their con
tents are trustworthy. The Jesus they portray as
™ Rom. viii. *"* Rom. xv. 9. ra Rom. ii. 16; xiv. 10; 2 Cor. v. 10.
™ Gal. i. 1. 8° Rom. i. 7; 1 Cor. i. 3; Gal. i. 3; 2 Cor. xiii. 14, 8ce.
32

374 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the Son of God, as the crucified and risen Redeemer
and Lord, is no Gahlean peasant, gradually glorified
by the Oriental imagination of his superstitious ad
mirers, but in the most transcendent facts of his hfe,
in the most exalted functions of his character, is the
general object of Christian faith within a quarter of
a century after his crucifixion. The identity of the
delineation of Christ which pervades the Epistles
with that presented in the Gospels proves that the
latter is no fancy picture, but a genuine portrait ; no
slowly-elaborated ideal creation, but a copy from hfe ';
no myth, but veritable history.81
3. Indeed, the acknowledgment that the author
ship of these four Epistles is correctly ascribed to Paul
seems to be not only irreconcilable with the mythical
origin of the Gospels, but perilous to the theory of
Baur himself. For how shall we reconcile with the
vehemently anti-Judaistic views attributed by Baur to
Paul the fact that we find him, in his letter to Chris
tians at Corinth, speaking of Christ as our " passover,"
and writing to mingled Jewish and Gentile believers
at Rome, whom he has never seen, with the evident
assumption that both parties agree with each other
and with him in the acceptance of a current concep
tion of the character and work of Jesus ? But we-can-
not enlarge upon this : it relates, moreover, to a point
upon which the extravagance of Baur's views has
been acknowledged by some of his followers,82 as was
said just now.
Equally irreconcilable with Baur's theory of the
origin of the Gospels are the views of Christ and his
8i See The Jesus ofthe Evangelists, by Rev. C A. Row, chap. xvii.
32 Cf., e.g., Ritschl's altkath. Kirche, 2d ed., 1857.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 375
work which pervade the Apocalypse. For here, in
" one of the oldest writings of the New-Testament
canon," 83 Jesus is adored as the " first-begotten of the
dead ; " " the Lamb that was slain," in whose blood
the robes of the saints are washed and made white,
and unto whom they raise united praises for their
redemption. 4. The futility which characterizes the theories of
Strauss and Baur, regarded as explanations of the
origin of Christianity, cleaves even more evidently to
the attempts that have been made to explain away
single yet fundamental facts in the evangelic his
tory. The resurrection of Jesus is such a fact. " Be
yond controversy," says Strauss, " the truth of Christi
anity stands or falls with the resurrection of Jesus." 84
And again : " Here we come to a point where we
must either confess the inadequacy of the naturalis
tic view of the life of Jesus, and so give up our whole
undertaking, or recognize our obligation to explain
the behef in the resurrection without resorting to
a miracle." M The attempts to fulfil this inexorable
obligation have resulted in curious specimens of
credulity and helplessness.
a. First we had wanned up for us the old Jewish
story,86 that the disciples came and stole the body.
b. A refinement upon this direct charge of false
hood upon the evangelists was the theory, that pri
vate friends, Joseph of Arimathea perhaps, removed
it quietly from the tomb for final interment elsewhere,
to the surprise alike of the disciples and the Jews.
ss Baur, drei ersten Jdhrhund., 3d ed., p. 80,
84 die Balben und die Ganzen, p. 127.
85 Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 288.
so Matt, xxviii. 13.

376 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
c. Then followed the flat rationalistic assumption,
that the death was only apparent, and the resurrection
merely recovery from a swoon ; so that the re-appear
ance from the sepulchre of this half-dead subject for
the physician and the nurse enthroned him forever as
the Lord of life ! 87
d. Baur coolly substitutes for an explanation a
refusal to give any. " For the disciples," he says, " the
resurrection had all the reality of a historical fact ; "
and that is all that we need know. It is "not so
much the fact of the resurrection, as the belief in it,"
which explains the history : " the real character of
the resurrection lies- outside of the sphere of historic
inquiry." ffl This from the man who insists on " pure
objectivity," and professes to tell how the history de
veloped itself in its actual connections ! The serpent
rests on a tortoise ; but what the tortoise rests on
you must not ask.
e. But the favorite hypothesis of late (adopted
also by Strauss) is that which ascribes the belief in
Christ's resurrection to visions or hallucinations. The
story which Paul says, within twenty-five years of
the occurrence in question, he had preached at Cor
inth,89 — that Christ rose on the third day, was seen
by Peter, by the twelve, by above five hundred breth
ren at once, of whom the majority were still living,
by James, by all the apostles, and, last of all, by the
Apostle to the Gentiles himself, — this story with all
its details, corroborating as they do the accounts
in the Gospels, yet evidently not derived from them,
we are asked to believe to be the product, in the
8' Cf. Strauss's language, Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 298.
88 die drei ersten Jahr., p. 89 seq.
89 1 Cor. xv. 3 seq.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 377
main, of the ecstatic or disordered state of mind of a
man liable to nervous attacks, perhaps convulsions or
epilepsy.90 To the same purport Renan, except that,
according to him, Mary Magdalen plays the principal
part in originating the behef: " The passion of a vis
ionary woman gives to the world a risen God ; " 91 and
except, further, that he feels himself authorized to give
the story a more ample furnishing of stage properties.
In the case of the twelve, he introduces " a draught
of air, a rattling window, a casual murmur ; " n and, in
the case of Paul, to a sickly constitution he adds in
flammation of the eyes, incipient fever with delirium,
and very probably a thunder-storm from Mount Her-
mon.93 But, gentlemen, even at the risk of seeming
not to appreciate the psychological miracles which
your theory proves you to be forward to admit, or the
compliment which, in offering it to us, you pay us as
" believers," we must beg to be excused.
f. The most recent anti-miraculous explanation of
note is that of Keim. Having acknowledged Jesus
to be a unique man, he refuses to deny him the pos
sibility of manifesting himself again after death in
some mysterious way ; which, nevertheless, was for
him altogether natural.94 His theory is chiefly inter
esting as a confession of the unsatisfactoriness of pre
ceding explanations, and an indication of the prog
ress which criticism is making towards the simple
verity of the biblical statements.
g. The only solution of this inexorable problem
which can be said to have met with success of any

w Stranss, p. 302. <"*• Vie de Jesus, chap. xxvi. end.
** Les Apdtres, p. 22. »8 Zes Apdtres, p. 179 seq.
04 Gesch. Christus, 2d ed., p. 133.
32*

378 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
sort (of what sort you shall be judges) is Schenkel's.
In his work on the " Character of Jesus," he speaks
sadly of the prevalent disposition " to regard the phys
ical re-animation of the Crucified as the essential point
in the accounts of the resurrection." " The risen
Christ is the transfigured and glorified Christ, the
Lord who is the Spirit." *- " Jesus Christ has truly
risen ; for he lives in. his communion, *not in flesh and
blood, . . . but always present to the eye of faith."
To the question, whether, by the resurrection of
Christ, he understands merely this continued spiritual
existence and influence, the reply is, No ; not merely
that : his appearances to his disciples were " real
manifestations of his personahty, which had come
forth from death living and incorruptible." And so
Schenkel has brought it to pass that both believing
reader and sceptical are half-mystified. They dis
pute over the question, whether he does or does not
believe in the resurrection as a fact of history. Those
who assert that he does, "greatly misunderstand
him," we are told ; those who call him an unbeliever,
" wickedly slander him." Schenkel had said that
Strauss's theory, that the Christian Church was
founded on hallucinations, " is at variance with a
highly-organized historic sense : " Strauss, reviewing
Schenkel's mystifications, declares in his rough way
that " such flummery is an abomination to the most
meanly-organized sense, moral as well as historical." %
Now, while the opponents of the Gospels pronounce
thus one another's theories for explaining the disciples'
belief that they had seen Jesus after his crucifixion
to be unsatisfactory, we can hardly be blamed for
85 Fumess's trans., il. 314 seq.
00 die Balben u. die Gatisen, p. 62.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 379
thinking them to be so also. Nay, more : if, after all
the ingenuity hitherto expended on it, the question,
" How came the disciples to beheve that Jesus rose
from the dead on the third day ? " still remains unan
swered, it ought not to be regarded as censurable in
us to think that the origin of the belief finds simple
and satisfactory explanation in the fact. At any rate,
all hypotheses thus far having been exploded accord
ing to the judgment of the critics themselves, there
should seem to be no other course left for plain people
but to hold on a while longer to the opinion that the
resurrection of Jesus was an actual occurrence. This
opinion, to be sure, may possibly be erroneous : but
it accounts for the origin and extension of the Chris
tian faith as no other theory has accounted for them ;
it has witnessed the birth and the death of every op
posing opinion ; it gives to the believer such light in
darkness, such strength in weakness, such triumph in
the hour of dissolution, that we may well adhere to
it as a working hypothesis until the critics devise
another which they agree among themselves in pro
nouncing to be more plausible.
5. Further : the gain which the Gospels have made
in the respect of critics is illustrated in successive
Lives of Christ that have appeared during the
past generation. Indeed, the bare circumstance that
the life of Jesus has become the acknowledged arena
of discussion is indicative of progress, and that in
two respects. It is a restoration of the historical
question to the period to which believers have always
claimed that it belongs. The Tubingen critics, who
boasted that they furnished us with the true solution
of the origin of Christianity, "found that solution, as

380 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
they thought, in the sub-apostolic age. Their theory
made little account of the personal history of Jesus.
Indeed, in 1846, Schwegler pubhshed an elaborate
exposition of the rise of the early Church, in which
Christ is despatched with the negative remark, that the
historical sources are too uncertain and incomplete to
permit us to sketch his portrait ; and the rise of
Christianity as an independent and universal religion
is attributable to the apostle Paul.97 But the recogni
tion of Christ as the problem is virtually a confession
that Christianity derived its origin from him from
whom it takes its name ; that, whatever part in
founding it may have been borne by apostles and pro
phets, Jesus Christ himself is the chief corner-stone.
Again : the concentration of discussion upon the his
tory of Jesus is a favorable indication in its bearing
upon the question of miracles. It is an acknowledg
ment that this question is a secondary and dependent
'question. Jesus himself is the miracle of miracles.
No solution of the question of miracles apart from
him can be satisfactory. If Christ was a supernatural
being, no wonder he wrought supernatural works.
And, on the other hand, it avails httle to explain
away the miracles as detached occurrences, so long as
he by and for whom they were wrought is acknowl
edged to be an exceptional being, unique in character
and endowments. Reduce him to the level of ordi-
dinary humanity, and the miraculous glories investing
him disappear as surely as the rays of the sun are
quenched when his descending disk has passed the
horizon. That old inquiry, therefore, " What think ye
of Christ? whose son is he?" — the question which
07 Cf. Schwegler 's naehapoatolisches Zeit alter, 1. 148.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 381
perplexed the first learned opponents of his Messianic
claims, — is still a summary presentation of the prob
lem. Theories of history, philosophies respecting Na
ture, man, God, are all wrapped up in the reply to
this one inquiry.
a. Strauss, to be sure, entitled his first book " The
Life of Jesus." Such a title would, at the present
day, excite an expectation to which the contents of
that work do not correspond ; for it is devoted to
showing that what the Gospels narrate either did not
occur, or did not so occur as it is narrated to have
taken place. This is the sum and substance of his
book. He tried to prove that the contents of the Gos
pels are not historical, but largely mythical.98 His
method of proof consisted in exhibiting the difficul
ties besetting the orthodox interpretation of the nar
ratives on the one hand, and the rationalistic interpre
tations on the other ; and, finally, the points of resem
blance between the narratives and the contents of the
Old Testament. But who and what Jesus was he
left the reader to glean from the volumes for himself.
The work is thoroughly destructive and negative.
No attempt is made even to show how many of the
supposed works and words of Jesus may be accepted
as historic, much less to combine these scanty relics
into a harmonious representation of either the actual
experience or the spiritual characteristics of the Man
of Nazareth ; and to the Gospels, their historical rela
tions, and the formidable proofs adducible in support
of their genuineness, he did not condescend to devote
a single section.
b. In 1864, twenty-nine years afterwards, Strauss
•» Band I. Vorr. S. iii. seq.

382 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
published a reconstruction of his "Life of Jesus,"
prepared, as the titlepage tells us, " for the German
people." It is, professedly, a re-affirmation of his
earlier views, but, nevertheless, exhibits significant
changes both in general treatment and in important
details. The attempt still to construct a life of Jesus
on a mythical basis, after all the progress which dis
cussion has made during the past thirty years, has been
pronounced a "critical anachronism:" and Strauss
seems to have felt in advance the justice of the sen
tence ; for, in his second " Life," he has essentially
altered his definition of a myth. It no longer signi
fies a visionary, undesigned glorification of Jesus, but
is confessedly made to include a considerable element
of intentional fabrication.99 As respects several of the
distinctive ideas of modern Christianity, — those, for
instance, relative to the personal dignity of Jesus, his
judicial and redemptive authority, — the disciples are
admitted to have been misled by Christ's own ex
travagant statements.100 The discrepancies between
the different Gospels, Strauss is now inclined to make
less of than formerly ; even takes it upon him to
speak a word of caution against the extravagance of
Baur's views in this particular ; intimating, that, in
his judgment, Baur has sought out a dogmatic signifi
cance in variations which are really attributable to
mere want of precision or to accident.101 The arbi
trary assumptions of the rationalists, over which he
was as ready in his former work as anybody to
make merry, he is now not above resorting to in an
exigency ; as when, in order to help out his visionary
theory of the resurrection, he talks about the disci-
»» P. 159. 180 P. 242. 101 P. 114.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 383
pies' excited imagination transforming " the next best
stranger " they met with on the way to Emmaus into
an apparition of their departed Master.102 And not
only by changes of this sort, even though some of
them are from bad to worse, does Strauss betray his
sense of the advance the whole discussion has made
during thirty years : he gives evidence to the same
point more directly and unequivocally. Formerly he
was contented with a negative result, — with the at
tempt to show that the current accounts about Jesus
are not historic : now he devotes a hundred and fifty-
four pages — nearly a fourth of his book — to an " his
torical sketch of the life of Jesus." Then not a section
was given to the Gospels considered as sources : now
their origin, their nature, their relations to each other,
are discussed through more than a hundred pages, —
of a book, remember, professedly written for the peo
ple. Indeed, then he claimed to write for theologians
only, and avowed an unwillingness to disseminate
doubt among lay-readers : 103 now, he says, he turns
from the theologians to the people, as the apostle Paul
turned from the unbelieving Jews to the heathen.104
Formerly he boasted of his dispassionateness : " Sci
ence thinks," he said ; " she has no emotions : " 105 now
he declares, that, " to rid the Church of parsons, reli
gion must be rid of miracles." 106 In fact, he often
writes hke a man who has lost his temper ; and the
general tone of his book is certainly not that of a
man who feels that he is on the winning side.
c. The first appearance of Strauss's " Life of Jesus "
102 p. 308.
ios See especially Streitschriften, i. 20; iii. 132.
104 Leben Jesu, 1864, Vorrede, p. xii.
ion streitschriften, iii. 138.
¦os Leben Jesu, 1864, Vorr., p. xix.

384 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
produced an excitement in the theological world
which has been rarely paralleled. Denunciation and
persecution were visited on its author from many
quarters. While the Prussian ministry for spiritual
affairs had under consideration the expediency of
prohibiting the sale of the book within the kingdom,
Neander came forward, and earnestly dissuaded from
the employment of forcible measures in a spiritual
struggle. The advice was heeded, and resulted in the
appearance, in 1837, of his " Life of Jesus Christ,"
which has had a wide circulation in many lands.
For the part which he took in vindicating intellect
ual liberty, Neander deserves the gratitude of every
lover of truth ; for the reverent and attractive deline
ation of the traits of Jesus as the Son of God, he
received the merited commendation of the friends of
Christianity ; while the candid and kindly spirit in
which he conducted the argument rendered the influ
ence of his work at the time as salutary as it was
extensive. But it has ceased to be a satisfactory
book. It falls short of the claims of the theme. For
an historic work, it is swayed too largely by subjective
influences. Many of its positions are assumptions.
Many of its assumptions, although opposite to those
of Strauss, are argumentatively viewed as unwar
ranted. His discussion of the Gospels considered as
sources of history is meagre and unsatisfactory. Many
of the doctrinal views he presents are deficient in
sharpness and consistenc}*" ; while, respecting several
of our Lord's leading experiences and important works,
the writer himself seems not to be free from doubt.
Such large concessions does he sometimes make, so
wavering and weak is his presentation of the case,

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 385
that for whole paragraphs we seem to be listening to
some semi-rationalistic writer rather than to a cham
pion of the faith. Indeed, it affords a striking illus
tration of the progress we are considering, that a book
which a generation ago was greeted with thankful
ness, and which, no doubt, owed not a little of its
success to its mediating character, should now be felt
on all hands to be fairly open to the vitriolic criti
cism of Strauss, who, in 1864, writes of it as follows :
" Neander's ' Life of Jesus Christ ' has three mottoes, —
from Athanasius, Pascal, and Plato. All good spirits
of theology and philosophy were invoked in this ex
treme tribulation : only that motto is wanting which
would have suited the book itself, and been, besides, a
biblical one ; viz., the saying in Mark ix. 24 : " Lord,
I believe ; help thou mine unbelief." m
d. Prof. Schenkel of Heidelberg does much towards
forestalling criticism by disclaiming the intent to
write a "Life of Jesus," and entitling his book a
" Portrayal of the Character of Jesus." All the more
emphatic, therefore, is the testimony to the growing
esteem for the Gospels as historic documents, which
is afforded by the fact that it was felt necessary to
prefix to such a work an estimate of the credibility
of the evangelists, accompanied by a protracted re
view of the traditional evidence in their favor. Dr.
Schenkel accepts them as independent of one another,
and although of unequal historic value, yet substan
tially credible ; " otherwise," he says, " the attempt to
portray the person of Jesus would be labor lost." 108
He assumes the priority of Mark's Gospel, although
io? Leben Jesu, p. 31 seq.
¦os Cf. Furness's trans., i. pp. 19, 20.
33

386 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
he thinks (without historic warrant) that it has not
come down to us in its original form ; and fixes the
date of the (imaginary) primitive Mark at from A.D.
45-58,109 notwithstanding the express testimony of Ire-
naeus,110 that the Gospel was written " after the death of
Peter and Paul." The fourth Gospel — which cannot,
in his judgment, have been the work of the apostle
John — was, nevertheless, written between A.D. 110-
120 ; and after arguing from the absence of develop
ment in the character of Jesus, and of all trace of con
flict or progress, that it sets forth an ideal rather than
an historic personage, he concludes, to the surprise of
the reader, by saying that " the fourth serves as a
really historical authority for the representation of the
moral being of Jesus. . . . Without it, the unfath
omable depth and the inaccessible height would be
wanting to us, and his boundless influence would for
ever remain a riddle." So that, though " Jesus
Christ was not actually what the fourth Gospel paints
him, he was that in truth." 1U
In his dealing with the contents of the Gospels,
Schenkel is as arbitrary, as confused, and as incon
sistent, as he is in his treatment of them as documents.
His avowed aim is, to " gather from the extant written
records a real idea of Christ, faithful to the original,
and of genuine historical truth." 112 And, on examina
tion, he finds " a portrait of Jesus, which, with the
exception of the miracles, is perfectly intelligible." 113
Rather an important exception, that ! And what does
Prof. Schenkel do with it ? He distributes miracles
into two classes. The first comprises all cases of heal-
ioo Furness, i. 201. u° _n Euseb. Ch. Hist., v. 8.
m Furness, i. p. 46. n2 Furness, i. pp. 14, 17. "3 P. 31.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 387
ing ; which were, as he believes, in reality no miracles
at all, but merely natural results attributable to the
extraordinary physiological or psychological endow
ments of Jesus. The other class consists of wonders
wrought, not on man, but on nature, and which, accord
ingly, cannot be attributed to known laws of personal
influence, but must be confessed to be acts of almighty
power. " These miracles of omnipotence," he says,
' ' are, humanly considered, incomprehensible." 114 Ac
cordingly, it is more than doubtful whether such
events ever took place. But how eliminate them
from narratives composed for the very purpose of
relating them ? Sometimes by passing them over in
silence ; in other cases by dismissing them as " ex
ceptional ; " elsewhere by representing them to be
mythical or legendary embellishments ; again, by
supposing that Mark went beyond the statements
of Peter ; and even by assuming that " Peter himself,
following Old-Testament precedents, may have set
many of the evangelical occurrences in a miraculous
light," 115 — an assumption which certainly sets neither
apostle nor critic in a very creditable light.
Not less embarrassing are the difficulties which
Prof. Schenkel encounters in executing his main un
dertaking after recognizing the substantial credibility
of the earlier Gospels. Starting from a humanitarian
conception of the person of Jesus, and assuming for
him a development like that of other men, he is com
pelled to read the gleams of a divine consciousness
out of the record ; to force his preconceptions upon
the narrative, instead of teachably educing the traits
of Jesus from it ; to modify what he does not deem
"4 Furness, i. pp. 27, 28. "¦"» Furness, i. 247 seq.; 274 seq.

388 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
to be " quite worthy" of Jesus ; indeed, to deny that
Jesus uttered what does not harmonize with the por
trait Dr. Schenkel has planned to draw. That portrait,
in fact, is the Jesus of Schenkel rather than the
Jesus of the evangelists.
e. Indirect testimony to the growing authority of
the Gospels, similar to that which Schenkel's book
affords, is exhibited by Renan in his " Life of Jesus ; "
for here we find again, that, after acknowledging the
early origin and substantial authenticity of the rec
ords,116 the biographer is compelled to resort in like
manner to devices of all sorts" to escape the legitimate
consequences of this acknowledgment. His adoption
of the legendary, as distinguished from the mythical
theory, relieves him" considerably from the difficulties
with which the admitted date of the Gospels would
encumber a follower of Strauss ; and yet he finds him
self in a strait again and again. After having made
large deductions on the score of legend, and dislo
cated, accepted, rejected, or transformed, the remnants
at his pleasure,117 he is compelled to confront the old
dilemma : either Jesus was a fanatic or an impos
tor, or both. And although he does not spare the
character of Jesus, but represents him occasionally as
" vain," " weak," " irritable," " resentful," " a disor-
ganizer," even so he cannot escape the alternative
of either miracle or fraud, but admits the latter; for
instance, at the raising of Lazarus. Strauss's re
mark,118 that Jesus, in offering prayer on that occasion,
118 Life of Jesus, p. 84, N.Y. 1865, Wilbour's trans.
"' See an impartial review of Renan's historic method by Colani in the Stras-
burg Revue de TMologie, published also in a separate form (1864). Tbe re
viewer shows that Renan, after adopting the chronology of John, " according to
which the public life of Jesus lasted three years," extends it to five!
"8 Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 476.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 389
for the sake of the multitude standing around,
"appeared as a play-actor, and as a clumsy one at
that," is offensive enough ; but what shall we say to
the representations of Renan ?119 — " Thoroughly per
suaded that Jesus was a worker of miracles, Lazarus
and his two sisters may have aided the performance
of one ; as so many pious men, convinced of the
truth of their religion, have sought to triumph over
human obstinacy by means of the weakness of
which they were well aware. ... As to Jesus, he
had no more power than St. Bernard or St. Francis
d'Assisi to moderate the avidity of the multitude
and of his own disciples for the marvellous. Death,
moreover, was in a few days to restore to him his
divine hberty, and to snatch him from the fatal neces
sities of a character wliich became every day more
exacting, more difficult to sustain." 120 What does
criticism itself say to the idea that the crucified Au
thor of the rehgion of truth was a weakling and a
cheat ? It " protests against it in the name of impar
tial history ; " 121 it declares m that Renan is far below
the level of his theme ; that the true Jesus towers
immeasurably above the species of " renowned charla
tan," the " medley of devotion and duplicity," 123 por
trayed by him. Indeed, the most cursory reader of
the book finds himself perplexed at its occasional re
ligious outbursts ; for example, the apostrophe with
which the account of the crucifixion is concluded:
" Repose now in thy glory, noble founder ! Thy
110 P. 306. ™ Cf. pp. 303, 304. m Colani, p. 69.
i22 See, e.g., Ewald in the Gott. gelehrt. Anzeig, and Keim in the Augsb. Ze/U,.,
as quoted in __". Renan rifutipar les Rationalistes Allemands, par l'Abbe Mei-
gnan, Paris, 1863.
i23 Colani, p. 70; cf. p. 73.
83*

390 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
work is finished; thy divinity is established. . . .
Between thee and God there will no longer be any dis
tinction," &c.124 On Renan's view, such language is
adulation. The object of it is unworthy. Adoration
and censure cannot be thus brought into alhance.
The incongruity glares upon every reader ; so that,
notwithstanding Renan's pictorial skill, his vivid de
lineations of scenery, his famiharity with Jewish lit
erature and usages, his captivating reproduction of
contemporary rehgious and social life, — all which
have contributed to give his book an unparalleled
circulation, — regarded as a life of Jesus, it is acknowl
edged to be a failure by the sceptic as well as by
the believer.
/. The latest noteworthy attempt to write a critical
Life of Jesus is that by Prof. Keim of Zurich. His
work is still incomplete ; and yet it is plain, from the
portion which has appeared,125 that while, like Schen
kel, he is inchned to exaggerate what is ideal and
psychological at the expense of what is historical, he
treats the Gospels with increased deference. Indeed,
nearly half of the first volume of upwards of six
hundred pages is occupied with discussing the histori
cal sources of his work and the rehgious opinions and
parties existing in Palestine at our Lord's advent.
As the result of these discussions in reference to
the Gospels, we find him approximating closely to the
dates which believers have currently accepted as
the time of their origin. The Gospel of Matthew, for
instance, assumed " substantially the form in which we

i24 P. 351.
•» Together with the author's earlier writings on the same subject, der
geschichtliche Christus, drei Reden, etc., 2d. ed., Ziirich, 1865.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 391
now have it " between 70 and 80 A.D.126 John's Gos
pel " undoubtedly arose between 100 and 117 A.D. ; " 12T
and " extant literature gives as early evidence of its
use as of the first three." 128 These are his statements ;
although he calls Baur his "great master," 129 and vig
orously opposes the fourth Gospel's genuineness. In
deed, in the last-named particular he goes beyond his
master, and refuses to acknowledge the intrinsic ex
cellence of this Gospel, talking about its " leaden mo
notony," — partly because the representation it makes
of our Lord as having seen and announced his death
from the outset of his ministry does not harmonize
with Prof. Keim's idea of the process of development
through which Jesus passed ; and partly, perhaps, be
cause of the instinctively-felt necessity of deducting
from the Gospel's worth in proportion as addition is
made to its age. As respects the spirit also in which
Keim prosecutes his work, he is as much in advance
of many of his predecessors as he is in his recognition
of the early origin of the Gospels. He professes
" not to have sacrificed his heart's interest in the re
ligious heaven of Christendom for a position of cold
neutrality, which becomes partisan simply by being
neutral;" 13° and declares with warmth, "I know no
higher name that fills my entire spirit than the name
of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world ; and I in
tend to write in the interests of piety itself," &c.lsl
The progress which these successive Lives of
Christ attest is as marked as it is gratifying. Begin
ning with the work by Strauss, whose aim was " to
put out the lights," we are brought down through the
i=o Jem von Nazara, i. 636. »» i. p. 146. 128 P. 137.
i^o Cf. also Vorw., p. ix. 130 j_s_ von _\faz., i. p. vii.
i8i Gesch. Christus, 2d ed., p. 12.

392 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
views of the Tubingen theologians, who made Jesus
little more than the vehicle of an idea, to a time
when, on the one hand, the Gospels are acknowledged
to date back to the first century, and to be in the main
authentic ; and, on the other, Christianity, in some sub
stantial definition of it, is confessed to have been the
personal work of Jesus. The problem to which scep
ticism now stands committed is, while acknowledg
ing the Gospels to be, in the main at least, historical
sources, to render Jesus of Nazareth comprehensible
as an historical personage. That problem it has not
yet solved. Of the various attempts to solve it made
of late years in Germany, France, England, none can
be regarded as final. Whatever their merits, they
have not yet achieved the task of explaining the
character and the career of Jesus by the ordinary laws
of psychology and history. However commendable
the aim may be to render his interior development
conceivable on the principles of ordinary human na
ture, it is beginning to be perceived that any merely
humanitarian exposition of it leaves out essential fac
tors.132 The failure to fathom him with human plum
met is beginning to suggest to the critics themselves
the infinite depths of his being.
Nor are the indirect benefits of these biographical
attempts restricted to the current estimate of the per
son of Jesus. They are likely also to enhance the
appreciation of the historic fairness of the evangel
ists; for although their authors profess to have
endeavored to delineate Christ " in his objective
132 In commenting on the baptism of Jesus, says Eeim (i. 549), " Our histori
cal conscience compels us to confess . . . that a divine intimation and control
must have attended the greatest act and the greatest crisis in the history of
mankind," &c.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 393
reality," to combine in their delineations merely his
toric and unquestionable traits, and although they
write under the clarifying and unifying influences of
eighteen centuries of Christian thought, they present
us with portraits in which we detect at once the per
sonal traits of the draughtsman. The reader of the
" Life of Jesus " by Strauss does not need to be told
that its author is a learned theorist, a philosophical
speculator ; we require no knowledge of the ecclesias
tical politics of Baden to enable us to detect the
traces of religious demagogism in Schenkel's book ;
and the " Vie de Jesus " reflects hke a mirror the
romantic, inconstant Frenchman, of exquisite tastes,
but easy virtue. And what interpreter would attempt
to harmonize the three ? In contrast with such rep
resentations of Jesus as these, the accounts of the
sacred biographers appear as transparent and guileless
as the hght.
Such a survey as we have now taken of the course
of hostile criticism respecting the Gospels necessarily
suffers from incompleteness both of statement and of
proof. But the deficiencies, if supplied, would not
improve the case for the critics: on the contrary,
hostile criticism has stimulated believing criticism.
The assaults upon the Gospels have quickened the
study of them, and especially of the character of Him
of whom they testify. The result is, that new
resources of Christian evidence are constantly coming
to light. A collation, for instance, of the shght dif
ferences of form in any given passage of our Gospels
as it is found in the very oldest extant writings (say
even in Marcion's time), reveals the fact that their

394 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
text had gone through a series of successive tran
scriptions before the date at which, according to
scepticism, it had its origin. And so textual criti
cism, which in its infancy was frowned upon by
Christians and welcomed by unbelievers, which
sturdy John Owen declared to be " atheistic," 133 is
bringing its tribute to the authority of that Word
from which no jot or tittle shall pass away.134 The
searching analysis of the character of Christ which
scepticism has instituted and provoked is establishing
in the general mind the conviction which the first
Napoleon is said to have uttered so emphatically : 135 " I
know men ; and I tell you that Jesus Christ was not
a man." The treatises of Dorner (whose earher and
principal work had its origin in Tubingen itself), Ull-
mann, Oosterzee, Pressensd, and others, on the Conti
nent, of Young, Bayne, Liddon, and others, in Great
Britain, and those of Bushnell and of Schaff in our
own country, are specimens of the varied arguments
for Christianity which this braneh of the controversy
alone has added to the Christian's armory. And anal
ogous resources of Christian defence are coming to
hght in the naturalness and harmony of other charac
ters, glimpses of which are given us here and there
throughout the New Testament. The combination
i53 Tregelles' Printed Text ofthe Greek New Testament, pp. 47 seq., 261 seq.
i*4 Cf. Tischendorf, Wann vmrden unsere Evangelien verfasst, 4th ed., pp. 120
seq., 126. Indeed, it is beginning to be thought that the very language of tbe
New Testament, which, after more than a century's opposition from those
whose zeal for God was not according to knowledge, was at length confessed to
prove its authors to have been unlettered Jews, may yet throw light upon the
more exact date even of the records, when the details of its history shall have
been more precisely ascertained than they are at present. Of little worth, how
ever, are such over-hasty judgments as those given in Geldart's Modern Greek
Language, Appendix I., except as stimulating to a more cautious and thorough
inquiry. •8= See Tlie Person of Christ, by Dr. P. Schaff, pp. 316, cf. 300 seq.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 395
of these scattered traits presents us, in each case, with
a personality so consistent, so sharply defined, so real,
as to leave no doubt that it was drawn from the life.
And thus the characteristics of John, Paul, Peter,
corroborate, in turn, the historic verity of the Gos
pels, and the genuineness of the Epistles bearing their
names. The apostles themselves are becoming hving
witnesses again for Christ.136
Indeed, the gravest deficiency with which this
review is chargeable is with a neglect to recognize
all the services rendered by sceptical criticism to
faith. The critics, for example, by refusing to regard
the Bible longer as a common storehouse of religious
truth, by declining to exempt it from the processes of
literary criticism, have led the way to a more discrim
inating acquaintance with its contents. They have
taught us to distinguish its constituent parts, and to
notice how each stands related to the circumstances
of its origin ; and thus, — although they meant it not
so, neither was it in their heart, — by emphasizing
the doctrinal peculiarities of Peter, of Paul, of James,
of John, they have helped us to appreciate the won
derful harmony which underlies these peculiarities.
This disclosure of unity amid diversity, this blended
independence and coincidence, is another attestation
of the truth. Surely the authors must all have been
taught of God. Nor is this beneficial result restricted
to the New Testament. Strauss, by tracing out indus
triously the minute correspondences between the New
Testament and the Old, has been preparing the way

188 Among arguments of this class are Howson's Hulsean Lectures on the
Character of St. Paul ; Leathes' Bayle Lectures, entitled The Witness of St.
Paul to Christ, The Witness of St. John to Christ; Stanley's Sermons and Es
says on the Apostolical Age.

396 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
for the participation of the Old Testament in the com
ing triumph of the New ; for the victory of the
whole Bible, and the Bible as a whole. Nor can we
pass over in silence a benefit, the full magnitude of
which has yet to be realized. The exaggerated repre
sentations, as made by the Tubingen school especially,
of the doctrinal differences among the New-Testament
Writings, have given a new impulse to the depart
ment of biblical theology, — an impulse among the first
believing fruits of which in Germany was Neander's
admirable work on " The Planting and Training of
the Christian Church," and which has already be
gun to affect the pulpits and the seats of learning
in Enghsh-speaking lands.137 In obedience to this
impulse, systematic theology may be expected to
become less speculative and dogmatic, and more
scriptural. Doctrinal systems, instead of being con
structed, as they have too often been, of abstract
reasonings, to which a biblical proof is added as a
seemly yet rather superfluous appendage, bid fair to
be compacted of the inspired statements, completely
collected, impartially interpreted, harmoniously com
bined. Thus, by occasioning a modification of our
scientific methods, scepticism is rendering the pres
entation of the truth more life-like and authoritative,
and so contributing to its own overthrow.
In a word, the future belongs to the Bible and its
friends. The results of critical research hitherto,
while, on the one hand, they may well render scep-
u7 As appears from the department of biblical theology recently organized
in some of our theological institutions, and such publications as Dr. J. P. Thomp
son's Theology of Christ, New York, 1870 ; Dr. W. J. Irons. Christianity as taught
by St. Paul, Bampton Lectures for 1870; and Prof. Smeaton's works on the
Doctrine of the Atonement as taught by Jesus and by the Apostles.

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 397
ticism modest, not to say self-distrustful, are fitted, on
the other hand, to augment the assurance of those
who believe in the historic trustworthiness of the
evangelists. Accordingly, the most searching inquir
ers may receive our God-speed. Let them be free
and fearless, so they be honest and accurate ; for they
can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.
They are but extending and deepening the founda
tions of an intelligent faith. -They are but tunnelling
and filhng up, and making straight, a highway for
our God through places now desert. Indeed, a more
correct summary of the result of their labors to the
present time can hardly be given than by accommo
dating words published by Strauss himself the year
before his " Life of Jesus " first appeared. In passing
judgment on the labors of certain critics of that day,
he spoke of " the stratagem by which Reason deprives
her instruments of a sight of the whole realm of
her activity, in order that they, laboring undismayed
each at his allotted portion, may advance her great
work of educating the race." 138 A genuine Caiaphan
utterance this.139 Substituting for an impersonal rea
son an all-controlling God, we may say, that while
the sceptics have supposed themselves to be working,
each at his chosen task, they have, in reality, been
co-working in the execution of the divine design of
educating the race up to the truth as it is in Jesus.
And let not our cheerful recognition of the benefits
which have accrued to the Bible from the assaults of
its adversaries be made by the latter a pretext for
charging us with an abandonment of our position,
188 Jahrb.f_krwiss_nsch.Knt.,_S_4,qx_ote_.byK_lge_it-lidieEvangelien,_>.6.
•80 Cf. John xi. 49 seq. 34

398 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
or, at least, with a change of front. Such a charge,
indeed, is not surprising from men who conceive of
the Bible as a collection of documents that determine
doctrine on all points at once and forever, instead of
prompting, guiding, answering religious inquiry from
generation to generation ; such a charge is in keeping
with the arraignment of the biblical writers for con
tradiction, because their doctrinal views do not all
wear the same hue, — as though light were any the
less hght, or from heaven, because tinted by the me
dium through which it passes : but such a charge
sounds oddly when coming from men who boast of
applying the same laws to religion as to all other
realms of thought. For where else is not progress
expected ? In what other department is not time
acknowledged to be necessary for/ the comprehen
sion, development, application, of great ideas?
But, however it may please any to misinterpret
our recognition of the law of development, — a
law, the recognition of which is a marked character
istic of the documents constituting the Christian
revelation, and traces of which are evident even in
the Gospels themselves, — recourse to that law is no
modern device of apologetics. Criticism, by calling
attention to the early relations of Judaism to the
Christian faith, to the divers aspects which the lat
ter presents in the different canonical writings, and
to the like undiscovered or unheeded biblical facts,
has, at the most, been but fulfilhng the prediction
which the sons of the Pilgrims, from generation to
generation, never weary of repeating, — that "the
Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth
out of his Holy Word ; " for, as Bishop Butler has

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 399
said, " It is not at all incredible that a book which
has been so long in the possession of mankind should
contain many truths as yet undiscovered." "And as
it is owned the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet
understood, so, if it ever comes to be understood,
... it must be in the same way as natural knowl
edge is come at, — by the continuance and progress of
learning and of hberty, and by particular persons
attending to, comparing, and pursuing intimations
scattered up and down in it, which are overlooked
and disregarded by the generality of the world." 14°
Indeed, so far is this notion of progress in under
standing and stating the contents of the Bible from
being a makeshift to escape the consequences of hos
tile criticism, that even the most conservative class
of believers, whose adherence to tradition precludes
inquiries like those the course of wliich we have been
reviewing, can utter with Dr. Newman such lan
guage as this : " The whole Bible is written on the
principle of development : . . . Christian doctrine
admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments." 141
And we who find a legitimate province — I had
nearly said the legitimate province — for reason in
religion, must, of necessity, recognize there the law of
growth, and maintain that Christianity, the concep
tion of the person, work, doctrine, of Jesus Christ,
can only come to its perfection in the course of
time ; indeed, " can only be approached by asymp
totes." 142 Those, therefore, do us injustice who talk
of Christians as cast-iron conservatives, the ene
mies, or at least the laggards, of learning, setting
mo .Analogy, pt. ii. ch. iii. p. 227, Bohn's ed.
i" Dr. J. H. Newman's Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine.
M" Niebuhr.

400 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
their face as a flint against modern research. On
the contrary, Christian theology claims to be "the
science of sciences." Biblical criticism, certainly, is
no infidel or forbidden thing : as was said at the
outset, it is the legitimate child of our Protestant
faith. The renunciation of bondage to tradition im
posed the necessity, as it afforded the opportunity,
for the inquiries in which Christendom is engaged.
It is quite possible indeed, as experience has abun
dantly proved, for rehgious inquiries, like other in
quiries, to be begun in prejudice, and prosecuted for
the maintenance of foregone conclusions. Reason
and conscience men can misuse in matters of rehgion
as in matters of every-day life; but, whatever the
department which inquiry involves, — whether criti
cism, history, philosophy, — there should it be prose
cuted untrammelled. The faith of the Christian is a
faith for which he is ready to render a reason. Joy
and peace in beheving are the prize of him that over-
cometh. And as the struggle now pending is one which
might have been predicted, so its issue can hardly be
doubtful. There are those, indeed, who assure us
that Christianity is already a thing of the past. They
cannot condescend longer to discuss biblical ques
tions. Believers in miracles they would fain look
upon as of unsound mind. The objections to the
Gospels are familiar to the inhabitants of Iceland ;
and the natives of India are reading Renan and
Strauss. in their vernacular. But let not diffusion be
mistaken for depth: let it not be overlooked that
foreign nations are but learning the lesson which
Germany, their teacher, is beginning to unlearn ; that

CRITICISM CONFIRMATORY OF THE GOSPELS. 401
sceptical criticism in other lands is flaunting herself
in the cast clothing of her German sister. Nor let
the opponents of the Bible think us presumptuous if
we interpret the very superciliousness of their bear
ing towards bibhcal questions as a sign of weakness :
indeed, it is because the scholarship of Germany is
candid and thorough enough to confess these ques
tions to be not yet past argument that it is passing
from unbelief to faith. There is always hope for a
man so long as he is ready to look at evidence and to
follow it.
But perhaps some one asks, " Must I force my way
through the jungles of criticism, must I thread these
historical and philosophical labyrinths, in order to ar
rive at the faith of a Christian ? " By no means ! Yet,
when it is alleged that the pretensions of Christianity
are at variance with the facts of history or with the
principles of philosophy, the allegation must be tested
on its own grounds. And the exhibition of the har
mony between biblical truth and every other depart
ment of science affords a constantly-augmenting pre
sumption that the Scriptures emanated from the Au
thor of Nature, the Father of the spirits of all flesh.
But such inquiries are no more a necessary prelimi
nary to participation in the benefits of Christian faith,
than a -comprehension of the phenomena of the photo
sphere is a prerequisite for receiving light and warmth
from the sun. To think to become a Christian by
any such process of investigation is like a patient's
expecting to recover his health by analyzing his phy
sician's prescription instead of taking it. Jesus Christ
offers himself to the race as the Saviour from sin ; in
vites every man to enter into present, personal, prac-
34*

402 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
tical relations with him. All inquiries respecting his
life, character, work, that fall short of establishing
this living, loving relationship, are of httle account.
But, this relationship estabhshed, the inquirers can
say to the critic, " No longer do we believe because
of thy story ; for we have heard for ourselves, and
know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world."

IX.

JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF THE ALL-SUFFICIENT
EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
BY KEV. D. S. TAIrOOTT, D.D.
" |3E ready always to give an answer to every man
1 ^ that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in
you," — an answer, a reason. The form of expression
rather suggests the idea of there being room for
choice, as if there might be a store of answers,
reasons, from wliich to draw the material of defence.
And it is only what might have been expected, on the
supposition of there being a divinely-revealed reli
gion for the world, that the evidence of it should be
exceedingly manifold, that it should stand connected
at so many points with the constitution of the human
mind, and should be so thoroughly interwoven with
the whole course of human history, as to be in the
highest degree complex and cumulative, and capable
of being presented in an endless variety of aspects.
It is so, certainly, with the evidence of Christianity ;
and we may well rejoice in the fact. Yet just here
lies a difficulty. To one who takes a general survey
of the immense domain of Christian apologetics, and
especially to one who attempts to grapple with some
of the more labored and comphcated demonstrations 403

404 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of the truth of revelation, the questions very natu
rally occur, Is all this necessary to the establishment
of a rational behef? Or, if there be a simpler argu
ment, is_ the conviction justly springing from it of
a grade essentially inferior to that which can be
reached only by following out the more extended
demonstrations, and testing, by reference to original
authorities, the validity of each step in the process ?
With what propriety can it be so emphatically af*
firmed, that " to the poor the gospel is preached," if
the highest assurance of its truth is thus made the
exclusive privilege of a favored few ? And the thought
is apt to follow, Surely, if Christianity had been from
God, convincing evidence of its truth would have
been brought within the reach of all who were will
ing honestly to weigh its claims.
Now, this difficulty I wish to meet by showing that
the essential evidence of the truth of Christianity
requires for its due appreciation no deep research;
that it is very simple and very plain; that Christ
himself, as exhibited in the Gospels, and occupying
the position he indisputably does in the history of
the world, is his own sufficient and conclusive argu
ment. The position taken in respect to the evidences of
Christianity by what claims to be the most advanced
thought of the age has given peculiar value to this
form of proof ; and it is not, probably, too much to
say, that more has been done for its development
within the last thirty years than during all the pre
ceding centuries of the Christian era. Even now,
perhaps, the subject has hardly been more than
entered upon. Volumes, indeed, have been writ-

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 405
ten on it, awakening, some of them, an interest almost
unprecedented in the history of literature. Yet, as
inquiry advances, new openings are presented on all
sides into boundless reaches which are still to be
explored. For, when we speak of the argument from
the life and character of Jesus as simple and easily
apprehended, it is not to be inferred that it is one
easily exhausted. It is simple in the sense that the
humblest reader of the Gospels may thoroughly feel
its power ; yet, in a sense, it is extremely complex,
and admits of unlimited analysis. The case of a
plain man seeking with a truly honest heart, and
with some measure of religious sensibility, to esti
mate for himself the trustworthiness of the evan
gelical accounts, may be compared to that of one
thoroughly alive to the loveliness of Nature, yet of
httle general cultivation, who looks out upon some
such prospect as that of the Bay of Naples is said to
be. His eye takes in at a single view the glory of
the scene ; and the effect it has upon him is visible in
every feature of his face. If you ask him to tell you
what he finds there, he will point out, perhaps, a few
of the prominent features of the landscape, but will
soon lose himself in general expressions of his ad
miration. Let a Ruskin take the same post of obser
vation. Give him time enough, and where will he
stop in his enumeration of the elements that consti
tute the beauty of the picture ? Give him time
enough, and he will exhaust upon each one of them
the vocabulary of a language, and will fill a hbrary
with the description. Yet, after all, he will only
have described, and that but very imperfectly at
best, just what the child of Nature saw and felt at
once.

406 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
It is possible, that even in the brief sketch of the
argument from the character and life of Jesus, which
is all that I shall attempt, some things may be
suggested which it will be thought are not likely to
occur as matter of distinct consciousness to such a
. reader of the Gospels as I profess to have in view ;
yet let it not be hastily inferred that I have trans
gressed the limits I have set myself. The argument
might be indefinitely expanded, and, after all, involve
nothing more than lies upon the face of the Gospel
narrative ; nothing more than what every candid and
attentive reader, possessing common power of ap
prehension, more or less sensibly feels the force of,
though he may not be able always clearly to trace
the process by which his conviction has been reached.
In the accounts of the four evangelists, there are
presented to us fragments of the biography of one,
who, at the time of his death, had not yet entered
upon middle age. With the exception of a few para
graphs contributed by two of the narrators, and re
lating to circumstances connected with his birth, his
infancy, and childhood, the history, as gathered from
all the four, relates to the closing period of his life, —
a period comprising, according to the most probable
computation, only about three years and a half.
Within this period, however, lay the whole of his
public work ; and, in the brief and simple record of
it, Jesus of Nazareth is set before us, as to all the
essential features of his character and hfe and plan,
more distinctly and vividly than any other personage
whom history commemorates.
The first thing which strikes us as we examine the
record is the surprising nature of his claims. He

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 407
claims to be not only a sinless man, but the Son of \
God, and one with God, and that in such a sense
that all men are bound to honor him even as they
honor God. He claims to be the Redeemer, King,
and Head of the human race, the immediate Source
and constant Maintainer of spiritual life wherever it
is possessed, and the final Judge of the world.
Now, let us suppose, for a moment, that the four
Gospels have no existence ; and let us suppose the
problem given to construct, by the aid of imagi
nation merely, a history which shall correspond in
its minuteness with that given in the Gospels, and
throughout consistently exhibit the daily hfe of one
maintaining such exalted claims, and acting in ac
cordance with them. Who would not pronounce the
task to be impossible, as involving conditions, which,
if not absolutely incompatible with one another, were
yet so far beyond the range of human experience as
to be reached and mastered by no conceivable effort
of human genius ? Yet such a history exists ; and
the mere fact of its existence is a sufficient vindica
tion of its truth. The picture of the hfe and char
acter of Jesus, exhibited in the Gospels with the
utmost minuteness and variety of detail compatible
with the briefness of the record, accords most fully
with the claims he is represented as advancing.
My limits will not allow me to trace even the out
lines of that wondrous life, to attempt even the most
general analysis of the varied forms of moral excel
lence which it displays. Suffice it to say, that the
impression all but universally produced by the evan
gelical history, in all ages and countries where it has
been made known, is, that the character and hfe which

408 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
it records are absolutely free from blemish. Strange
as it may seem, this has been the impression generally
received even by those who have refused to admit the
astonishing claims which are necessarily involved in
any fair interpretation of the language of Jesus ; and it
only shows how conclusive must be that evidence of
sinlessness which thus commands assent even when
associated with self-exalting assertions, which, had
they been advanced by any other human being, would
have been justly regarded as the extreme of blasphe
mous presumption.
Among the most remarkable of the attestations
borne by unbehevers to the loftiness of the moral
character of Jesus is the oft-cited language of Renan.
Compelled, in order to maintain his fundamental prin
ciple, that there can be no such thing as a miracle,
to resort to the supposition of an almost enforced
participation, on the part of Jesus, in what, according
to his view, was nothing more nor less than a series
of impostures, he yet avouches his conviction, " that,
whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus
will never be surpassed ; that his worship will grow
young without ceasing ; and that all ages will pro
claim, that, among the sons of men, there is none
born greater than Jesus."
The substantial correctness of the Gospel narrative
is beyond a reasonable doubt. In the well-known
words of another celebrated unbeliever, " It is more
inconceivable that four men should have agreed to
forge this book than it is that one alone should have
furnished the subject of it. . . . The gospel," he
continues, " bears marks of truth so grand, so strik
ing, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor of it

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 409
would be a more astonishing character than the
hero." The only question that can be raised is, What are
we to think of the claims which Jesus is represented
as advancing ? And the only difficulty in the way of
the full admission of these claims lies in the assump
tion, that miracles are impossible. But, rejecting the
claims, we are far enough from getting rid of miracles.
We find ourselves confronted by a series of phenomena
as completely inexplicable by the established laws of
the human mind as the resurrection of Lazarus is by
natural law, — phenomena isolated from one another
or inextricably perplexed, often mutually contradicto
ry, and all pointing to no end. The enigmas presented
are not enigmas only to the unlearned: they have
never been unravelled, and they are such as every
earnest and candid thinker feels to be beyond the
power of learning to unravel. Admit the one mir
acle of the incarnation, and where before were
countless miracles, arbitrary, discordant, aimless, we
see everywhere connection, order, harmony, and pur
pose. Every thing now becomes comparatively plain.
Only so much of mystery remains as that the
absence of it, upon the supposition of that one fact,
would be the greatest mystery of all. Under such
circumstances, is not implicit faith the dictate of the
highest reason ?
To the same conclusion we are irresistibly com
pelled when we come to regard Jesus as a teacher of
moral and religious truth. And here I may assume,
as something admitted on all hands, the essential cor
rectness of the accounts we have in respect to his
outward circumstances, his humble parentage, the
35

410 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
place where his youth was spent, and his early occu
pation. So, too, the genuineness, in the main, of the
utterances ascribed to him, — at least, by the three
synoptists,1 — may be regarded as beyond dispute.
Jesus wrote nothing, dictated nothing ; made no pro
vision, as far as we know, for his instructions to be
written out. None of them were written, that we
know of, for years after his death. Yet such is the
originality of his style of thought and expression,
that the boldest criticism does not venture to call in
question the substantial authenticity of the words
ascribed to him by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Never
was the line more distinctly drawn than here between
the style of the historian and that of the discourses
which he professes to report. For myself, I- am
fully persuaded, that, even upon grounds of the
most rigid criticism, the authenticity of John's Gos
pel is equaUy well established with that of the other
three. Yet, as it must be admitted that it is not
always easy to distinguish between his own language
and that which he ascribes to his Master, I am willing,
for the purposes of the present argument, to confine
myself to the teachings of Jesus as recorded by the
others. Nothing can be more unsystematic than
the shape and manner in which these teachings were
ordinarily conveyed. Rarely put into the form of
continuous discourse, imparted sometimes in familiar
conversation with a single person, or a few at most,
and called forth by particular inquiries, or by circum-
i It may not be altogether needless to Bay that this word has lately come
into general use among biblical scholars, as a designation of the first three
evangelists, with reference to the fact of their exhibiting pretty much the same
series of accounts pertaining to the life of Jesus ; while John, devoting little
space, comparatively, to what is related by the rest, occupies himself mainly
with those portions of the history which they have omitted.

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 411
stances incidentally occurring, they consist very much
of parables, and short, pregnant, pointed apothegms,
commanding attention, stimulating thought, awaken
ing inquiry, and fixing themselves in the memory
with a force such as the words of no other teacher
either before or since have ever possessed. Rules of
conduct are not unfrequently found among them,
which every one sees at a glance are incapable of
being literally carried into practice. Statements occur,"
which, though unlimited in form, carry on their face
the necessity of limitation. But everywhere the prin
ciple inculcated is beyond dispute ; and the hold
which it takes upon the mind is all the deeper from
the fact that the hearer or the reader is obliged, in a
sense, to work it out for himself from the concrete
form in which it is presented.
The sum total of the words of Jesus, collected out
of the different evangelists, may be read in the course
of a few hours ; and they contain hardly an expression
which was not probably in famihar use among the
men of his own time. Yet few, brief, simple, scat
tered as they are, they compose a body of moral
teaching, embracing principles which cover the whole
ground of human obligation. One spirit pervades
the whole, — a spirit that is even more distinctly
illustrated by the example of the Master than his
words express it ; and whoever has once thoroughly
imbibed this spirit carries within him a guide which
it is always safe to follow.
I do not insist here that any one of the principles
taught by Jesus was absolutely new to the world. It
is affirmed by some that Jesus taught nothing in re
spect to human duty whioh was never taught before.

412 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
I believe the statement capable of being shown to be
essentially untrue : but, of its truth or falsehood, the
ordinary reader has not the means of confidently
judging for himself; and I wish here to make no
assertion which it requires learning to verify. But
that the teachings of Jesus comprise a perfect system
of morals is what it lies within the reach of all to be
assured of ; and the fact that the assailants of Chris
tianity have never been able to find such a system in
any other quarter is evidence sufficient that no such
system is elsewhere to be found.
Nor is there any room to question that the great
features of this system, whether absolutely new to
the world or not, were strictly original as announced
by Jesus. No one will imagine that he could
have borrowed any thing from Confucius or Sakhya
Mouni or the -Greek philosophers. Even if it could
be shown that all that is essential to the moral sys
tem Jesus taught may be found in scattered frag
ments here and there among the sayings ascribed to
other teachers, who, in previous ages and far-off
nations, had madei extraordinary use of that inward
light which lighteth every man, this would detract
nothing from the claims of Him who alone has em
bodied in his teachings the sum of human duty, and,
still more grandly alone, has exemplified it in his life.
Take, now, the case as it stands. Here is a scheme
of morals and religion resting upon, and in every par
ticular thoroughly conformed to, such views of the
holiness of God, his spirituality and fatherhood, and
of the common brotherhood of man, as the largest
and profoundest thought of all subsequent ages has
been unable to improve, and such as it is compelled

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 413
to acknowledge final and exhaustive. The originator
of this scheme, so comprehensive in its spirit, equally
adapted to every age and country, and commending
itself with sovereign authority to all the best feehngs
of mankind everywhere, is one himself wholly un
taught by any human teacher ; a young man brought
up in penury and seclusion, trained to daily manual
labor in one of the most despised neighborhoods of a
remote and petty dependency of the Roman Empire,
and belonging to a race, which, at the time of his
appearance, was generally characterized by the preva
lence of a religious formalism, seemingly as impervious
to all just views of the divine requirements as pagan
idolatry itself, and of a blind pride of nationality, a
narrow and bigoted exclusiveness, which gave too
much occasion for the reproach cast upon them by
a great heathen writer of the generation following,
of being the enemies of every other portion of the
human family.
Now, I will not attempt, as some have done, to
argue directly the divinity of Jesus from the un
equalled intellectual and moral opulence displayed
in his teachings and his life. But, in our efforts to
penetrate the mystery which surrounds him, it is
certainly incumbent upon us, first of all, to seek for
light in the account he gives us of himself. What
was the general nature of his claims is certain. It is
impossible that the statement of them should have
been materially modified after his crucifixion by the
growing veneration in which his memory was held.
They are so intimately interwoven with the whole
tenor of his teachings, that, admitting what no criti
cism calls in question, we can stop nowhere short of
35*

414 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
the admission that Jesus claimed divine honors for
himself. As little can we resort to the supposition,
that, in so doing, he was under the control of an inno
cent self-delusion. If there ever was a sound human
intellect, clear, well-balanced, and raised above every
influence that- could disturb or cloud its operation, it
was the intellect displayed in the recorded life of
Jesus of Nazareth. The only alternative that remains
to us is, either to accept him for what he declares
himself to be, or to ascribe to him, without any
qualification, the boldest, the most arrogant, the most
blasphemous, of all impostures, yet an imposture
steadily directed to the promotion of the highest
style of goodness, and connected with a hfe, which,
except upon this revolting supposition, is a life of
sinless perfection, and the only such life that has ever
been lived on earth.
It is freely admitted that the acceptance of the
claims of Jesus is the acceptance of a transcendent
mystery. But upon any other ground that can be
taken, instead of a mystery, we have a monstrosity ;
and it is only one of the innumerable features which
. place that monstrosity beyond the limits of the possi
ble, that it would stand in irreconcilable contradiction
to those laws which we cannot help acknowledging
as among the highest and the most stable in the
universe, — the laws which govern the growth and
manifestation of moral good and evil.
Believe in the existence of such a moral anomaly
who can. The conscience and reason of mankind,
in view of all the facts pertaining to the teachings
and the life of Jesus, and unbiassed hy indefensible
assumptions, will concur in the unhesitating verdict,
" Surely this was the Son of God ! "

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 415
But no less forcibly does the evidence of the divine
mission of Jesus present itself in the light of what
he has actually accomplished as the founder of a
moral empire. He claimed, as we have seen, to be
a king ; and his kingdom was one to be established
by himself, — a kingdom absolutely unique in its
conception, — a kingdom of righteousness, bounded by
no territorial hmits, but embracing all, in every land
and age, who should be wilhng, in his own words, to
take his yoke upon them, and to learn of him. If the
boldness of the conception is amazing, more amazing
still, if possible, is the quiet assurance with wliich
the. young carpenter of Nazareth anticipated its be
coming fact. " I," he declared, " if I be lifted up
from the earth, will draw all men unto me."
Now, were there nothing more to be said than
simply that his anticipations have been realized as far
as this, that the civilization of the world began within
three centuries from his crucifixion to be professedly
a Christian civihzation ; that it is so to-day, and has
been mainly ever since ; that, in all nations above the
hne of semi-barbarism, his law is to-day the acknowl
edged standard of right, and in his name, professedly
at least, kings reign, and princes decree justice ; that,
through influences going forth from him, whole races
of men have been brought up from the depths of sav
age life, while the annals of all time may be searched
in vain for the record of such a change accomplished
by any other agency ; and, in a word, that every step
of substantial moral progress that has ever been taken
since his time in the history of mankind has had its
origin in his teachings, — were nothing more to be said
than this, the fact that the confidence of Jesus in his

416 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
own destined sovereignty among mankind has been
even so far justified, would be of itself enough to war
rant the admission of his claims. The position which
Jesus confessedly occupies in the general history of
the world since the time of his appearance is a position
which its whole preceding history, rightly understood,
is seen to have been a preparation for his taking, and
for his thus becoming, as he is, the central figure
of all ages. Is it conceivable that such a position
can have been allotted by an overruling Providence,
or even by blind chance, to an impostor or a fanatic,
or a being that never existed but in fiction ?
But the plans and the anticipations of Jesus in
respect to the empire he was to estabhsh have been
realized in a far higher sense than this. It may well
be doubted whether he ever contemplated the gather
ing of the nations to himself as nations. His kingdom
was to be established primarily in the hearts of indi
vidual men. It was to men in their individual capacity
that the call was addressed to become his subjects, to
love him with a supreme affection, and to take his life
of labor and sacrifice for the good of others as the
model of their own. It was in their individual capaci
ty that men were to be brought under the constraining
influence of his love as manifested in giving his life
a ransom for many, and were encouraged in all their
efforts to become like him by the assurance, " Ask,
and ye shall receive."
In whatever part of the world the words of Jesus
have been made known, there have always been
found hearts ready to receive them ; and to these
they have become the medium of a new life. A
new style of character has come into existence, — a

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 417
character to which nothing more than a distant ap
proximation has ever been witnessed in lands un
visited by revelation, and even that but rarely, — a
character the controlling element of which is supreme
love to Christ, and love to man for Christ's sake, and
which is uniformly referred, by all in whom it is ex
hibited, to the power of Christ working in them.
This character, in its distinctive features and in
its practical manifestation, is essentially the same in
every land, and has been so in every generation.
The personal experience connected with it is cor
roborated by the testimony of millions upon millions,
living and dead, representing every century, every
race of men, every grade of cultivation, every form
and aspect of human life ; millions upon millions
agreeing oftentimes in nothing else ; strangely refus
ing sometimes even to acknowledge the claims of one
another, and, more strangely still, misunderstanding
one another sometimes so far as to stand in mutual
hostility ; yet all agreeing in this one thing, — the spirit
of loving trust in Jesus, and of hearty obedience to
his. law.
It involves no real abatement of the force of the
argument, that the empire of Jesus, viewed in this
light, has included thus far but a small proportion of
the human family. With all his confidence in the
ultimate and universal triumph of his kingdom, the
Master anticipated, and most clearly predicted, that
its progress would be slow. Nor is the argument
weakened by the admitted fact, that, of those who
make the most unreserved professions of personal
allegiance to him, great numbers are manifestly
destitute of all participation in his spirit. As illus-

418 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
trating the parable of the tares and the wheat, even
this only furnishes new proof of the divine prescience
of Jesus.
It is a circumstance more deserving of considera
tion from its supposed tendency to weaken the force
of the argument from the empire of Jesus established
in the hearts of individual believers, and exhibited
in their lives, that, particularly in more recent years,
that interest in human welfare, and that self-denying
devotion to its furtherance, which have been long
regarded as the exclusive glory of Christianity, have
been sometimes exhibited in an eminent degree by
those who fail to recognize in Jesus any thing more
than a merely human teacher. But not to raise the
question here, how far it is conceivable that a true
participation of the Master's spirit may co-exist with
essentially defective views of his person and his work,
it is enough to say, that, wherever there is displayed
any marked resemblance to his character without the
circle of those who own him as their Lord, the most
rational as well as the readiest explanation of its
origin is found, either directly or indirectly, in his
all-pervading influence-. The fact remains, that a
kingdom has been built up in human hearts, — a
kingdom containing all the elements of permanence,
and fitted to be universal, — a kingdom correspond
ing in its nature to that which Jesus professedly
undertook to found, and of which he so confidently
announced the final triumph.
True, the existence of such a kingdom, invisible
and purely spiritual, limited as yet in its extent,
advancing at best but slowly, and sometimes hardly
seeming to advance at all, makes a less sensible

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 419
appeal to a merely worldly imagination, and the
argument which it supphes is less adapted, upon a
superficial view, to. produce conviction of the divine
authority of its Founder, than the dominion which
he holds as the nominally recognized Sovereign of
nations. But it needs only to consider the obstacles
which have been surmounted in the progress of his
kingdom hitherto to be assured that there is no lack of
power with him to fulfil his promise and his pledge
of making it ultimately embrace the world. In view
of what has been actually wrought, and of events
which are at present passing, it now demands im
measurably less faith to anticipate the full realization
of all that is implied in the predictions of the uni
versal reign of Christ, as something to be brought
about in the existing hne of the divine administration
of affairs on earth, than would have been required
eighteen hundred years ago to believe in the destined
accomplishment of what we all see and know to have
been accomplished; and wherever there is taken a
comprehensive survey of human history, and due
weight allowed to it, and, above all, wherever there
is a heart ahve in any just measure to its own moral
wants and the moral wants of man, the evidence
furnished here commends itself as an evidence in
ferior to no other, even in its power to satisfy the
reason, that Jesus is the Son of God.
The course of argument which has been thus
briefly indicated takes nothing for granted that is
capable of being reasonably called in question.
Nothing has been assumed in respect to the author
ship of the Gospel history, nothing in respect to its
inspiration or the perfect accuracy of its details,

420 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
nothing in respect even to its antiquity beyond what
is universally admitted. No reference has been
made to the miracles of Jesus as an independent
evidence of his claims. They have only been inci
dentally referred to as contributing to make up that
picture of a hfe of unparalleled beneficence which
carries in itself the proof of having been drawn
from actual reality. Nothing more has been as
sumed in regard to miracles than simply that they
are not impossible ; and the vahdity of this assump
tion is essentially involved in the admission of the
being of a God. The general argument, as it has
been already stated, is not a new one. It has often
been presented, and in a great variety of forms. It
has never been refuted. No reply lias ever been
made to it, which, among those who recognize in any
proper sense the being of a God, has been regarded,
except within a very narrow circle, as possessing
even a show of plausibility. All attempts to set it
aside have thus far resulted only in the clearer mani
festation of its strength.
If any are disposed to ask, " Why, then, repeat
here what has been so often and better said before ? "
my justification is to be found not so much in what
has now been said as in what has been left unsaid.
As the argument is commonly presented, much is
introduced which must be received on trust ; and the
convincing force of the facts and considerations
which are self-evident is apt to be impaired by their
being associated with others requiring a confirmation
which is not within the reach of all. I have studious
ly endeavored to eliminate from the argument every
thing that admits of question, though at the risk, of

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 421
its presentation appearing somewhat bald and meagre
in comparison with what some may think it might
easily have been made. My simple object has been
to show, that, in what every one may assuredly know
of Jesus, there is ample ground for yielding him full
and boundless trust.
But some one, perhaps, may here reply, " The argu
ment, after all, establishes positively nothing more than
a kind of historical certainty at most ; and the truths I
am required to receive are such as, from their very na
ture, in order to command my assent, must be brought
home to me with an entirely different kind of cer
tainty." The feeling of this difficulty, I apprehend,
springs, in great part, from the undue prominence
which the Church has commonly assigned to that ele
ment in faith which is purely intellectual. But let me
say to any one who finds himself embarrassed by it,
The teachings of Jesus, at least in respect to moral and
religious duty, are such as your moral nature must
assent to with absolute assurance. Just yield your
self, then, fully to those teachings, and the promise
will be fulfilled to you : " If any man is willing to
do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine."
In making a legitimate use of the certainty you
have, you will come to possess the certainty you
crave. I have said that the argument that has been pur
sued assumes nothing in regard to the inspiration of
the Gospels. But, the divine mission "of Jesus being
once admitted, it is but reasonable to suppose that
special provision may have been made to secure the
transmission to the world of a perfectly reliable ac
count of his life and teachings. And the testimony of
36

422 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
so many of the sacred writers to their own inspira
tion, regarded from this point of view, merely as the
testimony of ordinary men, is entitled to great confi
dence. The more closely we study their writings,
the more convincing does the evidence appear that
they were speciaUy caUed to their work, and fitted
for it, and guided in it. In hke manner, the testi
mony which is borne by the writers of the New Tes
tament to the inspiration of the Old finds abundant
confirmation not only in the unequalled grandeur of
many portions of the latter, but in the general
structure of the whole, forming as it does an organ
ism, and thus disclosing the agency of one control
ling Mind, engaged in carrying out a plan of which
it is not possible that the individual writers, acting
independently of any higher influence, and scattered
along through so .many centuries, should have had
any other than the most remote conception.
That the authors of the various writings that make
up our Bible were guided, in general, by a divine in
fluence differing in kind from that enjoyed by any
other writers whose works have been transmitted to
the present time, and that the Bible thus stands
alone in its authority among all other books, may
justly be held with unwavering confidence. But
what precisely was the nature of this inspiration,
how far it precluded the influence of human infir
mity and limitation, and whether it is to be recog
nized as operating in the same way in aU the books
of the Bible, and in every part of every book, are
questions upon which good and wise men have always
been divided, and upon which there is room for
honest diversity of opinion. Inspiration is essen-

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 423
tially miraculous ; and the principle of economy in the
employment of miraculous agency, which is often so
conspicuous in the sacred narrative, — and which, by
the way, is among the incidental indications of its
authenticity, — is full of suggestion here. And it
needs only a very limited survey of what is incontes-
tably the course of Divine Providence to show how
unsafe it is to make our own conceptions of what it
is necessary or desirable for God to do a ground of
assumption as to what he has actually done.
It is hardly conceivable that any truly fair-minded
man, after a thorough investigation of all the data
that are to be taken into account in forming an opin
ion upon this subject, should be able to rest in any
very definite theory of inspiration with a degree of
confidence even approaching that which he is entitled
to feel in the divine authority of Jesus, and in the
truths immediately connected with that central fact.
Yet how often do we hear men say, " Why, the mo
ment we admit the possibility of a doubt as to the
perfect accuracy of any statement of the Bible, we
find ourselves at once afloat upon an ocean of uncer
tainty, and we know not what to beheve " ! Now, I
cannot help thinking, indeed I feel assured, that those
who talk in this way often have a better foundation
for their faith than they seem to know of. But, if
what they say is strictly true, what does their faith
amount to ? To say nothing of the mournful desti
tution of all genuine spiritual experience and insight
necessarily imphed in the declaration, if admitted to
be strictly true, their only protection against making
utter shipwreck of belief is simple ignorance, — an
ignorance which a little gleam of light, incautiously

424 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
let in, may at any time scatter in a moment ; for
they have only to begin to inquire in sober, candid
earnest, in order to find, that, whatever may be the
truth in relation to the subject, there is no such
absolute certainty attainable in respect to it as they
hold to be essential to their believing any thing.
Language is inadequate to set forth as it deserves
the pernicious folly of the position attempted to be
held by some, — that the very idea of a written reve
lation implies, of necessity, the direct communication
to the writers, from above, of every word to be em
ployed. The most malignant attacks upon the Bible
have probably done less towards unsettling faith, and
confirming unbelief, than the well-meant treatises on
inspiration, in which it is maintained that the truth
of Christianity itself must stand or fall with the doc
trine, that every word of the Bible was written under
a guidance that absolutely excluded aU mistake.
It is not to be denied, that, in the re-action against
such unwise and untenable positions, some recent
writers of high authority, while still defending stren
uously all that is essential to Christianity, have been
too ready to concede the historical inaccuracy of cer
tain scriptural statements upon minor points. Due
reverence for Scripture requires that aU possible pains
should be taken honestly to vindicate the accuracy
of every thing which it contains. AU honor to those
who have undertaken the defence of the Pentateuch
against Colenso, and who have so triumphantly ex
posed the shallowness of his learning and the weak
ness of his logic ! But better, a thousand times
better, that his objections should be left unanswered,
than that they should be refuted in such a way as to

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 425
convey the impression that the admission of a doubt
as to any of the details of the Mosaic history must
sap the foundation of all just confidence in the Chris
tian revelation.
The leading facts in the history of the Jewish
nation are as much beyond dispute as the general
course of events in our late civfl war ; and the prog
ress of discovery, from time to time, is continually
narrowing the circle within which there is even sup
posed to be any room for doubt. But, to one who
takes a correct view of the whole subject, it is al
ways painful to hear any new discovery spoken of
as confirming the truth of revelation. The truth
of revelation needs no confirmation; and within the
sphere of external evidence, to all intents and pur
poses,^ is incapable of confirmation. The confirma
tion of a minute historical statement of the Bible is
no more a confirmation of the truth of revelation
than the breath we every moment draw is a confirma
tion of the doctrine of the atmosphere. If we can
suppose such a case as that, by some wonderful series
of discoveries, the truth of every historical detail
both of the Old Testament and of the New should
be established beyond a doubt, the additional confir
mation which would thus be given to the truth of the
Christian revelation would at most, according to any
just estimate, amount to nothing more than the dif
ference between a milhon and a million and one.
If the course of reasoning I have pursued be valid,
the inference follows, — and it is one which cannot be
too earnestly insisted on, — that the ultimate evidence
of Christianity is entirely independent of all questions
as to the inspiration of the sacred writings ; as to
36*

426 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
their "^authorship, and freedom from interpolations;
and as to what books are to be included in the canon ;
independent, in fact, of every thing which can be
regarded as being stfll matter for critical inquiry.
Though we were to concede every thing which the
most audacious criticism, merely as criticism, aside
from what are purely atheistic assumptions, claims
to have established, or can be imagined capable of
establishing in the future, the essential proof of
Christianity would remain unimpaired. I do not say
these things to prepare the way for the admission
of any of the pretended results of the destructive
criticism of recent times ; but I put the matter thus
strongly — though, I am sure, not more strongly
than the truth aUows — with a view to the relief of
many who are sometimes perplexed with difficulties
which they cannot dispose of to their perfect satis
faction, while yet, as long as those difficulties are
not fairly met, they do not see exactly how they can
justify either to themselves or others the confidence
which they still cherish in the Christian revelation.
The thought, I am aware, is likely to be sug
gested here, that revelation is of value only for the
truths which it contains ; and the question may be
asked, "How are we to arrive at any certainty in
respect to the doctrines which constitute the system
of Christianity, except upon the basis of an unquali
fied acceptance of the strictest theory of inspiration ? "
But I ask, in reply, How do we become assured of
the doctrine of inspiration ? Most certainly we are
not at liberty to assume the truth of this doctrine in
order that we may have inspired authority upon
which to rest our assurance of it. But if this great

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 427
fundamental doctrine, as it is so commonly regarded,
is itself capable of being established without our first
assuming it to be true, what is there essential to
Christianity which may not in hke manner be estab
hshed independently of the same assumption ? If we
accept Paul's statement simply as that of a trust
worthy man, that he received his knowledge of Chris
tian doctrine by revelation, why might we not in
the same way, and with equal confidence, accept his
statement as to what that doctrme is ? How much
more, then, having, as we do have, ample reason to
believe that he was divinely guided to express with
infallible precision the doctrinal truth revealed to him,
may we still maintain unshaken confidence in aU his
teachings, even though compelled to admit the exist
ence of a remote possibility, that either in respect to
the personal expectation he expresses in Acts xx. 25,
or to that in Phil. i. 25, he may have been mistaken !
The truth of Christianity once admitted, belief in
inspiration, as we have seen, would seem to foUow
almost as a matter of necessity ; and any just concep
tion of inspiration must imply, at the very least, that
those who enjoyed it are worthy of all confidence as
the expounders of reUgious truth. But, in addition
to the guaranty thus furnished to our faith, the fun
damental doctrines of the Christian revelation, as
accepted by the great body of believers, are so inti
mately connected with one another, that one who
has truly taken the first step in belief wfll ordinarily
feel httle need of evidence for what remains to be
received. The amazing fact of the incarnation of
the Son of God, which we are constrained to ac
cept as furnishing the only rational explanation

428 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of a history the truth of which cannot be denied,
finds its only adequate complement in just that
scheme of doctrine which the Scriptures plainly
teach in respect to the moral exigencies of the
human race, the redemption accomplished for it by
the sacrifice of Calvary, the methods by which that
sacrifice is made avaihng, and the infinite loss in
volved in its rejection.
The general current of thought is, to all appearance,
fast bringing men to feel, that, for those who are
willing to receive any thing as true for which they
have not the direct evidence of the senses, there is
nowhere any tenable position short of the substantial
acceptance of these truths. The struggle to main
tain a precarious foothold somewhere else cannot be
very long persisted in. The difficulties of the effort
are continually multiplying, and the ultimate abandon
ment of the whole middle ground between Atheism
and Christianity may be looked upon as certain.
Upon minor points connected with the details of
Christian truth, the form in which it. is held and the
explanations given of it, there has always been, and
there always wiU be, a diversity of views. Vain is
the hope of securing any thing like absolute unifor
mity of doctrine by precise theories of inspiration,
artificial canons of interpretation, or minute dogmatic
formulas. Christianity is essentially a law of liberty
in thought as weU as in life ; and the only security
against the corruptions to which it is liable in both
these aspects is one and the same, — the general diffu
sion of a deep inward experience of its reality and
power. If it is a truth of prime value in its place, and

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 429
never to be lost sight of, that " the Bible,, the Bible
alone, is the religion of Protestants," no less essential
and pregnant is the truth, that the spirit of Jesus is
the religion of Christians. An infaUible Bible with
out an infaUible interpreter is no security against
doctrinal aberrations without limit. But in the spirit
of Jesus we have the infallible interpreter we need.
Wherever this is clearly found, there is and must be
aU essential truth. And this spirit, ever consistent
with itself, may be confidently rehed upon to main
tain, throughout aU coming time, whatever is truly
distinctive in that great' harmonious scheme of doc
trine which the Church, as a body, following its
guidance, has never ceased to hold : "My sheep hear
my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; . . .
but a stranger will they not follow."
In the meanwhfle, let Christian behevers dismiss-
forever those groundless fears of danger to the
faith which have been so long the reproach of
the Christian name. Nothing can be more signi
ficant of the general failure to discern the true
grounds of confidence in revelation than the pre
vailing jealousy in respect to the possible results of
speculative thought and of scientific investigation.
Take, for example, the apprehensions which are often
expressed by men of some intelligence in ordinary
matters as to the effect which may be produced even
by making known the facts in relation to the various
readings of the manuscripts of the New Testament,
and the grounds there are for questioning the gen
uineness of particular passages. Even the defects of
our common English version must not be pointed out,
nor the necessity insisted upon of a revision which

430 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
may embody the results of the progress that has been
made in biblical learning for the last two centuries
and a half, lest the popular faith should be unsettled.
If the popular faith is capable of being so easily
unsettled, then, by all means, let it be unsettled from
the sandy basis upon which it rests, and be put upon
a basis such that no increase of knowledge can ever
unsettle it again. Let the policy which would check
investigation in any quarter, or cover up any of its
ascertained conclusions, be left, hereafter, to those
who have some reason to dread the hght. Let
encouragement be given to the most thorough re
searches in every department of knowledge ; and let
aU new truth, as fast as it is discovered, be proclaimed
upon the house-top : but let it also be proclaimed,
and let men be made to see and to feel that it is so,
•that the truth of Christianity rests upon a basis which
no conceivable discovery in any branch of science can
possibly affect ; that it is proof against every thing
short of what it is certain that science can never fur
nish, — an absolute and overwhelming demonstration
that there is no God.
In conclusion, I have only to add, that the part
allotted to the Church in the subjugation of the
world to Christ must he very much — perhaps I
might say entirely, at the last analysis — in compel
ling men to feel the power of the great argument,
which, in its outlines, I have endeavored this even
ing to present ; the argument which is found in the
character and life of Christ himself, — in what he
was, and what he said, and what he did, while
dwelling in the flesh ; in all the results he has since
accomplished ; in the work he is achieving now. So

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 431
far as preaching is concerned, he is the best preacher
who can most effectually do just this. I trust I
shaU not be charged with underrating the value of
learning as a means of furthering the moral and
religious advancement of the world : it can hardly
be supposed that the pursuits to which my life has
been devoted have had any tendency to lead to such
an error. But I wish here to express my deep con
viction, that no wide range of learning is essential
to the attainment of the highest success in the min
istry of the gospel. God, by his providence, seems
to be making necessary the general employment of
a class of laborers differing, in some respects, from
those whom our churches have felt themselves
mainly called upon to rear. A thoroughly learned
ministry, adequate in numbers to the world's de
mands for religious teaching, it is vain to attempt to
furnish. Nor is there reaUy any imperative need of
such a ministry for the work at large. It is whoUy
a mistake to imagine that the unexampled array of
learning and dialectical skill which characterizes the
modern assaults upon Christianity has created a de
mand for any thing corresponding among the gen
erality of those who undertake to defend it. So far
as these assaults are such as can be repeUed by learn
ing only, they do not even strike at any thing that
is vital to the evidence of Christianity ; and, so far as
they rest on speculation, they find their most effectual
refutation in the testimony of our moral nature.
There is room enough, indeed, in the field of labor
occupied by the Christian ministry, for the profitable
employment of the richest mental culture and the
most profound and varied learning ; and it is justly

432 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
and urgently demanded, that, within the ranks of the
ministry, such culture and such learning should be
found. There are many portions of Scripture the
true meaning of which can be approached only
through an accurate acquaintance with the lan
guages in which they were originally written, com
bined with a good knowledge of the times in which
the writers hved, and of the whole history of
biblical interpretation. Then, too, if it is a worthy
and ennobhng pursuit to investigate the laws of
Nature, to study the revolutions of empires and the
growth of nations, how much more so to explore, as
far as may be, the bearings of those truths pertaining
to immortality which are made known or intimated
in revelation, and to follow the progress, through
the ages that are past, of that kingdom which is to
endure forever ! And it is of unspeakable impor
tance that provision should be made whereby devout
and gifted minds may be enabled, in every sphere of
research, to go on, if possible, far in advance of those
who are disposed to employ each step of progress
as a new vantage-ground from which to assail the
truth of revelation. StiU it must never be forgotten
that the main work of the ministry is to lead the
world to Christ. And, in order to be led to Christ,
the world needs to hear of him from those to
whom the history of his life has become a Uving,
ever-present, all-controlling reahty; men who can
say to their divine Teacher, " Thy words were found,
and I did eat them ; " men in whose daily lives his
own life is reproduced, and who, in speaking of him,
speak as of one whom they have seen and known, —
yea, whom they are daily beholding face to face.

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 433
John Bunyans, rather than John Seldens, are the
great need of all times ; and are as much, at least,
demanded in our own day of universal inquiry and
fast-advancing light as ever. Bunyan, the iUiterate
and rude, with his profound Christian experience and
his strong common sense, but with a little broaden
ing of his views, would be no contemptible antagonist
to the strongest of the modern champions of unbehef.
Such men as he was can well afford to dispense with
very much which the accepters of revelation, alike
with its rejecters, have too commonly regarded as
essential to its defence. When pressed with any
argument which cannot be met by an appeal to sound
common sense and the moral constitution of an
honest man, they may boldly reply to their opposers,
" We are not careful to answer your objections. Let
them stand. Our faith rests upon a rock that lies
below their reach. Whatever difficulties they in
volve are nothing to be compared with the difficulties
you must encounter in the attempt to set aside the
claims of Jesus. Here are the facts in regard to
him ; unique, stupendous ; beyond controversy, facts ;
and challenging explanation as weU at your hands as
at ours. We undertake to explain them ; and the
view we take, while it involves no assumptions
which you can demonstrate to be false, brings aU
the facts into harmony with one. another as perfectly
as the movements of the planets are harmonized
in the system of Copernicus. Till you can bring
another explanation which will do the same thing,
you are bound to accept ours."
But, after all, it is not by preaching alone, nor
mainly, that the argument we have been speaking
37

434 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of is to be urged upon the world.* The lives and
labors of Christ's own little ones everywhere, sharing
his spirit, copying his example of self-denying benefi
cence, and silently testifying to all around them of
the. continued exercise of his divine might and of
the continued progress of his kingdom, must be the
great, standing enforcement of it. And if so much
has been accomplished by this agency hitherto,
under all the disadvantages created by the wide
spread domination of ignorance and self-seeking and
sectarian zeal, what may not be expected from
its working in that Church of the Future, which
prophecy long ago foreshadowed, and the grand form
of which, projected on Faith's horizon, though as yet
but dimly seen, is growing more and more distinct
with each succeeding year ! What changes may
come ere the edifice attains the full perfection of its
majestic beauty ; how much of the old scaffolding of
creeds and organizations will be wholly taken down
and thrown away ; how much is to be finaUy worked
in, and so made still of use as a portion of the finished
structure, — it were yet premature to attempt to
say. I venture upon no enumeration of the aisles and
chapels and crypts and niches of that vast cathedral.
But this I am sure of, that nothing wiU be wanting
to its completeness, nothing to its harmony ; that all
that is good and true on earth will find a place in it,
and that whatever it includes of evil and of error
will be but as the dust upon its pavement; that
stably resting on its deep-laid foundations, compact
in the order and fitness of its hving stones, its -walls
unblemished by a fracture or a stain, and reflecting
in every part the glory of its Builder, it will stand

CHRIST THE EVIDENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 435
forth before the universe as one, a worthy realiza
tion of one eternal plan, one principle of holy, self-
sacrificing love pervading and vitalizing all its wor
ship, and all that might have seemed discord once
conspiring to make up the concord of one perpetual
anthem of praise and adoration rendered to "the
Lamb that was slain."

X.
EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY.
BY REV. MARK HOPKINS, D_}„ LL.D.
WE claim that Christianity differs from other
religions, —
1st, In its origin.
Of the origin of the different religions in the world
two accounts are given. According to one of these,
man had originally the true religion. He was in the
moral image of God, and worshipped him acceptably :
but he wilfully turned from him ; and, having done
this, he created gods after his own imagination, and
devised forms of worship that might be supposed
acceptable to gods thus created.
This is the Bible account. It foUows from it that
other religions are the product, not simply of imper
fection and unavoidable ignorance, but of wickedness.
The statement of the apostle Paul is, that, when men
" knew God, they glorified him not as God, but be
came vain in their imaginations, and changed the
truth of God into a lie ; " that " they did not like to
retain God in their knowledge," and that hence they
" worshipped and served the creature more than the
Creator." The other account is, that the different religions of
436

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 437
the world are the outgrowth of man's religious na
ture, as the different languages are said to be of his
inteUectual and emotive nature. Of religions thus
originated, some, as Christianity and Mohammedanism,
claim to have been given by direct inspiration from
God ; while others, as Buddhism and Confucianism,
make no such claim.
This is the account of Naturalism. According to
it, man was not originally in the moral image of God,
or in his image at all. As stated by some, he is the
only self-conscious product of unconscious forces
working upward; and so is himself God, so far as
there is a God. According to others, he has been
developed from a germ, originally, perhaps, created by
God, but at the greatest possible remove from him.
But, whatever theory of the origin of man is adopted,
it is assumed that he was left to work out his religions
from the instincts and cravings and conceptions of
his own mind; and that any claim to supernatural aid
comes either from self-deception, or from an attempt
to deceive others.
Thus viewed, these different religions, so far from
being any of them the product of wickedness, are all
good for those with whom they have originated. They
are the highest possible product of the human mind
up, to the present time. From the lowest Feticism
up to the worship of the sun, aU forms of idolatry are
but the blind gropings and yearnings of a being igno
rant but progressive, and a necessary step in his up
ward progress.
Of these accounts we adopt the first. Do we, then,
say that no rehgion but that of the Bible is from God,
or can be acceptable to him ? Yes : we say that not
37*

438 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
one of them is capable of rebinding the soul to God,
which, according to its etymology, is the proper func
tion of religion; and also, that, as religions, their
tendency is to degrade the race.
But, in saying this, do we say that pagan nations,
constituting even now more than half the race, are
whoUy forsaken of God ? No. It is not for us to
limit God in his methods. His Spirit is abroad in
aU the earth. Men may be better than their rehgion.
We remember Job and Melchisedec, and the. wise
men of the East, and Cornelius. We appreciate
every pure and elevated moral sentiment, and everyT
noble conception of God, contained in the literature
or sacred books of those nations. We think rever
ently of any aspiration of any soul towards God.
We believe, that, in every nation, " he that feareth
God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him."
But, believing this, we would not ignore wickedness,
and mistake for charity an indiscriminating sentimen-
talism that vaunts itself as seeing something of good,
because something of the religious element, equaUy
in cannibal rites, in the orgies of Bacchus, in the
dance of the Israelites around the golden calf, and in
the worship of God in spirit and in truth. We be
lieve with an apostle, that "the things which the
Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to
God." We say that a religion for man must be an
acceptable mode of worship for a sinner ; that the
Bible alone reveals such a mode of worship ; and that
moral sentiments and sublime conceptions of God are
not a religion. *
This exclusive claim of Christianity to be from God
we simply state. If it can be substantiated, it makes

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 439
a difference heaven-wide between that and other re
ligions. That it can be substantiated, we do not doubt;
but to do that would require us to go over the whole
ground of the Christian evidences as compared with
those of other religions, for which this is neither the
time nor the place. We pass, therefore, to points
that are intrinsic, admitting of immediate comparison ;
and we say, still under the head of origin, —
That Christianity, as distinguished from Judaism,
differs from other religions in growing out of a system
which it set aside at the same time that it acknowl
edged it to be divine. Than this, no problem could
be more difficult ; and there is nothing in other reli
gions either parallel or analogous to it. As prepara
tion and consummation, as prophecy and fulfilment,
as type and antitype, there was needed, and there was,
such a correspondence between Christianity and Ju
daism that its truth might be proved from the Old-
Testament Scriptures, while yet it needed to be in
utter contrast to Judaism as simple and expansive,
and adapted to all men at aU times and in all places.
That such a correspondence and contrast between
two great historical systems should be the result of
contrivance, and by Jews, too, in favor of Gentiles, is
simply impossible. Nor could it have been the out
growth of the religious nature. That is primarily
one of feeling. It does not grasp great problems, and
arrange wide adjustments, and wait for the " fulness
of time," and know when its hour has come, and
have its miracles ready, and such miracles ! and its
historical personage, and such a personage ! and step
forth", as in a moment, from the narrowness of a single
people and of a small province to claim the heritage

440 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of the whole earth and of the ages. No. Nothing
can rationally account for this but the supposition
that it was a divine movement analogous to those in
nature by which a lower growth is superseded by a
higher. Christianity was the fruit-bearing stalk
coming forth from its lower unfolding leaves of Juda
ism, which it cast off, and left to die.
Again : Christianity differs from other religions in
its origin, because that origin is not only from God,
but from the love of God. " God so loved the world,
that he gave his only-begotten Son." Here we have
the origin of Christianity as in love ; and whether
we look at the principle itself, or at the degree and
mode of its manifestation, it is wholly unlike any
other religion.
Account for it as we may, man has regarded God
with terror, and as a Being needing to be placated.
In approaching him he has brought offerings and
bloody sacrifices, and submitted to penance and self-
torture. No heathen, in ancient or modern times,
in Pagan or in Christian lands, no philosopher, has
risen to the conception of a love of God for man in
combination with holiness. Hence the conception
of a system as originating, not in himself, but in the
self -moved love of a holy God; and a love so great
as to correspond with his infinite attributes would
not have been possible. In direct contrast with any
thing that can be adduced- in connection with the
origin of other religions is that passage in John, in
which we have both the origin and the great charac
teristic of Christianity : " Herein is love, not that
we loved God, but that he loved us, and gave his Son
to be a propitiation for our sins."

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 441
It has, indeed, been objected to Christianity, that
this doctrine of propitiation, or of an atonement, rep
resents God, not as a God of love, but as implaca
ble. Misapprehending the relation of the love of God
to the atonement, this objection makes the most won
derful manifestation of that love the ground of a de
nial that it exists. The true view is, not that the
death of Christ made God love the world, but that
the coming of Christ, and his whole office, had its in
ception in the love of God manifesting itself both as
compassionate and as holy. It is one thing for com
passion to relieve suffering under natural law, and
another for mercy to pardon guilt under moral law.
The highest manifestation of love is that of a holy
being for the guilty. As we exalt the holiness and
the sacrifice demanded by it, so, and so only, do we
exalt the love ; and, when the love itself both provides
and makes the sacrifice needed for the pardon and
restoration of the guilty, placability emerges from a
union of justice with mercy, not as mere compassion,
but with a glory that must otherwise have been un
known. It is not, then, those who accept the doc
trine of an atonement, but those who deny it, who
deny and make impossible the highest manifestation
of the love of God.
Having thus seen that Christianity differs from
other rehgions in its origin, — 1st, as from God ; 2d,
as from a previous divine system which it set aside ;
and, 3d, as from the love of God, — we now ob
serve, —
2dly, That Christianity not only differs from other
rehgions in its origin, but also in its essence.
Originating in love, its essence is love. As a

442 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
rehgion, its essence is love to God. Its first and great
commandment is, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with aU thy heart." If the religion had not
originated in love, to obey tbis command would not
have been possible. For the same reason that man
could not conceive of a system as originating in the
love of God, he could not conceive of a God who was
to be loved. Accordingly, his gods have been too re
mote or indifferent or selfish or hideous to be loved.
Would he make his God spiritual? — he became an
abstraction. Would he embody him? — he ceased to
be a God to the thoughtful, and became an idol to the
masses. It was a revelation of love by a God worthy
to be loved, and that only, that made love possible :
" We love God because he first loved us."
In thus making the love of God its essence as a re
ligion, Christianity has seized on the only possible
uniting and harmonizing principle of the spiritual uni
verse. Of this, gravitation in the material universe is
but a symbol ; and, phflosophicaUy, the discovery of
that was as nothing compared with the discovery of
this. Not in its morality, but in this, — in the union
of man to God by love, — is the originality and won
der of the system. He who is thus united to God has
aU things; he who is not thus united to him has
nothing : and the system, be it of rehgion, or of a
phflosophy that would take the place of religion, that
has not the love of God in it, is a charnel-house of
the best affections. It is the only principle through
which man can be ennobled by being subject, and be
free while he serves, and make sacrifices with a ra
tional joy.
From this principle of love to God, love to man

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 443
necessarily flows. Hence the religion naturally flow
ers out into philanthropic and benevolent institutions.
These distinguish it from all others. They are a
great feature of it, that might well be dwelt upon if
there were time. Hence, too, the religion must draw
after it a morahty in all directions as rational and as
perfect as itself. Everywhere the tendency has been
to separate rehgion from morahty ; to set them in op
position even : but a religion without morality is a
superstition and a curse ; and any thing like an ade
quate and complete morality without religion is im
possible. The only salvation for man is in the union
of the two as Christianity unites them.
This outgrowth of the morahty of Christianity from
the rehgion by their origin in a common principle,
together with its perfection, is so a peculiarity of
Christianity, that it might well be mentioned under a
separate head. It is a great peculiarity, and has not
been enough insisted on. StiU, being from the same
principle, the morality is so much a part of the reh
gion, it so enters into that essence of it of which we
are now speaking, that it will suffice to mention it
here. Differing thus from other religions in its origin and
essence, we might expect, and we find, that Christian
ity differs from them, in the third place,
In its end. This end is complex, but is made one
by the relation of its parts as implying each other.
As its end, in part, then, and the first step towards
its completed end, Christianity, and that alone, pro
poses the perfection of the individual man.
That Christianity does propose this end is clear.
The moral law which it implies, and to the obedience

444 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of which it proposes to bring men back, requires per
fection. Christ commanded men to be perfect as their
Father in heaven is perfect; and the apostle Paul
made it the end of his preaching to present every man
perfect in Christ Jesus.
In thus proposing perfection as an end, philosophy
and reason are in accord. PhflosophicaUy, the problem
for man is the attainment by him of a perfect manhood.
Give us this, and we are content. Any system or
method that will give us this, be it religion or philoso
phy, be it regeneration or culture, we welcome. Fail
ing of this, man is a failure. Not tending towards it,
he is out of sympathy with every living thing that
grows ; and, if the want of this tendency be from any
thing but wickedness, he is not only a blot on the
universe, but a reproach to his Maker.
But what is the perfection Christianity requires ?
The divine idea to be reahzed in man must be that
of the moral image of God. This is central. In
the kind of faculties which he posesses as rational,
free, and moral, man is already in the image of
God. What he needs is his moral image, consisting
in character. Through this alone can he be brought
into harmony with himself, or with any perfect sys
tem of moral government. Give us this, and we are
content, because we know it will draw after it all
else that is desirable. This perfection of the moral
nature as that in man which makes him man, as that
alone which is possible to aU, — this, and this only, does
Christianity require. Physical strength, martial prow
ess, inteUectual culture, it passed by at a period when
these were in highest repute, because it was to be the
universal religion, and these were not possible for aU.

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 445
Christianity requires moral perfection : and it might
be supposed that that would always be identical with
itself ; but it is not, and we have not yet reached the
precise perfection which Christianity would evolve.
The perfection of an unfallen being is greatly differ
ent from that of one fallen and restored. This last
would rest on a new basis, and involve new relations
and characteristics. It would be the " perfection
which is in Christ Jesus," — a perfection through pen
itence and humility and meekness and faith ; and
that is a perfection which no heathen mind ever con
ceived of, or ever would have conceived of if it had
not been exhibited in actual life.
Christianity, then, differs from other religions not
only in seeking the perfection of the individual and
of his moral nature, which might, perhaps, have been
naturaUy suggested as an end, but in seeking a pecu
liar perfection which could not have been thus sug
gested. In thus commencing, with the individual, and work
ing for his perfection as an end in itself, regarding
him as having a destiny under the government of God
independent of human organizations, Christianity
first introduced a principle that is revolutionizing the
world. It had been supposed that the individual was
for the sake of the government, the organization, the
society. Christianity said, " No." If it did not say
that governments were for the sake of the individual,
it yet gave no heed to them when they would interfere
with his moral perfection. It thus established the only
democratic principle that is worth any thing, — one
that began to turn the world upside down then, and
that will never rest till it has done it completely, and
38

446 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
has achieved, through the perfection of the individual,
the perfection of society.
This brings us to the second part of the complex
end which Christianity proposes, and for which that
of the individual is an indispensable condition ; that
is, the perfection of society.
The perfection of society as an end is as much
demanded by reason as that of the individual. It is,
indeed, a condition of the full perfection of the in
dividual. Having a social nature, man finds his
sphere and scope in society as the bird in the atmos
phere ; and a perfect society would re-act upon him,
and raise him to a perfection impossible without it.
Of tbis demand of the social nature, and of the
reciprocal influence of the individual and society,
Christ was fully aware. Hence he established a
Church, — a community scarcely less original, whether
in its objects or methods, than his own divine char
acter. Its objects were, spiritual perfection, and
united action in extending the kingdom of God. Its
methods were, teaching, the remembrance of Christ
in the sacraments, and the estabhshment of an au
thority whoUy spiritual, with no power of enforcing
any exaction, or of punishment except by exclusion
from the society. Not only did Christ give no such
power : he expressly forbade it. " Ye know," he said,
" that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion
over them, and they that are great exercise authority
upon them ; but it shall not be so among you : but
whosoever will be great among you, let him be your
minister; and whosoever will be chief among you,
let him be your servant ; even as the Son of man came
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 447
his life a ransom for many." These are marvellous
words ; and a society based upon them, in which
humility and self-sacrificing service from love should
be the ground of pre-eminence, would be as far re
moved from ordinary society as a miracle is from the
ordinary course of Nature. There is in the concep
tion of it an ideal perfection, that holds the same
relation to the perfection of society that the character
of Christ does to that of the individual.
Constituted on such a basis, the local church could
best perform the functions of a government purely
spiritual ; but, in the multiplication of such churches,
a wide, spiritual community would be formed, the
members of which would be related to each other
through their common relationship to Christ as their
Head and King. Between such there would be the
fellowship of love and of mutual helpfulness, and
they might act together for wider ends than the local
church could compass ; but, with reference to such
ends, Christ appointed no organization, and gave no
authority. If, now, the earth were peopled by those
thus related to Christ, and to each other through him,
society would be as perfect as the hmitations and im
perfections of the present state would admit.
But Christianity goes farther. It provides for
and looks forward to a perfect corporate life for the
whole body of those who receive it. As Bernard
says in his " Progress of Christian Doctrine," " it
builds the city of God." It alone builds it. For
this the long history of the world is but a preparation.
For this the world waits. The city of God, — the
New Jerusalem which John saw " coming down from
God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for

448 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
her husband," — this it is that stands at the close
of the scenes presented by the Bible, as the Garden
of Eden stands at their opening. Perfection at the
opening, perfection at the close ; but how different !
In the one, the perfection of nature and of innocence ;
in the other, of costly magnificence, and of a mul
titude whom no man can number, redeemed, pardoned,
" washed in the blood of the Lamb." How appro
priate is each in its place ! — the garden as the abode
of the first pair, the city as a symbol of a perfect,
social, and corporate life. From nothing seen on
earth could a city have been associated with a perfect
social life. How sublime the confidence in the reno
vating power of Christianity that could do that ! And
it was just that that was needed. Nothing else could
stand at the close of the vista in the place of the
New Jerusalem that would so kindle the imagination,
and draw the affections, and satisfy the highest ten
dencies of man. No other consummation could so
glorify God.
And here we find the third element in the com
plex end proposed by Christianity, — the glory of
God. This results immediately from the other two, and
cannot be separated from them. From the attributes
manifested through Christianity, this glory is higher
than any other. The heavens, especiaUy the heavens
of modern astronomy, declare the glory of God ; but
it is a glory of wisdom and of power, — a glory that
pales before that of wisdom and of love, finding their
culmination in mercy harmonized with justice. If,
as has been well said, the stars send up a sflent song
to the glory of God, it is indeed silent compared

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 449
with that voiced and conscious utterance which John
heard going up " as it were the voice of a great mul
titude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the
voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia ! for the
Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and
rejoice, and give honor to him ; for the marriage of
the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself
ready." Such voices, connecting earth with heaven,
and time with eternity, opening to man his highest
destiny, and bringing to God his highest glory, carry
with them their own evidence as divine, and are in
striking contrast with any thing science or philosophy
has to offer.
We have, then, as the one complex end proposed
by Christianity, the perfection of the individual, the
perfection of society, and the glory of God. Neither
of the first two can be complete without the
other; and from the completeness of both must re
sult the highest glory of God. An end hke this
is proposed by no other rehgion. It is worthy of
God, is approved by reason, and makes revelation
analogous to nature by carrying its schemes out to an
extent and perfection that transcends the imagina
tion. But, if perfection be thus an end of man, — indis
pensable to the further, end of glorifying God and
enjoying him, — why does he not attain it ? That
he does not, aU concede. Except where Christianity
is, there is no tendency towards it, but the reverse.
What is the difficulty? Was there original imper
fection ? or has there come a blight over that which
was once fair and perfect ? These questions the Old
Testament answers, and reveals sin as the one obsta-
38*

450 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
cle that comes between man and his end. The New
Testament accepts the answer given by the Old, and
claims to remove the obstacle. Hence we say,
In the fourth place, that Christianity not only differs
from other religions in its origin and essence and
end, but also in being a remedial system wholly con
ditioned on the fact of sin.
The import and reach of the fact of sin must be
understood if we would understand the Bible ; for,
according to that, the whole history of the world,
both natural and moral, turns upon it. Without
attempting to explain the fact itself of sin, the Bible
explains by that all that is perplexing in our present
state, whether in man or in nature. Is nature out
of adjustment with man, yielding him food only by
the sweat of the brow ? Is he subject to disease,
and at length to a death that carries with it a sting ?
Is man at variance with himself, — his passions and will
on one side, and his reason and conscience on the
other? Do men defraud and injure and kill each
other ? Is man estranged from God, either question
ing his existence, or rejecting his authority ? The
cause is sin. So says the Bible. Is it right ? We
say, Yes. For what are estrangement from God,
and selfishness and malignity, and the rule within of
passion and wiU, but forms of sin ? But these, and
the evils coming from them, are the great evils.
Let man be at peace with himself, with his feUow-
men, and with God, and the sunshine of God's smile
would so rest upon hfe, that its whole aspect would
be changed. If decay and death would remain, yet
death would have no sting, and nature would become
more friendly through a fuller subjection to man.

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 451
Coming, then, as the greater evils of life do, from
character rather than from outward condition, the
Bible is plainly right in attributing them to sin. Is
it also right in affirming that the relations of ex
ternal nature to man have been affected by sin ? At
such a suggestion science stares, and positivism mocks.
But there is a higher spiritual philosophy, in accord
ance with which we may rationally affirm, first, that
matter is subordinate to spirit ; and, second, that mat
ter is always so adjusted by God as to be an expression
of his feehngs towards his creatures. Give us these
two propositions, and we are content. The first, none
but a materialist wfll deny ; and the second wiU be
denied by no one who believes in a moral govern
ment. Doubtless, one object of the adjustments of
matter is the training of the inteUect. For this they
are admirable ; but tbis is subsidiary to moral impres
sion, and for that the principle wfll be that the phys
ical surroundings of moral beings shaU correspond
with their character.
That this is a principle of God's administration, we
infer because both congruity and justice demand it ;
because men instinctively act upon it ; and because it
is so wonderfully apphed in the present mixed state
of things, where its application would seem most
difficult. Not only does Nature task the intellect as
constructed on scientific principles, and become a
companion for man as reflecting his every mood,
and show a deep correspondence between matter as
now arranged and the mind by furnishing a material
origin for all words expressive of mental states ; but
the amount of good and evil in Nature corresponds to
that in man, and is just what it^hould be in a state

452 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
of trial looking forward to a final separation of the
two. Placed in a world where there is something of
moral goodness and something of wickedness, with
tendencies to higher degrees of both, man finds in
Nature both the promise and the threat; the mate
rials from which Hope may construct her heaven, and
from which Remorse and Fear may build their place of
torment. No correspondence could be more perfect
than that between the mixed character of man and
the characteristics of Nature and of the animals
around him. This, we think, fixes the place and
uses of matter, and estabhshes a principle that is
universal. If so, not only must the greater internal
and social evils be traced back to sin, but also the
physical evils. The storm within not only finds its
analogy with that without, but accounts for it.
But, whatever account may be given of the origin
and issues of the present state, it is certain that, the
Old Testament assigns sin as the cause of all there
is in it that is disastrous and perplexing ; and that
the New Testament accepts the solution, and makes
it its one business to remove sin and its consequences.
It was said of Christ before he was born, that his
name should be called " Jesus," because he should
"save his people from their sins." If there had been
no sin, he would not have come ; there would have
been no Saviour ; there would have been no caU or
place for Christianity, it is remarkable how dis
tinctly it puts itself on this ground. Distinctively
it is not a religion at aU, or a system of morahty,
but a remedial system. It declares that Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners ; and proclaims
itself to be but a ^mporary dispensation, looking

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 453
forward to a time when Christ " shaU have dehvered
up the kingdom to God, even the Father," " that God
may be all in all."
As thus distinctively remedial, Christianity is the
oretically perfect. It satisfies the conscience by its
provision for expiation, and the reason by its provis
ion for personal renovation, and deliverance from sin
through the power and aid of the Holy Ghost. Under
other systems there has been the idea of expiation ;
but the combination .of that with the indispensable
element of renovation, and of a conformity to a holy
God in moral character, is peculiar to Christianity.
This is a marvellous combination. Without it, the
system could not be remedial ; without it, the idea
of expiation can only encourage sin.
It is of the essence of Christianity to be a remedial
system. As such, it is perfect. But combined with
it, and a part of it, is also a perfect system of religion
and of morality. The rehgion is perfect, because it
satisfies the reason by requiring a worship that is in
spirit and in truth, and by presenting a God who is
worthy to be thus worshipped ; and because it satisfies
the affections by presenting this God not only as
just, but as placable, and as a Father. The morality,
as has been said, is perfect, because it springs from
love. It is this combination in Christianity of a remedial
system with a rational system of worship — that is,
with what is properly a rehgion — and with a perfect
moraUty that adapts it to man in all his relations and
wants, and makes it to be so the system for him, that
no other is possible. No such combination is approx
imated in any other rehgion. That it exists in Chris-

454 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
tianity shows that Christ comprehended all the ele
ments of the problem to be solved in the restoration
of a guilty being under a perfect moral government, —
a problem probably the most complex and difficult
that could arise under the government of God.
Nor does- Christianity as a remedial system present
itself simply as comprehending the problem to be
solved, and as perfect in theory. It is not a mere
doctrine or exhortation, but differs from other re
ligions as embodied from the .first in institutions of
expiation that have had an historical development.
These aU pointed to a wonderful Person who was to
come. That Person came. From his coming, Chris
tianity at once cast off all that was typical, local,
adventitious, retaining that which was remedial,
spiritual, universal ; but, in doing this, it preserved
its historical character by making itself dependent
on a new set of facts, some of which are so its doc
trines, that, without them, it could have no power.
From this point, ignoring devices of human wisdom,
grappling in seeming weakness, utter weakness, with
the powers of evfl, it set on foot a practical system,
not for the subversion or renovation of institutions
or of governments, but for the spiritual renovation
of individuals through a teaching ministry and the
power of the Holy Ghost, which has been leavening
society from that time to this.
At this point I make a stand, and caU attention to
Christianity as primarily, distinctively, and avowedly
a Mgniedial system, conditioned solely on the fact of
sin. As such, it is neither the product of the reli
gious nature putting out its tendrils, and uttering ele
vated sentiments and high aspirations, nor a blind and

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 455
passionate expression of a sense of guilt through self-
torture and the sacrifice of the natural affections ; but
it is a broad solution, in clear vision, of the great prob
lems of life as they are connected with the existence
of evil, and a persistent and practical attempt, con
tinued from the beginning, to combat and remove the
evil. " For this purpose the Son of God was mani
fested, that he might destroy the works of the Devil."
What a contrast, then, have we here between Christ
standing at the centre of a great remedial and histor
ical system, combining with it, also, a perfect system
of worship and of morality, and any philosopher
merely uttering his own speculations ! What a con
trast between him and the founders of religions with
no antecedent history, who either ignore the great
problem for man, as needing both a remedy and a re
hgion, as needing both to have guilt removed and to
draw nigh to God, or else leave the elements of that
problem in a wholly confused and nebulous state !
How impossible that such a system, with such a cen
tral personage, producing such results, should have
been the joint work of Jewish chroniclers and bards
in ancient times, and of Galilean peasants and fisher
men in times more recent ! As weU might we sup
pose that they could create the earth and the
heavens. The chief objection to the view now presented wiU
be found in the place assigned to the fact of sin, es
peciaUy as bearing on the physical universe. Of this
fact physical science knows and can know nothing.
Pantheism, positivism, fatalism, can know nothing of
it. Still it is in full accordance with the highest phi
losophy, which is one of freedom, and of the suprem-

456 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
acy of will, — one which makes matter flexible to
spirit, and subordinate to moral ends. It is a phi
losophy which accepts the being of a personal and
holy God who can be sinned against. It enthrones
and exalts moral law tiU it gives a place to the trans
gression of it, even on this little planet, which re
quires a redemption as transcendent as if the diameter
of the earth were equal to that of the solar system.
It smiles at the scepticism which would disparage
what is done here in settling or ill illustrating prin
ciples of moral government, because our planet is but
a speck ; as if these principles, belonging, wherever
settled, to the eternities and to infinity, could have
any relation to times or places or magnitudes or dis
tances ; as if, indeed, the very smallness of the planet,
and, if you please, of the sin, did not render more
conspicuous the grandeur of that all-pervading law
which would permit nothing to escape it, and which
would make the transgression of it by its feeblest sub
ject, in its remotest province, an occasion for its
highest manifestation. On this point we ask nothing
more, we accept nothing less, than the estimate of
moral law implied in the words of our Saviour, when
he said, " Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one
tittle shall in no wise pass from the law tfll aU be ful
filled." Accepting this, we shall find no difficulty in
believing that the highest use of the material universe
is to subserve moral government.
Between man and his end, sin intervenes, — that
only. This Christianity recognizes, and differs from
other religions in being a remedial system based
wholly on that. But sin and its consequences are to
be removed ; and, in removing them, —

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 457
I observe, in the fifth place, that Christianity differs
from other religions in its method.
If Christianity had not originated in the love of
God, its peculiar method would not have been pos
sible ; but, originating thus, it must follow that the
first movement, both in providing a remedy and in its
application, would be on God's part. In the idea of
expiation through sacrifice offered by a priest, Chris
tianity is not peculiar. Possibly this idea, so uni
versal, may have originated from the blind gropings
of the religious nature under a sense of guilt; but
the idea of a love in God so great that he should
first move towards man, and should himself provide
the sacrifice, — as Abraham said to Isaac, " My son,
God will provide himself with a lamb for a burnt-
offering," — that idea is peculiar to Christianity. To
a being filled with the apprehension and distrust en
gendered by guilt, such an idea could never have
occurred. Plainly there are two general methods, and but
two. One is, that God should provide something for
man's acceptance ; the other, that man should provide
something for God's acceptance. One is, that man
should make offerings, or undergo sufferings, or work
out an obedience by which he may be saved: the
other is, that he should accept a salvation freely offered
by God, and then obey him through that faith and
love in his heart which were involved in the very
act of acceptance. Of these, God's method is, him
self to provide the sacrifice, and to offer a free sal
vation. Sin was too great a thing to be atoned for
by man. It was " not possible that the blood of
buUs and of goats should take away sins." Only
39

458 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
" by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once
for all " could we be sanctified. In virtue of this
offering, itself originating in the love of God, and
accepted by him, Christianity proffers a salvation
wholly free. In this is its essence. Man has abso
lutely nothing to do but to accept it, yielding him
self into the hands of God just as he is, with no
previous attempt to make himself better. For that
he is to rely entirely on the tempers wrought in
him in connection with the acceptance, and on the
promises and provisions made by God for aid in a
life of new obedience. It is not obedience first, and
.the acceptance of God's offer afterwards, but the
acceptance of the offer first, and obedience through
that. It is the proclamation to aU of this salvation,
free as water, that is the evangel, the gospel, the
glad tidings. It is this that makes it to be tidings
to be believed, instead of a system of philosophy, or
of dogmas to be understood. A provision for sinners,
it comes to all who feel themselves such on precisely
the same terms. A provision of God, it is equal to
every case. The chief of sinners is not beyond its
reach. Under other rehgions, aU this is reversed. There
is no love on the part of God. The movement
begins with man. Meritorious work, in some form, is
made the ground of hope ; and there is no labor or
suffering that men will not undergo on this basis.
They make the fundamental mistake of seeking to
improve their condition without improving their char
acter, — a mistake which is at the root of all for
malism and of most superstitions. Even under Chris
tianity men wfll do this . thus showing a sense of
need in proportion to their opposition to God.

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 459
The contrast between Christianity and other reli
gions at this point, and the evidence of its origin from
God, becomes more striking as we observe how this
offer of a free gift is received by men. If it had
been generally and cordiaUy welcomed, we might
have supposed that the idea originated in the desire
of men for it ; but it is this very offer that is the
special ground of repugnance. The implication of
sinfulness in its doctrine of expiation, and of help
lessness in that of a free salvation, together with the
requirement of a holy hfe, are so distasteful, that
nothing excites stronger opposition. Hence neglect,
contempt, ridicule, persecution ; hence the sneer at
evangelical religion that haunts polite literature ;
hence the illy-suppressed bitterness of the bland
liberal who can tolerate any thing but this. A re
ligion which could not fail to be thus " everywhere
spoken against," which had within itself the con
sciousness that its profession would cause "a man's
foes to be those of his own household," has no
affinity at this point with any other religion, and
could not have been from man.
In being thus a gift to be accepted, instead of a
religion into which we are born, Christianity draws
after it a distinctive feature of Christian countries,
which is both a puzzle and a stumbling-block to
others. The puzzle is in the application of the
Christian name to those who do not accept the re
hgion : the stumbling-block is, that Christendom is
not an exponent of Christianity.
With such an origin and essence and end, with such
an apprehension of the obstacle between man and his
end, and with such a method of removing it, —

460 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
I observe, in the sixth place, that Christianity differs
from other religions in being adapted to universal
dominion, in having looked forward to that from the
beginning, and in having organized a body of both
men and women pledged to carry it out to that
result. »
On these points a word must suffice. The adap
tation of Christianity to become universal results
from its spiritual character ; from its deahng directly
with individuals, and dealing with them only in
what pertains to aU men as under the moral govern
ment of God. Wherever there is a sinner to be
saved, there Christianity is needed, and is adapted to
come. The sublime fact that Christianity (for it was really
that) has looked forward to universality from the
beginning is seen in the promise to Abraham, that
in his seed aU nations should be blessed ; and in the
last command of Christ, — so simple, so decided, so
comprehensive, — " Go, disciple aU nations."
This command was addressed to those who heard
it as disciples, and not as men ; and, whether women
were present or not, there can be no reason why they
are not as much bound by it, both in letter and in
spirit, as men. Needing the same salvation, mem
bers in common of an organization in its very con
stitution aggressive, they are to be co-workers with
men and with God in bringing the world back to him.
In thus elevating woman to all that is permanent
and highest in work, Christianity is altogether pecu
liar. In doing so, it initiated, in an imperceptible
and unobtrusive way, a radical revolution of society.
Where woman is the companion of man, with equal

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 461
advantages for culture, and has an equal and intel
ligent interest in social institutions, the whole spirit
and aspect of society is changed. The family becomes
sanctified; motherhood and sisterhood become an
angel guardianship ; and in rational comprehension,
with an intelhgent and cheerful helpfulness, men and
women give themselves to the realization of the end
proposed by God. So, and so only, can the foun
dation be laid of a civilization that shall be perma
nent, and permanently progressive.
The work of subduing the world to God by the
elimination of sin is wholly a moral and spiritual
work. In doing it, Christianity understands itself;
and I observe, in the seventh place, that it differs from
other rehgions in relying wholly on moral and spirit
ual means.
That Christianity itself — pure Christianity — ¦
should be persecuted was to be expected. Claiming
universal dominion, it is necessarily exclusive ; and
it was natural that other systems should struggle
against it with whatever of life was in them. But
that Christianity should use either force or physical
appliances was not to have been expected. It never
did or can do this, except through perversion. Nei
ther of these has any relation to belief, to love, to
character, in which are the ends of Christianity ; and
Christianity never sanctioned the use of any means
that would not subserve its own ends.
For its perversions under the forms of superstition
and persecution Christianity itself is not responsible.
Upon all such perversions God has cast a blight. A
Christianity so called, either planted or sustained by
39*

462 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
these means, has always become corrupt and effete,
like paganism itself, which it really is. God has no
respect to names : and he is showing men that nothing
that is not the product of truth and love can be per
manent ; that only Christianity can sustain Chris
tianity. I will only add, that Christianity differs from other
rehgions in its Founder.
This, it may be said, does not affect the rehgion.
It. would not if Christ had been merely a sage or
a prophet. But he was more : he was the central
personage in an organic and unfolding system that
goes back to the beginning of history, and reaches
forward to its close; and his person and work and
character and claims, and the facts concerning him,
are of the very substance of his system. Take Plato
away, and Platonism remains. Take Christ away,
and you have no Christianity. Take away his person
as divine, his character as sinless, his death as sacri
ficial, his resurrection, his ascension, and his personal
relation to each of his followers as a Saviour, and
you have little left worth contending about. Christ
not only made a revelation, but he was one. He was
" the brightness of the glory of God, and the express
image of his person ; " and Christianity differs from
other religions by all the difference between the
revelation which God has made of himself in Christ
and any thing else that claims to be a revelation.
As thus a revelation of God in the form of man,
and so the Man, the Head of the race, Christ became
a new force in history, a marvellous central personal
ity, around whom a deeper interest has been con
stantly gathering since the hour of his crucifixion.

EXCLUSIVE TRAITS OF CHRISTIANITY. 463
Through this only can we account for the effects that
have been wrought by the life and death of One, who,
aside from this, was but a young man, without learn
ing or property or office, who wrote nothing, whose
public hfe was less than three years, and who was
crucified as a malefactor. Around this Person the
interest will continue to deepen. It is to Him as the
centre of a personal influence, and not to laws and
tendencies, that we look as the hope of the world.
We believe that he now lives to administer a moral
and spiritual system made possible only through his
coming and death. That system, we believe, is moving
forward as never before to the displacement or de
struction of whatever may oppose it. We believe
that He who is at the head of it, and who once came
in lowliness and was rejected, will come again, at the
end of the dispensation, with power, and will bring in
an everlasting kingdom of righteousness and peace.
" Even so, come, Lord Jesus ! "
Having, then, a religion with such an origin and
essence and end, with such a condition and remedy
and method, with such promise and means, and with
such a Founder, we call upon those who reject it to
give us something better. Some religion we must
have. If you must take this from us, we call upon
you to give us one with an origin grander and more
touching than the love of God, with an essence purer
and nobler than love, with an end higher than the
perfection of man and the glory of God. Give us
one that accounts more rationally for the evils of life
than by sin, and that offers for them a better remedy
than the life and death of the Son of God and the
aid of the Holy Ghost. Give us a freer salvation ;

464 CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
give us a grander outlook into the future ; give us for
our work better means than those that are moral and
spiritual ; give us for our Saviour and Head and
King one who loved us better than to die for us, one
more sympathizing than to be " always with us," one
mightier than to possess " all power in heaven and in
earth," — give us this, or cease, we entreat you, your
efforts to take from bewildered and sinful man his
best aid and guide in life, his only hope and consola
tion in death.

INDEX.

INDEX.

American institntions as obligated to the Bible, 30-32.
American Union, original suggestion of, 30, 31.
Arabian Desert described, 103-105.
Art, and its obligations to the Bible, 32.
Bacon, Rev. Leonard, D.D., lecture by, 171-195.
Baur, his theory of the origin of Christianity, 327 seq., 348, 351 seq.
His views of the Gospels, 328 seq. His criticism of Stranss,
339. His retraction, 351. Criticised by Strauss, 339, 382.
His concessions fatal to Strauss's theory, 372 seq. ; and to
his own, 374. On the resurrection of Jesus, 376. His as
sumptions respecting history, 339 seq. (See Tubingen school.)
Bible contains the most ancient forms of truth, 13-17. Marks the only
development of Oriental mind as a civilizing force, 18-25.
A power in the civilization of the West, 25-38. Shows the
only way to a perfect civilization, 38-46. The only history of
the world before the Flood, 15. Ancient, as compared with
other books, 15-17. The only force that can energize and
civilize the Oriental nations, 23-25. Influence on the English
mind, 26-30. Single ideas of, the civilizing and renovating
forces of society, 41-44. The guide-book of Palestine, 139,
140. Absolute need of by man, 258-262. The, its contents
gradually apprehended, 399. Its nature and office, 398. The,
as related to future civilization, 11-46.
Burning-bush, miracle of, 114-116.
Canaan, distribution of among the tribes of Israel, 152-154.
Canon, the, date of, 363. Reception of, 344, 364. The earliest extant,
353 seq. 467

468 INDEX.
Cheever, Rev. George B., D.D., lecture by, 227-292.
Christ, the surprising nature of claims of, 406-414. Originality of the
teachings of, 411, 412. Claims of to divine honors, 413, 414.
Founder of a moral empire, 415-418. Specinl provision for
making and preserving historical account of, 421,422. His
veracity stands or falls with the Old Testament as well as the
New, 269-272. Himself tlie all-sufficient evidence of Chris
tianity, 403-435. His word final and decisive on the interpre
tation of the Old Testament, 289-292. The reign Of on earth,
224-226.
Christianity and historical science, 335 seq., 395. Its relation to ante
cedent systems, 342 seq. Attributed to Paul by the earlier
Tiibingen critics, 380. Inexplicable by naturalism, 343, 392.
The evidences of growing, 393 seq. Our understanding and
application of progressive, 398 seq. Personal, 401. Exclu
sive traits of, 436-464. Exclusive in its origin, 436-441. Ex
clusive in its essence, 441-443. Exclusive in its end, 443-450.
Exclusive as a remedial system wholly conditioned on the fact
of sin, 450-456. Exclusive in its method, 457-459. Exclu
sive in its adaptation and purpose for universal dominion, 460,
461. Exclusive in relying wholly on moral means, 461, 462.
Exclusive in its Founder, 462-464. Argument for, independ
ent of questions of inspiration, authorship, genuineness, &c,
of the Scriptures, 425, 426. Essential doctrines of, inseparably
connected, 427-429. Has its origin In the love of God, 440-
443. The ends of, the perfection of roan, 443-446. The ends
of, the perfection of society, 446-448. The ends of, the glory
of God, 448-450. Argument for, to be enforced by lives of
Christians, 433-435. Argument for, in what sense simple,
404, 405.
Church of the future, 434, 435.
Civilization, all modern forces of, Occidental, 18-20. Biblical by indi
vidual regeneration, 38.
Congregational Conference of Churches suggests the American Union,
30,31.
Conversion of the world to be accomplished by showing the character
and life of Christ, 430, 431.
Criticism, biblical, and Protestantism, 324 seq., 400. The so-called his
toric, 325, 329. Sketch of sceptical, 325 seq. Its evasions and
subterfuges, 366 seq. Interna], 345 seq. Textual, 394. Sub
servient to truth, 397 seq. Not prerequisite to personal faith,
401. Cannot remain neutral, 340, 3*)1. God-speed to, 397.

INDEX. 469
Danger to the faith, groundless fears in respect to, 429, 430.
Decalogue, its relations to the Mosaic law and institutions, 178, 179.
Identical with the covenant, 178.
Ebal and Gerizim, recognition of law at, 155-158.
Egypt, the arts of, 133, 134% The ten plagues of, 135.
Elisha, the mocking of by the forty-two children considered and
explained, 246-248.
Epistles, Paul's : Baur acknowledged four to be genuine, 328 ; Hilgenfeld
seven, 371. Baur's concession dangerous to his theory, 374 seq. ;
fatal to Strauss's, 372.
Evil, Scripture theory of the toleration of, 44.
Ewald on personality of Moses, 89, 90.
Exegesis, rationalistic, 330 seq. Indirectly tributary to faith, 331 seq. ;
and miracles, 326, 333; and doctrines, 333 seq., 396.
Faith a personal act, independent of criticism, 401 seq.
Fisher, Prof. G. P., lecture by, 293-323.
Future life and retribution taught in the Old Testament, 267-282.
Taught in Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, 282-289.
Gibeon, battle of, 147-151.
God, the mercy of in judgments, 219-221.
Gospel history, the peculiarities of, its own vindication, 407 seq.
Gospels, the, Baur's views of, 328 seq. Origin of, according to Eichhorn,
335. Religious histories, 337 seq. Sceptical prejudgments
respecting, 339 seq. Mutual relations of the first three, 345
seq., 371. Newly-discovered evidence for, 352 seq. Trust
worthiness of historical argument for, 363 seq. Supposed
traces of in the apostolic fathers, 365. Schenkel's opinion on,
385 ; Renan's, 388 ; Keim's, 390 seq. Veracity of, illustrated
indirectly by sceptical lives of Christ, 392 seq. Reception of,
344, 350, 364.
Guizot, his testimony to the divinity of Christianity, 343.
Hebrew theocracy, lecture on, 171-195.
Hebrew prophets, the gospel of the, 227-292. Outline character of,
227-231.
Hilgenfeld, 368,371.
Hopkins, Rev. Mark, D.D., LL.D., lecture by, 436-464.
40

470 INDEX.
Immortality and future retribution could alone produce those noble Old-
Testament lives, 272-282.
Impartiality, the pretence of, to be abandoned, 340, 391.
Infidelity, its debt to the Scriptures, 32-38. Of to-day, 213, 214.
Inspiration and revelation indispensable, 258-262. Its nature and
different modes, 310-312. Nature, extent, and aims of, 421-
. 425.
Isaiah, lecture on, 196-226. How he precedes all the prophets, 200-202.
As a poet, 201-203. Book of, when written, 203. And his
contemporaries, 204. The two political events of times of,
204-207. As a preacher on the times, 207-209. As a prophet,
209, 210. Three great principles or doctrines of the writings
of, 210-224. (1) Constant presence and agency of a supreme
and personal God, 210-214. (2) The inevitable punishment
of sin, 214-219. (3) The chastisements of God designed to
bring men under the law and favor of God, 219-224. Proph
ecies of concerning Christ, 221-224.
Israel, heroic age of, 132-170. Infancy of in Mesopotamia and Syr
ia, 132, 133. Childhood of in Egypt and Sinai, 133-137.
Youth and manhood of, 137, 138. Cruelty of, charged and
considered, 152-155. Judges of, office and work, 163-166.
History of, very peculiar, 166, 167. Work of, to teach the
world monotheism, 166, 167. Taught specially for their work,
167-170. Condition of in Egypt, 171. Exodus of, 172, 173.
Religion of, 173, 174. Government of, patriarchal, 181. Per
sonal liberty of secured, 183, 184.
Jericho, capture of, 145, 146.
Jesus, portrait of in the Gospels proved historical by the Epistles, 373
seq. Strauss's view of, 327 ; Schenkel's, 387 ; Renan's, 389
seq.; Keim's, 391. Resurrection of, how explained by sceptics,
375 seq. Successive Lives of, evince progress towards faith, 379
seq. The central problem of Christianity, 380. A problem
not yet solved by scepticism, 392, 394.
John, the Gospel of, Baur's view of, 329. Unity of, 347. Attested by
the Clementine Homilies, 356 seq. ; by Basilides, 358 : by
Valentinus, 359. Keim on the date of, 391.
Jordan, the miracle of crossing by Israel, 140-145.
Josephus invents the word " theocracy," 174.
Joshua and Judges, lecture on, 132-170.
Joshua, farewell address of, and character, 158-161.
Judaism acknowledged by Christianity, and yet set aside by it, 439, 440.

INDEX. 471
Keim, Prof., finds traces of the Gospels in the apostolic fathers, 365.
His explanation of the resurrection of Jesus, 377. His Life
of Jesus, 390 seq.
Lardner, 325.
Literature, and its indebtedness to the Bible, 26-30.
Lord, John, LL.D., lecture by, 196-226.
Luke, the Gospel of, Baur's view of, 328 seq. Controversy respecting,
347 seq.
Marcion and his views, 347 seq. His Gospel a mutilation of Luke's,
348 seq.
Mark, the Gospel of, Baur's view of, 329 ; Schenkel's, 385. Its charac
teristics, 346. Its relation to Matthew's, 345 seq. Its connec
tion with Peter, 346. Its co-ordinate evangelic rank inconsist
ent with Baur's theory, 346 seq.
Matthew, the Gospel of, Baur's view of, 328, 368. Its relation to
Mark's, 345. Attested by Epistle of Barnabas, 361. Keim
on the date of, 390 seq. Hilgenfeld on the date of, 368 seq.
Mead, Rev. Charles M., lecture by, 47-85.
Menes, the first historical king of Egypt, 87, 88.
Messianic idea through all the prophets, 249-258.
Ministry, learned, to what extent needed, 431-435.
Miracles, rejection of, a source of insuperable difficulties, 409. And exe
gesis, 326, 333. Prejudged by sceptics, 341. Required to
account for admitted historical facts, 343. Schenkel's distri
bution of, 386 seq.
Mohammed, pretended visions of, 115, 116.
Moses in his historic personality, a lecture on, 86-131. Common con
sent of scholars to the personality of, 89-91, 126. Legends
concerning, 94, 95. Incidents in infant life of, illustrated
from profane history, 97-102. Silence concerning his youth
and manhood significant, 102, 103. In the desert, 105-112.
Miracles of, 114-120. Great work of, what, 122. Legislation
of, 123-125. Cosmogony of, 125. Outline of character of,
127, 128. Death of, 128-131.
Muratori's canon, 352 seq.
Myths, Strauss's theory of, 326 seq. Modified recently, 382. Really
overthrown by Baur's concessions, 372. Discrimination among
must be had, 93-97.

472 INDEX.
Naturalism, and its account of the origin of different religions, 436-438.
Neander, his Life of Jesus Christ, 384 seq. His Planting and Training
of the Christian Church, 396.
New-England fathers and the Bible, 1 1-13.
Objection answered, that Egyptian history is silent about the Exodus,
120-122.
Old Testament and New a unit, 268-272.
Parker, Theodore, the strength the Bible gave him, 35-37.
Phelps, Rev. Austin, D.D., introduction, 11-46.
Priestly order, what, 1 80.
Priests and prophets in Israel, whence and why, 233-240.
Prophecies must be studied as a whole, yet each in its own time,
place, and circumstances, 262-267.
Prophecy, relation between the local and the Messianic, 249-258. To
be studied as centring in Christ, 267.
Prophet, offiee of, 196-199. How different from priest, 197.
Prophets, schools for training, 236. False, how punished, and why, 237,
238. False, rise and number of, 244-249.
Prophetic office, when established, 197-200.
Prophetic and priestly offices distinguished, 240-244. Prophetic office,
perils of, 240-244.
Punishment by natural laws, 214, 215. By positive infliction, 215-218.
Reason and religion, 399 seq. The so-called " religion of," 332 seq.
Renan, his theory of the Gospels, 329 seq. His criticism on Strauss,
340. On the resurrection of Jesus, 377 ; of Lazarus, 389.
His Life of Jesus criticised, 388 seq. His critical lawlessness,
388. Testimony of, to Christ, 408.
Resurrection, the, of Jesus, sceptical attempts to explain, 375 seq. Of
Lazarus, commented on by Strauss and by Renan, 389 seq.
Revelation, the book of, its admitted genuineness inconsistent with
Baur's theory, 375. Value of confirmation of, 424, 425.
St. Paul, lecture on, 293-323. Religious faith and life of before con
version, 294-296. Ideal of righteousness not changed, 295.
Under conviction, 298-303. In harmony with the other
apostles, 304-313 ; and Judaism, 304-310. On the schools
and sects, 313. In work a missionary, 314. As a scholar
314-317. His combined zeal and prudence, 317-320. His
hearty sympathy with men, 320. His religious consecration

INDEX. 473
320, 321. A witness for religious supremacy in the Christian
teacher, 321. A witness against ritualism, 322.
Salvador on the laws of Moses, 124.
Scepticism losing ground in Germany, 371, 400 seq.
Schenkel on the resurrection of Jesus, 378 ; on Strauss, 378. His
Portrayal of the Character of Jesus, 385 seq. His view of the
Gospels, 385, 387. Explanation of miracles, 386. Comments
on Irenasus criticised, 336.
Semler and sceptical criticism, 325. His view of the relation between
Luke's Gospel and Marcion's, 348.
Sinai, the mountains of, and desert, 136, 137.
Strauss, his theory of the origin of Christianity, 326 seq., 351 seq. One-
sidedness of, 338. Overthrown by Baur's concessions, 372.
Outgrown, 382. His idea of a myth, 326 seq. Modified
lately, 382. His remarks on Christ as " the Redeemer," and
" the Light of the world," 334. On affected impartiality, 340.
Criticisms on Baur, 389 seq., 382. Criticised by Baur, 339.
His view of the resurrection of Jesus, 375, 376. Criticised by
Schenkel, 378. His opinion of Schenkel, 378. His first
Life of Jesus compared with his second, 381 seq. His
criticism on Neander's Life of Jesus Christ, 385. On the
resurrection of Lazarus, 388 seq. On the relation of the Old
Testament to the New, 327, 395.
Synoptists, style of, 409-411.
Talcott, Rev. D. S., D.D., lecture by, 403-435.
Thayer, Rev. J. Henry, lecture by, 324-402.
Theocracy of Hebrews not a form of government, 181. Not of mirac
ulous intervention, 182. Effects of, 184-189. Of the Puri
tans, what, 191-193. Of the Hebrews, what, 175-189.
Theology growing less dogmatic and more biblical, 396. A progres
sive science, 398 seq.
Thompson, Rev. J. P., D.D., LL.D., lecture by, 86-1.31.
Tubingen school, their theory stated, 327 seq. Criticised, 339 seq., 368.
Their retractions, 351, 368, 371. Their subterfuges, 366 seq.
Losing ground, 370 seq. (See Baur.)
Tyler, Rev. W. S., D.D., lecture by, 132-170.
Volckmar on the priority of Luke's Gospel, 349. His extravagances,
368. 40*

¦,.':;, ¦', ,

_P@_^____w%

& wm-

?WfwM_W&iWw$-