REVELATION AND ITS RECORD WILLIAM W GUTH for tkz foanim^efjiCoi{tg^^tB^CoU!n.y)_ • ILIlIBlB^ISy • Bought with the income of the Clarence Campbell Fund REVELATION AND ITS RECORD BY WILLIAM W. GUTH President College of the Pacific " The word of God is not bound *' Paul BOSTON SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 1912 copyright, 1912 Sherman, French &• Company TO HELEN PREFACE In current thought there are many who hold to the belief that revelation is a body of truth handed down in the past and recorded in writ ing.1 Even some writers of progressive ten dency draw a distinction between natural and revealed truth, the first being truth which man arrives at on his own account, the second being truth which came or must come direct from the mind of Omniscience. All truth is revelation and all revelation is natural. The idea one man would impart to an other is, in a limited sense, a revelation, and if he has been successful in imparting it he has also been natural. No outside or unusual force is necessary to reveal the idea. If the one for 1 "Revelation and Scripture come to be for us prac tically synonymous and co-extensive." — James Orr: Revelation and Inspiration, p. 21. See also, Revela tion and Inspiration by Reinhold Seeberg (Eng. tr.). Neither of these books came to my attention until my own was in print. They are scholarly and eminently sane discussions, but seem to confuse rather than clarify the idea of revelation when they hold that, on the theory of progressive or natural revelation, "Christ" is rele>- gated as "only one in the series of leading minds who have disclosed Divine thoughts to man." (Seeberg, 119 f., cf. p. 44.) v vi PREFACE whom the revelation is intended cannot receive it on his own account, no kind or amount of extraneous effort would make him receptive. Here is the burden of the whole matter. The ability to receive a revelation must be in evi dence as much as the capability to dis close a truth. The deaf man cannot hear music, however sweet or loud the strain may be. His ears must be first uncovered. So the proffer of a revelation is only one side of it; there must also be a receiving side. The moral sense is so quick and responsive that men have declared our knowledge of good and evil to be the result of "direct revelation." But however the truth is revealed, the revela tion must be worked out by him who would profit thereby. As there have been occasions and op portunities for receiving revelation and men prepared at those times to receive it, it would look as though the mind of the Eternal had been disclosed once for all during a certain period of time. Now some truths have come to us with the marks of finality upon them and the book of revelation, so far as they are concerned, has been closed. At least so it would appear to the finite mind. Among such truths are the Copernican sys tem of astronomy, the law of gravity, and per haps the law of the conservation of energy. So in the Bible there are truths revealed which PREFACE vii in their essence seem to be final. But the final ity of such truths is not a confining force which would limit and narrow them, but an ex pansive power which makes them appreciable by all people and applicable to all times. The dis coveries of Copernicus did not fence in the heav ens but, in fact, took all barriers away. The truths which the prophets preached and Jesus proclaimed do not close the Bible but rather throw it wide open. Man must work out every truth declared to him or which he approximates on his own account before it can be a revelation to him. We would not underestimate the forces outside of man which make his conception of truth possible. That there is a power working in him to make truth known is the only explana tion we have for the wonderful feats man has accomplished in grasping truth. But we must hold clearly in mind man's necessary activity in the reception of truth. Revelation, in its prac tical or intelligible result, is the working out by man of the truth God would work in.2 In the following discussion I have endeavored 2 This "formula" (Phil. 2:121-13) is set forth as "the mandate of evolution" by Francis Howe Johnson in his recent book, "God in Evolution," (p. 145), a man date which forces one to consider "the living, never- ceasing stream of influences that work within and without us." Mr. Johnson's noteworthy book first came into my hands as I was reading the page-proof of my own manuscript. viii PREFACE to show first, the necessity of revelation because of the nature both of God and man; second, the conditions under which it must be received; and last, its record in various living and imper ishable forms. I have used the noun "record" in a very wide sense, meaning any evidence whatsoever, direct or indirect, written or un written, seen or unseen, material or spiritual, by which we can argue for the presence of God in nature, in man, and in the ongoing of the world. Quotations from various authorities are made, not to bolster up my own argument particularly, but to show that many minds in widely different fields have come to substantial agreement on the fundamentals of thought and life. This in itself is evidence to me of a sin gle source and a unifying power of revelation. William W. Guth. San Jose, California. CONTENTS CHAPTER page I The Idea of Revelation ... 1 n The Nature of Revelation . . 17 III The Object of Revelation . . 35 IV Conditions of Receiving Revela tion 51 V Revelation and Inspiration . . 67 VI The Distinction Between Reve lation and its Record ... 85 VII The Record of Revelation in Nature 105 VIII The Record op Revelation in Human Life 127 IX The Record op Revelation in History 149 X The Record op Revelation in Music and the Fine Arts . . 173 XI The Record of Revelation in Profane Literature . . . 195 XII The Record of Revelation in Holy Writ 215 THE IDEA OF REVELATION THE IDEA OF REVELATION "If belief makes the mind keener, if belief makes the heart more willing to bear the cross of self-sacrifice, if belief unlocks powers of the will hitherto unsuspected, we shall hold that the belief itself is an evidence of the unseen to which it points." — Francis J. McConnell. There is an incentive of the Unseen. Man has a feeling that he can know the unknowable. Ages ago a Hebrew poet voiced a universal fact when he sang in firm confidence: "This is the generation of them that seek Him; that seek thy face, O Jacob." l Every generation has been and is a God-seeking one. The note of the psalmist to-day, weaving into his hymn the warp and the woof of the soul's confidence, is no less certain and reassuring than that of the psalmist yesterday. This day, to-day, is the generation of them that seek Him, that seek His face. We stand at the seashore and watch the waves break and seemingly come to naught on the sands. But behind the waves is the full ocean rolling on and on in its landward stride. i Psalm 24:6, 2 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD And so rolls on and ever the vast deep of the soul's consciousness reaching out toward the land, toward a firm resting ground, in its search after God. Although individual generations may have become as weary as the waves, and as hopeless, beyond were the heaving and throb bing generations, pushing on toward the same shore, untiring in the same quest. As long as water fills the ocean and a single human desire remains, will this quest go on. Men seek God because they are dependent upon the elements of nature and the wills of other men. These are too strong for them, often, or too vacillating. They would relate themselves to some one supreme, central, gov erning power to which they can surrender them selves in confidence. Not even the heroic in daring and the strong in originality can meet the perplexities of life out of their own re sources. They, too, seek God because there are tempests in their souls they would have stilled, because there is a peace they have intimations of and an unsinking ground for hope. Men seek God on the same basis that they seek anything else worth while. They are actu ated in reaching after the Unseen in like manner as are men who uncover the earth for gold. In any serious search for real values there is not nearly so much chance as often appears. Men seek gold where they believe it can be found. THE IDEA OF REVELATION 3 We often read of buried treasure, of an island where a pirate's gold has been secreted, or a latitude and longitude where a Captain Kidd's ship, weighted to the gunwales, has gone down. These stories are found in books written for children, making an appeal, also, to the healthy child-spirit of a fullgrown man. They are fascinating. But they do not lead a man to leave the serious pursuits of life and chase after a rainbow. In the mountainous regions of the extreme west of our land the case is different. Serious and earnest minded men are there in search for gold. They are not the chance pros pectors of the days of '4*9 when gold could be picked up in the placers of California and Ne vada. They are men, many of them, trained in schools of mining, all of them by practical experience. They are competent to push their pursuit after the precious metals. They have a very high percentage of actual knowledge and, hence, a large measure of success. They know the nature of the soil out of which gold has come, they know the configuration of the gold-bearing mountains, they make inferences and draw conclusions and act upon them. And they are usually right. So men seek after God. Because they be lieve He has been found in ages past, succeeding generations seek Him. If Moses and David knew Him there is no reason why Cromwell or 4 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Stonewall Jackson should not have known Him. The faith of all these men was strong in the ex istence of God and in His guiding hand. If the first two were rebellious and disobedient in the practice of their faith and the last two harsh and forbidding in the construction of their faith, their contemporaries, nevertheless, be lieved that they not only had glimpses, but now and then whole views, of the Infinite and His character. God was a dominant force in their lives and history will not read His influence out of their careers. To push our mining illustration a little fur ther, the prospector after God has found out- croppings of His presence in every hill and val ley of human life. This fact leads men to infer that knowledge of God can be mined; that the ore of His presence can be brought up by spir itual and mental effort, that it can be assayed and minted and stamped with the image of His likeness and given currency in the intercourse of men. The God-miner is not on as certain ground as the gold-miner. But his method is equally valid, and, in its own sphere, just as productive of wished-for results. The evi dences which reward his search are intimations of deeper underlying facts. His practical faith leads him to meditate on the things of God and his meditations issue in living tests of his faith. He can THE IDEA OF REVELATION 5 . . . "dimly guess, from blessings known Of greater out of sight." 2 He will not be discouraged when some ask him for his proofs of God's existence. He can dis pense with conventional proofs. The proofs he has have an inherent energy and enable him to leap to God. There are arguments, in the na ture of analogies, that satisfy him. He will point, for example, to the fact that astrono mers, many years ago, were very much disturbed whenever they observed the planet Uranus, be cause at one point in its track it curved out ward from its true orbit. Here was a fact without a known cause or explanation. It led to a faith which was the evidence of things not seen. For two mathematicians, unknown to each other, began to work out the problem. They! ^a(^ definite data on which to proceed : the law of gravity, the relation of number, the per- fectness of a curve or an orbit. Gradually each scholar moved up to one point. Some entirely unknown mass of attractive power was drawing Uranus out of his course. They calculated the distance across millions of leagues of space, they estimated the weight of the disturbing body, they designated the place where it must be found. The telescopes were turned on the spot. No disturbing element was to be seen. But it 2 John Greenleaf Whittier: The Eternal Goodness. 6 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD must be there, said the one mathematician. It must be there, said the other. So convincing was the proof that astronomy thereafter took cognizance of the declaration. And one day a lens, stronger than any theretofore ground, was fitted to a telescope and turned on the spot, and the disturbing body, a planet, now called Neptune, was seen. Here the faith of the scien tist, who, it is so often declared, spurns faith and moves by sight alone, caused him to walk steadily onward without seeing until the day came when the veil was lifted, and he saw. While man has no telescope with which to see God and never expects to look upon Him with the physical eye, he has as strong reasons for believing He exists as those the astronomers had for the existence of the unseen planet. His faith becomes the substance of things hoped for. It leads him to study his fellow-man with patience and to note that in his course he is in flected upward. On the basis of human knowl edge, human experience, human desires, human love, he works out the reason for this upward tendency. He affirms the existence of a power that draws steadily upward, and, with faith equal to that of the scientist, argues that God exists. He cannot see Him, but he believes he feels Him. Some day, as he hopes, the veil here will be withdrawn and he will see God as He is. THE IDEA OF REVELATION 7 But some will object that this is merely an emotional impulse and not to be likened to a miner seeking gold or a mathematician verify ing an hypothesis. We have handled and used gold, we have looked upon and fixed the char acter, of Neptune. But who has seen God at any time or who has heard Him speak? These arguments seem to have force, but men disre gard them. For, in spite of all logic to the contrary, God is a reality to them. They have eyes to see in the world of the spiritual what they cannot prove in the world of the material. Why this is so they do not know. Here is a development they cannot follow in the process but which they know in the result. The only process they can be aware of is obedience to their spiritual impulse. And this spiritual im pulse is stirred by the hope which "springs eter nal in the human breast." Of course it is not following the scientific method to offer one's hope as a proof of any fact, especially so' monumental a fact as the ex istence of God. But it is psychological. For all healthy life proceeds on the basis of hope. In the mental and moral and physical life, prog ress and impetus are dependent upon hope. Hope means steadfastness, constancy, endur ance, opposition to cowardice or despondency. The brave man, the enthusiastic, the energetic, 8 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD the ambitious man, the man in whose veins the blood runs pure and free, is hopeful. We cannot weigh hope as we can gold or use it as a medium of exchange in the commercial world. But it is ponderable, nevertheless, and has a current value in the affairs of men far greater than the intrinsic worth of any number of coins. For hope is the mother of belief. And without belief, life is impossible. A man may discard the traditional beliefs of religion, philosophy, art, science, politics, but he will re main a believing creature. Believing implies a desire to reach the truth. As the eye turns to light rather than darkness, so the mind turns to truth rather than error. A normal, healthy, well developed man would rather believe good of another than evil. So he believes that at the basis of society, and un derlying all the phenomena which his eye can see and his mind can grasp, there is an essential goodness, a fundamental trueness. He cannot really make himself believe that society is bad and irredeemable, that the world, as we are able to understand it, has neither order nor purpose ful direction, that it is rushing along as an engine without a driver or a ship without a rudder. He believes in the true and the good because truth and goodness build up and estab lish. He has no use for the man who merely tears down. He frowns upon him in the moral THE IDEA OF REVELATION 9 and intellectual world just as in the physical. He will tolerate him only when he can build a better structure than the one he would pull down. There have been but few men who have been willing to abandon themselves to despair. The most pessimistic and soul-harrowing thoughts in the writings of men who have looked only upon the dark side of life are modified by other passages or denied by their conduct in the daily affairs of life.3 Men look before they take a leap into the dark, and after looking, the chances are they will do nothing rash. Man believes truth is at the center because men widely separated, with no means of inter communication, have reached exactly the same thoughts and have expressed them in similar phraseology. Great minds run in the same chan nel, and so do lesser minds, because the chan nel leads to the truth and all counter-streams must sooner or later empty into, it or dissipate in the sands. It is not surprising, therefore, that practically all religions, however widely separated the races and cults may be, have a similarity in their main features. The most primitive, as well as the most highly developed s "I have noticed, during years of self-observation, that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that this doctrine [of material atheism] commends itself to my mind." — Tyndall. 10 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD faiths, have doctrines of incarnation, of sacrifice and sacraments, of renunciation, of resurrection and judgment. The followers of Mithras, the god of light in the ancient Persian mythology, had a religion so closely bordering upon that of the Christian that some scholars are claiming Christianity was borrowed from Persia. But there is a deeper fact underlying here, namely that all minds, whether they be heathen, pagan, or Christian, in their search for the truth, will go in the same direction. All will not go equally far. History shows us that some peo ples have gone farther in their search after truth than others, and that some minds among the same peoples have outdistanced their fel lows. But whosoever seeks to understand fun damental reality will have a certain trend just as surely as the vine in the cellar will grow to ward the window. Without earnest convictions nothing large or sound is possible. All great ages have been ages of sincere belief. The age of Rousseau, for example, was an age flippant and superfi cial in its beliefs. We do not turn particularly to Rousseau or to his French contemporaries for noble, inspiring, or directive thought. Their age is not one of the great constructive epochs in the history of civilization. The age of Dante, on the other hand, was an age of earnest belief and consequently one of the nota- THE IDEA OF REVELATION 11 ble stages in the development of the human race. "In Dante's time learning had something of a sacred character." For this Dante was largely responsible. His "whole nature," says Lowell, "was one of intense belief. There is proof upon proof that he believed himself invested with a divine mission. Like the Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was imbued, it was back to the old worship and the God of his Fathers that he called his people." 4 So the intensity of his belief molded and shaped the beliefs of his contemporaries and of the masses. We cannot accept all that he believed, but we do not enter the fog or the miasma of the swamp when we walk or leisurely stroll through the pages of his writings. That men believe in goodness rather than evil, that they prefer the light to darkness, that truth, as they experience it, is constructive and guiding, while error, as they know it, is de structive and misleading, are commonplaces of every day life. They are underneath the as sumption of the untutored mind that infinite goodness, light, and truth somewhere and some how exist. Belief thus becomes mixed with trust and eventuates in faith. They also lead the thoughtful mind to go behind them and give a reason for the faith which they inspire. « Complete Works, Vol. 4, p. 160. 12 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Even those who declare that we cannot get back of the appearances and phenomena of life are forced, as Herbert Spencer was, to posit an Unknowable and to admit that the likenesses and changes among things, as they appear to us, must have resemblances to fundamental re ality itself. This is but a step to the unspecu- lative thought which assumes that funda mental reality is a personal Being ; and that the virtues which are imperfect and incomplete in man must be full and perfect in Him. And strange as it may seem, this assumption of un- speculative thought is the material which the greatest minds of all ages have worked over in the crucible of their intellects, bringing out a product which does not differ in essence, but only in form and expression, from the clinging faith of simplicity. This is the incentive of the Unseen, tugging at the hearts of those who are not capable of reflective and continued thought, and rousing the intellectual suscepti bilities and capacities of those who are capable, not failing in the end to enlist also their emo tional and volitional faculties. Therefore, all men seek God. As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so pant the souls of men after God. They cannot get along without Him, and the very thought of their dependence upon Him implies an ability and a willingness on His part to help them. Did He not speak to them and THE IDEA OF REVELATION 13 could they not hear and understand Him, He would be of no possible use to them. These assumptions of faith underlie the con viction that man can know God. They make a revelation of God to man not only desirable, but highly probable. Man cannot rest in any thought short of a capability and willingness on the part of God to reveal Himself to man. While he would not be bold enough to declare that God must or must not do this or that, yet he finds the whole conception of God baseless if He have neither the power nor the inclination to communicate His mind and will to man. What the nature of such revelation is needs to be inquired into, but that God has revealed and will continue to reveal Himself, men verily be lieve. THE NATURE OF REVELATION II THE NATURE OF REVELATION "If we will not admit the possibility of a God speak ing to us, it is equivalent to saying, 'If there were a God, by no possibility through endless ages could he speak with the men he has created;' and by such a con clusion we make any conceivable God weaker than we ourselves." — Eleanor Harris Rowland. Knowledge has its beginning in a venture of faith. We do not come to faith through sci ence, but to science through faith. We under take to give reasons for our beliefs rather than hold beliefs because of our reasons. Beliefs originate in the spiritual being of man ; reasons issue from his mental being. The belief will have a birth uncaused by him ; the reason will have a development through his conscious effort. The one is raw material, the other a structure. "Any fact which gives knowledge," we are told, "is a revelation." x But we must be care ful to interpret the word "give" in the sense of presenting the material out of which knowl- i Henry Melvill Gwatkin : The Knowledge of God, Vol. I, p. 5. 17 18 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD edge can be made. For knowledge does not come without effort on our part. There must be a conscious reaction of the mind against the material which is given us for thought. There can be no knowledge without a mind capable of receiving the revelation and fixing it as knowl edge. What is given is really the impact of suggestion. What is received is the impulse to work out the suggestion. The working out will be partial and unsatisfactory. No man can fully express himself. There is always some thing backlying. Knowledge is thus only an approximation. We see in part and cannot produce more than we see. But the part leads on irresistibly to the whole. Man projects the whole even although he feels he cannot realize it. He has a presentiment of the whole. He be lieves somewhere, in some mind, truth is whole and comprehensive. So he makes a venture of his faith and progresses, as he believes, toward knowledge. He projects an infinite Mind. He sees, he feels, reality about him. He would lead this reality back to a primary and ultimate Reality. Reality in his mind pushes him back to the mind of Reality. He has, therefore, a stimulus for his faith. Vague and intangible though it may be, there is a force which stirs him to faith as surely as the wind bulges the sail. And he can guide his belief as the ship- man can turn his prow. There are no paths THE NATURE OF REVELATION 19 before him, but he is no more on a trackless sea than is the mariner. His faith is the star that leads him on. Now what is the stimulus of his faith? Dar win was frequently asked for his religious opin ions. He wrote many letters giving his views on fundamental questions. He was exceedingly cautious in: all his statements.2 But in one letter, at least, he committed himself to the very thing he was doubtful about. He was writing to a Dutch student in 1873. After referring to the extreme improbability of "this grand and wondrous universe, including our conscious selves" having arisen "through chance," and saying that "to a certain extent" he deferred "to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God," he closed with the sentence: "The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty." 3 2 "The habit of scientific research makes a man cau>- tious in admitting evidence." Letter to a German stu dent, 1879. Life and Letters. Edited by his son, Fran cis Darwin, Vol. I, p. 277. 3 Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 276. The italics are ours. Compare this statement with the conclusion of Borden P. Bowne. "Technically, of course, our faith does not admit of demonstration; neither does any other faith or unfaith. But it does admit of being lived; and when it is lived, our souls see that it is good, and we are satisfied that it is Divine." Gains for Religious Thought in the Last Generation, Hibbert Journal, July, 1910, p. 893. 20 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Here is the real heart of the matter. What is man's duty? To whom is he duty-bound? How is he able to do his duty? Why does he want to do his duty? These questions go deeper than man's intellect. When the noted scientist said, "but man can do his duty," he gave evidence of a conviction not based on knowledge. This conviction, in spite of him self, led him to feel he was duty-bound, and to believe that he could fulfill the obligation. He felt instinctively a dependence, and that de pendence was on a power beyond the scope of man's intellect. Even although he was "aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose," yet something in him told him he was under obligation to something, seemingly, with out him and that he ought so to conduct him self that his life would be in harmony with this "something." This is an experience many men have. In fact it is of so frequent an occurrence that we are warranted in saying it is an experience com mon to all men. Psychologists as well as reli gionists have studied this "something" and have found it is not without, but within; that it is an instinctive tendency which man develops morally and philosophically. This tendency is described as the religious in man. It is the THE NATURE OF REVELATION 21 foundation of all religions. We are not here in the region of hypothesis, but in that of history. The records of historical research fix the fact that man, always and everywhere, has been moved by a tendency which sooner or later is sued in religious belief. Whatever the theories as to the origin and cause of this religious tendency, the fact stubbornly remains that man innately or intuitively is religious. No philoso phy has been able to create a religion ; and no psychology has been able to find the phenomena of the religious elsewhere except in man. It is not an outward influence, but an inward en ergy. Man does not acquire it, he is born with it. The center and circumference of religion and of religious instinct man has found in the Being whom, with the concensus of the world's opinion, we call God. Such a fact should lead thoughtful men to consider not whether there is a God, but how are we to think of God. The tendency, of course, is to think of Him in human terms and we are quite apt to create Him in our own image. To impart to Him the characteristics and attributes of man is to make Him a tenuous abstraction. Hence Haeckel's scoff at Diety as a "gaseous vertebrate." But can we think differently of God? "Anthropomorphism in some degree is inevitable, because each man must think in terms 22 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD of his own experience. Into his own personal universe, all that he knows must come." 4 Sci ence must speak of nature in human terms just as well as philosophy must think of God in human terms. There is no term the scientist can use which is not a formula of the human mind. The terms force and cause applied to nature and the ongoing of things are just as much derived from human experience as the terms mind and heart applied to God. "Modify them as you may, all causal conceptions are born from within, as reflections or reductions of our personal, animal, or physical activity: and the severest science is, in this sense, just as anthropomorphic as the most ideal the ology." 5 And yet we are told that the idea of God cannot be anthropomorphic, and appeal to the thoughtful man. A crude anthropomorphism that would attach to the Divine Being the lim itations of human kind, we cannot, of course, defend. But may we not move out from the idea of God imaged in the form of man to the idea of God thought of * David Starr Jordan: Stability of Truth, p. 163. e Martineau: A Study of Religion, Vol. I, p. 336. For a number of quotations on anthropomorphism see Note 3 to Lecture I, Illingworth: Personality,' Human and Divine, pp. 219-222. See also George A. Gordon: The Christ of T0-day, p. 86, and The New Epoch for Faith, p. 265, THE NATURE OF REVELATION 23 essentially as spirit like man? Can we not say that as the real man is spirit the real God also must be? Of course Jesus has told us that God is a spirit. But he added, they who wor ship Him can worship Him only in spirit. We know nothing of spirit except human spirit. In deed, we can be sure in our knowledge of only a very little of this. But the human spirit we do know has sufficient marks and characteristics to lead us to believe that it must have a likeness to another spirit from which it derives its power and in which it finds its fullness. If the ancients, or even our fathers, were guilty of thinking about God in a crude anthropomorphism, this is no reason why we should stop thinking about God in the only way and with the only means possible. Our task is to purify our thought; to bring our ideas of God into perfect har mony with the best we have been able to realize in human life and with our highest ideals. When man thinks of anything really worth while he thinks of something noble rather than base, something high rather than low. He is conscious of a spiritual impulse which pushes him upward. He has ideas of a great unknown where life is richer, better, more real. A heaven is projected, and a Lord of all. This Lord of all must be good, He must be holy, He must be loving. Hence He must be a self, a personality, and He must have moral relation to those who 24 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD aspire to reach or know Him. This is a crude thought of God. But it is the thought of countless intelligent people. They are not able to formulate their thought according to the rules of logic. They are hard put to it to give a reason for their belief in God. But they do believe in Him ; and what is vastly of more con sequence, they live, or want to live, as though He existed. They are not very far removed, after all, from the scientist who could not formulate a satisfactory reason for the exist ence of God, but who nevertheless said, "man can do his duty." Men want to be in right rela tions with the being whom they call God. And this fact, as stubborn a fact as we find in the whole human realm, gives warrant, if not valid ity, for the presuppositions, crude as some of them are, for the existence of God. Now we cannot think of God apart from per sonality. Although much vagueness, and even doubt, exists as to the meaning of the term,8 we need not lose ourselves here in abstractions. "The principle of personality is a positive and fertile principle." It is "one of the most fertile principles which has ever been able to establish itself." 7 We sense its meaning because we « "Whatever the Power be that sustains the world, we cannot conceive it to be a person even if we knew what a person meant." G. Lowe Dickinson: Knowledge and Faith, Hibbert Journal, April, 1908, p. 521. 7 Harold Hdffding: The Philosophy of Religion, pp. THE NATURE OF REVELATION 25 cannot understand anything in this world except through the medium of the think ing, feeling, willing self.8 This is person ality. The soul of nature means nothing if we can think of nature only on the basis of mechan ism with no personal directing power. The soul of man is nothing but a term if it begins and ends in itself and has no relation to other souls or to the one Soul. Men trust nature, else they would not till the ground and sow; they trust men, else they would not venture on social or business relations ; they trust God, else they could not hold to the trustworthiness of nature and man. Such words as trust and trustworthiness imply personality, and the heart of the implication has a moral significance. The moral relation implies not only activity actuated by moral motives, but for moral ends. Hence, a moral universe and a community of human beings who can be moral. Hence, also, a communion between God and man, a giving and a receiving, an asking and an answering. In the very nature of things, therefore, God 315-316. See also a most instructive discussion of the whole subject by John Wright Buckham: Personality and the Christian Ideal. » "The self itself as the subject of the mental life and knowing and experiencing itself as living, and as one and the same throughout its changing experiences, is the surest item of knowledge we possess." Borden P. Bownej Personalism, p. 88. 26 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD not only must reveal Himself to man, but must give Himself in all worthiness and dignity to man. It is impossible for man to hold anything good to himself and for himself. In spite of his naturally selfish disposition, in order really to derive benefit from his possession, he must share it with others. A thought can mean noth ing to us unless we impart it to others. This must be true even of God. So the goodness of God is meaningless unless man through God's vo lition can share in it. "One thing, and only one, we can safely say God must do: He must act according to His own nature." 9 If we believe that God is good, that He holds moral relations to man as well as the universe, of which man is a part, we must hold that God is under obliga tion to make that goodness and that moral re lation known to man so that man can benefit therefrom. As man thus becomes the object of the revela tion, it is valid to assume that God will adapt Himself to man. Living matter is "educable" matter.10 "It is matter selected and put into a course of training; it will profit by experi ence." al If this is true of living matter in the lower forms, it surely must be true of living »Gwatkin: The Knowledge of God, Vol. I, p. 135. 10 Nathaniel S. Shaler: The Individual, p. 22 f. " Newman Smythe: Through Science to Faith, p. 19. THE NATURE OF REVELATION 27 matter in the highest form. Unless man is an end in himself, he is subject to training. In the lower stages of his development we know he must undergo a process of training. This does not end when he reaches maturity. As he finds unoccupied fields in all ranges of knowledge he would like to possess, so also is he conscious of his inability to possess them. He would profit by experience. He gives himself to study in new realms even when, like Cato, he has reached the age of fourscore. Always and ever he hears voices declaring that much remains to be said to him, but that he is not yet able to bear it. Fi nality nowhere has been reached. The things we see clearly only lead us to the edge of dark ness whose depth we cannot determine. Our little candle makes the night more real. But we push on. What light we have penetrates the gloom, we can see our way and in some places can touch the current that floods our standing place with light. Gradually, grop ingly, man advances. If he were not drawn onward he would stop in his tracks. But like the explorer he hears a voice ringing . . . "interminable changes On one everlasting whisper day and night re peated — so : , 'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges — 28 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and wait ing for you. Go !' " 12 Gradually and progressively man has moved. He has received revelation not as though there were only so much of it and it was handed out bit by bit until all was gone, but as though each bit was part of an inexhaustible store and was a little more complex and com prehensive than the last. In our human efforts at education we labor gradually and progress ively, adapting the lesson to the learner. We cannot believe that God in His education of man would use less carefully thought out and serviceable methods. We cannot conceive of Him being haphazard where man exercises choice, or unmindful of an end where man, so far as his intelligence and experience go, takes each step with a definite purpose in view. If man must work according to the rule that two and two make four and that the whole is equal to its parts, God must work in the same way. For He is dealing, not with His equals, but with finite men who cannot find themselves in chaos but must be led by rule into order. Difficulties, of course, will arise. They will not inhere in the revelation, however, but grow out of man's unpreparedness. A simple axiom in geometry 12 Rudyard Kipling: The Explorer, Collected Verse, p. 19. THE NATURE OF REVELATION 29 will puzzle a pupil in the primary grade but ought not to present any difficulties to a high school student. Revelation will not settle all intellectual difficulties for some men, nor will it settle some intellectual difficulties for all men. If it did, it would not be revelation and there could be no intellectual endeavor. In general, revelation will be intellectually clearing because in essence it will be simple and adapted to its subj ect. Revelation, therefore, will not be limited to a particular time nor adapted only to a certain people. It will be received in time by particular individuals. But its scope must be timeless and extra-individual. The word of God must have had the same meaning for the first thinking man as it has for the thinking man to-day. The latter will get more out of it. But this is not because there was less revelation which the former might have had, but because the thinker of to-day can appropriate more of it than his earlier brother could. He takes revelation not only through the experience of the race, but through a larger range of subjects and pur poses in the light of which revelation is to be interpreted. Man has heard God's voice at divers times and in various ways. The revela tion, as we understand it, always has had refer ence to the progress of the race and the readi ness of the individual man. 30 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD But as we assume God to be One and Un changeable, so must we regard His truth. In this sense His revelation has been full and com plete, man's knowledge of it partial and received by defined stages. A fullness of time must come before man can see through the further pur poses of God which existed from the beginning. And we must assume that God will use certain means of leading man to see His truth. But we cannot suppose truth grows with God, as it does with man. God is the truth. In ways best known to Him He gives Himself so that man can appropriate more and more of Him. In nowise could He limit Himself to a particular time or to a particular way of revealing Himself. Such a question as the revelation of God to so-called heathen peoples cannot arise when we consider that, from the beginning, God has been reveal ing Himself. We find His presence in the liter ature and the life of peoples who lived ages be fore the patriarchs of the Old Testament. And we need not be surprised when the literature of such peoples shows a deep insight into the being and purpose of God. For if God loves his chil dren, we must assume that He has loved them from the very beginning, and not that He per mitted the race to begin and grow for a long period of years before He turned His kindly countenance upon it and reached down His arms to take it into a loving embrace. God revealed THE NATURE OF REVELATION 31 Himself long before the first child of Israel was born. Nay, we must even go further and say that God was in readiness to reveal Himself before any son of man was born. We read that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork." Man discovered this fact. As he contemplated it he was lost in wonder and praise. But he only discovered the fact. It existed long be fore he was born, and shows God's evident pur pose in revealing Himself to man. He left His mark on the rocks in the hills, on the stars in the heavens, on the waters of the deep, all for the purpose of making Himself known to man. Revelation, with man as its object, will also be moral and livable. We may say it will be ethical and not metaphysical. It will have to do with the practical ; not with the theoretical phases of life. We cannot see or know the sun except as we have certain indications concerning it. Men believe it exists and that it gives light and heat. But the sun itself we cannot know. So, meta physically speaking, we cannot know God. He does not reveal His actual self to us. But men believe He exists. As they live by appropriat ing the light and heat of the sun, so do they think they find life in God by living the truth which they believe He reveals. This faith has a satisfying content. Men know error is not livable. They base their actions on what they 32 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD know to be true and dependable, even although they have a very little amount of truth. As this tendency of man finds its cause in God, we as sume that God's impartation of Himself is moral and ethical. Men take it to be so and feed upon Him. And the result of their nourishment is a healthful, ruddy, wholesouled life which means soundness and sanity. It also means not only a desire to be good, but a large amount of good ness actually achieved. If the truth of God in its expression to man has a spiritualizing ef fect, we can dispense with the formal rules of logic in trying to ascertain His nature. We can look at the countless lives which have fed on this belief of His moral and ethical nature and have assurance of the kind of Being He must be. We can regard metaphysics as the theory of God's being and ethics as the fact thereof. The one would be theoretical, the other practical. Only the moral and ethical revela tion of God would be livable. And if man could not live the truth of God it would have no value for anyone but God. To think of God shut up to His own truth is impossible. Revelation is the unfolding of God to man. It has meaning for man only as he makes effort to understand it. It is adapted to man's capaci ties. It is gradual, progressive, timeless, uni versal, moral and livable. THE OBJECT OF REVELATION Ill THE OBJECT OF REVELATION "Man's life now, as of old, is the genuine work of God; wherever there is a man, a God also is revealed, and all that is godlike; a whole epitome of the Infinite, with its meanings, lies enfolded in the life of every man." — Carlyle. As man is the object of revelation it may be well to consider Job's question of old: "What is man that thou shouldest magnify him, and that thou shouldest set thy mind upon him?" The chemist and the zoologist both have an answer to the question, what is man? The one reduces him to his chemical compounds ; the other classi fies him in the animal world. But we go neither to the chemist nor to the zoologist for an answer to the question. What do so many pounds of carbon or lime, so many ounces of sodium or iron or potassium or magnesium or silican, so many cubic feet of oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen mean to us?- Or how much wiser are we when we are told that man is a featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus homo? Carbon is not conscious, lime cannot think, phosphorus does not suffer. Neither does the 35 36 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD animal kingdom as we commonly understand that term supply any analogy from which we could deduce our idea of man. He resembles the body of lower animals, speaking in the most general terms, and is properly classed among them; he is controlled by the common laws of physical and chemical action, he is ma terial in a vital and important sense. But he is so differentiated from the material that when we speak of man we unconsciously leave the material out of consideration. We look not to his body ; we look for the man behind the ex terior form. He manifests himself to us in action, and only by the nature of his action can we tell what he is. Man thinks and feels, he knows and remem bers, he imagines, reasons, judges. From these activities we infer an intellect. Furthermore man experiences mental pain or pleasure; he enjoys, he suffers, he loves, he hates, he is sen sible to outward and inner conditions not only as regards himself, but also in relation to others. Herein we may find, his likeness to other animals, for all of them are subject to heat and cold and weariness, they understand their own kind and are able to communicate with each other; while some of them remem ber, show moods of joy and despondency, at tain to a certain sense of fidelity and exhibit a degree of shame for wrongdoing. But the THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 37 analogy cannot be carried further than this. They are rightly called dumb animals because so far as anyone has as yet been able to dis cover, they have no reflective consciousness as man has, they are not capable of abstract think ing or of making investigations on their own initiative. Whatever may be their capacities or achievements, they are far below those of man. The first words of Genesis tell us once for all that God differentiated man from the lower animals, whether this was done at one stroke, or during a long period of ages, or whether the breath of life was breathed upon a clump of earth, or a mass of protoplasm. God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. So, too, is there a gap between man and Nature. A stone is an unconscious thing; man is a conscious being. The stone cannot pass to the man, and must always, so far as any power in it is concerned, remain a stone. But the man can pass over to the stone. He can mark it out, he can chisel it, he can make it live and throb and speak. So with countless lifeless things. Man has control over them and can make them do his bidding. We find that man is constantly meeting facts and influences which suggest action to him or which dissuade him from action. From this we deduce his will. He is impelled to act or not 38 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD to act. From within he finds his appetites, his desires, his judgment forcing him one way or the other; from without he finds the facts of human intercourse or the surrounding ele ments of his physical condition actuating him to do or not to do this or that. Through his will he can control these impelling forces and compel his mind, his heart, his tongue, his hands, his feet to act or move as he desires. The will in man sits upon the throne of his personality as the king of old sat upon the throne of his kingdom with absolute power to rule and control the subjects within his do minion. It was the theory that the King ruled by a Divine right and appointment and that he could do no harm, but would naturally seek to do good. And so it is not only a theory, but the fact, in regard to the will. It is a Divine gift and is supposed to rule by Divine ap pointment, to conform the action of man to goodness and truth. The action of the will is limited, just as the power of the king was, by forces over which man has no control. Man cannot choose his parentage, his original na tionality, his physical constitution, his early environment, nor can he determine the action of others which might influence his own. But in all these cases he can use his will to counter act any evil influence arising from these factors which he could not control. Strong wills have THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 39 often surmounted obstacles arising from un fortunate birth, or weak constitution, or early environment. Again, as man acts we find also that he judges concerning right and wrong. We con clude, therefore, that he is a moral being. He has a conscience, a sense of duty and obliga tion. Reduce man to his chemical compounds, warm these with heat, thrill them with electric ity, and they will have no consciousness of right and wrong. Man knows himself to be under obligation, he is forced to admit that there is some law above him. He has an in nate idea of right and wrong, of just deserts and deserved rewards, of guilt which wrong conduct makes him conscious of and of inno cence which right conduct assures him of. He has a conscience to which appeal can be made. This conscience is a reality; it says to him in tones which he cannot mistake: I must, I must not, I ought, I ought not. He finds that oft- times his conscience is not an infallible guide. He may be left in doubt or be misled as to what he ought to do, just as his mind may lead him to draw wrong conclusions or leave him in doubt as to the result of his investigations. But as man has found throughout the history of the race that he can safely trust his mind and that his thinking faculties are subject to the widest training, so man has also found that 40 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD he can trust his conscience and that it is capa ble of such training as to make it susceptible to the very slightest movement in the moral realm. Man is born neither a thinker nor a moralist, but he is endowed at birth with an infinite capacity to become both. Argue as we may, we will find even the most selfish adherent to the rights of the individual admitting that there is an underlying basis of right conduct which all individuals must observe. When David cried out: "Search me, O Lord, and prove me," it was his conscience working upon him, and he wanted to confess his wrongdoing. So we find man acts with a capacity to think, to control his conduct and to judge between right and wrong. Each one of these faculties, the mental, the moral and the volitional, is brought into play when man undertakes to learn the things of God. He who would know God must do His will and be pure in heart as well as have his thinking faculties in training. We assume, therefore, that the will and the emotions are a necessary factor of right think ing. We come close to the real man when we dis cover his habits of thought. As a man think- eth in his heart so is he. His habit of thought, likewise, will be a powerful factor in determin ing the right results of his thinking: more powerful even than the caliber of his mind. THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 41 When Paul preached on Mars Hill and men tioned the resurrection of Jesus, we are told that some of his hearers "mocked, and others said, we will hear thee again of this matter." * Here are two attitudes of mind which indicate the lack of ability and the possession of ability to understand truth. The man who mocks cur tails his chances to learn anything. "Mock ery," said Tennyson, "is the fume of little hearts." He who derides or jeers, who is con temptuous in action or speech, does so either because he is convinced of the truth of that at which he mocks and thereby seeks to convey the impression that he does not believe it ; or be cause he is destitute of mental fiber or moral conviction. In either case he is to be pitied, and to be pitied because there is so little hope for him. Those who would "hear again of the matter" exhibit a normal condition of mind and body. Doubtless in the crowd of Greeks about Paul were those who wanted more light before they were ready to reject the doctrine of the res urrection. Their minds were normal and open to the truth. Such a mind is the investigative mind, the mind which is ever the forerunner of progress and the constabulary of freedom. We find this mind active everywhere. The poet is stirred and excited by that mysterious i Book of Acts, Ch. 17:32. 42 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD wooing of nature which haunts him when awake and asleep. The field, the forest, the moun tain, has a message. It is as yet indistinct to him. He cannot grasp it. He would inter pret it, however, so he would hear again the song of the birds, again behold the modesty of the wild-flowers, again bid Nature to tell him what she knows about life. The artist is under the selfsame spell. He does not paint streams, merely, or mountains, or wooded plains and glens. These are only ap pearances. He would paint what they hide, and what his artist soul feels. So he seeks a continual interview with Nature, his whole being is open to her elusive humors and whims. The scholar invites with eager expectancy the tomes and records of the musty past or those of the ever present to tell him their story. They bring certain strange things to his mind, he would hear of them again. The scientist scans the heights of the heavens, digs into the depths of the earth, trails the bottom of the ocean, pierces the dank growth of the jungle, stands on the top of the mountain that belches out fire and smoke, only to hear again, to ques tion more closely. No labor is too great, no task too difficult or dangerous to deter him from seeking a personal interview with the forces of Nature in the hope of making them disclose their mystery. The mind is open THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 43 everywhere and everywhere re-echoes the re frain : we would hear thee again of this matter. And there are certain well regulated rules by which man, in his thought-activity, is guided. In the development of the arts we find a three-fold law everywhere applicable. There is first a striving after form, then comes a pe riod when form has been mastered, and finally there is a breaking away from form, an eman cipation from too great insistence upon form without returning to the previous formless state. An artist, as he blocks out his land scape or portrait, strives after form: the con tour of the face, the configuration of the scene. He moves in straight lines and with bold strokes until the form has been attained. Then seemingly ignoring the form he begins to move away from it, to infuse life into the face or the field and forest. The keynote of art is life, and the true artist turns to his work in voluntarily with the conviction that he came to give life to every endeavor of his art. He is an artist, however, because below the surface he sees the underlying form, without which there can be no life. This fact is important as it really marks man as capable of being the object of revela tion. It has played its part in every species of evolution. Turn, for example, to the devel opment of music, and especially on that com- 44 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD monest of all instruments, found in almost every household, the pianoforte. In the begin ning the great masters, Bach especially, strove earnestly for form. They gave us a style of music which is uninteresting to the average hearer and which is appreciated only by the musically trained, — the so-called counterpoint, of which the fugue is the chief production. With Beethoven began another era of striving after and attainment of form, a style of music en tirely different from that of the early com posers, the so-called harmonic system, of which the sonata on the piano and the symphony of the orchestra are chief examples. Here was form attained which, even in a Beethoven, be came hard and fast. Then came the inevitable emancipation from form, the infusing of life into the systems of Bach and Beethoven, which found its highest accomplishment in such pia nists as Liszt and Chopin and the great musi cal-dramatist, Wagner. Now music, to continue the illustration, may be regarded as a science or as an art. The science of music concerns itself with the rela tions of the notes of the musical scale to each other. And on this science, or relationship, are based all forms of music, the most light and popular songs of the day as well as the classi cal or romantic productions. Men may be come such adepts in the science of music as to THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 45 analyze mentally a composition and lose much of its aesthetic and emotional significance. They may be profoundly versed in the form and technique of music as a science and be un touched by it as an art, just as an habitual church-goer can be a keen critic of a sermon, appreciating its value as a piece of literature or logical reasoning and remain dead to its spiritual appeal; or a physicist may be an expert in the qualities of light and color and stand listless before a masterpiece of painting. But this is not the natural tendency of man. He strives for form that he may give, and not withhold, life. In spite of himself he is an artist as well as a scientist. As the musician is born with the cry echoing about him, I am come to infuse spirit and life into the forms and technique of music and make the heart strings of humanity vibrate with melody, so all men in their innate proclivities key their lives to the life-giving. Science gives us form ; art life. What we find in the work of man as it proceeds in its tendency from form to life, we also find trace able in the work of God. We cannot look upon Him merely as the Creator giving us form. Science in one way or another attributes cre ation to God. But if He were a creator only as scientist and not also as artist, we would have a world with God outside of it, interested 46 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD only in the form thereof, starting it and then leaving it to care for itself, resident on the rim of the universe, but not in its very heart, the pulse-beat of its life. We read in beautiful poesy that the earth in the beginning was without form and void, and that God shaped the heavens and the earth, giving form to sun and moon and stars, raising the mountains, hollowing out the valleys, covering the deeps with water, filling earth and sea and sky with living matter. But there was something be neath to which He could not give externality. Science can tell us about the earth; art only can describe the life of the universe. As some one has strikingly said : 2 "To the scientist the earth must forever roll around the central solar fire ; to the poet the sun must forever set behind the Western hills." So God, in creat ing the earth went from science to art, from form to life. His activity as the Subject of revelation is in kind the same as that of man the object of revelation. Living man under stands God because he has the artist's instinct and impulse. His mind has connection with his heart and the cold logic of his thought is infused with the warm blood of his emotion. In his thought-activity he makes for life, — life that is based on form but not encrusted in it. 2 Quoted by C. F. B. Masterman: In Peril of Change, p. 214. THE OBJECT OF REVELATION 47 Such is man, the object of God's revelation. He expresses and realizes himself in action. The directive, as well as motive, power of his activity is his habit of thought which proceeds in orderly form to give life. CONDITIONS OF RECEIVING REVELATION IV CONDITIONS OF RECEIVING REVELATION "The idea that pieces of information have been super- naturally and without any employment of their own in tellectual faculties communicated! at various times to particular persons, their truth being guaranteed by miracles — in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative power — is one which is already rejected by most mod ern theologians, even among those who would generally be called rather conservative theologians." — Hastings Rashdall. The things that God freely gives us are the things everywhere about us and in which we are concerned in every way. The sum of them makes up our world. Into this world we bring nothing. We have only what we have been given. We exist only because our existence has been made possible. We create because both the materials and the means of creation have been furnished us. We live, if our pres ence here is really life and not merely existence, because we have submitted ourselves to laws which are orderly and beneficent and to a will 51 52 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD whose natural and essential expression is that of helpfulness and uplift. Primitive man discovered these things for himself after long and ofttimes painful and sometimes disastrous experience. He did not know how to explain the giving of these bene fits or whom to recognize as the giver. But in his untutored way he made what acknowl edgment he could. He drew rude pictures, as in Babylonia, of man set in a garden with all the benefits of Paradise about him, or, as in Egypt, of the sun whose limitless rays ended each in a hand outstretched to earth bestowing the gifts of heaven. Or he had crude ideas of the substance from which all the good things of the earth came. Now he declared that this Su preme substance was water, now air, now fire. But as he became more enlightened, as in the days of the Hebrew Psalmist, he began to de clare the goodness of an eternal and only Be ing, of God the maker and creator of the uni verse, who brought man into existence, who loved him, and who freely gave to him of his priceless and exhaustless treasures. If we are inclined to look upon the utter ances of Scripture as sentimental, not founded in fact, we need only to turn to the declara tions of science to find substantiation. The world is made for man and each organ of man has its proper environment. There is light for CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 53 the eye, and wealth of sound for the ear, and plastic matter for the hand, and materials of thought for the brain. There is food to sat isfy hunger, there is drink to quench thirst, there is shade from the sun and shelter from the rain and a night time for sleep and re cuperation. Every living creature finds exter nal to itself the complement of that which is in ternal. And so marked are these arrangements and phenomena of life with an evidence of in telligence and good intention behind them that they are declared by the scientist, to quote Mr. Agassiz, to be the "premeditation of God," the "eternal orders of the thoughts of God." They are the things of God which He freely gives us ; life with all its vicissitudes, the opportunity for toilsome but worthy activity. Now every object which presents itself to man can be looked upon in at least two ways. We can look at it as what it appears to be, or as what it really is. The heavens above us are, at the same time, what we term the visible and also the astronomical heavens. The visible heavens are what we see at night with the naked eye or even with a telescope; the astronomical heavens are what the astrono mer sees. The visible heavens are the less real heavens, they are only what they appear to be ; while the astronomical heavens are the more real heavens because they approximate closely 54 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD to the heavens which really are. This illustra tion can be taken as an indication of the differ ence between a thing as it appears to us and that thing as it really is. And we note that we come to a knowledge of the thing as it really is by a closer scrutiny and study; by using a kind of knowledge adapted to the know ing-possibility of that thing. The ancients discovered the electrical prop erties of amber. But not knowing anything about electricity they described amber as it ap peared to them, i.e., they declared the mineral was possessed of a living soul. They could not understand how it could have properties of action unless either the soul of a man or a god resided therein. So, too, they were often painfully aware of the deadly properties of gas. If a man went down into a well and was suffocated, he was said to have been struck by some deadly hand. Or if he went into a mine and exposed a light and flashing flames and thunderous explosions were the result, often killing men without leaving any marks on the bodies, he was convinced that some supernat ural agent was present. Because so it ap peared to him. Yet the same faculties for rightly understanding these phenomena were possessed by the men of those days as well as by men of later days. They did not give the matter closer study because they were too much CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 55 possessed with the idea of ghosts and super natural visitors. For many long centuries men believed the world was created in six days of twenty-four hours each. Yet the same marks, which later and more thoughtful men used to disprove such a theory, were on the mountains and in the canons and river beds the whole time the er roneous view was held. It seemed as though the finger of God had written this record in rock and fossil and alluvial drift and there were no eyes open to see. Now that men have gone behind the visible works of God and approach to a knowledge of His true self we do not find He was any the less real when men ignorantly worshiped Him than now when the scientific use of the mind is declaring Him unto us.1 God reveals Himself in many ways and at different times. Revelation is a growing proc ess, and not a complete deliverance. This is true because life itself is a growth and the truth that is connected with life an expanding con tent. Knowledge comes in generalities, not in particulars. We say that Columbus discovered America, but what he discovered was an island i "The ancients believed the pearl to be the condensed dew of heaven, but the discovery of the actual process of pearlmaking has not detracted from the beauty of the gem or cut down its market value." Francis J. McConnell: The Diviner Immanence, p. 87. 56 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD to the south of us. He had no idea of the main land itself, especially of its later exploration. Newton discovered the law of gravity, but his problem was worked out by other scientists and in a way which opened up a new world, even for Newton himself, when he saw the complete building reared on the foun dation of his discovery. The continent of America said, in effect, to Columbus and the law of gravity, in effect, to Newton, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but you can not bear them now." So God has revealed Himself in Nature. The rocks which He has thrown up, the trees and the flowers which He has caused to grow, came, as it were, once for all. But man has been blasting into the rocks and analyzing the trees and flowers for the further solution of their mystery, and they have not yet disclosed their full story. So God has revealed Himself in the Scrip tures. He has laid a deposit which, in essence, is complete and final. Yet man has been work ing upon this deposit for better means of dis covering God's way. Thus and thus only can man learn God's truth. Revelation will come to him as he puts himself in the way of meeting it. The words Jesus spoke, aside from any orthodox belief concerning His being, afford the measure by which truth should be esti mated. He promulgated the spiritual law of CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 57 gravity and this law draws everything near to the center of truth. It is the force which will hold man's thought in its proper orbit, despite all counter attractions and repulsions. But man can refuse to run his mind in this orbit. He, therefore, will be in no condition to receive God's revelation. The communion of the spirit of man with the spirit of God results, as we see, in God's dis closing Himself to the soul of man. "There is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." 2 This is revelation : a breathing in by the spirit of man of the spirit of God. God moves upon a prepared mind. Revelation is a challenge to the intellect. There must be an attitude conducive to receiving a revelation before a revelation can be possible. God cannot reveal Himself to an irresponsive soul any more than He can to a stone or a block of wood. A few simple illustrations will show this. Stevenson in his often quoted "A Chapter on Dreams" 3 tells us that "he was from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer." In the begin ning this experience was most unpleasant to him. He "struggled hard against the ap proaches of that slumber which was the begin ning of sorrows." "But presently, in the course 2 Job 32:8. 3 Biographical Edition: Across the Plains, p. 206. 58 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD of his growth, . . . his visions were more constantly supported. . . . His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better stocked with par ticulars, became more circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life." The rea son for all this was that he "had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales; and so had his father before him." He had habituated himself, perhaps unconsciously, to see strange as well as usual things in his sleep. This "amusement" he later turned to account when "he began to write and sell his tales." "The stories must now be trimmed and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life." In this same way man habituates himself to discover truth. He puts himself in the way of receiving a revelation. The mathematician, as is well known, can work out his problems men tally. He has a sense of numbers and they respond to his most delicate touch. He takes his start from the pure perceptions of space and time, goes on freely constructing figures in space without reference to experience, and dem onstrates the properties of such figures. And he can forecast what others must prove by actu ally working out. The natural scientist goes further still. He knows of discoveries before they are made. As CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 59 the sailors in the North sea know when they are approaching the ice long before they actually see it by a bright appearance near the horizon which the Greenland men call the "blink of the ice," 4 so does the scientist forecast certain dis coveries long before they are realized because of the white light which his investigations project upon the horizon of human knowledge. Professor Shaler says : "It is indeed safe to say that any general truth in science has been known to the discoverer before it appeared in the facts as critically verified." 5 Emerson, fifty years before, said: "Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presenti ment of somebody before it was actually veri fied." 6 Why ? Because any man who trains his mind on some great truth will see more and deeper and farther than the immediate experi ence of other men will lead them to believe. "Verification is then demanded," to use the words of Professor Shaler, "in order to recon cile the thought with the observation." Interesting illustrations of this kind can be adduced to show conclusively that the mind of * Robert Southey: Life of Nelson, p. 13. b The Individual, p. 308. s Works, Vol. Ill, p. 176, Essay on Nature. "Every one knows how Darwin, by showing that earthworms have made most of the fertile soil of the world, verified in detail what Gilbert White had foreseen in 1777." J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 15. 60 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD man is not limited in its operation. The one essential for extraordinary accomplishment is the persistent application by individual men of the powers they possess. Newton gave the whole secret in five words when asked how he came to discover the law of gravitation. "By always thinking about it!" By always think ing about it, keeping the mind actively concen trated on some one thing, consciously working with the mind until the mind works uncon sciously for man. Stevenson doubtless gave a more complete account of the secret of his great knack of story-telling in the few words he wrote to a friend 7 rather than in his whole essay, "A Chapter on Dreams." "I am still a 'slow study,' and sit for a long while silent on my eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in — and there your stuff is good or bad." Moments of great inspiration come to men and they see far be yond the outer edge into the very heart of a problem. But these moments, on the one hand, are neither miraculous nor inexplicable, and on the other, are not to be forced by any unusual or extraneous efforts. "The pathways here," as has been well said, "are no flights of Pega- 7 A Letter to Mr. W. Crabbe Angus of Glasgow, quoted in Weir of Hermiston, Biographical Edition, p. 175. CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 61 sus; they are the daily route of the ideas of a trained mind in a familiar country." Truth always comes to man in the appear ance of a miracle. Each new phase of truth, as man first meets it, sends a thrill through his whole frame : men in all ages, both modern and ancient, have been undone as truth dawned upon them. Yet man's means for working out that truth and making it his own are the nat ural means he would use to solve any problem that might come to him, however ordinary that problem might be. Archimedes, the most cele brated geometrician of antiquity, was commis sioned by King Hiero of Syracuse to determine the amount of alloy in the King's crown with out destroying the crown. It occurred to him one day how this could be accomplished as he stepped into the bath and noticed the overflow caused by the displacement of the water. This truth so thrilled him that he ran home through the streets unclad, crying heureka: "I have found it." Yet he had to work out that truth by cold, mathematical calculation before it be came fixed as a truth. When Newton saw that his theoretic results were approaching an em pirical fact, the truth overwhelmed him: "his hand shook, the figures danced, and he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an as sistant to finish the computation." 8 But the s Emerson: Works, Vol. 8, p. 21. 62 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD computation had to be made, and by the slow, deliberate natural processes man has at his command. As we look upon the revelation of God in this light it becomes concrete and tangible. Man's perception of the revelation is reduced to a fixed law of mind and heart.9 The prophets of old were able to speak of God's mind for the future because they knew God's mind in the present. They were never flippant in the pres ence of God or presumed to be on familiar terms with Him. They bore themselves before Him as true gentlemen. They were always humble and devout seekers of His truth and purposes. By constantly communing with Him in this manner they discovered His nature. As they were also aware of man's conduct and needs, it was no remarkable feat for them to declare how God's love would be operative con cerning man's conduct and his needs. They saw the inclination of the twig and could prophesy regarding the bend of the tree. Men in other ages, for similar reasons, have also o "What Nature does not reveal to thy spirit, thou wilt not wrench from her with levers and screws," Goethe has well said. Nevertheless, "it has been the conviction of devout and discerning souls in all ages that God does not force Himself upon men, but that the seekers find Him, the pure in heart see Him, the men of faith are very sure of Him." Buckham: Per sonality and the Christian Ideal, p. 210. CONDITIONS OF REVELATION 63 been prophets. Thomas Jefferson was one when almost sixty years before the outbreak of the Civil War he said in reference to slavery, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." 10 The conditions of receiving revelation, there fore, are the conditions we must regard in mat ters of growth and progress anywhere. As men individually prepare themselves to receive the truth do they have revelations. God speaks to individuals, not to men in general. "All revelations, whether of mechanical or in tellectual or moral science, are made, not to communities, but to single persons." u This is so because truth cannot be generally or vi cariously accepted. Each individual must re ceive the truth on his own account and in the crucible of his soul and mind make it his own. It is well to emphasize this fact, on the one hand, as a protest against any view that would regard revelation as closed and the light de livered to the Fathers as the strongest light from the divine fire, and, on the other hand, as 10 Rashdall has an interesting discussion on the im portance of the mind in prophesy. "The Jewish proph ets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a great deal of hard thinking," and "there are obvious indications of profound intellectual thought" even in the teaching of Jesus. Philosophy and Religion, p. 134 ff. n Emerson: Works, Vol. VI, p. 239, Considerations by the Way. 64 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD an encouragement to those who want to believe, but who cannot accept doctrines or dogmas which have no counterpart in present day ex periences. There is a great difference between the sun shining on a stone and on a tree. Hy drogen in relation to a multitude of substances remains only hydrogen. It becomes quite a new thing when it touches oxygen. There can be life only where there is life. The more life we crave the more we shall have. Religion is life and truth must be worked out in life. If we are truly living, therefore, we shall receive such revelations as shall satisfy us. And our minds and hearts will ever be open to receive the further teaching of the spirit of truth. REVELATION AND INSPIRATION REVELATION AND INSPIRATION "The word inspired is usually reserved for that which has a more direct bearing upon human life and con duct. Those who believe in the daily and hourly in spiration of conduct can have little difficulty in believ ing that this inspiration may take and does constantly take the form of an impulse to write a book. But of course this inspiration may be of a higher or a lower kind. No book can be well and nobly written save by the help of the Divine Spirit: but we easily recog nize that works which directly bear upon conduct are inspired in quite another sense from works of fancy or imagination, or works of science or criticism or philos ophy." — Percy Gardiner. Man, when he came upon earth, found the record of God's presence and he contemplated it in its various forms long before it occurred to him to make a record of God's revelation on his own account. In fact, it may be said that man not only came into existence as a record of God's presence in the world, but that he also be came a medium through which God could con tinue His revelation and make it definitely and personally known. Man no sooner was con scious of himself than he discovered the master hand of the Almighty all about him. 67 68 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD This is true in the same way as the tourist in the great galleries of Europe will recognize the work of the masters. There is something in an old painting that the beholder instinc tively feels to be a real, almost superhuman, ex pression of life. Something in the picture strikes something in the beholder. There is a unity of feeling. Deep cries unto deep, and the presence of the Eternal is made manifest. It is given to some men to study the great mas terpieces in the galleries and to go forth and make their essence known, to verify and actual ize the spirit and the purpose of the painter. So it is given to men in the great gallery of nature and life to vivify and to actualize; to send forth as the ready coin of human exchange the spirit and the purpose of nature and the underlying essence of being. Men of all ages have been able to approach the heart of the Universe, to discover its message and to make that message known to the world. This is true ; a fact that no one will under take to dispute. Now it happens that God chose men whom He endowed with a special gift to commune with Him, to learn His mind and heart, and to make that knowledge known unto their fellow men. The question repeatedly oc curs : was there a body of revelation committed to certain men at a certain time which, in a sense, gave a complete disclosure of the mind REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 69 and will of God so as to preclude any further revelation of God along these lines ? This leads to the direct revelation of God in the Bible. Have we here a content which is complete in itself, to which no additions can be made? If we understand God rightly, especially if we appreciate the revelation which Jesus made of Him; and, further, if we take into due account the demands of the in tellectual needs of man ; we cannot say that God spoke to His people once for all, that He gave certain men during a limited period of time a knowledge of Himself which would be absolutely complete, which could not be added to or modified in any way. On the other hand, we must hold that the Bible is a record of God's revelation which furnishes man not only with a guide for his daily life, but also with a content which he may test in the melting-pot of his mind and find adequate material for all his intellectual demands. To resolve this seem ing contradiction as to man's ability to read God's mind to-day as in any of the past ages and the revelation which the Holy Scriptures give us, we are helped by the illustration which President Francis J. McConnell has given us in his little book, The Diviner Immanence (p. 83). "We may think of the exploration of the world from Columbus on through a century after. Through exceptional opportunity, exceptional 70 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD endowment, and exceptional personal endeavor the explorers of that time accomplished a task once for all; more, a task in which they can never have rivals. The writers of the Scrip ture performed the great service of the discov ery and exploration of the spiritual fundamen tals once for all." It is only on a basis such as this that we can satisfy ourselves as to the kind and nature of God's revelation in the Bible. When we look in the Bible, therefore, we find a revelation which many men consider to be the most complete discovery and satisfactory ex position of the being of God. The revelation in the Bible is the being of God entered into the being of men and forming that close communion of man and his Maker which every human being instinctively feels and persistently under takes to realize. In the Bible are set forth the fundamental truths which differentiate man from every other order of creation and elevate him to a plane which no other form of creation can even approximate. In the Bible God is reveal ing man to man and in the process of this rev elation reveals God to man so that man under stands the kind of being he is and the kind he may become. Great and inspiring as is the revelation of God in nature ; noble and elevating as is the revelation of God in literature other than the Bible and among peoples other than the REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 71 Hebrews and early Christians ; there is some thing so distinctive in the revelation of God as found in our Bible, as to set it entirely apart and differentiate it from every other divine revelation. We have just said that God used certain men in a certain way as the means, or instruments, of His revelation as set forth in the Holy Scriptures. That is, certain men were inspired of God to record His revelations. What is meant by inspiration is a question of great sig nificance. It admits of various interpretations and in no age seems to have had a definition which men will accept without question. When we speak of evolution, there are differ ent ways in which the term can be used. To day it is becoming more and more fixed in its meaning as method, merely, and never as cause. It is being rapidly divested of the significations which made it a stumbling block to faith. The word "inspiration," however, which gave stu dents of the Scriptures trouble long before the theory of evolution as a cause was expounded, still remains in doubtful associations. There are those who will say that inspiration can mean only one thing, namely, the utterance, audible or otherwise, of the Almighty to man, this utterance being construed as final in itself and which man could record exactly as re ceived, not letting the same go through the 72 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD alembic either of his intellect or experience. In other words, man, so far as the biblical writer is concerned, is an unconscious being, an automaton. God speaks to him, and he moves, not knowing that he is moving or the purpose of the movement. While this theory has appealed to many and still holds considerable force in the discussions on inspiration, it would seem that God in this way is robbed of any satisfaction whatsoever in the mental and moral development of His chil dren. It would remove Him infinitely from them. If He had no way of speaking to them other than to move mechanically upon a human being and make this human being give forth His utterance, He might just as well move in like way upon a stone or a stump of a tree. There would be no more consciousness in a man mechanically moved than there would be in a stone or a block of wood and it would be just as easy for God to vivify and inspire a piece of granite or iron as it would be for Him to move an unconscious human being. If the in strument of the inspiration is to have no part in the receiving and the transmitting of the message other than having it go through him, God could just as well use an inanimate object. God would be as distant in this kind of an in spiration from the human race as He is distant from the unconscious objects of nature. It REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 73 would be as if He merely set man to going as one might wind and start a clock, that man would continue in motion only as long as the mechanism worked, and that God, therefore, would repeatedly have to come into the world to keep human kind wound up. It would not place Him in the world itself, a living, vital part of the creatures whom He created. It would deprive Him of continual communication with them. He could not instruct them as to their further needs and according to their will ingness to learn. This mechanical theory of inspiration will not hold. It puts God too far away from the race. Man instinctively feels something in himself so akin to the Godhead that he believes he was made to commune with God. Com munion implies an interchange of thought and confidence. We commune with each other as we give and take. Our souls are illuminated and satisfied as we give of them to our fel lows and as we partake of the content of their souls. So God could not reveal Him self to man if He could not commune with man. He evidently made man for this pur pose, else He would have stopped with the brute creation. He gave man the conviction that he was to have dominion over every lower order of nature ; furthermore, that man was to spread abroad in the earth and subdue it. The 74 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD feeling of dependence man has always had, even when he has attained to highest intellectual ca pacity and has performed truly wonderful feats, leads him still to think that God created him for the purpose of bringing to effect in the world which He has made His kingdom of truth and righteousness and love. Man continues to- cry out to his Maker, "What is man, that thou hast visited him and set thine heart upon him ?" So, while with one breath mankind will sometimes insist upon this mechanical theory of inspira tion, with another breath he will deny the theory and declare it to be impossible. In order for God to reveal Himself He must have an object capable of receiving the revelation. Mind can only work upon mind and heart upon heart, and we dare not rob man of his mind and his heart and make him an irresponsive instru ment through which, or by which, the word of God is to come to the race. Not satisfied with the mechanical theory of inspiration, other men have insisted upon the verbal nature of inspiration. God spoke to man, and man, through his mind and heart, re ceived the message in the exact words in which God spoke. This theory, while really not differ ing from the mechanical, is insisted upon in order to relieve the Bible of inaccuracies or lack of authority. If we have not the exact words of the Almighty, how can we believe that the Al- REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 75 mighty has spoken to us? The cry is raised that, if we do not admit that we have the ipissima verba, we have no warrant that God has spoken and hence are left without authority in matters religious. It would seem that this question of verbal inspiration ought to be very easily answered. It is well known, of course, that the Bibles which we use to-day are translations from the original texts and it is of course known that every nationality has its own Bible. Thousands of these Bibles are printed every week. If we insist upon the verbal inspiration of the Bible we must insist, not only that every nationality has been able to translate into its own tongue the original and exact words of the Holy Scrip tures, but we must guard against any mistakes or errors which the typesetters might make in setting up the Bible. That such errors do creep in, is proved by the fact that the publishers of the Oxford Bible offer their proof-readers large rewards for the discovery of any typographical error after the proof has passed under the eye of two or three expert proof-readers. If we are to insist upon verbal inspiration we surely must go to the length of insisting that every typeset ter and proof-reader is inspired. For mistakes might creep in through their inaccurate work, and it would seem that in this case we should have to insist that they were mere automatons, 76 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD on the mechanical theory, inspired to re-print the record accurately. Taking our English Bible alone we have at least three editions. One is the King James ver sion, another is the Revised version, and the third is the American Edition of the Revised ver sion. There are important differences in these versions. In fact, the Revised version was made for the sole purpose of correcting the errors and inaccuracies in the translations of the King James version. Now why should there have been, on the theory of verbal inspiration, any in accuracies in the King James version and why did it happen that not only the American and English revisers disagreed among themselves as to what the proper translation in several cases should be, but that the English revisers had a disagreement among themselves and had to pass the final verdict by majority vote? If the Revised Edition of the Bible is more nearly correct than the King James version, then it would seem, on the verbal theory of inspiration, that we must declare the English revisers from 1881 down to the time that the Revised version was printed were more inspired than the trans lators of the King James version. When we go from the translations back to the original manuscripts, what do we find? The oldest Hebrew manuscript dates from the ninth century a. d. and is at present in the Royal Mu- REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 77 seum in St. Petersburg. As a matter of fact, the earliest Hebrew manuscript was written not much later than the ninth century B.C. and was not that part of the Scriptures which the manu script of the ninth century a. d. contains. What became of all the versions of the Old Testament from the time they were written up to the ninth century a. d. ? It will be seen at once through what countless hands the manu scripts must have passed. In the New Testament the matter becomes even more serious. To be a critical student of the New Testament one must be able not only to read several languages, but to decipher manu scripts written by many hands at widely sep arated times and which differ greatly in their content. Even the New Testament writers themselves were not accurate when they quoted from the Old Testament. We find two hundred and seventy-five Old Testament quotations in the New Testament.1 Of these only fifty- three agree ; that is, in only fifty-three has the Septu agint correctly rendered the Hebrew and in turn been correctly quoted by the New Testa ment writer. There are only ten passages of the Septuagint version correctly translated from the Hebrew. There are thirty-seven pas sages in the New Testament which have been in- 1 C. H. Toy: Quotations from Old Testament; Marcus Dods: The Bible: Its Origin and Nature, p. 113, f. 78 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD correctly quoted from the Septuagint. There are seventy-six passages in the New Testament in which the Septuagint version has been al tered into a rendering which does not agree with the original Hebrew, and there are ninety-nine passages in the New Testament where the quo tation is different both from the Septuagint and from the original Hebrew. If we say that our Bible is verbally inspired and that we have to day the verbal record which God gave to men from time to time as it appears in Holy Writ, how are we to overcome these many difficulties? On the other hand, if the Bible is not verbally inspired, is it the word of God? We must come to a more simple and satis factory definition of the word "inspiration." We cannot say that the Bible is mechanically in spired, or that it is verbally inspired. Luke gives us, as his reason for writing to his friend, "the most excellent Theophilus," the fact that so many had undertaken to set forth a declara tion of the beliefs of the early followers of Jesus. It was necessary for him to do so be cause he felt sure that he had information which either was more accurate or which he could set forth with fuller light than others had. Luke says that he got his information from those "which from the beginning were eye witnesses and ministers of the word." He does not say that his message comes direct from the mouth REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 79 of God. It came to him through the word of many mouths long after the. facts he was de scribing happened and long after the words of Jesus he is quoting were spoken. With Luke as an example, it seems that we can go for our definition back to Job, who de clared that "there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them under standing." This spirit in man is alive, it is quick, it cannot be moved upon in any mechan ical way. By its very nature it must have a real part and activity in any inspiration which it might receive. The effect of the inspiration of the Almighty upon this spirit is not to issue in a verbal reproduction of words spoken, but is to issue in an understanding. That is, the spirit as it is moved upon by the inspiration of the Almighty understands, and as it understands it undertakes to give forth that understanding to others. The very essence of the nature of man makes this possible and necessary. As we look at the achievements of the human race we can always find the cause for its prog ress in this understanding which the spirit of man has had through the inspiration of the Almighty. In music the spirit of man has been moved upon to such an extent by the underlying harmony of the spheres that man has caught this harmony and has given it forth in various ways until a listening world has heard the Al- 80 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD mighty speak in the musical tones of heaven. In art man has been influenced by the spirit of the Almighty to such an extent that he has been able to move his hand upon lifeless can vas or cold stone and make canvas and stone speak. No verbal inspiration here could be thinkable. Only as the artist had the under standing which the Almighty gave him could he work out the revelation he received from God. So we can look in the great literature of past and present days and find the spirit of God mov ing upon the spirit of man in a similar way. So in commerce, in trade, so in politics and states manship, so even in the most humble affairs and the humdrum tasks of daily life, the spirit of God is manifest in the life of man. The spirit of man is susceptible to enlightenment through the inspiration of the Almighty. This under standing coming from God helps man to reveal God's thought and to fix His purpose. But some will say, if this be true, there is then no difference between the inspiration which we have in the literature of to-day and the in spiration which we have in the literature of the Bible. In principle there is no difference. God is moving upon the hearts and minds of men to-day even as He moved in the past. He is giving man His revelation and man is in spired by Him to give forth His product to the world. We cannot believe, on the principle of REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 81 inspiration enounced by Job, that God did not inspire Milton and Tennyson and Browning or Whittier and Longfellow and Sill. But there is a degree of inspiration which differentiates the inspired poem or essay of to day from the inspired word of Holy Writ. As we saw in the matter of revelation that the men of Bible times were moved by the Almighty to make discoveries in the realm of spiritual and moral truth which were all-inclusive, so do we find that the men of Bible times were inspired to give forth that discovery which sets them apart forever as laboring under an inspiration of a distinct kind. We know that all books of the Old and the New Testament are not equal. There is a degree or range of spiritual truth or awakening, and this fact should lead us to insist upon the degree of inspiration as being indicative of the quality of the inspiration. As has been well said, the presence of inspira tion is discernible in the product ; yet the mean ing and nature of inspiration cannot be decided by abstract reflection, but only by study of the outcome. "What inspiration is must be learned from what it does. . . . We must not determine the character of the books from the inspiration, but must rather determine the nature of the inspiration from the books." 2 - Borden P. Bowne: The Christian Revelation, p. 44, f, later published in Studies in Christianity, p. 29, f. 82 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD The highest product of Browning or Tennyson is ennobling. It leads us to the Inner Courts of the Almighty. It gives us a real under standing of Him. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between the inspiration of the modern poets and the writers of the Bible. This difference is in the content of the inspira tion. It would not be possible to make a se lection from as many ancient or modern writ ers as there are writers in the Bible and build up as consecutive and consistent and comfort ing an account of man's relation to God and God's attitude to man as found in Holy Writ. In fact, the best thought of modern poetry is but the reflex influence of the Bible. The con tent of the Bible is truly unique. Among the books of the world it has no competitors. It is preeminently the book of religion. It is the source from which the religious stream in liter ature is fed. It is the sun which does not borrow, but lends its light.3 s On the "Fall of Verbal Inspiration," see Reinhold Seeberg: Revelation and Inspiration, pp. 1-5. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN REVELATION AND ITS RECORD VI THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN REVELATION AND ITS RECORD "Christ never intended to shut up His Gospel in a book. . . . The only word that our Lord ever wrote, so far as we know, was traced with His finger on the unrecording ground. It was not His will that His re ligion should be, like Islam, the religion of a book. He wrote His message on the hearts of a few faithful men, where it was not to be imprisoned in Hebrew or Greek characters, but was to germinate like a seed in fruitful soil." — William Ralph Inge. Revelation is one thing, the record of revela tion quite another. As concerns the latter we have to do with man's attempt to fix the truth as revealed to him. However it might be said that man received the truth, whether by visions or dreams or unusual happening or in the quiet, orderly, ongoing of daily life, his record of that truth must be the result of a deliberate effort to make it known and appeal to others. The familiar illustration from Robert Louis Stevenson will serve to make this point clear. In his essay "A Chapter on Dreams" he tells us that while he slept at night a company of 85 86 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD little brownies came and kept converse with him, weaving the plots of his stories and filling in the details so that all he had to do was to write them out in the daytime. He had to write them out, however. The dreams were the revelation, the writing-out the record. "That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then." Nevertheless, the actual record was his. "I am an excellent adviser ; . . . I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make ; I hold the pen, too ; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it ; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise." J There is a jest in this statement. Yet it contains the hard, sober fact, that man must make a record of his revelation by laborious effort. And because of his necessary limita tions he is never sure that he has put down in the record all he has received in the revelation ; or that he can make men see in the record what i Across the Plains: Biographical Edition, p. 226. REVELATION AND RECORD 87 he actually perceived in the revelation. Man always receives more than he is able to record. His ability for comprehending truth is greater than his facility for making that truth known. No man can fully express himself. Hence revelation includes more than man can actually record. Truth appears in measured quantity to every generation and each generation for mulates it and the good in that formulation is taken up by the next generation. So has reve lation grown, even although we have not al ways been able to note its progress. But there are other considerations as to the record of revelation. It may seem to be press ing the word beyond its meaning when we use "record" not only to indicate a written word or a visible sign, as we might find on the rocks or in the heavens, but also any evidence of God's presence. This use of the word, however, is not only permissible, but necessary. When Jesus said: "The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life," 2 He emphasized the spiritual, the invisible record of the words, and not the characters as exhibited in the Greek or any other language. Jesus' words were spirit, and no visible record could be made of that spirit. His words give life not because they can be spread on paper and read, but be cause of what is back of and in them and which 2 John 6:63. 88 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD cannot be visually reproduced. Job speaks of the intangibility of the real record of revela tion when he asks: "Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts ?" 3 And likewise Jeremiah, when he says: "I will put my law in their in ward parts and in their hearts will I write it." 4 The codification of God's law is in the inward parts of man and the record of God's revela tion is written in the human heart. From the very nature of the case a written record of revelation is always something par tial and perishable. This invisible record is alone adequate and lasting. Paul clearly in dicates this in his second letter to the Corinthi ans.5 "Do we begin again to commend our selves? Or need we, as some others, epistles of commendation to you, or letters of com mendation from you? Ye are our epistles writ ten in our hearts, known and read of all men: for as much as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, writ ten not with ink, but with the spirit of the liv ing God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart." "Who hath also made us able ministers of the new testament ; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. But if the ministra- 8 Job 38:36. * Jeremiah 31:33. 5 Chapter 3:1-3, 6-8. REVELATION AND RECORD 89 tion of death written and engraven in stone was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: how shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?" Revelation, then, is spiritual, but its record material; revelation is eternal, its record tem poral. The one has to do with the spirit of man, the other with the signs and images man undertakes to make. The first has to do with a message that has more in it than any one man or age can grasp, the second with the expression and interpretation of the message which each age must make for itself in terms of that age. There can be no discrepancy as to the fact of revelation. For as Eucken has well said, the essential function of a fact is to yield its living meaning to the present in some imperishable form; and it cannot do this unless it has a ca pacity for development in accordance with its own nature and exercises in itself the life it im parts.6 Records of the fact, however, not only may be, but unavoidably will be, divergent. A rose or a lily, a sunset or a storm has a message for man. This message is a revelation. There is something here which Nature gives to man in the sense of impartation, that is, giving and e W. R. Boyce Gibson: Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life, p 41. 90 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD yet, to a greater or less degree, retaining. Na ture gives all that man can receive; it neces sarily retains what man cannot take. The primrose by the river's brim remains to one only a yellow primrose, while to another the flower in the crannied wall holds the secrets of God and man. The distinction is always evident whenever two or more men undertake to record the revela tion the flower or the sunset makes. The poem of Coleridge will differ from that of Shelley or. Emerson, but the revelation in the heart of Nature is the same to each. None can exhaust the revelation or give it full expression. To every lover of field and sky the voice speaks to day as it did to the poet of yesterday, and more is seen in the waving grain or the starried dome than any poem can possibly convey. "I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." 7 7 Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey. REVELATION AND RECORD 91 The poem will inspire the devoted soul to see in nature what otherwise would not be seen. But in this sense it is only a guide, — although a most valuable and inestimable one. The poem sends us into God's out-of-doors and bids us take on our own account what it can in nowise give. The poem is a record of revelation, not revelation itself. However incomplete or unsat isfying or even uncertain the record may be, the revelation remains as the fact having in it the source and the fullness of the life it com municates. Nature always tells us more than we can repeat. So of truth. Philosophy, in its essence, is the same. Philosophies differ. In essence, philosophy is truth itself. In fact, philoso phies are attempts to express and fix the truth. The one is revelation; the others are record. Here again we see the fullness of the one and the partialness of the other. The etemality of the first and the temporality of the second ap pear without bidding. Each thinker, to a large extent, is the creation of his age. Even al though majestic souls have leaped the bounds of their time and projected themselves into the world of men not yet born, they were made by the conditions which surrounded them, of which they were a part, and out of which they had to take the very material for their struc ture. Hence, when man undertakes to record 92 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD his thinking he may be sure that it will not be perfect or imperishable. The record, doubt less, will contain a certain amount of truth, and so far as this goes, it will be as true as though it were the whole of truth. The nearer he is to the heart of things, the larger his mind and the longer his reach, the closer he will bear in upon truth and the wider will be the area he explores. But what he actually comprehends of truth will be but a small portion of truth itself. So, too, in matters of religion. Lofty souls have a spiritual sense which keeps them always in the precincts of pure religion and undefiled. And faithful souls, by earnest endeavor, come into the same possession. Often are we helped by the influence of some strong heart and lifted into a religious experience which otherwise we perhaps could not reach. But here as else where the revelation and the record are easily differentiated. The revelation is the dynamic force which out of life gives life; the record is a static transcript, without power of its own to move for itself or upon mankind. Religion based upon a written word and confined to that word has no expansive properties and must re main inert. To expand and have action it must be moved by a spirit which cannot be bound in the covers of a book. The robust minds of the Old and New Testaments empha- REVELATION AND RECORD 93 sized this fact. Jesus and Paul did not allow it to go unnoted. So also do we find that "Plato long ago exposed the necessary limita tions of the written word as a guide. 'When they are once written down,' he says, 'words are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not; and if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them ; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.' 'There is another kind of writing,' he goes on, 'graven on the tablets of the mind, of which the written word is no more than an image. This kind is alive ; it has a soul ; it can defend itself.' " 8 Because there is more in the record of the Scriptures than men have been able to spell out in word was the allegorical method of in terpretation resorted to. Allegory was defined by Heraclitus, in the fifth Century b. c, as the form of speech which says one thing and means another.9 Men would not have hit upon the allegorical method of interpretation had the written word been able to give a real record of the revelation behind the word. Religious lit- s Plato: Phaedrus. W. R. Inge, Faith and its Psy chology, p. 107, f. 9 Interpretation of the Bible, George Holley Gilbert, especially Ch. I, is full of interesting matter on this point. 94 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD erature would have been spared the fanciful and insipid subterfuges to get a meaning out of the Scriptures which was not there had the Biblical writers been able to clothe revelation fully with their words. This was impossible. Not only did large parts of it remain in its pure state uncovered, but men in different eras changed the clothing to conform to the newer style. The word of God remains unwritten. There have been many attempts to set it down in writing, but these have succeeded only par tially. Even although they may be complete as far as they go, and be satisfying and com forting, yet there is too much in the mind of God to be grasped and fixed by the puny dic tionary of man. The Logos still remains as a virgin content. There have been, there will be, many logos-doctrines, but no one, nor all of them, being man-made, will be comprehensive or exhaustive. Because the Word was life it became flesh and dwells among us. While the reach of intellect is too short to understand what this means, we believe that this Life is the Light of men and that . . . "the heart can apprehend A deeper purport than the brain may know." 10 10 Edward Rowland Sill: The World's Secret, Poeti cal Works, p. 136. REVELATION AND RECORD 95 And because the Word is life we may be sure it cannot be analyzed. In spite of any advance the vivisectionist may make he will never be able fully to analyze the living organism. It is an open question whether the knowledge gained through the vivisection of an animal or ganism will be sufficiently analogous for safe use in treating the human organism. As a matter of fact we can never know until the human organism has undergone vivisection. That this will be impossible we may assume from the indisposition of human beings to give themselves over to the vivisectionist. Living man does not want "a biology which is all necrology." Only a dead organism can be fully analyzed. Where life is there will be change, new adapta tions, sloughing off the old. Life can never become static so that final observations concern ing it may be made. It will always remain dy namic. Strictly speaking, we do not know how it may behave and exhibit itself under differing circumstances. It has a tendency to adapt it self to conditions and master situations. As it cannot be analyzed so also must its revelations remain unrecorded. What is put down hard and fast to-day may need to be changed to morrow. Medical books become antiquated in a decade. Real life, the ultimate Reality, re vealing itself to man, can never be caught and 96 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD held in words and signs. Its meaning can only be approximated. The value of the approxi mation will depend upon the degree in which man wills to put himself in communication with the spirit of life. He can give himself over to the contemplation of the poem, the painting, the sunset, until he is thrilled and enthralled by the truth underlying. So much the more can he come in conscious communion with the Spirit of all, who inspires the poet and painter, and who Himself is back of and in the sunset. The record of revelation is the attempt of man to give form to his conclusions of thought. Thought is impossible without formulation. All life pushes for form. Science gives us un mistakable evidence that the early plant and animal life underwent a long period of striving after form. The jelly-like masses of living mat ter strove with evident design to reach a skele ton form that would give structure and purpose to the gropings of life. We find this to be a fact not only in science but in development gen erally. This is a law well recognized in theory. It is only in practice that it is apt to be disre garded. Thinking and observant men are quite ready to admit that we cannot get along with out form of some kind. There never was a greater fallacy than the belief that any system, be it of science or religion or art or business or statecraft, could be built up without form, with- REVELATION AND RECORD 97 out a well defined substructure. The trouble is not that we believe we can do without form, but that we insist upon form and then become encrusted in it, — take the record for the revela tion. There are some of course who deride or are disturbed by the idea of doctrine in religion. They say let us get away from theology, it has served its purpose. We need not look very sharply to see that this very movement away from theology, so-called, is only a striving after form of another kind. Religion without the ology, without doctrine, without creed, is as unthinkable as a human being without an an atomical framework. Not against form in re ligious belief should men be exercised, but against fixity of form, lifeless form, the form that grows around the outside of a religion, holding it in, hampering it, until the natural religious instinct in sheer revolt asserts itself, and breaks the outer casing. Form, doctrine, creed, must be an inner framework around which the breathing, living, lifegiving structure can be built. There is a great deal said in favor of science as against religion, as though science were free from, and religion bound up in, form. But we find here the very same striving after form. Every experiment ever made assumes in some form the law of gravity and of the conservation 98 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD of energy. Without a full unwavering belief and faith in these two great laws the scientist would be such only in name. His very life — as a scientist as well as physically — is as de pendent on these assumptions as the existence and vitality of man's religious nature depend on his belief that God is, and that God is love. And when we study these laws of gravity and the conservation of energy we find, not that they are supreme in themselves, having their origin in and limited to the field of science, but that they can be accounted for only on the basis of a supreme and independent being who oper ates according to eternal laws and holds all energy in the hollow of his hand. They are the record of and not revelation itself. In the field of science as in religion there is danger of persistent clinging to form. There are scientists to-day who hold hopefully to the mistaken and misleading belief that a theory of evolution can in any way account for the origin of things. No man or school has been able to give an intelligent and reasonable account of the beginning of life, independent of an all wise and all powerful and all knowing being. And yet there are men who in steering clear of the Scylla of form in religion have been caught and held fast by the Charybdis of form in science. New light is shed on some great problem of truth as in organic evolution as a method of REVELATION AND RECORD 99 God's movement, and then men take the form and try to mold all life into it ; or as in psychol ogy when the mental and physical states of a growing child are found subject to tabulation and of great significance in determining what his proper training should be, and then the psychologist, seemingly losing sight of the wider application to life, spends his time with uncer tain details and tries to force moral and reli gious growth upon a procrustean bed ; or as in Bible study when the scholars found certain facts in the origin and development and tradi tion of the Scriptures and then failing to rec ognize their value in the constructive study and teaching of the Bible began to study details and to form untenable hypotheses as though the field of Scripture were a playground for the scholars and not the soil in which was planted the tree of life as a healing for the nations. We hear talk sometimes of Jesus as being utterly opposed to the Mosaic law and as usher ing in a great reformation, as though He were opposed to form. It was not against form, but the incrustation in form, that He uttered His protest. Even an iron casting, He would have shown us, as it comes from the molder's form, needs to have life put into it before it is ready to serve in its appointed place. It must be chiseled and filed and smoothed and polished to get the marks of the form off it. Jesus was 100 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD not so much a reformer as a conformer. He got the two great laws on which hang all the law and the prophets out of the mouth of the lawyer who was a master in the Mosaic law. Jesus' reply to him as he repeated the law was, "Thou art not far from the kingdom." At another time, when another lawyer asks Him: "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers at once: "What is writ ten in the law? How readest thou?" And when the lawyer quoted the Mosaic law, Jesus said: "Thou hast answered right, this do and thou shalt live." To the rich young ruler who asked how he could be saved, Jesus Himself quoted the law. When the young man an swered that he had kept the law from his youth up, Jesus replied: "Yes, but it has only been a form for you, you have never given it life." And this, giving life to form, was the one thing the young man lacked. It was this, too, that Jesus taught Nicodemus, the great scholar of the Sanhedrin: not that he must abolish the law, but that he must put life into it and live thereby. Even the little details of anise and cummin and tithing, of which the Pharisees made so much, Jesus did not cry down. He simply declared to them : "This ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone," to have found in the law a real liberty for showing mercy and doing justice and seeking the truth. REVELATION AND RECORD 101 Jesus makes a true distinction between revela tion and its record. He applies the law which we find in nature and in science to the progress of civilization generally. He came not to de stroy what God had revealed to the prophets and law-givers of old, but to fulfill it by in fusing into it His life. He who was most fully versed in the old law was best fitted to realize its new interpretation. This we learn from the brief account given us of Nicodemus u and the full detail of Paul's life. They found the es sential framework of belief, and on this built a structure that had flesh and blood and mus cle, actualizing a life of service and sacrifice which gave life to others and gave it abun dantly. 11 Francis G. Peabody in his The Religion of an Edu cated Man, p. 58, ff., has a striking paragraph on Nico demus, the "cultivated gentleman, bred in the schools of learning," whose "scientific mind" was led away from the traditions of the law to the freedom of life. "Step by step the mind of the educated man has moved, from criticism to sympathy, from sympathy to sacrifice, until at last, precisely when many an untrained mind takes flight, it is the scholar who brings the rational offering of service as his answer to the message of the Christ." George A. Gordon: Ultimate Conceptions of Faith, p. 152, f., has a similar characterization of Fichte, the philosopher, as he passes successively from Spinoza, who held him under "the domination of the material world," and Kant, who led him to fear that the "mental world is only a subjective dream," to the "ultimate vocation of man. He is finally a doer, and in this vocation he sets agoing within himself, and in the universe beyond him, all the bells of reality." THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN NATURE VII THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN NATURE "So far from dispensing with the need for a Divine First Cause, the theory of evolution, if only we have the faith in science to carry it to its conclusion, and the courage to interpret it, proves irrefragably that no evo lution was possible without a pre-existent Deity, and a Deity, moreover, transcendant, non-material, and non- phenomenal." — F. C. S. Schiller. By nature we mean the external world. As an unspeculative person, innocent of its deeper meanings, defined the term, nature is "all out of doors." Into this out of doors man is born and he finds it a continual source of wonder ment. He alone of living creatures gives evi dence of appreciating its marvels. A horse man will wind up the mountain slope accom panied by his faithful dog, and on some pro montory where suddenly a scene of grandeur is disclosed, will halt his horse to drink in the beauties of nature. He will be transfixed be fore the scene. The horse will not look upward but turn to grass, if any is about, and the dog will be concerned only in his master. To what 105 106 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD extent an infant is impressed with the glories of nature we do not know, although the roll of ocean wave will fill it with delight. We do know that there are some human beings so stolid and indifferent that they find no charm in the aspects of mountain, wood and ocean. But even they at times involuntarily are magnetized and feel the thrill. Nature calls and speaks, she has a message for all who will give heed, she is spiritually minded even as man is. Although it may be claimed that man reads into Nature his feelings and impulses, as he imputes to God human char acteristics, we find no answer to the question what it is in the wooded hill or the rolling sea that stirs the feebngs and impulses. Those who have exhibited a large degree of spiritual- mindedness have also brought forth from nature the deepest impressions of soul life behind her ex ternal forms. We find that the musings of the poet come as close to the facts of nature as the investigations of the scientist. Some minds, given to coldly calculated comparisons, find in terest in showing how the real poet and the pure scientist agree. They take delight in putting their conclusions into print.1 While it is in structive and satisfying to know that the poet can square his meditations with the axioms of i See for example, Sir Norman Lockyer and Winifred Lockyer: Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature. THE RECORD IN NATURE 107 the scientist, this knowledge is not necessary and does not help us to understand nature any better. We instinctively feel that the poet goes behind all the forms of nature down to her moods and discovers her real essence. He can feel her pulse beat. He need not vivisect her forms to determine how the blood courses her veins. He knows she has a soul. For not otherwise could she breathe into man the very heart of her Hfe. If poetry agrees with science we welcome the fact. But we do not read the poem because the scientist can approve it. We read it for its own sake, because it gives evidence of a life which science, as such, cannot fathom. For this reason it is immaterial whether or not the first chapters of Genesis are true to scientific fact. Their message is deeper than scientific investigation or description can go. If they were based on scientific knowledge only, we should have to stop where the scientist must cease his labor, that is, at the point where he is forced to declare his inability to account for the origin of Hfe. Over his pathway is the sign : "Thus far and no further." But the poet can pass right on. Out of the depths of his heart he can delve into the deeps of nature. Nature has a soul. She is spiritually minded, we repeat. This is her record of reve lation and is more clearly to be read than the 108 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD prints of her presence in rocks and strata. The psalmist of old speaking of the Almighty said : "Thy way is in the sea and Thy pathway in the great waters and Thy footsteps are not known." 2 The sea can bear no imprint of His steps ; neither can the land. But to psalmist and to poet and to every impressionable soul the whereabouts of the Almighty are unmistakable. In the stilly recesses of the forest, especially where the redwoods tower hundreds of feet high, that soul is indeed dumb and blind which cannot hear the voice of the Eternal and see the work of His hands. And the forest is only one of the many places where we can feel and know God. "Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, — both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being." 3 But this is unscientific. We are permitting our feelings to manufacture our facts. We are 2 Psalm 77:19. s Wordsworth: Tintem Abbey. THE RECORD IN NATURE 109 finding in outer nature what we feel in the in ner man. Yet the force that impels us here is without as well as within. We have discovered how to tell the age of trees by the annual rings they make. We say confidently that the av erage life of a redwood is from eighteen hundred to two thousand years. But which is the more remarkable, the fact that man discovered the markings, or that the trees are so marked? Is it mere chance that makes the markings? If so, they serve a most useful purpose. They stimulate an activity in man which leads him to look for other evidences of law and order. This fact, with similar facts innumerable, has caused the birth of science. Knowledge is born as man observes facts and it grows as he makes inferences. His observation does not make the fact ; the fact leads him to observe. There were redwoods in the forests of Cali fornia before the patriarchs were born. They must have had the same annual markings then that they have now. It is inconceivable that man was ever responsible for the marks. They existed even although Abraham or his fore fathers or contemporaries did not know this fact. Such facts give man a stimulus to push his mind's quest ever deeper and further. He finds no frontiers in nature. Forevermore is he a pioneer exploring, conquering, and colonizing new territories. As Columbus moved westward 110 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD by the impulse of faith and discovered the Amer ican continent, so the argonaut moved toward the Pacific and uncovered an Empire. We call him the adventurer, not because he was wild and foolish, but because he was hardy and brave. So the pioneers in knowledge have made their ventures. They speak of the unity of nature and of the conservation of energy with the con sequent reign of law and unmistakable order. Phenomena which man was able to' observe led him to draw conclusions concerning the exist ence of external facts. The further he pushed his observations the more was he forced to be lieve in a single cause and a unifying source of all existence. The laws of the conservation of energy and of the unity in nature were un avoidable ventures of the scientist's faith. And these led irresistibly to a further venture of faith which declares that the source of energy and the unifying cause of nature is a personal Being with mind and will and heart. The activity of such a Being implies personal and intelligent work. There is an impersonal and unconscious working seen in many of the phenomena of nature. The scientist speaks of chemicals and acids working when they are in the state of fermentation or effervescence. And there is a power at work here germinating and changing both solids and fluids as if under the THE RECORD IN NATURE 111 direction of an intelligence and will. Of course there is no agent discovered at work and to the superficial onlooker no intelligence appar ently is present. This spontaneous ongoing, therefore, has so impressed the minds of some observers that they have concluded the whole material world and finally man must have come into existence in just this way. That somehow matter got into a state of ferment and gradually the worlds were thrown into space, the moun tains were piled up, the seas covered, lower and then higher forms of life emerged, until finally man was evolved. On this theory, according to Haeckel, man is only "an affair of chance, the froth and fume at the wave-top of a sterile ocean of matter." But this theory has such insuperable diffi culties that it can be held only by one who has let the speculation of his mind make a bankrupt of his reason. What is matter? And how did it get to working? The exponents of this view never stop to answer these questions. Neither do they seem to note how inextricably they get bound up in their own phraseology. Matthew Arnold's well known definition of God that He is "the Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," goes to pieces, on the theory of impersonal cause, as soon as we try to under stand the meaning of his words. A single word 112 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD in his beautiful phrase lands him where he did not care to alight. "Now what is meant here by the word makes? For the word necessarily calls up three, and only three, kinds of 'mak ing;' either 'making' voluntarily, as a man makes; or 'making' instinctively, as a beast makes; or 'making' neither voluntarily nor in stinctively, but unconsciously, just as an eddy or a current may be said to 'make.' Of these three kinds of 'making5 which is meant ?" 4 If the Eternal is not a person then the righteous ness which it causes is neither voluntary, in telligent, nor conscious ; and hence it would be meaningless to man. Man can have no knowl edge of that which! is unintelligent or incapable of being made intelligent. Herbert Spencer said that "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipa tion of motion ; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." 5 These words are certainly grandiloquent. Yet one of England's ablest jurists who is also a mathematician of note, de clared publicly before a critical audience that "every important word in this definition is either * Abbot: Through Nature to Christ, Vol. I, p. 44. 5 First Principles, p. 397. THE RECORD IN NATURE 113 unmeaning or wrong, and ought to be reversed or combined with its opposite." 6 Science has many gaps, we are told. These gaps must be filled up with temporary hy potheses constructed by scientific faith. The scientist must believe, for the time being, in what he cannot see. This we readily grant. But an hypothesis must make for mental sanity and intellectual order or it is nothing. We are ready to argue from the order and beauty and goodness that predominate in nature to an in telligent being whose expression is order and beauty and goodness. But we balk when asked to believe in a blind and unconscious power as the responsible agent of all that we see about us, a power that can neither think nor will. We cannot deduce order from chaos, light from darkness, intelligence from unconsciousness, in a word, something from nothing. Scientific faith is not to be derided or disparaged. We owe too much to it for any such procedure. But when it is made to replace and to deride all other faith, it leads only to the darkness of de spair, to that city of dreadful night where "The world rolls round forever like a mill, It grinds out death and life and good and ill, It has no purpose, heart, or mind or will." 8 Lord Grimthorpe: Journal Victorian Institute, No. 114 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD where man is ground "to slow years of bitter breath" and then is ground "back into eternal death," 7 where not a knavish brain, but a weak pair of lungs is the real evil, and where man's highest duty to the race is not to punish the vicious and criminal, but to weed out the de fective and feeble. This is the world of a blindly and uncon sciously working physical nature, and to this scientific faith run wild will conduct us. It is not the world of the God and Father of the hu man spirit to which the promptings of man's inner necessities ever lead, the world of a loving and caring Father who is forever working and waiting for the manifestation of His children. My Father worketh, and He worketh personally and intelligently and for your welfare. This is the word of Jesus. And when we consider God's work, we say with all the confidence and with far more intelligence, what the early He brew said: "And God saw everything that He had made and behold it was very good." Only the workman who has devised the plan and who is superintending its carrying out, is qualified to say whether or not the finished product is or will be good. We can trust his judgment. 68, p. 291. See Frank Ballard: Miracles of Unbelief, p. 80, f., also Delo Corydon Grover: The Volitional Element in Knowledge and Belief, p. 159-167. i James Thomson: City of Dreadful Night. THE RECORD IN NATURE 115 "The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well enveloped, I swear to you there are divine things more beauti ful than words can tell." 8 In the early days God's presence in the world was felt through the indications of His might and power. The Hebrew writers set this fact forth in metaphors which will forever continue to impress and please the student of nature. The same is true of the great nature poets of all ages. In the beginning men seemed to be only conscious of the titanic power of the Almighty as exhibited in storms or earthquakes or water spouts. They did not realize the energy be hind every sprouting blade of grass or budding tree. The gently falling rain or the noiseless rising sun did not particularly impress them as evidence of God's power. Of the law of gravi tation they had no idea, as the earth and not the sun was the center of their system. But they had a real conception of God's pres ence in nature. They were as impressed as we by "the powers that make our whole solar sys tem travel in space toward an unknown goal, that keep our earth together and awhirling round the sun, that sway the tides and rule the a Walt Whitman: Song of the Open Road. 116 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD winds, that mold the dewdrop and build the crystal, that clothe the lily and give us energy for every movement and every thought — in short, that keep the whole system of things agoing." 9 Forever and ever man has found the universe immeasurable. We can have no conception of a million miles of space, yet our sun is 93,000,000 miles away and the farthest star we can see is a million times farther away than the sun. In every molecule a stellar sys tem is discovered which, infinitesimally, resem bles the solar system. Light travels 186,000 miles a second, another fact of which we can make no mental picture. Yet the energy of the Almighty is sufficient to extend over the meas ureless leagues of space and we on our planet have all the light and heat we need. And with all this power in the universe there is evidence of a firm control. We find order and not chaos. "He appointed the moon for seasons; The sun knoweth his going down." 10 The power of the Almighty is in check. "We have begun to conceive of Divine action as uni form, incessant, and general, throughout each and every region of the universe, however vast o J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 4. io Psalm 104:19. THE RECORD IN NATURE 117 or however tiny, so that the infinite whole is animated forever by one immutable principle of life; and this conception we call, in common parlance, the conception of a government of law and not of caprice." u We need not fear that planets will go crashing down through space or that the earth will speed on uncon trolled. Because order is discovered in the world of nature men have assumed that it is an explana tion of the universe and due to the reign of law. But, as has been well said, "order is not an ex planation of anything, but something that it self calls for explanation." 12 In trying to ex plain order we cannot stop short of the mind and will and purpose of God. The telescope and the microscope disclose order everywhere. The more we study the more we are amazed. As a great railroad system is a network of or derly arrangement conceived and controlled by a master mind, so is the universe a system of in ter-relation working as if mechanically in the orderly ongoing of things. But there is no danger of collision due to forgetfulness or mis takes as in the case of the railroad. The far- seeing eye and the firm hand have all parts in control at the same time and "the Italian wind, n John Fiske: What is Inspiration? in Darwinism and Other Essays, p. 115. 12 W. K. Brooks : Foundations of Zoology, p. 287. 118 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD gliding over the crest of the Matterhorn, is as firmly ruled as the earth in its orbital revolu tion round the sun." 13 The order in Nature issues naturally in adaptation. Part fits into part and everything has its place. "How well the structure of bone is suited to stand strains, how well the bird's skeletal and muscular systems are adapted for flight, how well the heart is constructed for its ceaseless work, what a fine instrument the eye is, how readily the leaf insects escape detection when they alight on a branch, how effective a contrivance is the Venus Fly-trap ! But so one might go on for hours." 14 Of what good are the earthworms, we may ask. They have met only the contempt of man kind. And yet they have had a most important part to play in the history of civilization. God has adapted the earthworm to the soils of the earth so that cultivation and growth could be possible. "By their burrowing they loosen the earth, making way for the plant rootlets and the raindrops ; by bruising the soil in their giz zard they reduce the mineral particles to more useful form ; by burying the surface with stuff brought up from beneath they were plowers before the plow, and by burying leaves they have made a great part of the vegetable mold 13Tyndall: Fragments of Science. "J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 25, f. THE RECORD IN NATURE 119 over the whole earth. There may be 50,000 or 500,000 of them in an acre ; they often pass ten tons of soil per acre per annum through their bodies ; and they cover the surface at the rate of three inches in fifteen years." 15 If these were not the careful words of the sober scientist we should begin to doubt. Instead we wonder. "O Lord, how manifold are thy works ! In wisdom hast thou made them all; The earth is full of thy riches." la "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the jour ney-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and the grain of sand, and the egg of the wren. And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the par lors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depressed head sur passes any statue. And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextil- bons of infidels." " The orderliness and adaptation of God's ac- ib J. Arthur Thomson: The Bible of Nature, p. 32. ie Psalm 104:24. " Walt Whitman: Song of Myself. 120 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD tivity in the universe make for beauty and pleas ure. Every foot of God's earth is marked by His artist finger. Not only the aesthetic but also the patriotic is stirred in man as he looks upon the beauty of his own country. He starts across the Santa Cruz range of mountains, for example. He follows the brooks and rivulets purring by the wayside, he ascends to the red wood crested summit and sees a thousand spires sending their vanes aloft, and Roman basilica and Gothic cathedral in perfect form silhouetted against the sky. Involuntarily he cries, "I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills." The beauty in Nature touches the emotional in man. But it is not by any means mere senti ment which prompts such words as the follow ing: "What inexpressible joy for me to look up through the apple blossoms and the flutter ing leaves and to see God's love there ; to listen to the thrush that has built his nest among them, and to feel God's love, who cares for the birds, in every note that swells his little throat ; to look beyond to the bright, blue depths of the sky, and feel they are a canopy of blessing — • the roof of the house of my Father; that if clouds pass over it, it is the unchangeable light they veil ; that, even when the day itself passes, THE RECORD IN NATURE 121 I shall see that night only unveils new worlds of light, and to know that if I could unwrap fold after fold of God's universe, I should only unfold more and more blessing and see deeper and deeper into the love which is at the heart of all." 18 Yes, nature has its forbidding aspect. Two weeks ago the vegetable man promised to de liver us some choice strawberries. To-day he comes with longdrawn face and tells us he has killed eighty-five gophers in his berry patch, but only after his berry crop had been completely de stroyed. We build a comfortable bungalow on the side of a mountain overlooking a glorious panorama of nature which the most wondrously inspired artist with unlimited time at his dis posal could imagine. A cloudburst, unan nounced, hollows out of a V-shaped chasm one hundred feet and more at the top and takes bungalow and all around it away in a moment's time. We clear some land, build our house, plow our fields, set out our trees and vines and sow our seed. If left alone nature will soon re claim its own. Weeds will grow through the gravel on the walks, witch grass and wild morn ing glory will cover the fields, suckers and wild branches will shoot out from grape vine and tree, thrip and other pests innumerable will prey on is Elizabeth Charles, quoted by Charles F. Aked: The Courage of the Coward, p. 245, f. 122 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD the fruit or noble branches until orchard or arched walk is denuded. The rose has its thorn, the wild flower its poison ivy, the pure white lily too often its muck. And here, where I am writ ing, beside a babbling mountain brook, in a bower of redwood, oak, and elm, with birds all about gladsomely singing, and squirrels chas ing each other in glee, the mosquitoes present their bills with an unpleasant rasp and I must pay the score! A word of Scripture comes to us at this point as a satisfactory and profoundly impressive reply. "Go forth and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it." Man's task is not only to multiply in the earth, but to replenish and subdue it. There are lacunae to be filled and waste places to be reclaimed. And the very forces we can refer to as accountable for the desert conditions are also the factors which make wild the cultivated spaces if left uncared for. It is a man's job, this subjugation of na ture. It is no work for the pessimist or the stoic. Neither the grumbler who stands up and lets his snarl be heard nor the indifferent who lies down and lets the world roll over him has a place in this universe. Nature has a call to man. When he listens he will discover it is not the call of the wild, but a call of the domestic. The world is not moving from order to chaos but from chaos to order. Cataclysms may be THE RECORD IN NATURE 123 incidental to the movement, but the forces of nature do not prey upon man as something external and inimicable. All in all, they are beneficent in purpose and make man feel at home in his own world. They help him to ar range his daily economies. As he goes to his labors he learns that "The world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good." 19 He finds the record of a working and construct ive Spirit rather than that of an intimidating and destructive force. is Browning: Fra Lippo Lippi. THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN HUMAN LIFE VIII THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN HUMAN LIFE "The universe presents itself in man variously sxm- dered and graded. It becomes all important to shift upward the center of gravity in his life, thereby ena bling him to co-operate in the construction of the uni verse. Without man's participation and decision, the movement at this particular point can make no further progress. What could be better calculated to give his life meaning and value than this possibility of rising to a level of spiritual freedom, to a life which, in the very act of consolidating itself, allows him to share in the fruition and development of the whole reality?" — Ru dolf Eucken. Our knowledge, as Emerson has said, is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds. We fail to grasp this truth and to note that what we know to-day is the result of count less factors and forces which from the ages have been opening up the eternal deeps of truth and fertibzing so much of the mental field against which the mind of man can react. This is one of those general statements which give the in dividual in his work-a-day world but little com fort. 127 128 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Man wants a principle which he can apply. He knows there is mystery about him. He knows full well how little he knows. He fails to understand nature. Much of it is harsh and forbidding. Often to him it acts cruelly and arbitrarily. He fails to understand the events of which he is a part. Why, when he is trying with his mightiest strength to do right, should it go ill with him? Why, when he is patient beyond endurance, trustful beyond the province of confidence, gentle and mild beyond even the last claim which meekness and humility can make, should it continue to go ill with him, should persecution be added to insult and the cross of Calvary to the crown of thorns? Why should the deeps of the soul be finally forced to leap their bounds, and that last cry be wrung from the broken spirit : "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On such a cross as this good and brave men have been crucified. The written and unwritten annals of life record many such instances. We read them in books and in the lives of people we know. We have said: Why are the ways of God so strangely inscrutable and so inscrutably strange ? "Oh, this false for real, This emptiness which feigns solidity, — Ever some gray that's white, and dun that's black — THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 129 When shall we rest on the thing itself, Not on its semblance?" 1 So the sea of faith seems to recede and leave the shore of life dry and sandy. The waters go out with the noise of thunder. We are alone in the ensuing silence. The horror of great darkness is upon us. But the gloom is soon dispelled. Hardly be fore man has thought to consider himself alone and abandoned to his fate the tide begins to turn. The great sea rolls back upon itself : first the ripples, then the waves, finally the billows. "If I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for a time : I press God's lamp Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day." * This is the hardihood of faith, the principle acording to which man applies himself to his daily tasks. It is the faith which precedes rea son even in realms wherein we think we stand on solid ground and can walk by sight. It is the faith that heralds knowledge as the shafts of light which shoot up from behind the hills an nounce the rising sun ; yea more, which seem to pull the sun up out of his bed of darkness and 1 Browning: A Bean Stripe. 2 Browning: Paracelsus. 130 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD summon him to usher in the day. On the one hand man is sure he is helpless and ignorant. His intellectual activities when shut in to them selves assure him of the fact. "This much is clearly understood — Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge — just so much as shows that still It ends in ignorance on every side." 3 But he is not ready to rest here. Just when the mind Goliath has seemed to possess the field, the heart David comes on the scene. "I stretch lame hands and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope." 4 This living faith is the essence of our being. It is the record of revelation in man. We can not reason until we have such faith. We have faith in the honesty of certain men and we rea son that they will act after a certain manner. Here is the faith of reason which underlies the stability of social, commercial, and political ac tivities. Even although we reason more or less on an uncertainty because the fickleness of men 3 Browning: Francis Furini. * Tennyson: In Memoriam, IV. THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 131 must be taken into consideration, the principle of our reason based on faith remains. We have faith in the law of gravitation and on this faith we declare certain results to be inevitable. We are no more sure here of our actual knowledge than we are in the case of honesty. Because certain conclusions follow certain premises we have unshakable faith that such a progression will always obtain. And we reason freely on this basis. We see clearly that if we could have no faith in nature, this world would become a chaos just as surely as the stability of business would be undermined if we could not trust the men with whom we must deal. The difficulties of the age in which particular men live are not sufficient to shake their faith in the soundness of nature and reality. They believe the tide will turn and lift their stranded craft from off the beach. Every age is a diffi cult age in which to bve. We show a lack of historical perspective if we claim that our pres ent era presents problems more intricate and more intense for our handling than problems of past ages presented for the men of those days. If the questions we must answer to-day seem more perplexing than the problems our fathers had to face, it is because by natural ex pansion and the entering in upon rightful do mains, our life has become more varied and com plex. But it is the life up to which we have 132 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD grown and of which we have the capacities to be master. The problems of the present issue out of the progress of the past. They are our heritage, and it is our privilege to solve them. The intensity and worth of the life we are living are indicated by the way we face obstacles and front difficulties. As we read of the trials and persecutions of the early Christians we marvel at the soul power they developed and the heroism they exhibited. And we fail too often to appreciate the source of their strength which enabled them at once to endure hardship, to master difficulties, and to live a life in that day which would be the avenue and the guide for the life of the morrow. Their source of help came from that intangible, im material, power house which can be nowhere lo cated, but whose dynamic currents are every where felt. With these currents they con nected, and thereby acquired the power which made them strong in heart. They were enabled to drive away fear. This fact cannot be too greatly appreciated. Fear is so dominant in the lives of men that a pessi mistic philosopher declared heroism to be only the art of concealing fear. Men fear their fel low men, they fear the elements, they fear dan ger, punishment, misfortune, losses, unpleasant duties, difficulties, exertion, sacrifice, pain, death. We analyze fear and find that it belongs to the THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 133 childhood of the race and the infant periods of the developed man. The soul trembles and fears because it has not grown up, because it has not gone out into the dark and boldly faced any evil supposed to be lurking there. In the early beginning the element of fear was the most characteristic feature of religion. Men were terrified by the expressions of nature and so these powers, which they knew could at any moment be hostile and fatal to them, drove them first to prayer and then to sacrifice as a means of appeasing divine wrath. As the thoughtful used their powers of intro spection they began to see that fear has no place in the life of a man who had mastered him self, and hence should not be a controlling factor in the religious life. So the best pagan philosophy, both in Greece and Rome, declared against fear as childish. "The happy man," according to Socrates, was "he who could put all fears and inexorable fate under his feet." But this view of fear led to a stoic fatalism; a bold and too often a bragging determination to take whatever came in life, implying that only an inexorable fate ruled the universe and not a supreme mind and a loving will. The pagan philosophers, with all their sub tlety and wisdom, had not learned that it is not will power in man, but perfect love which cast- eth out all fear. While they were developing 134 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD their systems of thought and philosophies of life, the Jewish thinkers were setting down in imperishable words their ideas of fear and its relation to religion and fully developed life. "I will look unto the hills," one of their Psalm ists declared. And then he said: "From what other source can my help come?" And his fel low-men voiced the same question with its im plied answer. So the heights about them be came the hills of hope, their bulwarks, their towers of strength. The "fret not thyself" of the Old Testament and especially of the thirty- seventh Psalm is merely the abbreviated, the terse, way of saying: "Fear thou not, for I am with thee, be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee, yea I will help thee, yea I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." And even the children sang: "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me." Here is a fact of considerable consequence. It indicates that man has been spurred on by an innate force. He has believed in himself because he could believe in a power stronger than himself. Dante found truth centered in his own being which he related to a higher and dominant Being. His beliefs were all colored by this fact. As he followed his beliefs he de voted himself to their development. He sought truth wherever it was to be found and for the purpose of using it. He was not interested THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 135 in truth only for its own sake, but for the measure it would give him to remedy the defects in his thought and life, and hence enable him to lead others into a fuller and more perfect bfe. He imbued himself with the writings of Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah because he found this written revelation of God corresponding accurately with God's revelation in history and nature. This he used as a ful crum to move his own and subsequent ages. We turn to Milton and find a similar example of concentrated belief in righteousness and pu rity. He believed he was "not merely the coun tryman of Shakespeare and Cromwell, but of Homer and Sophocles, of Dante and Tasso, of Luther and Melanchton, — of all men who ac knowledge the sway of the beautiful, the noble, and the right." He could write nothing not dictated by this belief. He saw the righteous ness and love of God as declared by the proph ets. He appreciated truth and goodness in na ture and led these back to God as their source. For his beliefs he was ready to make any sacri fice. Against the advice of his physicians he wrote his "Defence of the People of England" for which he paid the price of his eyesight. So we do not wonder that Wordsworth, two hundred years later, sang to him: 136 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD "Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay." Emerson was equally intense in his convic tions as to the essential goodness and truth of the world. "Nothing shall warp me," he said, "from the belief that every man is a lover of the truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malig nity in nature. The entertainment of the prop osition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no athe ism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet." 5 Tennyson believed so strongly that God reveals Himself in every human soul and his faith was so intense in the divine principle in the world that Jowett was led to say of him, "he had a strong desire to vindicate the ways of God to man." 6 With Dante, with Milton, with Emerson, with Tennyson, with all the lofty spirits of the world's history, men believe in the righteousness, the love, the truth, that writes itself in and b Works, Vol. Ill, p. 263, f., in the essay New Eng land Reformers. « Quoted by Arthur Christopher Benson in his Alfred Tennyson, p. 114. THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 137 through nature and hews out the destiny of the ages. And with them men believe that under all and in all is the God with whom the patriarchs spoke face to face, whom the prophets declared, and to whom the psalmists sang their praises. Men hold to their belief in God because it as sures them of their sanity. Heine's well known words are not too strong. "The mere discus sion of anyone of the existence of God causes me to feel a strange disquietude, an uneasy dread, such as I once experienced in visiting New Bedlam when for a moment, losing sight of my guide, I was surrounded by mad men. God is all that is, and doubt of His existence is doubt of life itself, it is death." Strong and forbearing souls resent more quickly perhaps than anything else the icono clast in religion. They make a clean cut dis tinction between one who tears down because he has means and material to build better, and one who destroys for the sake of destruction. Care ful men have been led to the verge of un justness in their criticisms because they believed the positive note was lacking in the writing or preaching of other men. Carlyle, for ex ample, has been regarded as purely negative in his thought. While we cannot endorse the statement, yet it is interesting to note how se rious men will narrow their usually broad views in judgment upon others whom they regard as 138 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD unsound in their beliefs. Carlyle "hates false hood," said one of these critics, "rather than loves truth, and is a disorganizer of wrong rather than an organizer of right. His writ ings tend to split the mind into a kind of splen did disorder, and we purchase some shining fragments of thought at the expense of a weak ened will. . . . His negative thought, therefore, can never become a positive thing; it can pout, sneer, gibe, growl, hate, declaim, destroy; but it cannot cheer, it cannot cre ate." 7 He was among prose writers what some hold that Matthew Arnold was among the poets. They shudder at the statement that "The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world." 8 Even so appreciative a critic as Professor Wood- berry must reject Matthew Arnold's "creed of illusion and futility in life." "From a poet so deeply impressed with this aspect of existence, i Edwin P. Whipple: Character and Characteristic Men, p. 120, f. s Dover Beach. THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 139 and unable to find its remedy or its counterpart in the harmony of life, no joyful or hopeful word can be expected and none is found." 9 His Dover Beach surely places him "among the skeptic or agnostic poets." "the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams. So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkbng plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night." Matthew Arnold's proclamation concerning bfe and destiny, and other proclamations like his, came from "the voice of a regret grounded in the intellect." And this is where men, im bued with the thought of God's consistency and goodness, take issue with him. However fas cinating the thought or seductive the form of his poetry, they will not bear with him. He sought to understand fundamental reality through his mind. "It is plain to see that in the old phrase, 'the pride of the intellect' lifts its lonely column over the desolation of every page" of his writings.10 8 George E. Woodberry: Essay on Matthew Arnold in A Library of the World's Best Literature, Century Edition, p. 853. io George E. Woodberry, op. cit., p. 854. 140 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD That man cannot sense the spiritual world and know the things of God by intellectual striv ing only is one of the strongest proofs of God working in man. When man reasons he is apt to become metaphysical, when he prays he can not help but become ethical. True prayer is the longing of the soul expressed in activity which undertakes, as far as possible, to bring about the answer to the prayer. It is useless to pray for goodness in life without trying to be good. The ethical outgo of life, therefore, is not based primarily on reason. It is based more particularly on activity incited by the emotions. The grand and impelling hymns which make their appeal through the religious art both of the poet who wrote them and of the musician who composed them are precious to every devout soul. They have their sway be cause of the Gospel fact on which they are based. Back of and in them is a faith that holds supreme in spite of reason to the con trary. The strong songs of Tennyson and Whittier and Watts and the Wesleys, to say nothing of the Latin and early German Chris tian hymns, weave their strange spell over the intellectually minded as well as over the untu tored. Others than Matthew Arnold have been unwillingly held by the charm of the Cross in terpreted in song.11 On this spiritual avenue n The late Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren), writing THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 141 and through the emotional vent men satisfy the cravings and longing of the soul. But the evidence of God in man is found not only in the faith that there is Reality in the universe consciously striving to realize goodness and truth. It is also and quite as much indi cated by the practice we find among men to actualize goodness and truth. This we note con tinually in the ordinary outgoes of daily life. Take the matter of social relationships. We are not all naturally inclined, especially if we are to receive no reward therefrom, to the help of others. Self-protection might well be called the first law of human nature. It has a won derful expansive power, and from being simply a measure of defense, protecting one from the assaults or encroachments of another, it widens into a means of aggression and becomes a sys tem of taking from the other all that can be le gitimately — or in its worst estate, all that can be illegitimately — taken. Yet the very fact that in the awful stress of business and social competition there are men found who are true to their trusts, is an indica- for the British Weekly, says that only a few moments before his death, Matthew Arnold declared the hymn tcWhen I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of Glory died," to be "the finest in the English language." Quoted in Christianity Vindicated by its Enemies, Daniel Doiv chester, p. 110, f. 142 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD tion of the real character and soundness of hu manity. Men and women are found in abun dance who are not only faithful to the duties they must assume, but who also are willing to serve their kind without the expectation of re ward. We could expect little of the coming generations if fathers and mothers should de termine they would do nothing for their chil dren without an adequate return. The future is safe because parents in a million homes toil and slave that not they but their children may reap the results. "I cannot save myself from this deprivation in life," says the father, "but to the extent of my power, I will save my chil dren therefrom. They shall have the opportu nities I lacked." Because of unrequited serv ice parenthood is hallowed, and God is evidenced in human life. Of every real benefactor it can be said that he saved others but could not save himself. The countless barefooted boys and ragged girls who are picked up from the streets and properly fed and clothed and schooled through the bene ficence of some charitable gift are saved in a sense in which their benefactor could not save himself. The man who helps to build a school, an asylum, a church, sets forces in motion for the salvation of generations yet unborn, when he himself can reap no benefit therefrom. Many of the masters whose productions in THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 143 art or literature or music inspire and ennoble us to-day, received but scant recognition during their lifetime; none of them full merit. Some of them lived and toiled and died rejected by their generation. They saved others, they could not save themselves. The hardy men who sailed unknown seas, plunged into tangled forests, crossed heated plains, and climbed icy mountains to open up a new country, saved in the past and will save in the future innumerable millions of human souls. What was their reward and what place have they in our estimation? Kipling answers in his poem The Explorer. After this stout heart has refused to remain where civilization would have afforded him happiness and plenty, and has dis covered the new country and blazed the way amid hardships that almost took his life, he says:"Well I know who'll take the credit — all the clever chaps that followed — Came, a dozen men together — never knew my des ert fears; Tracked me by the camps I'd quitted, used the water-holes I'd hollowed. They'll go back and do the talking. They'll be called the Pioneers ! They will find my sites of townships — not the cities that I set there. 144 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD They will rediscover rivers — not my rivers heard at night. By my own old marks and bearings they will show me how to get there, By the lonely cairns I builded they will guide my feet aright. Have I named one single river? Have I claimed one single acre? Have I kept one single nugget — (barring sam ples) ? No, not I ! Because my price was paid me ten times over by my Maker. But you wouldn't understand it. You go up and occupy." 12 A few cities and streets named after Colum bus and a World's Fair in his memory are but meager attempts to honor him worthily. We cannot pay our indebtedness. So with all the commanding men of the world's history, whether recognized as such in their day or not. They have left to us and to coming ages a heritage which never can be paid or fitly commemorated. Their unrequited service has made the progress of the world possible. The father and mother do not save themselves from deprivation and sacrifice because of love for their children. The missionary, the bene factor, does not save himself from hardship, iso- i2 Collected Verse, p. 21, f. THE RECORD IN HUMAN LIFE 145 lation, or the mere hoarding of money, because of his sincere love for humanity. Even the ex plorer, after making due allowance for the ele ment of pure adventure or even gain, is really actuated by the desire to advance civilization. And this is love : love that cannot be annihilated, that is not mortal, that has none of the features and elements of mortality, but is a perennial fountain of life, springing from the very deeps of inextinguishable Being. This love in prac tice is what truth is in theory. Whenever man has received God's truth it has always been through his desire to work it out. Truth with out form and substance is void. It must become flesh and be active. Browning sums it up briefly when he says : "Take all in a word ; the truth in God's breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: Though He is so bright and we so dim We are made in His Image to witness Him." Not the men who add to the quantity of life but those who deepen its quality are accounted great. Truth becomes incarnate in them and hence realizes itself in love. They witness Him. They bear conclusive evidence of the fact of God in man. Their lives count in the silent, ef fective perpetuities of civilization and progress. The unseen power they exert enables them to 146 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD influence their generations for good and is in kind the very power God exerts to accom plish all His purposes. It is the power which enters into man and which he in turn works out. Paul grasps and fixes this truth when he says : "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God working in you to do and to will of his good pleasure." 13 is Phil. 2:12-13. See Preface, ante, p. VII. THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN HISTORY IX THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN HISTORY "The great proof of God's presence in history and the sole significance of that presence lie in the mental and moral realm. The slow moralization of life and society, the enlightenment of conscience and its grow ing empire, the deepening sense of responsibility for the good order of the world and the well-being of men, the gradual putting away of old wrongs and foul diseases and blinding superstitions, — these are the great proofs of God in history." — Borden P. Bowne. Man, in the thought of his Maker, is not so much a human being as a divine becoming. Civilization, therefore, is not a product, but a process. This is true as we saw in Nature. From the time when the worlds were thrown out into space by the eternal movement until this present moment she has been at work bring ing out new forms and perfecting the old ones. So man is in process of development. The dictum, "I think, therefore I am," must be sup plemented by another: "I am, therefore I must develop." From the moment when man became 149 150 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD conscious of those stirrings within him which enabled him to throw out from himself whole worlds of thought even until now he has been in a process of development. And with nature he must continue this process. Initiation, de velopment, perfecting, this is the order. There will be a continual breaking up of the old and the beginning of the new. These transitions will often be times of confusion and strife, when man will "hear of wars and rumors of wars," and when there shall be "famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places." But these periods of storm and stress should not cause unnecessary worry, for, to quote the language of Jesus, "all these things must come to pass." Again these "last days," the times of leaving the past and venturing out into the future, will be periods of absolute peace when development will be as quiet as the surface of a steady stream. Thus onward man goes, whether convulsively or gently ; by revolution or evolution. In this ongoing we find the fac tors that make for civilization in war, there fore, as well as in peace. As war has played so important a part in the affairs of nations it must be considered in any discussion of the record of revelation in his tory. Men have claimed that civilization has! never been furthered by war. This thought, Jiowever, is only the child of the wish that it The record In history isi might be so. When we look at the facts we find that war has not only been a very vital element in the progress of civilization, but seemingly, from the human point of view, a necessary one. A drop of water, as the miscroscope shows us, is a huge battlefield where countless pygmies are waging war against each other. And this condition is but a miniature of our own world in its early stages when self-protection was the supreme law, and might was right. Even as we come down the corridors of time and enter the more spacious rooms of man's bettered con dition, we find the animals of greed and rapac ity and boasted strength still rampant. Be cause man has been able only slowly to slough off the clay from which he has emerged, war has been a necessary sequence. In this inevitable condition we see the won derful adaptive power of the Creator. For He has ordained that even the wrath of man shall praise Him. Where He has not been able to work with the best means, He has used what He has had. History has ample illustration of this fact, and there is nothing more suggestive in the development of mankind than this evidence of God's supreme patience with man's imperfec tions and His wisdom in using whatever good there is in man. Egypt went out to fight Baby lonia. The tiger in man was let loose. But good as well as harm came out of the conflict. 152 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Pharaoh's armies brought back to the Nile val leys not only prisoners and spoil, but ideas and impressions. And soon there began a work of adaptation and transformation among the Egyptian peoples. The Euphrates Valley and all the intervening country had made a positive contribution to Egypt's civilization. In turn the Babylonians were influenced by Pharaoh's men, for they too carried ideas and impressions which they could not help leaving behind. So wasi it in the case of Persia and of India. The successive invasions of the Greeks introduced their arts and language to sluggish peoples, disseminated wisdom, taught the art of agri culture, infused a broader and better spirit. Greece itself was unified through war. And, making a broad jump over the intervening time, we find that the United States of Amer ica owe their union and solidarity to a most bloody and disastrous war. However dark we may paint the picture of war, and however ar dently our souls may long for the time when nations shall "beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks," war has been a vital element in the world's civilization. War has not only carried civilization to dis tant countries and made world nations of pro vincial peoples and established or unified other THE RECORD IN HISTORY 153 nations and peoples; it has also inspired and nourished feelings and conduct that take high rank in the scale of virtues. There is, for example, the virtue of patriotism. We need not dwell on this thought. The very fact of our country endangered stirs heart-throbbings in the breast of every loyal citizen. There is also the virtue of heroism which war has inspired and nourished. Perhaps had there never been a clash of arms we should not now be able to appreciate what real heroism is. We say this without forgetfulness of the heroism displayed daily in all the battles of peace. "One dared to die; in a swift moment's space Fell in war's forefront, laughter on his face. Bronze tells his fame in many a market place. Another dared to bve ; the long years through Felt his slow heart's blood ooze like crimson dew For duty's sake, and smiled. And no one knew." If there had never been war history's page would have been marred. One hero after another would fall out of account and the great names of the great nations which have in different ages pushed civilization to its then possible limit would be no longer the cherished heritage of our youth. We should be hard put to it to 154 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD find a substitute that would keep alive the heroic spirit in their breasts and incite them to deeds of valor.1 We do not wish to be understood as saying that war must be continued in order to fur nish us examples of bravery. We say only that war in the past has objectified the spirit of valor and ingrained the heart of civilization with chivalry and knighthood. Thus we have learned to appreciate the valor of a peace ful era. For he is the great hero who, unher alded and in the ordinary affairs of his daily work, will exhibit, not only on extraordinary occasions, but constantly, in the prosaic occur rences of every day duty, those qualities of manhood which stand for truth and honor and sobriety, for fair dealing and brotherly love and righteousness. A third virtue which war has emphasized and furthered is that of mercy. We appreciate this seemingly contradictory fact when we study the influence of war upon civilization. As it has stirred the spirit which would protect coun try, home, and honor, and has incited to deeds i William James: The Moral Equivalent for War (McClure's Magazine, August, 1910, pp. 463-8, also The Popular Science Monthly, October, 1910, pp. 400-410, Memories and Studies, p. 265, ff.), is a most interest ing discussion on war and the need of a moral equiv alent. His substitute, however, as he himself confesses, is only a "utopia." THE RECORD IN HISTORY 155 of bravery on the march, in camp, and at the front, it has also revealed to man the deepest and most real element of his nature: that of unselfishness which finds outward expression in human sympathy. For what have the men of all ages discovered as they have gone forth to fight their enemies? They have found that the men over the mountains or across the seas were men as they were, that they had all the frailties and all the virtues of human beings, and that, therefore, they were brothers. It has seemed necessary at different crises of the world's history that men should go forth with the engines of war to learn the lessons of mercy and brotherly love and human kind ness. We may admit all the torture that the sick and wounded and captured have suf fered at the hands of enemies and the degrada tion that has followed in the wake of every army when mercy seemed far away. Yet be tween all opposing armies there have always been the interchanges of friendliness, and ene mies in name have been brothers at heart. So true is this and so steady the development of this feeling, that mercy is now administered on every battlefield by an organized force, and wherever the cloud of war moves there goes also the sunshine of sympathetic ministry. War has also taught us lessons of monumen tal importance in the conduct of business and 156 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD commercial affairs. We have learned how to concentrate and mobilize great forces, what tac tics and strategy are, what it means to carry on a world campaign, what is the value of the man behind the gun, what the need of con stant and intelligent training amounts to in the real emergencies of life. These and many more facts that might be enumerated, show us that war has played an important part as a factor that makes for civilization. Yet war has not been the ideal factor for hu man progress. It is rather to be characterized as an evil in the past to be shunned in the fu ture. For when nations go to war they are on the defensive. All forward movements for the time being must cease. Commerce is paralyzed, ordinary pursuits are hampered, the arts and crafts hindered, the usual occupations of man abandoned, and undivided attention must be given to feeding and clothing an army and waging a winning fight. And the times of idle ness for a large body of men which every war brings and the spirit of indifference which set tles down upon so many would, if indefinitely continued, cause a most baneful result. We would not suggest, therefore, that war is the best evidence of God's presence in history. War is unquestionably a period of man's weak ness when he is hovering around on the plain rather than climbing the mountain. The great THE RECORD IN HISTORY 157 factors that make for civilization are the di vinely given means by which the Almighty in tended man should rise to the heights. As we study these means, the mental, the moral, the spiritual faculties of man, we note that the real battle grounds of progress have not been on the blood stained fields of war but in the torn and tossed souls of individuals as they have struggled up into the light. God in his tory is God in men endeavoring with single hand to overcome and possess and make habit able the waste places in their lives. "For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two." 2 Each time man, as an individual, has con quered an inherent weakness or overcome a force of environment he has reached a "last day" where he could look down upon what he left behind and up to what was yet to come. He has actualized an ideal. History to-day is made up of the ideals of yesterday. And the ideals of to-day will be the history of to-mor row. These ideals are the concomitant work ing of mind and heart and will in man pushing for the betterment of conditions. Not bullets and bayonets, therefore, but ideas and thoughts ; not forced marches and pitching of tents, but 2 Kipling: Tomlinson, Collected Verse, p. 241. 158 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD steady progress in honesty and civic righteous ness ; not men running out a battle line and throwing themselves at their brother's throats, but men drawing together their kindred, their neighbors, all whom they touch in the great world movements of the day, — this has been the trend of human advancement even although the picture has been brought out in the dark ness and through disintegrating forces even as a negative is developed. History in the making is the record of reve lation. We, of course, are too close to the scene to note this fact. But time defines the issues and clarifies the view. "In history we find great waves of tendency succeeding and cross ing each other, and, by their ebb and flow, con tributing more than any other factor to deter mine the character of the principal epochs." 3 These waves of tendency show clearly that man in spite of himself is not able to stem the on ward stream of life as it irrigates and makes fruitful the field of human endeavor. They are the marked features of civilization as we study history. They, of course, are hardly dis cerned while history, is in the making. For it is given to but a few men in each age to see deeply and far. These chosen spirits very sel dom have been able to make their fellow men s Rudolf Eucken : The Meaning and Value of Life, p. 44. THE RECORD IN HISTORY 159 see as they saw. The great seer has always been a lonely individual and very often a ridi culed one. Men's views are made and colored too largely by heredity, environment and self- interest. Belief tends to fixity in form and men are not so much coaxed as coerced out of their opinions. We talk about getting the view point of those with whom we differ. In the critical con cerns of life this is exceedingly difficult. The movements that grow out of a great national or political issue have a diverging and not a concentred Hne of procedure. The differences which caused our Civil War, to take only one of many ready illustrations, grew out of the inabil ity of the opposing parties to understand each other. As a result "an irrepressible conflict," to use Mr. Seward's words, was on. The won der to-day is that the actual combat of arms was so long delayed. Those in the South as well as those in the North who loved the Union and who would have saved it, were powerless to avert war. Even efforts made to avoid clash of arms had the opposite result. Clay and Van Buren in 1844, as probable opposing presi dential candidates, agreed to publish letters, the effect of which, it was hoped, would prevent the vexed question of the annexation of Texas to the Union from becoming a political issue, and hence discourage discussion as to the ex- 160 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD tension or restriction of slavery. But "the painstaking effort" "to eliminate this annexa tion question from the presidential campaign had for its actual effect the making of that question the paramount issue of the contest." 4 Even so far seeing a man as Abraham Lin coln was unable to get the view point of the South on the matter of State's rights, as is evidenced by his recommendation that Congress buy the slaves of their owners as a practicable measure looking toward peace. He did not recognize that the ownership of slaves was only an incident in the reasons why the men of the South were waging war. That they were con tending, rightly or wrongly, for liberty based on State autonomy and local self government, Mr. Lincoln failed to realize. At least so we are told.5 Here were tendencies in the middle period of our American History which were not discerned, except by the very few, and which caused the bitterest strife and enmity. It would surely be daring to say that, in the purpose of God, the Civil War was a necessary event in the prog ress of our Nation. If we believed in an un conscious will or a blind force we should have to hold to the reign of necessity and Matthew * George Cary Eggleston : The History of the Con federate War, Vol. I, p. 59, f. s Ibid, Vol. II, p. 9, f. THE RECORD IN HISTORY 161 Arnold's "darkling plain" "where ignorant armies clash by night." But as we see God's hand in history we note that He uses man as best He can. One of the Psalmists in describ ing the attitude of the Children of Israel, as they were being led from Egypt to Canaan, de clared that they had "limited" the hand of God.6 Their critical attitude, their spirit of dissatisfaction and rebellion, made it impossible for God to deal with them according to their advantage. The keen insight of this ancient writer leads us to see how man necessarily hin ders his own advance. In the conduct of the Children of Israel as they were struggling up from a worse to a better condition we recognize the conduct of mankind in general, and see how the hand of God is shortened, how He is forced at times to throw His blessings at us with difficulty rather than let them come gently and naturally. But even when the wills of men have been re bellious and recalcitrant the purposes of God have prevailed. We believe that the union of the American States and not a confederacy has been a positive gain for the Nations of the world and hence for the progress of mankind. Whether this was the plan of Providence we do not know. Yet the result shows all the marks of a Master hand. This hand, according to 6 Psalm 78:41. 162 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD our finite vision, holds peoples together and makes nations more effective in furthering civilization. Somehow or other there is a law of the conservation of energy operative in the affairs of nations as well as in the processes of nature. No nation has ever died of dry rot and no conquered peoples have been annihilated. There has always been a remnant left out of which the same people were to reappear resus citated or a new nation was to grow. "History gives us no clear case of any nation perishing from old age. It is altogether probable that if the Roman world had been left to itself — had not been conquered and taken possession of by a foreign race — it would in time have recovered its productive power and begun a new age of advance. Some early instances of revived strength, as under Constantine and Theodosius, show the possibility of this. The Eastern Ro man Empire, under far less favorable condi tions than the Western would have had, did do this later to a limited extent. The West would certainly have accomplished much more." 7 The stream of life in any nation or age is al ways strong enough to make a channel toward the main currents of progress. "Nothing is more evident from history than the fact that 7 George Burton Adams: Civilization During the Middle Ages, p. 6. THE RECORD IN HISTORY 163 weaker bodies of men driven out by stronger do not necessarily relapse into barbarism, but fre quently rise, even under the most unfavorable circumstances, to a civilization equal or su perior to that from which they have been ban ished." 8 At times it would appear that the voli tion of man was exerted to thwart the purpose of God. But here again streams of tendency are in evidence. The very episodes in history which caused so much dismay, and in which in dividual men seemingly played a part far be yond their own powers or importance, neverthe less mark periods of greatest consequence. Judas had his place in the drama of Jesus? ca reer as well as Peter or John. What the out come of Jesus' mission would have been had He not been betrayed we of course do not know. We are able to make our judgments only from the facts as they are and not as they might have been. Arguments for, as well as against, Judas can be made by those inclined to specu late on the reasons as to the cause and the consequences of his act. Mankind despises the traitor and on this account Judas has been painted fully as black as the circumstance war rants. That he is inseparably identified with the tragedy of the crucifixion, however, remains s Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, Vol. I, p. 310, f. 164 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD a fact. History must take him into account and associate him with the greatest of the world's dramas. The designs of those who bribed him came to naught, but this must be attributed not to the inability of man to lay a base plan, but to the inherent tendency of the purpose of Jesus to prevail. Other illustrations serve us to show the in trinsic adaptability of human strivings toward right ends and real progress. "Had the mon astery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside, where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind have taken another date and another form." 9 For our purpose the significant thing in construing these facts is that there has always been a full ness of time when the onward tendency was distinctly marked. Of course we do not intimate that the act of Judas, or the mission of Luther or Tetzel, was necessitated by blind fate or the will of God. We hold, the rather, that God is in history through the instrumentality of mankind and that His ends are gained by the willingness of 9 James Martineau: Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 113. THE RECORD IN HISTORY 165 individual men to see the right and do it. Ezekiel the prophet was thoroughly possessed with the idea that when men are under the in fluence of the Almighty they will go straight forward where the spirit is to lead them. He had the insight of a seer and read the past and present history in the light of the future. He picked out the great leaders, such as Moses, and David, and Isaiah, and while he could not put his stamp of approval on every phase of their character and conduct, he yet saw that they were men upon whom the spirit of God rested, and that, in spite of their failings, they were powerful instruments which God could use for the shaping of His plans. They were men who came out of the whirlwind and the fire, as he saw in one of his visions, and "went everyone straight forward; whither the spirit was to go they went, and they turned not as they went." 10 Because man is human, and hence frail, we are apt to judge his acts only in relation to himself. As Napoleon was campaigning throughout Europe during those two eventful decades he and his maneuvers were estimated only in relation to himself and his ambitions. Men were looking at him and waiting for his next move as though all that he did centered in him and had reference to him alone, forget ting entirely that he might be only one of the 10 Ezekiel 1:12. 166 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD factors in the great march of history and that behind him was an unseen hand holding destiny in control. Yet we can understand Napoleon and his campaigns only as a current in the ever on ward flowing stream of civilization. He was an instrument in the hand of God, — imperfect as he was, — and the great work he accomplished was to sow broadcast over the whole continent of Europe the seeds of liberty and equality which the French Revolution ripened. He him self, no less than Savonarola and Columbus and Luther and Bismarck and Washington and Lincoln, heard an inward voice calling him to his task. The voices that such men have heard have simply been the absolute and irresistible conviction that they are called to do some great deed and they proceed to do it. They issue, as Ezekiel's men, out of the whirlwind and the fire and go every one straight forward whither the spirit is to go. That their deeds inure ulti mately to the benefit of mankind is evidence of their divine mission. And so the great men of every age play their part also for the ages which are to follow. The voice that cried out against taxation with out representation and the hand that signed the Declaration of Independence were quite as much the voice and hand of Alfred and Wycliffe and Hampden and Milton as of Adams and Otis THE RECORD IN HISTORY 167 and Jefferson and Franklin. The cannon that thundered on Bunker Hill was likewise heard beside the Thames, and fifty years later Eng land, in the Reform Bill, secured the same rights of freedom for which the colonists fought. For the same imperial spirit that arbitrarily ruled over the colonist in America governed the mi nority in England, and the Continental army fought not only for the freedom of those on the Atlantic seaboard, but also for the freedom of their brothers on the British Island. "English men now understand that in the American Revo lution you were fighting our battles," said Sir Edward Thornton, when Minister of Great Britain to the United States in 1879. The mass of humanity, of course, cannot ex ist except as it is made up of individuals. But the significance of the individual has relation not in and to himself so much as to the mass. The part great men play in history, therefore, indicates the direction of the current. We can read the signs of the times as we read their lives. Sometimes it would seem that particular men are caught in the wheel of destiny and crushed so that the greater good can be rea lized. The figure of Stonewall Jackson in the Confederate Army is one of the most austere and pathetic in human history. To many of his soldiers he was only a hard and unbend ing man of religion who sucked lemons for dys- 168 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD pepsia and ordered blind marches to keep his men moving. All this is relentlessly as well as realistically set forth by Miss Mary Johnston in The Long Roll. Yet his worth as a real man, his valuable services to the Confederacy, the tragedy and sadness of his death,11 mark him as one of the consequential forces in the development of the American Nation. Indeed, at the dedication of a monument to his memory in New Orleans, the veteran Father Hubert prayed: "God, when thou didst decree that the Confederacy should not succeed, Thou hadst first to take Thy servant, Stonewall Jackson." 12 While this is merely an opinion and does not take into account the figure of General Grant whose genius was marking him at the time of Stonewall Jackson's death as the only man ca pable of leading the Federal forces to victory, yet we cannot put away the conviction that the fate of the great Confederate General had much to do with the final outcome of the Civil War. God is in history. The record of His revela tion is on every epoch and era of advancement. 11 He was shot, as is weE known, by his own men through an almost unavoidable blunder. His last words were: "Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action. Pass the infantry to the front." Then a little later: "No; let us pass over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees." i2 Carl Hovey: Stonewall Jackson, p. 128. THE RECORD IN HISTORY 169 We could not understand the progress of the race if we were shut up in our study to deeds of men and women uninfluenced by divine power. He who has a vision of the Eternal must see Him leading out His ministers from the whirl wind and the fire and sending them straight for ward where His spirit is to go. There is an inwardness in the events of history that makes itself felt as we look back over the years and centuries. The stream of progress is never stopped. There may be, as there have been, the eddies and counter currents, and even at times a backward movement. But, as the Euphrates river of old, winding in and out, often turn ing back upon itself, nevertheless reached the sea, so do we find that the general direc tion of the human stream of life has been on ward. The currents underneath have made for progress. These currents have been the under lying forces that hold men, as individuals and as nations, to the real in life. God has been in history not in any outward sense but in an inner sovereignty, the very heart and soul of the great movements that have made for truth and righteousness and betterment. THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS "Art is the tender human servant that man has made himself for his solace. He has adjusted it to his facul ties and restrained it within his scope; fashioning it from the infinite substance, he has impressed upon it finite form. It is a voice less thunderous than nature's, a lamp that does not dazzle like the great sun. It sim plifies the wealth that is too luxuriant, and makes tan gible a fragment of the great ethereal beauty no mortal can grasp. Thus art is visible and audible lightness; it is the love of God made manifest to the senses, a particular symbol of a universal harmony." — Daniel Gregory Mason. Art in its general sense includes every effort by man to express emotion. It is the exhibition of human susceptibility to the true, the beau tiful, the good; and the evidence of human skill to portray and fix the virtuous and aes thetic inclinations of man. Its field is music, the fine arts and literature, for each one of these expressions of the emotional is, in the wider sense, an art. Art, especially in music and the visible forms, is so closely allied with the truly 173 174 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD religious that it has always been regarded as a sort of religious sense divining and express ing truth which all men feel but cannot under stand or express. It is peculiarly the activity of man under the direction and influence of a mightier power. This power we identify with God and hence find in art a record of revela tion. In this chapter we confine ourselves to music and the fine arts. Pericles speaks of the "Music of the Spheres," expressing in this phrase a conviction that na ture has a soul and that this soul is attuned to harmony. Byron said: "There's music in the sighing of a reed. There's music in the gushing of a rill, There's music in all things, if men have ears, This earth is but an echo of the spheres." Men have had ears and they have heard the voices of melody and harmony and rhythm, the natural inflection of fury and fear and joy and peace and love. All varieties of expression has nature produced. The forests sing their symphonies ; the mountains give forth their pas sions ; the valleys reverberate their oratorios ; the brooks and the streams laugh in rippling cadences or flow in silent reveries ; the seas roar ; the floods clap their hands ; the hills break out into singing. RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 175 Man hears the symphonic drama which na ture is skillful to render. The grand recitative, the animated chord, the realistic power of har mony, and the surprising effects of instrumen tation are all found in nature. "See deep enough," said Carlyle, "and you see musically, the heart of nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." Great souls have tried to reach it, for they have instinctively felt that God's world, to use Bushnell's fine phrase, "is a soundingboard for the heart." Babylonia, Egypt, China, Arabia, — all lands and peoples have made effort to fathom the deep mysteries of earth's harmony. Civilization has marched to the tune of music whether the note was crude or cultured. Orpheus had the power of charm ing all animate and inanimate objects with his sweet lyre. Arion, the famous player upon the cithara, when thrown into the sea by the sail ors, was saved by the dolphins which had gath ered about the ship to listen to his lyre. These two legends show us how the Greeks personified music. Coming down through later times we find the same emphasis placed upon harmony and rhythm as the soul of man expresses the soul of nature. The master-singers and the minne singers and the minstrels have sung in the open air and in the court, in the hall and in the sanctuary, subduing strife and envy and pas sion, touching the melodies of the human soul till 176 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD it sang the joyous, happy, irresistible ballad of love. We turn to Holy Writ and find the influence of music upon man set forth in poetic imagery — an imagery so irresistible as to lead us at times to read fancy as fact. At the dawn of creation we are told the morning stars sang to gether and all the sons of God shouted for joy. When the Israelites had passed safely out of the bondage of Egypt, Miriam, the prophetess, took a timbrel in her hand and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances and they sang a song of triumph to the Lord. When Jabin and Sisera, the ene mies of Israel, were discomfited and put to rout, Deborah and Barak sang praises unto the Lord for His mighty victory. When David returns, exulting from his tri umphs over the Philistines, the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing to meet him with tabrets, with joy and with instruments of music, and they answered one another as they played: "Saul hath slain his thousands, And David his ten thousands." When David, the King, brings the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to the City of David, he dances before the Ark with all his might and RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 177 all the house of Israel accompanies him with shouting and with the noise of the trumpet. And hear the grand recitative they sing: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, And be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors, And the King of Glory shall come in ! Who is the King of Glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, The Lord, mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, Even lift them up ye everlasting doors, And the King of Glory shall come in. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord of Hosts, He is the King of Glory." When Mary, who has a vision of the Christ, visits her cousin Elizabeth, the latter is filled with the Holy Spirit and sings with a loud voice : "Blessed art thou among women." And Mary takes up the response and sings: "My soul doth magnify the Lord And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour; For he hath regarded the low estate of his hand maiden. Holy is his name." 178 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD On the night when the shepherds kept watch over their flocks, the glory of the Lord shone round about them and suddenly the angels of heaven broke forth with joy and a multitude of the heavenly host was praising the Lord and saying : "Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will to. men." In the tragedy which stained the page of his tory with a blot of carmine, the very deeps of the earth thundered forth their passion, so that mountain and valley trembled and the granite of the hills was rent. In the vision which John had on Patmos, he beheld and lo a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds and peoples and tongues, bowed before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes and with palms in their hands and they sang with a loud voice saying: "Salvation to our God, which sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb." And the angels took up the chorus and sang: "Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be unto our God forever and forever." RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 179 And a voice came out of the throne, saying : "Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both great and small." And then there was heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying : "Hallelujah, Hallelujah, for the Lord God Om nipotent reigneth, let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to Him." This is the spirit of music in man, which the inspiration of the Almighty giveth understand ing. ¦ To some He giveth more than others, for there are souls born with all the music of heaven and earth throbbing in them, eager for expres sion. But to all He gives some. There is none too poor in soul responsiveness and sus ceptibility not to be stirred by the beautiful forms of expression which lead us, as Carlyle says, to the edge of the infinite and let us for a moment gaze into its depths. Our life is set to music. When sad, it is a dirge, when happy, a paean. Beethoven put "his sorrow into sonatas" and Schubert his joy into song. The peasant, sitting in his 180 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD kitchen, hears the clock tick, the teakettle hum, the logs purr as they burn, and consciously or unconsciously his soul is touched, he has solace which wealth could not buy. The more cul tured man longs for "the ablution and inunda tion of musical waves" and goes where he can bathe his soul in the stream of harmony, when, as Emerson says, with the first note of the flute or horn or the first strain of a song, he quits the world of sense and launches on the sea of ideas and emotion. For music untwists "All the chains that tie the hidden soul of harmony." Our moods fit into that of music. The babe falls to sleep to the soothing lullaby of its mother ; the old man hears the notes of love and is young again, roaming the woods and the meadow hand-in-hand with his heart's desire; the soldier tramps to the sound of music and hardly knows he is tired ; the sailor circles the capstan and with his "ho-heave-o" hauls up the ton of steel as a featherweight; the aged couple sit in their lonely cabin and have visions of heaven and home where there will be neither want nor| sorrow nor tears, as some sweet-voiced singer brings the angels trailing clouds of glory into the room. The soul that is bereft of a loved one takes courage as the sweet and ten der notes alleviate and bind up the wounds and RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 181 is strengthened to say: "Though He slay me yet will I trust Him." As the soul is thus stirred to its depths it is brought face to face with its real likeness. Spirit with spirit meets. God communicates with man and man communes with God. Hence is harmony the true note of religion, and hence has music played so prominent a role in re ligion. The inspiration of the Almighty gave the prophet of old understanding and he instituted a divine service of music and set up the Levites in the house of God with cymbals and psalteries and harps, and "the Levites and the priests praised the Lord day by day, singing with loud instruments unto the Lord." God ordained that through music the eyes of the seer be opened. The spirit of prophecy fell upon Saul when he met the school of the prophets coming down a hill with psaltery and a tabret and a pipe and a harp before them. Elisha said: "Bring me a minstrel," and it came to pass that when the minstrel played the hand of the Lord came upon Elisha. Through music the soul has been led from darkness into light. "When the evil spirit from the Lord came upon Saul David took a harp and played with his hand, so Saul was refreshed and was well and the evil spirit departed from him." Browning has taken this incident to show the power of 182 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD music to lead us to see the highest ideal. With a vision of the Christ the poet brings the perish ing King to life. So prophecy and psalmody and poetry are set to music, man joins the choir of heaven and sings unto the Lord; he makes a joyful noise unto Him who is his King. With the help of music life becomes a melody and living a thanksgiving. In the fine arts, also, we discover the record of revelation. The work of brush and pen and chisel fastens the ideal of artistic values. In music man is inspired to fix the harmony of na ture and appeals to the noblest in his fellow-man through the ear. In art, — using the word in its limited sense, — man is inspired to fix the order of nature and appeals to the aesthetic in his fellow-man through the eye. This order the artist does not find bound as by a decree, but free and untrammeled. It is restrained only as the star in its orbit or the river in its chan nel. As we look at the star or the river we think not of restraint, but of a Creator who made the marvels of nature. Both the star and the river appeal to us as free. Only when we begin to study this freedom and try to ac count for the wonder do we discover the neces sary restraint underlying. This restraint is the order of nature ; the order which holds and inspires the artist and which he tries to repro duce. Its essential characteristics are beauty RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 183 and unity ; and man in spite of himself feels he can be free only as he conforms himself to the order of nature and expresses himself in beauty and unity. "In the best music, painting, poetry, building, sculpture, man is the being that he fails to be in the actual world." x This is the ideal in all art, the goal of man's striv ing. As in music, therefore, so also in paint ing and sculpture and architecture, there is a spirit in man which the inspiration of the Al mighty giveth understanding. Bezaleel, the artist and architect of the taber nacle and the ark of the Lord, we read, was filled with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in un derstanding, in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship to devise curious works, to work in silver and in gold and in brass and in the cutting of stones to set them and in the carv ing of wood to make any manner of cunning work. God put this talent and this skill in his heart so that he could teach others also to be cunning, that is, adept and dexterous to do the work of the engraver, the embroiderer and the weaver.2 The beauty and pleasing in tricacy of the curtains and the bars, of the candlesticks with their lamps and reflectors, of the altar of incense, the pillars with their hooks, i George A. Gordon : Ultimate Conceptions of Faith, p. 159. 2 Exodus 35:30-35. 184 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD the chapiters with their fillets of gold and sock ets of brass, the table with the vessels of sac rifice and anointing, especially the mercy-seat with the cherubim, — all these wondrous works of art gave the idea and inspiration for the magnificent temple of Solomon reared decades later with its foundation and pillars and beams and arches of immense stones and wood, inlaid everywhere with checkerwork and wreaths and chains in gold and silver and brass, and chapi ters with pomegranate decoration and archi traves with delicately wrought lily ornamenta tion, which even after the vicissitudes of the centuries called forth continual exclamations of awe and delight. It is not necessary to draw attention to the fact that this art was in the service of religion. As in Israel, so everywhere, art had a religious inception. These two, art and religion, as well as music and religion, started hand in hand and continued close companions. What would seem trivial to us in artistic value had a tremendous significance and impulse on the art side for reli gion. The religious instinct of man has in vested the crudest forms, — such as the black Kaaba stone at Mecca or the sandstone and granite monoliths at Stonehenge, — with reli gious significance. This religious element, among some peoples more slowly, among others more rapidly, developed the artistic form and RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 185 expression. And although all nations did not advance to what we would term an artistic ideal, they all in some form or other sought to give artistic expression to the religious impulse and motive. In Babylon, in Egypt, in Palestine, the art ist wrought for the gods, seeking to rear for them houses or temples which would be worthy for their indwelling. This is true also of Greece, especially of the early artists as they reared the Parthenon or carved the statue of Jupiter. The Jews had an aversion to giving bodily representation to the sacred. This ac counts for the fact that they never reached a high form of artistic expression. Measured by the art of other peoples they fall far below artistic standards. This is true in a less de gree also of the Babylonians who, like the Jews, belonged to the Semitic race. There was very little religious demonstration among them in plastic form or color. They represented their gods or demons in bas-relief or in lines crudely marked out on soft clay or chiseled in hard granite. Their religion, like that of the Jews, was rather a matter of the spirit than of the sense, — "an image in the mind rather than an image in metal or stone." But when we come to the Egyptians, we find their temples eloquent with the actions and deeds of the gods. They deified everything 186 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD from the Pharaoh down to animals and inani mate objects. This was all represented in pictures. The landscape of Egypt is covered with temples and towers and tombs and pyra mids. They all have religious significance. They are all gorgeously but beautifully deco rated. In the day of its vigor Egypt was an artistic dream. "The lotus capitals, the frieze and architrave, all glowed with bright hues, and often the roof ceiling was painted in blue and studded with golden stars." The wonder of the world is the marvelously drawn and col ored representations that have been and are being brought to light in the tombs of the kings. These pictures on walls inside and out will thrill travelers for decades to come. The religious element in Greek art is also noticeable in its earliest forms. The first rep resentations of temple images and offerings are in the shape of fetishes or logs of wood un- couthly carved or designed. These were sym bols of the divinity, — the expression of that spirit in man which would reach out and not only grasp that great spirit, but objectify it. Even in this primitive state art must have ren dered great service to religion. As the inspi ration of the Almighty began to give the Greek artist understanding, and he began to assert his capacity to render "the human form divine" RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 187 in a more adequate manner, art "was immedi ately enlisted in the service of religion ; and we should miss entirely the spirit of Greek sculp ture during its earlier period, if we failed to reabze that almost every work which it produced was in one way or another intended for reli gious dedication." 3 Phidias, the greatest art ist of Athens, represented the patron goddess in his chrys-elephantine statue which was set up as a worthy embodiment of Athena in her own Parthenon. His statue of the father of the gods, Zeus, represented the noblest form of divine power and perfection so that it had a religious and uplifting influence on all behold ers. The highest type of Greek art was the visual representation of the virtues as personi fied by the Greek mind. This was not the high est type of spirituality, but it was significant as showing the inner relation of art and re ligion. In Italy the religious motive in art rules. It is different, however, from that of Egypt or Greece. There the "faith was a worship of nature, a glorification of humanity, an exalta tion of physical and moral perfection." Art dealt with the tangible, it appealed to the sensu ous, the earthy nature of mankind. But in s Ernest Gardiner: A Handbook of Greek Sculpture, p. 81. 188 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Italy, after the era of Christianity gave the world a Christ who could be represented in bodily form without any thought of sacrilege, the inspiration and the service of art for ob jectifying the religious spirit reached their height. The sensualism of the Greek artist gave way to the spirituality of the Italian. This can be traced in all the forms of art. Not only have we the Christ represented in the Madonnas, the Adoration, the Transfiguration, the Scourging, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross and the Ascension into Heaven, but all the saints, apostles, martyrs, have been actualized upon the canvas for religious pur pose. These representations were to find lodgment in churches. So churches were built by men "moved by a true fervor of religious faith." The church to be a house of God must have an altar intended to be a resting place for some master representation of the Son of Man ap pealing to the sons of men. Its niches and re cesses must contain idealizations in marble or on canvas of the Christ in His various minis trations, or of some saint especially revered and worshiped. For the building of this church the artist expected no reward. "He was well repaid by the delight of seeing his design grow from an imagination to a reality, and by spend ing his days in the accepted service of the RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 189 Lord." 4 So did the architect labor with a religious zeal; so too the people in whose com munity the cathedral was building. The work would go on from generation to generation ; many knew they would never be able to see their work completed or worship in the sanctuary. But they contributed willingly of their meager earnings to the enormous expense of construc tion. For it was the Lord's house and how could they appear before Him above if they refused to work for Him below! The church in that day as never since was indulgent to art and never since has art risen to so high a de gree of beauty and devotional value. The artist's soul thrills with the thought of truth and beauty. He sees what the ordinary man feels ; "he enlightens it with his eyes, he transfigures it according to his heart, and makes it utter what is not in it, — sentiment, and that which it neither possesses nor under stands, — thought." Millet painted a cumbrous French cart slowly moving along a country road. So realistically was the work done that men have declared they could hear the wheels creak. He painted a man and a woman bow ing their heads at sunset in a field when the evening bell, the angelus, called to worship. And his work was so soulful that men have de- * Charles Eliot Norton : The Building of Orvieto Ca thedral, from Notes of Travel and Study in Italy. 190 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD clared they could hear the tolling of the bell. One who has seen such a cart on a French road and heard the creak of the wheels, or who has seen the peasants bow their heads in evening worship as the village bell tolled, will hear the same noise and the same ringing as he looks at those pictures. And it does not take a great stretch of the imagination for others to realize the same effect. Millet, like all true artists, knew how to make his canvas vibrate with life. He saw in his creations what he carried in the depths of his soul; he gave it form and color with the witchery of his genius and sent it forth trusting that the deep in his soul would touch the depth of other souls. Eager striving, tumultuous passion, fever ish emotion, placid serenity, — these the artist, with the wand of imagination, calls out to take a place on canvas. Grief, love, joy; sadness, hate, rapture; — all the delicate, intangible shades of feeling, he puts in his pictures. It is the spirit, which is made wise by the great Spirit, that the painter objectifies. True art is not only order and beauty for the eye, but also for the soul. This is its essence. The painter gives new strength and compass to the soul; his work purifies by its mute eloquence. Into the infinite he leads the soul of the be holder so that he may be transformed with visions of the infinitude of life. RECORD IN MUSIC AND ART 191 This is the record of revelation in art. While we recognize that at those periods when religion showed greatest potentiality and zeal art was at its lowest, as in the first age of Christianity, the Puritan age and the age of the evangelical revival in England; and that when art was at its highest, religion flut tered at a very low ebb, as in the time of the Renaissance; still religion has found one of its most vital expressions in art and by means of its forms has been able to objectify spiritual truth for the learned and cultured as well as for the lowly and unlettered. Whether we see in the painting of a landscape all the moods of nature which we feel as we look upon the real landscape, but cannot express ; whether we look into the face of some man or woman or child as it peers out of the canvas and see certain depths of soul which we instinctively feel as akin to ours ; whether we look upon two or more figures grouped in a thousand conceiv able ways and experience the joys and blessings of hearty laughter, romping fun, honest labor, quiet meditation, soul inspiriting communion; or realize the pangs of grief, the lonesomeness of sorrow, the venom of hate and anger ; whether we stand in silent contemplation of some scene in the life of Jesus or the allegorical or symbolical representation of the beauty, the love, the truth, which He embodied, we are in 192 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD the charm as well as in the dynamic force and far-reaching effect of the inspiration of the Al mighty. We are better and happier men and women because God has thus inspired great souls and through them has permitted us to see another and corroborative aspect of his reality in this world and in the human soul. THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN PROFANE LITERATURE XI THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN PROFANE LITERATURE "The supreme revelation of literature is the revela tion of those great qualities and characteristics of hu manity which have determined its history, which have shaped its experience, which have guided its develop ment, which have persisted through all change of out ward circumstance, and which make up its real being, yesterday, to-day, and forever." — William Henry Craw- shaw. One ought really to apologize for the use of the word "profane" in connection with "litera ture." Yet it is a necessary distinction be tween literature in general and the literature of the Bible. In music and painting, in sculp ture and architecture, the highest product is not something from without but something from within. It is the spirit in man which the in spiration of the Almighty giveth understand ing. The same is true of literature. It grows out of life and is the interpretation and revela tion of life. " A good book is the precious life- blood of a master-spirit," said Milton. It 195 196 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD sways human intelligence, stirs human passion, influences human action. Every great book is a document concerning human life and can never be an artificial product. Acute men live. Lit erature is one of the products of such life. Music or painting may be debased and ap peal to the lower passions and motives. In that proportion it is unworthy and false. This is even more true of literature. It affords ready opportunity to corrupt and contaminate. Literature that is false and base fails in its true literary quality in proportion to its baseness and falseness. It ceases to be a record of reve lation. A picture, a sonata, a poem, any work of art, may be made to impose upon a man, as any man may tell falsehoods or betray confi dence. But to that extent he is less a man and goes to his own death and oblivion. Life proceeds upon the basis of being true at the center. Men of all types have consciously, even unconsciously, striven to give expression to this trueness. A lily is no less fair because it is picked from a foul bog, and a truth is no less a truth because it sometimes comes from a source morally contaminated. But lilies usually come from proper surroundings and so does truth. The greatest of all man's creative powers is the gift of language. With this medium he can utter himself clearly and effectively. One man speaks what a million have experienced. IN PROFANE LITERATURE 197 He does not say: "I shall write a lyric." He is stirred by the passions of life and an im mortal song is the result.1 We have countless illustrations of the way in which this truth has worked itself out in the lives of great souls. Take Bunyan, for exam ple, who wrote one of the English classics. For years after his Pilgrim's Progress ap peared, its wonderful literary value was not dis covered, and many to-day who would feed on the great masterpieces of literature do not drink from this well of English undefiled. Not only from its literary side, but also from its religious and spiritual side, is this book note worthy among the productions of men. For in the whole range of religious literature there is not found a richer, purer, stronger evangel ical theology than is contained in this marvelous allegory. And yet who was Bunyan? A poor man who had never been in a school, and in his earlier years not an especially good man. But he went through a great heart experience, his spirit was given understanding by the in spiration of the Almighty, his influence has ex tended far and wide, his name is immortal. He had no intention whatever of writing this book, and when it was written many advised him not to give it publication. i On the foregoing paragraphs see W. H. Crawshaw: Literary Interpretation of Life, pp. 1H6. 198 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD It is impossible for us to analyze the proc esses, intellectual or spiritual, by which such a writer gets at his truths. They are not based on philosophical reasoning or scientific re search. Indeed we find the rules of logic and the experiments of the laboratory able to take us only so far in our search for truth. Just at the point where we would ask our vital ques tions they stop. If we would go further at all it is only by the hand of the poet. He leads us over the "unplumbed salt estranging sea." We are ready to follow because he speaks a language our souls understand, we would hear his voice, for he calleth his own by name. He will go beyond the proofs of what is known, he will pass away even from what is real. In the unknown he will find all the perfection and fruition of the known; and in the ideal he will smooth over and supply the deficiencies of the real. "Browning's Pippa is a gentle, noble soul, bringing goodness everywhere ; in real life she would be a poor mill-girl insulted by a thousand sordid and accidental details. Shel ley portrays Beatrice Cenci in the transfiguring light of poetic truth ; actual experience would show her tortured by a sinister and ignoble fate. No Greek youth could have matched the perfect plastic beauty of the Disk-thrower, and no Italian woman ever symbolized cruel IN PROFANE LITERATURE 199 sphinx-like loveliness as does the Mona Lisa. Corot's nature is grayer and softer and more harmonious than ever existed on earth. And such songs as Schumann's 'Ich Grolle Nicht' and Tschaikowsky's 'Nur Wer die Sehnsucht Kennt' pulsate with a passion as intense but far less torn and fragmentary than that by which they were inspired. This serene perfection, which wraps like a mantle all works of genuine art, ... is attained only by excluding the irrelevancies always present in nature." 2 It is the escape of prophetic sight and power from the very deeps of the soul. It is human but so tinged with the divine that we see the God- hand and hear the God-voice. An illustration of the power of literature to move the human will and bring about far-reach ing results for good is found in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. That the victory of the North over the South in the Civil War was a real blessing for the South as well as for the whole Nation 3 is recognized by far seeing 2 Daniel Gregory Mason : The Meaning of Music, in The Outlook, 26 April, 1902, p. 1005. 3 E. P. Alexander, Brigadier General in the Confed erate Army, in his Military Memoirs of a Confeder ate, (p. VIII) says: "We now enjoy the rare privilege of seeing what we fought for in the retrospect. It no longer seems so desirable. It would have proved only a curse. We have good cause to thank God for our es- 200 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD men all over our Country. "Personally" Mrs. Stowe "knew very little about slavery except by hearsay. Of necessity" her story "abounded in inconsistencies, mistakes of fact, and impossibilities so far as its social depictions were concerned. . . . But the novel made a tremendous appeal to the sentiment of hu manity in antagonism to slavery. It argued no question, it offered no statistics, it presented no thesis. It simply appealed to the sentiments of men, and women, and children, for the aboli tion of slavery and its influence was immediate and well-nigh limitless." 4 That such a book could have so forceful an effect in the real abolition of slavery is one of the many instances of a spirit in man which goes beyond the externalities of form and even of fact to realities that are incontroverti- cape from it, not alone for our sake, but for that of the whole country and even of the world." * George Cary Eggleston : The History of the Con federate War, Vol. I, p. 107, f. This opinion is note worthy as coming from a gentleman who fought on the Confederate side. He also meets the criticism "that Mrs. Stowe's work was not at all great as a creation in fiction but that its immediate and stupendous success and influence were due solely to the adventitious cir cumstances of its publication" by calling attention to the fact that "those adventitious circumstances did not exist in the remote European countries into whose lan guages the novel was presently translated and among whose people it continues to be a classic to this day." — Ibid, p. 108. IN PROFANE LITERATURE 201 ble and convincing. There are no canons of literary criticism by which such a work can be analyzed. We may take evidence as to its in sufficiency of fact and its crudity of form. But the question will remain for decision not by a judge on the bench but by a jury in the box. And there is never much doubt as to how the twelve men, good and true, will decide, moved as they always are not by judicial tem perament and strict principles of law, but by the convictions of right and justice which the commonalty of mankind hold. A book of a similar character, although in an entirely different field, is Henry Drum- mond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World. Here the author, taking hold of the great spir itual truth underlying the Darwinian theory of evolution, undertook to show not only the simi larity but the identity of law in the natural and spiritual realms. Herein was he led to a mis taken conception of law, not only as it obtains in the natural or spiritual world, but as it is traceable in different parts of the natural world. His thesis when first presented to a company of scholars was "with one dissenting voice" "unanimously condemned." 5 Yet, in spite of the inconclusiveness of his logic and the mistaken assumption of his analogy, there is 5 From Mr. Drummond's own statement appearing in his Life by George Adam Smith, p. 161. 202 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD power underlying his discussion that made the book one of the most potent influences of the time for sane religion and an understanding between science and theology. He failed to harmonize the underlying principles of law in the natural and spiritual worlds, but he saw and he made others see clearly that there is one law, one force, one Being, inherent in and per vading the universe. That this law, this force, this Being, is multiform in its activity and ex pression and cannot be pressed into an identity of form or procedure which would hold in same ness throughout all realms of nature, mind and spirit, — as Drummond seemed to believe, — did not detract from the great truth of his essay, that God is in His universe and that the world of nature and man is one glorious revelation of His thought and attitude.6 Literature has its heart in the common hu manity of the world and hence is timeless. Its message is not restricted to a particular people or place. We read a book by a foreign author, whether in the original or translation, and are stirred by the heart throbs of the people de picted. The unusual setting of the story, oc casioned necessarily by the differences of scenery and customs, is of course interesting. « Similar inconsistencies of reasoning also marred Mr. Drummond's The Ascent of Man, but the spiritual in sight of this book likewise was compelling. IN PROFANE LITERATURE 203 We are pleased to learn of life beyond the seas. But our delight in reading the book is not be cause of the new faces and voices and view points. These are the incidental necessities of place and time. We are moved by the human- ness of the characters and the circumstances. For we are not reading French or German life and conditions. We are really reading univer sal life without reference to country or age. The heroes of Homer are as much alive to the reading youth as the heroes of Daniel Boone's or Kit Carson's time. In reality mythol ogy is itself a myth. We do not care whether Hector or Achilles ever lived ; or for that matter whether Homer ever lived. There is far more truth than fancy or fun in Kipling's lines: "When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; An' what he thought 'e might require, 'E went an' took — the same as me ! The market-girls an' fishermen, The shepherds an' the sailors, too, They 'eard old songs turn up again, But kep' it quiet — same as you! They knew 'e stole ; 'e knew they knowed. They didn't tell, nor make a fuss, But winked at 'Omer down the road, An' 'e winked back — the same as us !" 204 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD For Homer, or whoever it was, dipped down into the full ocean of human life and brought his net up teeming with the experiences men everywhere and always have made and doubtless always will make. The great ballads and lyrics of the present and immediate past are full of reference to Homer's and Virgil's adventures. Achilles sulks in his tent to-day just as much as in the dawn of literature, and all the great heroes of the past crowd our history in its mak ing. As a matter of fact any great masterpiece of literature is not the product of any one age but is ageless. If Homer had not heard men sing by land and sea he could never have sung himself. And how far back into the ages the songs go which Homer heard we can hardly imagine. But all of the great heart experi ences of humanity up to the time Homer sang went into his song. We need hardly mention a later instance as corroborative. Shakespeare is not marked in his significance either by age, nationality, or time. Old chronicles, histories, tales, dramas, worked over so as hardly to leave any evidence of source, or embodied almost without change, went into his own marvelous productions that fix him forever among the im mortals of literature. It was Shakespeare, a single individual at a particular time, writing as universal humanity for eternity. His pulse IN PROFANE LITERATURE 205 beat because the heart of mankind throbbed. Literature was the spontaneous expression of his life. However in form and style and con tent he differed from Homer is of little conse quence. Both men live because the blood of a common humanity flowed through their veins. We do not overlook the fact that all great literary geniuses have reflected and represented the large factors and influences of the race from which they sprang, of the nation to which they belonged, and of the age in which they lived. What might have resulted had Shakespeare lived in Browning's time we do not know. Some critics have declared that had Browning lived in Shakespeare's day he would have been as great a dramatist as the bard of Avon himself. Goethe surely could not have written the poetry of Tennyson or the essays of Emerson, nor could the author of Les Miserables have given us the Scarlet Letter. Differences of nation ality and of age, if not also of race, make this impossible. But each man in his own country and surrounded by racial and temporal influ ences has given us the soul of man as reflected in the heart of the universe. "Truth is within ourselves: it takes no rise From outward things, whate'er you may believe; There is an inmost centre in us all, Where truth abides in fullness." 7 t Browning: Paracelsus. 206 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD Into this "inmost center" great souls of all ages have penetrated and have found truth in its fullness. Such men have always walked in the front rank of the men of their day, and many of them have led the vanguard. As it truly has been said that the people will perish where there is no vision, so is it true that there has not been any long period of civilization's progress where there have not been men with a vision. There have been periods of sluggish growth but no real times of stagnation. False prophets have arisen but they have never been able to dis parage the teaching of the true. Men suffer ing from mental or moral astigmatism have given us their distorted visions. But whenever a Matthew Arnold or a Lord Byron has lived a Tennyson and a Browning have been his con temporaries. As railroad and steamship com panies test out the eyesight of their engineers and captains, so does each age put its pilots to the proof. The optimists have outnumbered the pessimists, moods of doubt have been over whelmed by the tides of faith, In Memoriam cancels Dover Beach. Science, commerce, politics, art, philosophy, religion, have all left their record of revelation in literature. There is no phase of human ac tivity that language does not express. But it is rather to those forms of literature that dis- IN PROFANE LITERATURE 207 close more particularly the facts and meaning of human nature that we look as interpreting life and hence as a record of revelation. Whether in novel, essay, poem or drama; whether in history, biography, memoir or let ter, we find ourselves comparing our own ex periences with those of others. We make an alogies and form judgments with no thought of error or uncertainty as we read the experiences or incidents, the hopes or longings, of others. We are influenced to joy and sorrow, or moved to laughter and tears, as we enter into the ex periences of human beings, whether in real life or fiction. The significance of this influence is the fact that some men have been given the gift to express what other men feel, and to actual ize what other men live. Language has been the readiest record of revelation. The great are known to us in their method and kind of speech as well as in their acts. Grant's whole nature is indicated in the phrase : "We shall fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." Lincoln's character is summed up in his own words : "With malice toward none and charity toward all." Each of these men in his writings has given us a philosophy of history and of bfe that shall bring to all who read them an evidence of God in the world and in human life. Not only in his Gettysburg Address but in many of his other 208 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD speeches and in more of his sayings will Abra ham Lincoln continue to be a record of revela tion. The names of great men in other coun tries and times need not be called to witness the fact that the Infinite lives and breathes in the finite. When we hold to the definition of literature as the product of men and women who have given and give themselves to literary effort we have no lack of evidence to show how God has moved human beings to witness Him. Not only in the content of the literature but in the form thereof do we find this fact. God reveals Him self in nature according to order, adaptation and beauty. These too we find in literature. We are not less impressed by the order and beauty in literary products than we are in na ture. And we find adaptation everywhere in evidence. The various forms in literary expres sion lend themselves to exhibit all phases of har mony, order and beauty. We sometimes wonder which makes the stronger appeal, the captivating form in which a poem is written or the thought it is intended to express. To be sure the inspiration which prompts the thought will also produce the power fitly to express it. The poet is gifted both as to thought and versification. The two really are one, else he would not be a poet. We are speaking, of course, of real poetry and not IN PROFANE LITERATURE 209 mere rhyming. When Wordsworth writes, for example, "My heart leaps up when I behold A Rainbow in the sky : So was it when my life began ; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die !" the beauty of the lines is as pleasing as the thought is compelling. The verse calls up not only the actual scene of the rainbow but also the experience of witnessing its glory. This is only an example picked out at random from the many similar effective touches in Wordsworth and from only one poet out of scores who might be quoted. The personality of each poet enters into his poems, and we have souls as unlike as Kipling, Walt Whitman and Browning express ing our experiences in their own particular way. Their form is as different each from that of the other as they themselves are in disposi tion. Of course certain poems, both because of thought and form, will appeal to some persons and not to others. The personality of the reader needs to be taken into account as much as the personality of the writer. But he who has no appreciative sense of poetry is cut off from a most essential source of soul power. 210 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD The world of men can never become so material and so practical as to make appeal and to give power only to the practical and materially minded man. In fact we can really live in spite of the material and practical tendencies of civ ilization because of the spiritualizing influences which issue from souls keyed to the music and ideality of the universe. The poet enhances life's values. This he is able to do because in him is a deposit of God's truth which he shapes and fashions for the pleasure and inspiration of his fellow-men. He could not be true to himself did he not give expression to the eternal in him. Even were there none to read he would still be constrained to write. The same is true in kind if not in degree of the essayist and moralizer. There is a distinct difference between the style of Emerson and that of Carlyle, but it is the difference which existed in the men themselves. Both have a message for their fellows and both must give it expression. The ruggedness of the one's thought as well as the even tenor of the other's is evident in the style of each. Neither could speak like the other because neither could live like the other. But both had a revelation for humankind of which their respective writing is a record. Both appeal to one's sense of beauty in their style, although the beauty in Carlyle's work is that of the Scotch mountain and lake IN PROFANE LITERATURE 211 while Emerson's is that of the more quiet New England scenery. Both enlarge one's thought, although Carlyle's greatening is more the ad ding from without while Emerson's is the growth from within. Both quicken and deepen the emotional nature, although Carlyle's effect is rather that of a rushing mountain stream while Emerson gives a hint of the tides which are underneath and cannot be seen. Both en noble and refine the spirit, although Carlyle's tendency is that of the workman using heavy tools to bring out the form and semblance, while Emerson suggests the artist putting on the delicate but strong finishing touches. It has been said that the essayist writes be cause of an impulse to frame words in pleasing sentences and paragraphs rather than from a conviction that he has a message which must be delivered. This judgment is too superficial to receive much notice. It depreciates the sincerity of men and women who have left a real impress upon the world through their writings. Art for art's sake, when rightly interpreted, means life for life's sake. The essayist who really lives gives life. In so doing he also adds to the artistic content of literature. He becomes a moralizer in spite of himself. Even when he disavows preachment he nevertheless preaches. When Coleridge said to Lamb, "Have you ever heard me preach?" Lamb replied, "I have 212 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD never heard you do anything else." The es sayist is a moralizer, Gilbert K. Chesterton as well as Arthur Christopher Benson, H. G. Wells as well as Samuel McChord Crothers; he is a moralizer because he is living deeper in the pres ent and farther in the future than most of his contemporaries and is hearing the bell of eter nity ring. He would be the last to declare he is the medium of God's revelation. Doubtless he would disavow this claim did he hear it made for him. He writes not as playing a part but as being himself. And, being himself, he makes for the whole. Other men see the universal in him and feel the breath of the farther shore. His art eventuates in life and his life makes for art. To cultivate the sense of beauty, to en large the thought, to quicken and deepen the emotional nature, and to ennoble and refine the spirit — this is the effect of all real literature, whatever its form may be. Herein lies the se cret of the influence the writings of man have had in the ongoing of time. Every true piece of writing, both as to thought and expression, is a work of art. The artist is given the power to discover what is in the heart of man and to tell of his discovery so effectively that men will see and know his words are truth. Revelation to him will be the truth in him and its record the literature through which he gives it expres sion. THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN HOLY WRIT XII THE RECORD OF REVELATION IN HOLY WRIT "We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From graven stone and written scroll, From all old flower fields of the soul; And, weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the book our mothers read." — John Greenleaf Whittier. As all roads in the beginning of the Chris tian era led to Rome, so all roads in the realm of Christian civilization lead to the Bible. They may have their origin in the remotest end of the intellectual or spiritual kingdom, they may lead over deserts or quagmires as well as through flower bordered fields, they may come down through the valleys or up over the heights : but whence or in what way, finally they come to the Bible. Rome in her strongest day never had a power over her subjects like unto that which the Bible holds over the thought and life of men. Rome's 215 216 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD strength was only relative: a mightier oppo nent might at any time arise; it was only tem porary : the ills that all men are heir to sooner or later would gnaw at her vitals and she must sink down and disappear. The strength of the Bible, on the other hand, has never been threat ened by the greater power of a rival in the field of religious literature: it has held its own on comparison with, and shown itself to' be superior to all other bibles in the field of comparative reli gion; its strength has never been subject to de cay: by an organic force it renews its vitality continually and always has the dew of youth upon it, strong as a young man to run a race and conquer. No book has held the attention of mankind for anything, even approximately, like the time the Bible has. All nations have found in it their light and life, and all peoples have discovered it to be as well fitted to their own conditions and needs as if it had been writ ten for them in particular and not for the whole world in general. Here is one of the great facts of history and of life ; a fact as stupendous as it is stubborn. Man can no more ignore it than the mariner can ignore the Rock of Gibraltar. To some men the Bible may mean nothing more than a mere name or vague idea, as the Rock of Gib raltar may be a fact of which they have merely heard but of which they know nothing definite. THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 217 But despite this ignorance or indifference the Bible stands guarding the entrance to life as Gibraltar does the Mediterranean. And he who finds his way to the study of the Bible is as mightily impressed by its unspeakable strength as the traveler when he first comes in sight of England's stronghold. In former times, and to some extent even yet, it has been held a sacrilege to put the Bible to the same tests as are applied to other an cient documents. But there is nothing to fear from careful and consistent criticism. We demand only that the investigator be fair as well as capable, and that he do not allow his conclusions to be more rapidly made than the facts will allow. Like any other history of a people the Old Testament is composed of docu ments written at widely separated periods of time and place, and reflecting views of men who were the children of their day, largely lim ited and controlled by prevailing custom and circumstance. Hence the different sources of the Old Testament are not of equal value. Legend and folk-lore, anecdote, parable, riddle, poetry, apocalypse, are found side by side, or intermixed with chronicles, old laws, genealo gies, biographies, history and prophecy,1 the i On this subject an interesting statement is made by a well known Catholic scholar. The Bible, he says, "contains old history, handled with freedom, legends, 218 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD whole being set forth to show the providential leading of a people by Almighty God. Written history among the Hebrews began about the year 900 b. c with the oldest history of David. But long before this time traditions and legends, poems and anecdotes, were current among the Israelites, as among all early peo ples before the day of written history. As long as the Israelites were leading a nomadic life there was no occasion for writing down their sayings and stories as these were sung and told from mouth to mouth and at the camp fire un til they became well known even to the children. But when they settled in fixed abodes, and es pecially in times of peace, little by little a de sire grew to preserve their sayings and stories and traditions in permanent form. The era of writing began. Many ancient remains of writ ten literature are scattered through the books of the Old Testament. We find them repro duced in exact citation and also adapted in song and legend. The same is true of the New Testament. and folk-lore, chronicles quoted and abridged, genealo gies of people and settlements of races according to current views, anecdotes illustrating the qualities of heroic men, laws in every stage of growth and decay, proverbs, parables, apocalypses, dreams, speeches. It offers us biography viewed under a religious light, apo logues and meditative prayers, riddles, etc." William Barry: Tradition of Scripture, p. 236. THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 219 Here we find divergent accounts in the first three Gospels and contradictions which need to be harmonized. This is an undertaking which found favor even in the most conservative cir cles, for what preacher of a former generation was without his "Harmony" of the Gospels? And all of those who wrote concerning Jesus were not eyewitnesses, nor were their means of knowing about Him all of the same kind. Long after Jesus' death, when there was dan ger of losing the exactness of His utterances, those who stood nearest to Him or who had been most strongly influenced by Him, undertook to give an accurate account of His life and teach ing. Luke, in the preface to his Gospel, tells us with much particularity how painstakingly he gathered the information for his life of Jesus, how he sifted and weighed and arranged the material which came to his hand. In the strict meaning of the term he was the first higher critic, for he used the true scientific method in gathering and collating his sources and drawing reasonable inferences from them. In studying the Bible, therefore, it is well to remember that we are using old manuscripts which have come down to us from various sources and through a multiplicity of hands during a long period of years. Careful investi gation and reverent discrimination are neces sary. Some things will always be difficult to 220 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD understand. Others we shall never get in their true meaning, owing to the mutilated form in which the manuscripts were handed to poster ity. In spite of all the difficulties,2 however, the Bible stands supreme as the book of reli gion and gives us a content we find nowhere else. The Old Testament goes to the heart of every problem mankind in any age has had to solve. His hopes and longings and fears are all ex pressed in imperishable words and his cry for deliverance from himself and the world can never be subdued. In the New Testament "the gospel goes straight to the heart of things, concerns 2 George Bancroft when a student at Berlin wrote to Professor Andrews Norton on February 15, 1821, as fol lows: "A few weeks ago, animated by the encouraging assistance of Baron Humboldt, I ventured the 'Aga>- memnon' of jEschylus. What a world of difficulties start up on every page ! How uncertain the readings ! How doubtful the interpretations! Many a place re fuses to admit of an explanation unless boldly amended by conjectural criticism. And yet when the obstacles are all fairly encountered, and as far as our weak powers extend, overcome, what greater delight can a man feel than that of reading 'Agamemnon'? It is the sublimest work of Grecian tragedy," etc. (Reprinted in The Transcript, Boston, June 26, 1906.) The same can be said of the study of the Bible in the original manuscripts, especially those of the Old Testament. And how much truer is it of the Bible to say that "when the obstacles are all fairly encountered" "what greater delight can a man feel than that of reading" the Sacred Scriptures! THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 221 itself directly with the highest moral and relig ious efforts of human life, tells us on what every thing ultimately depends, and in its transcen dental idealism overleaps almost all the means and conditions by which, and under which, the higher life of man works and develops." 3 Much as man would get from under author ity and be absolutely free, he nevertheless looks for authority and would have a final authorita tive word giving him his direction. Even those who consider themselves free to put the Bible to the most strenuous tests ; to criticize it at will ; to compare it with other religious or phil osophical literature ; nevertheless exhibit, in one way or another, their desire to find the final word of authority. In fact, the very reason why the Bible from the beginning has gone through such severe ordeals is because men have considered that it is, or ought to be, authorita tive, and their criticism really has been the best evidence of the universal desire on the part of man to find an authoritative guide in life. There are those who insist upon the Bible, as it stands, as being such an absolute authority. If the Bible is not such a book, they can not find in it any guide or consolation whatever. The whole teaching power of the Bible depends upon its authoritativeness. As to just how we aWilhelm Bousset: The Faith of a Modern Protes tant, Eng. tr., p. 82. REVELATION AND ITS RECORD would define this word "authority," and what kind of a control it should have over men, there is no unanimity of opinion. In fact, those who declare most strenuously for the authority of the Bible have more or less vague notions of what the authority should be. The whole question of the authority of the Bible is wrapped up in the questions of revela tion and inspiration. We could hardly claim that the Bible carried with it an especial au thority if we did not find in it a revelation of God. Furthermore, if this revelation had not been received through the medium of inspired men it surely could not carry with it the weight of authority necessary to make the Bible a real guide in life. As we found that God's revela tion is not confined to the Bible, nor that only the men who transmitted this revelation were inspired, so do we find that the Bible does not contain the only or all of the guidance that man has or should have in life. We should say, how ever, that as the supreme revelation of God is found in the Bible and the fullest degree of in spiration, so also is the authority of the Bible superior to and comprehensive of all other au thority. Take, for example, the Ten Commandments. Criticism has centered around these Command ments perhaps more so than around any other part of the Old Testament. Scholars have de- THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT clared that the Ten Commandments, in the form in which we have them, were not the original Commandments and that their authorship is ex ceedingly doubtful. But this code remains, in spite of criticism, as an authority in all mat ters which pertain to the conduct of men and of nations. The human race probably will never come to a time when the Ten Commandments will be looked upon as obsolete or as having lost their bearing upon the practical matters of human kind.4 What the critics say is interesting and important, but they are not able to take from us the Ten Commandments as they have been alive in the world for century upon century and as they fit into the life of the human race to-day even as they met the conditions of men a thou sand years before Christ was born. There is an authoritative note in their utterance which compels the attention of man. Although he may not be willing to submit himself to them, yet he cannot reason away their significance and applicability in the affairs of his daily life. Thou shalt have no other God beside Me. Thou * "In vain we call old notions fudge ' And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge And stealing will continue stealing." Motto of the "American Copyright League," written by James Russell Lowell. 224 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD shalt honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not desecrate the Holy Sabbath. Thou shalt not commit murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false testimony. These sound with a note so strong that it is heard above all the din and confusion of a work-a-day world. Man cannot get away from these Command ments. If we look at them carefully we will discover that even although they mention par ticular things which man is not to do, they do not enter into details. They are general in content. They have relationship, not to a par ticular time or a particular people, Palestine, for example, and the children of Israel, but are universal in their scope and have reference to all times and to all peoples. Furthermore, they are not philosophical in content, but are ethical. They are not some thing that only the learned can grasp, but something that the child on his way to kinder garten can understand. Yet each one of the Commandments has so ample a scope that in it all of the wider bearings of conduct can be dis covered. "Thou shalt have no other God be side Me." There is no argument here as to the being or nature of God. The statement as sumes not only that God is, but that He is ab solute, and that no other worship on the part of man can have any effect or validity. Under THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT this general commandment the whole scheme of the philosophy of religion and morality of con duct is embodied. "Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother." There is no argu ment here as to filial duty, no question raised as to the relationship between parents and child. Yet the whole concern of the family, of the do mestic life, of the security of the home, is in volved in this one commandment. So with all the other commandments. They refer to a par ticular thing. But when we consider that there are only ten commandments, and hence a lim ited number of particular things designated, we must search for the secret of their power and the cause of their continued life in the element which gives them universal relevancy. So we might look at the great prophets, Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah. Each one thun dered against evil at a particular time. One might declare that their words have reference only to an epoch in history, just as each presi dential campaign in our own country seems to center about some one question. But when we hear Amos beginning those awful denunciations against the nations surrounding Israel and Ju dah, and coming by gradual stages in his ap plication to Judah and then to Israel, we hear the echo in our own land, in our own immediate vicinity. The words of Amos, although they have to do with evils and kinds of persecution 226 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD of which we know nothing to-day, nevertheless strike home with convicting power. We can think of the same kind of oppression and cor ruption and malfeasance and infidelity and greed and lust and wickedness immediately about us and of which, in some way or other, we are a part. Amos' words are authoritative. They strike every land, every age, every individual. Even although in detail they do not apply par ticularly to us, in their broad and far-reaching sweep they take us into consideration and fill us with the same kind of dread and remorse which were awakened in the people of Judah and of Israel. So the great sermons of Isaiah which he preached to his fellow citizens ring in our ears, apply to our conditions, convict us of our guilt, condemn us for our misdoings. We are unable to escape their application. Although we know nothing about burnt offerings, or vegetable offerings, or peace offerings, or any of the other rites which Isaiah declared to be an abomination, yet when he says : "Your new moons and your appointea feasts, my soul hateth. They are a trouble unto me. I am weary to bear them, and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you ; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear ; your hands are full of blood," we understand that he has been talking to every THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 227 nation and of every people which has lived since his day. We find in his particular teachings the universal element of God's authoritative ut terance. He, too, is not a philosopher nor a metaphysician. He does not make investiga tions or give definitions after the manner of the scientist. But he is the preacher — the man who is in close touch with humanity; the man who is living near to the Almighty, and who be comes a prophet because, knowing the nature of God and seeing the wayward conduct of man, he can foretell what must be the conduct of God and the end of His disobedient children. Furthermore, in the Old Testament, there is always the expression of an unfulfilled longing. Man realizes his insufficiency. He knows that his tendencies are toward evil ; that his will to controvert his tendencies is weak and that he is forever in the grasp of powers that draw him down. Yet in spite of this he tries to reach upward. He has a yearning to scale the heights of good behavior. The greatest need of his soul is to come in contact with the ideal. We find everywhere that he has made this ideal per sonal. He looks forward to the ideal Deliverer, the ideal Friend, the ideal Saviour. He turns to the future and looks for one to come who in himself will contain every element that will make for perfect truth and perfect conduct in man. There is an authoritative note even in REVELATION AND ITS RECORD the longing of the Hebrews. It appeals to us as Job cries: "Oh that there were a man who could speak to God and intercede for man." This longing for a mediator between man and God is so irrepressible in the Old Testa ment that it is well to consider it in the light of the revelation the Bible brings. The idea of mediation between God and man is common to all religions. In the lowest grade of civilization and among savage people the idea of a mediator, of one who pleads for a man with God or the unseen powers, finds its expres sion and incarnation in such forms as the medi cine man, the sorcerer, the rainmaker, whose functions are to appease the offended and angry gods of nature. These men were thought to be gifted with occult powers and hence were re garded with veneration and awe. They were supposed to penetrate into the unseen world, to read the future and influence the supernatural powers. They sought to accomplish this by the use of charms and spells, ghosts and totems. They professed to mediate between the living and the dead, between the lost and the seeking, between the weakness of the finite and the pow ers of the Infinite. Even the savage felt his need of a close union with the gods and by such means did he try to appease them and find their favor. His cry : "Oh, that one would plead for a man with the gods," becomes truly pathetic. THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 229 In the higher forms of religion the idea of mediation takes on a loftier phase. The priest becomes the mediator between man and God. He pleads with God by means of animal sacri fice and the offering of first fruits. Among the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Hindus and the Buddhists, the priests en joy high rank and are venerated by the com mon people to a great degree. They busy them selves in perfecting most elaborate and richly adorned rituals. They have no potency, how ever, and are unable to help their devotees. The priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, we are told, prayed and cried aloud all day to their gods for help, doing themselves bodily harm, to attract their attention. But it was all in vain. So even to-day the ruins of vaulted temples and arched tombs, built where the Nile, the Euphrates, the Mediterranean Sea, almost washed their outer courts, re-echo with the cry: "Oh that one might plead for a man with God." In the Hebrew religion the idea of media tion is fundamental. Surrounded as they were by pagan nations, the Hebrews borrowed from them many of their early religious ideas. But the mind of the Hebrew was as a furnace purg ing and purifying all pagan ideas which came to it. So we find the idea of mediation among the Hebrews distinctly their own. In the be ginning the head of every household was a 230 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD priest or mediator, making sacrifices for his family and entering into covenant relations for them with God. We read of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob performing these functions. A typical example of a mediator in the Old Testament is the patriarch Abraham plead ing with God for the city of Sodom in which Lot, a member of his family, had taken refuge. He stands with all humility, but with praise worthy insistence, begging of the Almighty that He spare the city if fifty righteous are found therein. And when the request is granted he asks that the city be spared if only forty-five righteous are found therein, and then forty, thirty, twenty, until, throwing himself upon the mercy of Jehovah, saying he is mere dust and ashes, and begging the Lord not to become angry with him, he pleads for the city if only ten righteous are found therein. At a later period we find Moses appearing as a mediator for his people. Time and again he goes to Pharaoh to plead for them until Pharaoh gives permission for them to depart. Then out in the wilderness it is he who mediates between them and God, bringing to them the laws on the tablets of stone, beseeching God in their behalf when they fall into the error of making the molten calf, even going so far as to express himself as willing that his own name be blotted out of God's book if God will but for- THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 231 give the people their sins. Twelve centuries before Christ we find a mediator willing to sac rifice himself for the sins of his people! In the priesthood the idea of purity enters in to an important degree. A man must be cere monially pure in order to stand before God for his fellow men. He must be without bodily blemish. None other could approach the altar of God and sacrifice thereon for the benefit of the people. The priesthood became a caste, only the priests could enter the sacred precincts of the temple, and only the high priest the holy of holies. The priest bears the sins and iniquity of the people and, in surrendering himself to God, makes atonement for them. Their sacrifices and offer ings also must be pure and without blemish. But we do not need to read at length in the Old Testament to learn that the priests became cor rupt, and disgraced rather than hallowed their office. The people were left without a media tor, one in whom they could trust. So the cry issued from the lips of many a burdened soul : "Oh that one might plead for a man with God." Side by side with the priesthood grew the prophets who afterwards took upon themselves the duty of denouncing the corruption of the priests and the profanation of the temple. A prophet, too, must be without guile, a man of 232 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD clean lips, a real servant of the Lord, who could speak for God to the people. So we have such mighty men as Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah who stemmed the tide of iniquity, and raised their voices above the storm to declare the jus tice, purity and love of God. They cry : "Thus saith the Lord," and rebuke without reserve the unrighteousness of the high and mighty. They intercede for the people, plead for them with God, as Jeremiah prayed for Jerusalem and Ezekiel for the Nation. And the loftiest ideal of the prophet is to suffer for the sins of his people. He becomes the real servant of the Lord, despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. There were only a few great names among the prophets. The many were false to their calling, they were ready to prophesy for money or position, to flatter the people, to become mere tricksters, who cried: "Peace, peace, when there was no peace." So the longing of many a heart con tinued to express itself in the words of Job : "Oh that one might plead for a man with God." The idea of mediation, as we see, is a funda mental element in religion. Man has always recognized his estrangement from God and longed for union with Him. He has always had a sense of incompleteness and Insufficiency, and an impulse to find a being who could speak with final and absolute authority. The media- THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 233 tion of patriarch, priest and prophet was a con secrated hope for deliverance. But patriarchs and prophets and priests came and went. Some were holy and undefiled, others were corrupt and blemished. There must be one acceptable in all respects who could plead for a man with God; one who would stand as the representative of the race for all time. Men might accept or reject him, but there he would stand and con tinue to stand as the perfect medium between a loving God and a sinning people. The later Jews themselves realized that all other media tion had failed. They believed that God must send a Messiah who would execute the divine will and realize the blessings of divine grace for Israel. He was to be invested with superhuman powers, he was to be sinless himself, and hence could purify as well as liberate Israel. The New Testament writers declared that these ideas became incarnated in Jesus Christ. In the full ness of time, we read, God sent forth His only Son as the Redeemer of the race. Christianity, above all religions, therefore, emphasizes clearly and forcibly the real need of mediation between man and God. This is the one theme of the New Testament and Job's cry : "Oh that one would plead for a man with God," is there satisfied. The disciples give us strong proof of the mediatorial office of Jesus Christ. They did not fully understand Him until after 234 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD His death and resurrection had made many of His sayings plain. Peter becomes their spokes man in that eloquent defense of his Master as recorded in the second and third chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, familiar as he was with the Hebrew religion and its idea of media tion, recognized at once in Jesus the perfect mediator. He reveals to man God's love and brings divine grace to him. "For we are jus tified freely by His grace through the redemp tion that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath sent forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood. For God commended His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." Through Jesus also He communicates to us His knowledge, for "He who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. For God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. For He hath made Christ to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Especially does the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews dwell upon the mediatorial work of Jesus Christ. He was genuinely a man, hav ing assumed human flesh and blood and was made like unto his brethren. He acknowledged a common dependence with them upon God and confessed Himself their brother. He grew, in THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 235 consequence of His earthly experience, both in stature and knowledge, He was obedient, indus trious, pious, and faithful. He had a supreme faith in God and prayed to Him incessantly. Through the discipline of temptation and suffer ing He was perfected for his mediatorial work. This development at every stage was sinless. The innocency of His childhood was tested and strengthened by hard struggle and His sinless- ness was the result of a constantly increasing realization of the good. So does the writer to the Hebrews describe Jesus as the perfect Me diator who has passed through the heavens to the immediate presence of God, who is per fected forevermore, the same to-day, yesterday and forever, who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Thus, also, we find Jesus speaking for Him self. "Which of you convicteth Me of sin?" is His challenge. In the pure light of His spot less character all defilement shrivels up or slinks away. Because He was sinless, separate, and apart from all men in this vital respect, did He have a right to plead for man with God. He came to give His life a ransom for many, and this was a voluntary surrender. He claimed a divine sonship and union with God; He was a dispenser of the bread and water of life; the light of the world, the true vine, the good shep herd. He was the door of the sheepfold, the 236 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD only way to the Father. To see Him was to see the Father. He exemplifies the idea of per fect mediation in His teaching. His original ity, His lofty tone, His spiritual power, His self-evident truthfulness, proclaim His divine origin and show Him to be the speaker through which the will of God on earth is realized. In the mighty works which He did He exhibits divine power over the ills and frailties of man. In His prayers He carries on His work of media tion as is especially shown in the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John. In His death He substantiates His claim as the perfect media tor. He dies for no personal object of His own, but wholly on behalf of His people. He is a perfect sacrifice for them. Jesus exhibited in Himself the necessary asso ciation with the Almighty which made Him the particular recipient of the will of the eternal and fitted Him to make a strong and sufficient appeal to man. Although there are those who cannot declare Jesus to be the realization of the Jewish hope, that He is the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, men cannot rid themselves of Him. As Emerson has said: the name of Jesus "is not so much written as plowed into the history of this world." 5 Thoughtful men must account for His peculiar power and per sistency in the world, the indwelling of His spirit 5 Works, Vol. I, p. 126. THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 237 in the men of to-day, the saving fullness of His life which means life in abundance for every human soul. No great philosopher, no com manding genius in the thought world, has found himself able to escape this authoritative power of Jesus. The greatest minds of the ages since Jesus came into the world have considered it extremely important to account for Him and to fit Him into their systems. Even the criticism, whether moderate or extreme, which has been directed against the Christ has had for its final result the deepening of the conviction that man cannot walk along the highway of life without encountering Jesus. Although He may be snubbed on the road or ruthlessly forced off it, He regains the right-of-way. Jesus in Himself is an authority which the intellect must recognize. While we would ad mit the contention that the details of Jesus' life do not fit into the life of to-day, practically speaking, yet we cannot overlook the aptness of His message for to-day. His teaching is so far reaching that it comes to us with full po tency of authority. In His teaching He does not ally Himself with the schools. He is not a philsospher nor a metaphysician. He allies Himself with the people. He knows the needs of the human soul. He is a moralist in the direct sense of that term and spiritualizes every thing He touches. This is the secret of His 238 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD mighty power and the reason why His author ity is immediate and universal in nature. His appeal to men has always been irresistible. A remarkable proof of this fact is the quick re sponse of men and women who hear of Him for the first time. Missionary history is full of ex amples. Especially has His influence over the thinking men of the Orient been fascinating. The imaginary heathen of the first century expresses the conviction of many an Eastern soul to-day: "If Jesus Christ is a man, — • And only a man, — I say That of all mankind I cleave to him, And to him will I cleave alway. If Jesus Christ is a God, — And the only God, — I swear I shall follow him through' heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air !" 6 As Jesus was in the days of the flesh, so countless people to-day regard Him. To them He is the vital union between man and God, living in glory as the undying, unfailing, un- forgetting, friend and Saviour of man ; still rep resenting God to man and man to God, so that in Him man may be at peace and at rest with « Richard Watson Gilder: The Song of a Heathen (So journing in Galilee, A.D. 32). Complete Poems, p. 53. THE RECORD IN HOLY WRIT 239 God. The figure of an interceding priest in heaven has ever been profoundly impressive and helpful to Christians of all ages. The cry of Job is still uttered: "Oh that one might plead for a man with God." But the hungry, longing soul turns to Christ and finds in Him the one for whom Job's burdened soul yearned. In the Sistine Madonna a curtain is thrown back on both sides in the foreground. The Madonna and the Christ Child emerge front the clouds with a host of angels in their train. On one side in front of the curtain Saint Bar bara is kneeling in adoration and looks down and out of the picture, while on the other side Saint Sixtus, looking up at the Virgin, points in the direction in which Saint Barbara is looking. Originally this painting formed the altar piece of a humble church in one of the smaller towns of Italy. The curtain in the picture was joined by the actual curtains of the altar. As one came into the church the figures in the picture looked real. At the altar men and women, burdened by sin and sorrow and grief, were kneeling. There is no earthly help for them. Out of the picture Saint Bar bara looks down upon them with unutterable compassion. But Saint Sixtus turns to the Christ and pointing to the bowed forms be seeches aid for them. "I can do nothing," he seems to be saying, "Thou alone canst help." 240 REVELATION AND ITS RECORD This master painting represents the supreme record of revelation in the Bible. "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous ; and He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." INDEX INDEX Abbot, "Through Na ture to Christ," 112. Abraham, 109. Acts of the Apostles, (17:32), 41; second and third chapters, 234. Adams, George Burton, "Civibzation during the Middle Ages," 162. Agamemnon, The, 220. Agassiz, "Premedita tion of God," 53. Aked, Charles F., "The Courage of the Cow ard," 121. Alexander, E. R., "Mil itary Memoirs of a Confederate," 199 f. Allegorical Method of Interpretation, 93 f. Amos, 135, 225 f. Anthropomorphism, 22, 23. Appearance and reality, 53. Archimedes, 61. 2*3 Argonaut, The, 110. Arnold, Matthew, criti cism of his "Eternal not Ourselves," .111; his "Creed of Illu sion," 138 f; opinion of "When I survey the wondrous cross," 140 f; "Dover Beach," 138 f, 161, 206. Art, in relation to sci ence, 45 f; Egypt, Babylonia, 52; inspi ration of, 80. Art critics, 68. Authority, final, 221 f. / Bach, 44. Ballard, Frank, "Mir acles of Unbelief," 114. Bancroft, George, on translating Agamem non, 220. Barry, Wilbam, "Tradi tion of Scripture," 217 f. 244 INDEX Beethoven, 44. Belief, life without im possible, 8; all great ages ages of sincere belief, 10. Benson, A. C, "Alfred Tennjyson," 136; a morahzer, 212. Bible, as record of revelation, 69 ; typo graphical errors in, 75 f ; revision of, 76; errors of translation, 76 ; Old Testament quotations in New, 77 f; great fact of his tory, 216; how to be studied, 219; author ity of, 221 f. Bismarck, 166. Boone, Daniel, 203. Bowne, Borden P., "Gains for Religious Thought," 19; "Per- sonalism," 25 ; "The Christian Revelation," 81; proofs of God in history, "The Imma nence of God/' (p. 45), 149. Bousset, Wilhelm, "The Faith of a Modern Protestant," 220 f. Brooks, W. K., "Foun dations of Zoology," 117. Browning, inspiration of, 81 ; highest pro duct of ennobling, 82 ; "Fra Lippo Lippi," 123; "A Bean Stripe," 128 f; "Par acelsus," 129, 205; "Francis Furini," 130; "Take all in a word," 145; "Saul," 181 f; "Pippa Pass es," 198. Buckham, John Wright, "Personality and the Christian Ideal," 25, 62. Bunyan, John, 197 f. Bushnell, Horace, God's world "a sounding board for the heart," 175. Byron, on music, 174. Carlyle, man a genuine work of God, 35; re garded as negative in thought, 137 f ; heart of nature music, 175; effect of music, 179; INDEX 245 compared with Emer son, 210 f. Carson, Kit, 203. "Chapter on Dreams," R. L. Stevenson, 57, 85 f. Charles, Eliziabeth, quoted in Aked's "The Courage of the Coward," 121. Chesterton, Gilbert K., a moralizer, 212. Christians, trials of ear ly, 132. Chopin, 44. "City of Dreadful Night," 113 f. Civil War, (The Ameri can) 159 f. Coleridge, a preacher, 211 f. Columbus, what he dis covered, 55 f; moved by impulse of faith, 109 f ; cannot be fit tingly honored, 144; heard inward voice, 166. Communion of God with man, 73. Conscience, a reality, 39 f. Corinthians, second let ter to, (3:1-3, 6-8), 88. Corot, 199. Crawshaw, William Henry, supreme reve lation of literature, "Literary Interpreta tion of Life," (p. 238), 195, 197. Creed, necessity of, 97. Cromwell's belief in God, 3 f . Crothers, Samuel Mc- Chord, a moralizer, 212. Dante, his nature "one of intense belief," 10 f ; a lofty spirit, 135 f. Darwin, Charles, views on religion, 19 f. David, belief in God, 3 f. Declaration of Indepen dence, 166 f. Dickinson, G. Lowe, "Knowledge and Faith," 24. Doctrine, 97 f. Dods, Marcus, "The Bible; its Origin and Nature," 77- 246 INDEX Dorchester, Daniel, "Christianity Vindi cated by its Enemies," 140 f. Drummond, Henry, in fluence of, 201, f. Earthworms, 118 f. Eggleston, George Cary, on "Clay and Van Buren, Lincoln," 159 f; on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 200. Emerson, on Nature, 59; on Newton, 61; "Considerlations by the Way," 63; on knowledge, 127; "New England Re formers," 136; belief in righteousness, 136; his essays, 205; com pared with Carlyle, 210 f; name of Jesus "plowed into history," 236. Eucklen, Rudolf, his philosophy of life, 89; the universe in man, "The Meaning and Value of Life," (p. 99), 127, 158. Evolution, doctrine of, 71, 98, 112 f. Exodus, (35:30-35), 183. Ezekiel, (1:12), 165; as a mediator for the Nation, 232. Faith, stimulus of, 19; the hardihood of, 129. Faith of reason, 130. Fear, 132 f. Fiske, John, "What is Inspiration," 117- Form, striving after and breaking away from, 43 f. Formulation of thought, 96. French Revolution, 166. Gardiner, Ernest, "A Handbook of Greek Sculpture," 187. Gardiner, Percy, mean ing of inspiration, "Exploratio Evangel- ica," (p. 478), 67. Genesis, first chapters of, 107; everything "good," 114; com mand to subdue the earth, 122. Gibson, W. R. Boyce, INDEX 247 "Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy of Life," 89. Gilbert, G. H., "Inter pretation of the Bible," 93. Gilder, Richard Wat son, "The Song of a Heathen," 238. God, all men seek, 12 ; personality of, 23 f; crude thought of, 24; educating man, 28 ; He and His Truth unchangeable, 30 ; cannot bmit Himself, 30; record of His pjresence, 67; com munion with man, 73 ; might and power of, 115. God seeking genera tions, 1 . Goethe, quoted, 62 ; in dividuality, 205. Gold-miner, 3, 4. Gordon, George A., "The Christ of To day," "The New Epoch for Faith," 22 ; "Ultimate Con ceptions of Faith," 101, 183. Grant, General, victor ious leader of Federal forces, 168; his na ture indicated, 207. Grimthorpe, Lord, on Herbert Spencer, 113 f. Grover, Delo Corydon, "The Volitional Ele ment in Knowledge and Belief," 114. Gwatkin, Henry Mel- vill, "The Knowledge of God," 17, 26. i Haeckel, Deity "a gas eous vertebrate," 21 ; "man an affair of chance," 111. Heavens, visible and as tronomical, 53. Hebrew manuscript, oldest, 76. Heine, world without God would be bed lam, 137. Higher Critic, Luke the first, 219. Higher Criticism, 99. Hoffding, Harold, "The Philosophy of Reli gion," 24. Homer, Milton, coun- INDEX tryman of, 135; he roes of, 203; bor rowed material, 203 f. Hope, all healthy life proceeds on basis of, 7 f . Hovey, Carl, "Stone wall Jackson," 168. Hydrogen and Oxygen, 64. Illingworth, J. R., "Personality, Human and Divine," 22. Inge, William Ralph, The Gospel not in tended to be shut up in book, "Faith and its Psychology," (p. 119 f, 122), 85, 93. Inspiration, 71 ff; Me chanical theory of, 71 f; verbal theory of, 74 f ; in modern liter ature, 80 f. Isaiah, Dante imbued with writings of, 135; his significance as a prophet, 225 f. Jackson, Stonewall, his belief in God, 4; value as a soldier, 167 f. James, William, "The Moral Equivalent for War," 154. Jefferson, Thomas, pro phesied American Civil War, 63. Jeremiah, Dante imbued with writings of, 135; significance as a prophet, 225 ; as medi ator, 232. Jesus, "Yet many things to say," 56; His words the meas ure for estimating truth, 56 f; empha sized spiritual record of revelation, 87; rev elation cannot be bound in a book, 93; was not against form but laid istress on life, 99 f; makes dis tinction between rev elation and record, 101 ; "My Father worketh," 114; "wars and rumors of wars," 150; place of Judas in Jesus' career, 163 f; danger of losing INDEX 249 exact utterances, 219; character of, 235 ; name "plowed into history," 236. Jesus Christ, mediation through, 233 ff. Job, "What is Man?" 35 ; spirit in man, 57, 79 f ; "Who hath put wisdom in inward parts?" 88; his cry for mediator, 228, 231, 232, 239. John, Gospel of, (6 :63) 87. Johnson, Francis Howe, "God in Evolution," VII. Johnson, Mary, "The Long Roll," 168. Jjordan, David Starr, anthropomorphism, in "The Stability of Truth," 22. Judas, place in Jesus' career, 163, 164. Kaaba, 184. Kipling, "The Explor er," 27 f, 143 f; "Tomlinson," 157; "When 'Omer Smote 'is Bloomin' Lyre," 203. Knowledge a venture of faith, 17; a result of conscious effort, 18. Lamb's remark to Cole ridge, 211 f. Legend, Orpheus and Arion, 175. "Les Miserables," 205. Life, cannot be ana lyzed, 95 ; beginning of cannot be account ed for, 98; set to music, 179. Lincoln, Eggleston's view of, 160; heard inward voice, 1 66 ; character of, 207 f. Liszt, 44. Logos, logos-doctrines, 94. Lockyer, Sir Norman and Winifred, " Ten nyson as a Student and Poet of Nature," 106. Longfellow, inspiration of, 81. Lowell, James R., on Dante, 11; on the 250 INDEX Ten Commandments, 223. Luke, how he got his in formation, 78 f; the first higher critic, 219. Luther, 164. McConnell, Francis J., Belief as evidence of the Unseen, "Relig-*! ious Certainty," (p. 18), 1; "The Diviner Immanence," 55, 69 f. Man, the object of reve lation, 26, 35, ff ; can not be reduced to his chemical compounds nor his likeness be found among low-dr animals, 35 ; manifests himself in action, 36; has will-power, 37 f ; knows himself to be under obligation, 39; habituates himself to discover truth, 58; a divine becoming, 149. Manuscript, oldest He brew, 76. Martineau, James, "A Study of Religion," 22; "Seat of Author ity in Religion," 164. Mason, Daniel Gregory, art "the tender human servant," The Out look, (26 April, 1902), 173; "The Meaning of Music," 198 f. Masterman, C. F. B., "In Peril of Change," 46. Mathematician, at work, 58. Mediation, idea of, 228 ff. Messiah, idea of, 233. Millet, Jean Francois, 189 f. Milton, inspiration of, 81; his belief in righteousness, 135 ff; lofty spirit, 1 36 ; "good book precious life-blood of a mas ter-spirit," 195. Mind, normal condition of, 41. Mithras, followers of, 10. "Mona Lisa," 199. 'Moses, knew God, 3 f; as a mediator, 230 f. Music, form in, 44; as a science or an art, 44 INDEX 251 f; inspiration of, 79 f. Mythology itself a myth, 203. Napoleon, a current in the stream of civiliza tion, 165. Nature, impartation of, to man, 89 f; is the external world, 105; has a soul, 107; for bidding aspect of, 121 ff; has call to man, 122. Nelson, Life of by Southey, 59. Neptune, discovery of, 5 f. New Testament, compo sition of, 218 f. Newton, not aware of full meaning of law of gravitation, 56; how he came to dis cover law of gravita tion, 60. Nicodemus, Jesus' lesson to, 100; his attitude as a scholar to Jesus, 101. Norton, Charles Eliot, "The Building of Or- vieto Cathedral," 188 f. Old Testament, composi tion of, 217 f. Orr, James, "Revela tion and Inspiration," V. Paul, sermon on Mars Hill, 41 ; revelation cannot be bound in book, 93; Philippians, (2:12-13), 146; rec ognized Jesus as per fect Mediator, 234 f. Peabody, Francis G., "Religion of an Edu cated Man," 101. Pericles, "Music of the Spheres," 174. Personality, cannot think of God apart from, 24 ; meaning of, 24, 25. Peter, on mediatorship of Jesus, 234. Philippians, (2:12-13), 146. Philosophy, as revela tion and as record, 91 f ; must take Jesus in to account, 237. 252 INDEX Philosophers, pagan, 133. Plato, on limitations of written word, "Phae- drus," 93. Prayer, true, exhibited in action, 140. Priesthood, idea of, 231. Prophets, The, how they foreknew, 62 ; the great, 225 f; as mediators, 231 f. Psalm, (22:1), 128 (23:4), 134; (24:6) 1; (37:1 ff), 134 (77:19), 108; (78 41), 161; (104:19) 116; (104:24), 119 (121:1), 134. Rashdall, Hastings, in formation not super- naturally given, "Philosophy and Re ligion," (p. 139), 51, 63. Reality, fundamental, a personal Being, 1 2 ; appearance and, 53. Redwood trees, tower ing height of, 108; age of and markings, 109; silhouette of, 120. Religion, lofty souls, 92. Religions, primitive, 9 f ; all similar in main features, 10; founda tion of all, 20 f. Revelation, of God not only desirable but highly probable, 1 3 ; any fact which gives knowledge, 17; inex haustible, 28 ; intellec tually clearing, 29 ; timeless and extra-in dividual, 29 ; moral and livable, 31 ; a challenge to the in tellect, 57; in Bible, 69; record of, 85 ff; includes more than man can record, 87; spiritual and eternal, record of, material and temporal, 89. Rousseau, age of, flip pant and superficial in belief, 10. Rowland, Eleanor Har ris, possibility of God speaking to man, "The Right to Be lieve," (p. 103), 17. INDEX 253 Savonarola, inward voice calling, 166. "Scarlet Letter, The," 205. Schiller, F. C. S., "need for a Divine First Cause," in "Riddles of the Sphinx," (p. 197), 105. Schumann, "Ich Grolle • Nicht," 199. Science, anthropomor phic, 22 ; in relation to art, 45 ; substanti ates Scripture, 52 f; strives for form, 97 f; has gaps, 113. Seeberg, Reinhold, "Revelation and In spiration," V, 82. Septuagint, errors in translation from Old Testament, 77 f- Shaler, Nathaniel S., "The Individual," 26, 59. Shakespeare, Milton countryman of, 1 35 ; made free use of oth ers' material, 204; re sult had he lived in Browning's time, 205. Shelley, "Beatrice Cen ci," 198. Sill, Edward Rowland, inspiration of, 81 ; "The World's Secret," 94. Sistine Madonna, The, 239. Smith, George Adam, "Life of Henry Drummond," 201. Smythe, Newman, "Through Science to Faith," 26. Socrates, on fear, 133. Sophocles, Milton coun tryman of, 135. Southey, Robert, "Life of Nelson," 59. Spencer, Herbert, forc ed to posit "Unknow able," 12; criticism of definition of "Evolu tion," 112 f. Stevenson, R. L., "C hapter on Dreams," 57, 85 f; letter from "Weir of Hermiston," 60. Stonehenge, 184. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, qualifications for writ ing "Uncle Tom's 254 INDEX Cabin," 199 f. Ten Commandments, 222 ffJ Tennyson, on mockery, 41 ; inspiration of, 81 ; highest product of, 82 ; "flower in cran nied wall," 90 ; agrees with science, 106; "In Memoriam," 130, 206; desire to vindicate ways of God, 1 36 ; lofty spirit, 136; hymns of, 140. Tetzel, 164. Thomson, James, "City of Dreadful Night,'" 113 f. Thomson, J. Arthur, "Bible of Nature," 59, 116, 118, 119. Thornton, Sir Edward, on result of American Revolution, 167. Toy, C. H., "Quotations from Old Testament," 77. Truth, at the center, 9; unchangeable, 30; al ways comes as a mir acle, 61. Tschaikowsky, "Nur wer die Sehnsucht Kennt," 199. Tyndall, on skepticism, 9 ; "Fragments of Sci ence," 117 f. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 199 f. Unseen, incentive of, 1. Uranus, influence of Neptune on, 5 f. Vivisection, 95. War, 150 ff. Washington, George, voice calling, 166. Watson, John, on Mat thew Arnold, 140 f. Watts, Isaac, hymns of, 140. Wells, G. H., a moral izer, 212. Wesleys, the, hymns of, 140. Whipple, Edwin P., opinion of Carlyle, 138. White, Andrew D., "A History of the War fare between Science with Theology," 163. Whitman, Walt, "Song of the Open Road," INDEX 255 115; "Song of My self," 119. Whittier, John Green- leaf, "The Eternal Goodness," 5 ; inspira tion of, 81 ; songs of, 140; quotation from "Miriam," (complete poems, Household Edition, p. 342), 215. Woodberry, George E., Criticism on Matthew Arnold, 138 f. Word, The, become flesh, 94, 95. Wordsworth, "Peter Bell," 90; "Tintern Abbey," 90, 108; on Milton, 135 f; "My Heart Leaps Up," 209. YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 9002 08867 8728