^> /2- . 2-3 
 
 Jfntm tl|r fftbrarg of 
 
 l^quf atlyri bn I|im tn 
 
 tl|? Bltbrarg nf 
 
 Prtnrrtnn Slfralngiral S^tmxnnr^ 
 
 ,C3S 
 
A NARROW AX 
 
 IN BIBLICAL CRITICISM 
 
 y BY 
 REV. CHARLES CAVERNO, A. M. LL. D. 
 
 Mutabo pro causa. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 56 Fifth Avenue 
 1897 
 
Copyright, 1896 
 By Charles Caverno. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 We did a deal of work in the old barn floor 
 on cold winter days — made nearly all the tools 
 used in carrying on a farm whose working power 
 was represented by four or six oxen — carts, 
 sleds, drags, harrows. Sometimes we got out 
 the frame of a new house or barn or shed. A 
 log was rolled into the floor, or cut in on skids 
 with pry or crowbar, blocked up and trigged. 
 Then the chalk line was snapped along the top 
 on the two sides, and a man mounted the log to 
 cut in, along at intervals, with a narrow ax, to 
 the chalk line. That done, the outside to the 
 depth of the cuttings was chipped off, and the 
 log began to take the square shape for further 
 work to the end designed. 
 
 Many serviceable farm implements have been 
 made with no tools but a narrow ax, an auger, 
 chisel and mallet — implements by which the 
 struggle for existence was successfully carried 
 on, a family fed, clothed, schooled, and perhaps 
 a boy sent to college. 
 
 Whereto this parable? 
 
 The following pages are analogous, in Biblical 
 study and criticism, to the processes of the old 
 barn floor. They are a thing of narrow axes, 
 cross-cut saws, chalk lines, mallets and chisels. 
 
4 PREFACE 
 
 So far as the discussions are critical they may 
 be considered as evolutions of the narrow ax. 
 
 But why ask any one to read the result of 
 work so crude? Well, as in the former case, a 
 living may be got with coarse tools — and a living 
 means a good deal here as well as there. I have 
 had to get my living {sfiritualiter diciiur) out of 
 the ground herein tilled, b}' the use of such tools 
 as came to hand. I have done it (again spirit- 
 ualiter dicihcr) with a fair result of comfort to 
 myself — so I could sleep nights after my day's 
 work was done. 
 
 Much herein was thought out and wrought 
 out years ago. I have corrected from time to 
 time as I have had occasion for use. That proc- 
 ess of correction would probably go on with- 
 out limit. But as the problems stand before my 
 mind at this date, I am reasonably satisfied with 
 the conclusions herein set forth. 
 
 My work will be of no service to experts in 
 Biblical criticism, but it may be helpful to 
 some who may wish to work a little further 
 along than they are toward the solution of prob- 
 lems that tax all minds. 
 
 The most I wish to assert in my justification, 
 is, that I think somewhere in the direction in 
 which I go, will results, fairly restful, be found. 
 
 C. Caverno. 
 Boulder i Colorado ^ i8g6. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE 
 
 I. The Revelation, No. 1 9 
 
 II. The Revelation, No. II 32 
 
 III. Job... 57 
 
 IV. Jonah 76 
 
 V. Isaiah 93 
 
 VI. Imprecatory Psalms 130 
 
 VII. A Missing Chapter in the Life 
 
 OF St. Paul 150 
 
 VIII. Biographical History from 
 
 Abraham to Christ 173 
 
 IX. History, Tribal and Synthetic 198 
 
 X. Philosophical History 232 
 
 XI. The Story of Eden and the Par- 
 able OF the Prodigal Son 255 
 
 XII. Psalms not Imprecatory 279 
 
 Index 299 
 
A NARROW AX IN BIBLICAL 
 
 CRITICISM. 
 
 L 
 
 THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTERS I. -XI. 
 
 I MARVEL that the Revelation is not a more 
 popular book than it is, that is,that it is not in more 
 familiar use both for moral and literary purposes, 
 for spiritual comfort and intellectual quickening. 
 Not even all the darkness that has been shed 
 upon it by the innumerable multitude, from 
 saints to cranks, birds of dole and omen, who 
 have acted as commentators upon and interpret- 
 ers of it, ought to have consigned it to the ob- 
 scurity in which it seems to be. 
 
 It ought to be a book of vision, of inspiration 
 and comfort to the Christian, and it ought to 
 rank as a masterpiece in literature. Yet am I 
 mistaken in the assertion that it has fallen and 
 is falling into neglect and disuse? This might 
 
 9 
 
10 THE REVELATION 
 
 be a hopeful sign, for it might signify only the 
 decay of belief in it as a prospective conjuring 
 book of the history of the nations; it might sig- 
 nify only the lull, the mental indifference, which 
 marks a period of mental transition, from sys- 
 tems of thought over-worn and unsatisfactory, 
 to something enclosing within itself a living 
 interest. 
 
 Should that be the case, the present indiffer- 
 ence can be tolerated. But I feel so sure that 
 the kind of thought, heretofore connected with 
 this book, has no natural connection with it, that 
 T am anxious to hasten the day when it shall 
 become again, as it undoubtedly was to the gen- 
 eration for which it was written, an apocalypse 
 — an opening — a revelation — to the mind that 
 reads it. 
 
 The main help one needs in studying the 
 Revelation is the New Version; then the Greek 
 text, if one can compass it. The New Version 
 is a great improvement on the Old. Commen- 
 tators as a rule are to be discarded. This is not 
 to say that there are no commentators who are 
 a help towards the proper understanding of 
 the Revelation. It is simply to say that with 
 rare exceptions they have not been a help, but 
 
THE REyELATION 11 
 
 have been a hindrance. To give this caution 
 is far from saying that a man should sit down 
 and construct his own system of interpretation 
 from the King James or the New Version or the 
 Greek text. Perhaps the difficuhy has been that 
 we have had too much of that kind of work. No 
 book in the Scripture needs more broad and 
 general scholarship to secure its comprehension 
 than this, 
 
 ' The man who can get into the general system 
 of thought of Jew and Gentile — who can under- 
 stand the course of mind in the day when this 
 book was written, has the help of the first im- 
 portance, beyond the text, in the elucidation of 
 the meaning of the Apocalypse. 
 
 What John saw with his open eyes — for he 
 had an open eye — in the world round about him 
 is the key to what he painted by his imagina- 
 tion, or by an inspiration that filled in and gave 
 color and life to what imagination limned. So 
 it is not less but more of learning that is wanted 
 for a full treatment of this book. The difficulty 
 has been that men, from the time of the early 
 fathers through the middle ages to these later 
 days, have superimposed their visions — what 
 they could see through wooden eyes — upon the 
 
12 THE REy ELATION 
 
 vision of John. Why it is better to take the text 
 than almost any commentary that is likely to 
 fall into 3'our hands, is that so you are very much 
 more likely to come nearer to the vision of John 
 — you have only your own imagination to curb 
 or regulate — your own disposition to set up a 
 system of thought for John — to restrain. 
 
 Without arguing the question, it may be stated 
 that the Johannean authorship of the Apoca- 
 lypse is herein assumed. 
 
 Further, the treatment will follow the method 
 of division of the book into two sections — the 
 first section consisting of the first eleven chap- 
 ters, the last section comprising the remainder 
 of the book- Whoever will take the pains to 
 read the Apocalypse will see that this division 
 is inherent in its structure — that it \ay in the mind 
 of the author. It will be evident also that in the 
 first section the author's vision hovers over 
 moral forces and events seen from a Jewish 
 basis; in the second section it falls on them in 
 a Roman field. 
 
 The book is a "revelation," given to show 
 
 unto the servants of God "things which must 
 
 come shortly to pass." It was given, primarily, 
 
 for the help of those in the immediate day and 
 
THE REl^EL^TION 13 
 
 generation of its composition. It was to aid 
 them in the elucidation of problems which were 
 then pressing upon their minds, problems of 
 practical perplexity, of the Spirit's agency. 
 Now consider how utterly useless the prevalent 
 notion, that this book is an outline of secular 
 history for all coming time, would have made 
 the book to the church at the close of the first 
 century. It is the problem that presses upon 
 your own mind now that is of interest to you. 
 What do you care about the problems that are 
 to press upon somebody else five hundred or 
 three thousand years from this time? "Suf- 
 ficient unto the day is the evil thereof." The 
 coming generations, with the assistance of God, 
 will take care of their own problems. 
 
 For you your question is, what is the imme- 
 diate outlook for the church? Is it to be 
 swamped beneath a tide of luxury and poverty 
 and materialism? Will the next generation fear 
 God and keep his commandments as earnestly 
 as the last? What is the immediate outlook for 
 the people of this country? Shall we get 
 through presidential elections safely? Shall we 
 in our generation escape serious conflict be- 
 tween capitalists and wage-workers? And so 
 
14 THE REyEL^TION 
 
 on. Your interest in such questions for the fu- 
 ture dies out just according as the questions re- 
 cede in the distance of time. 
 
 So you may take the questions that pertain to 
 other countries and peoples. You want to know 
 what is to be the outcome of the present Eastern 
 question, not of one that may exist over the same 
 ground five hundred years to come. You want 
 to know what will be the result of Stanley's ex- 
 pedition across Africa; what will be done about 
 the slave trade; what England will do with 
 Egypt and Uganda, what with the Irish ques- 
 tions; what the United States will do with Ha- 
 waii; whether the nations of Europe will arm 
 or disarm. You have no great interest in pos- 
 sible commotions in Africa or Europe or Amer- 
 ica two thousand years hence. It is the things 
 that "must shortly come to pass" which always 
 press the most intense interest upon us. 
 
 Now certainly a Christian, toward the close 
 of the first century, must have been deeply anx- 
 ious over the horoscope of his immediate future. 
 
 The religion to which he had given his adhe- 
 sion had come to draw upon itself the attention 
 of the secular powers which ruled the world. A 
 conflict was inevitable — a conflict had begun. 
 
THE REVELATION 15 
 
 Who is the ruler of the world — God or Caesar? 
 If Cassar, in the long-sufferance of God, seems 
 to have the domination now, is that domination 
 to last? If one goes down to death for the faith 
 here, what then? What is beyond? Are there 
 any compensations for faithfulness unto death? 
 To what does one go who endures martyrdom? 
 Questions of that sort — and surely they were of 
 terrible import — were of practical interest in the 
 latter days of the Apostle John. The Roman 
 government seems to have had its iron hand on 
 him when he was in Patmos. Then the faith in 
 which the Jewish Christian had been born, the 
 faith of his fathers, was a worn out affair and 
 wrath was impending over his own kith and kin, 
 if it had not already descended in the fearful 
 destruction of the sacred city — Jerusalem. But 
 the Jewish people were as hostile to the new 
 faith as the Gentiles. Did Cagsar persecute, so 
 did the synagogue and the temple. Turn which- 
 ever wa}^ the Christian might, the powers of the 
 earth were against him. What should he do? 
 Was it worth while to face a struggle in which 
 all the odds, so far as the forces of the world 
 were concerned, were against him? Why die 
 when he could recant and live? There is a 
 
16 THE REVELATION 
 
 glimpse of the problem that lay before the mind 
 of John. 
 
 His design is to strengthen, to encourage the 
 disciple of Christ to stand fast in the faith, to 
 establish his belief that God has a kingdom in 
 which the disciple will reign triumphant, if his 
 faith fails not under persecution ; to convince 
 him that the powers of earth hostile to him, 
 though they might triumph for a time here, were 
 hastening to corruption and destruction — to an 
 awful overthrow, in which he will assuredly 
 have part if he denies the faith and beconies 
 allied with the doomed powers of sin. That is 
 the moral intent of the revelation of John. 
 There is no mistaking it, there is no possibility 
 of confusion here. To strengthen the moral 
 purpose of his brethren in Christ, as they were 
 then tempted to renounce the faith, in face of all 
 the persecuting forces arrayed against them is 
 the central thought, the central purpose of John. 
 
 Take that common refrain of the epistles to the 
 seven churches; you can work out much by ask- 
 ing yourselves why "He that overcometh" is 
 made a common refrain. There was a condition 
 of things which supported it— a condition of aw- 
 ful moral significance. But run over that refrain 
 
THE REyELATlON 17 
 
 as it is repeated . and see what immeasurable 
 power of moral leverage over tempted souls John 
 gets out of it. 
 
 Overcome — die if necessary to overcome — 
 and you "shall eat of the tree of life which is 
 in the midst of the Paradise of God." Over- 
 come — die if you must to overcome — and you 
 "shall not be hurt of. the second death." Re- 
 cant, if you choose, to save your life and 
 your bread, but so you can never "eat of the 
 hidden manna"which is reserved for the faithful. 
 In the trouble that is to come upon the whole 
 world to try them that dwell upon the earth, 
 overcome, and "I will make of you a pillar in 
 the temple of m}^ God." Sits Caesar on a throne 
 and orders you to death; overcome, and the 
 throne of Csesar shall become a dunghill in 
 comparison with that to which you shall be ex- 
 alted — "I will give you to sit down with me in 
 my throne, even as I also overcame and sat down 
 with my Father in his throne." Fear not the 
 throne of Cassar, courage will make you a partner 
 in the power which proceeds from the throne of 
 the Lord God Almighty. Can you not see how 
 the enforcement of this thought would make a 
 church of victors, of heroic martyrs, if martyr- 
 
18 THE REI^ELATION 
 
 dom came? Now the rest of the book is simply 
 picture painting, parable adjuvant to this main 
 moral purpose. It is to be interpreted along 
 moral lines just as much as a parable of the 
 Saviour. The kingdom of heaven is like thus 
 and so according to both. It is as pertinent to 
 raise the historic question when it was that a 
 woman lighted a candle and searched through 
 the house for a piece of lost money, or when it 
 was that a merchant made his voyage for goodly 
 pearls, or when it was that a man sowed wheat 
 and an enemy sowed tares in his field, as it is 
 to ask for a historic fulfillment of these paintings 
 of John illustrative of the struggle of moral 
 forces, illustrative of his faith and of the faith of 
 all Christians in the ultimate dominance of the 
 kingdom of God. There is another broad view 
 quite evident to one who will keep the whole 
 section, covered by the letters, together before 
 his mind. It is drawn from a Jewish point of 
 observation and was evidently intended to do 
 work with Jewish mind. The letters to the 
 churches are addressed to churches in Gentile 
 cities, to be sure, but there was a Jewish element 
 in those churches. It would seem that the 
 Jewish element predominated. The cast of the 
 
THE REyELATION 19 
 
 letters, while true enough to the moral needs of 
 minds of all nationalities, is yet of Jewish tone and 
 abounds in references and illustrations more 
 particularly adapted to Jews. 
 
 The "candlestick," the "synagogue," 
 "Balaam," "Balak," "Jezebel," the "vessels 
 of the potter broken to shivers," "Jews that are 
 not Jews" but "of the synagogue of Satan," the 
 "temple of my God," the "new Jerusalem com- 
 ing down out of heaven from God" — such allu- 
 sions identify the mind to which the letters were 
 more particularl}^ addressed. Then the high 
 water mark of the author's power is reached in 
 the description of the sealing of the one hundred 
 and forty-four thousand out of the tribes of Israel, 
 and of the adoration of God consequent thereon. 
 True, engaged in that adoration was a "great 
 multitude which no man could number, out of 
 every nation and of all tribes and peoples and 
 tongues." But this multitude constitutes the 
 background into which the picture fades in the 
 distance. Israel holds the foreground. The 
 pomp and circumstance and particularization in 
 the action come out over the saved of Israel. 
 Then when the forces of evil have wrought their 
 will, when "the mystery of iniquity" (to bor- 
 
20 THE REyELATlON 
 
 row language from Paul) is accomplished, when 
 the '"woes" come, work and glide past, the 
 whole action conies to tinal pause in a vision 
 which could have its full significance only to a 
 Jewish eye and be fully appreciated by a Jewish 
 heart. The drama is completed and the curtain 
 falls on this vision: ''And there was opened the 
 temple of God that is in heaven, and there was 
 seen in his temple the ark of his covenant.'' 
 The temple and the ark of the covenant! How 
 dear they were to the Jew! All his notions of 
 sacredness in religion, all the pride of his patri- 
 otism centerd on them. They were to disappear, 
 from the earth, perhaps had already disappeared, 
 but the Jew would rind his consolation in the 
 assurance that they were opened on high. You 
 can rind in this book that double Israel which is 
 seen throughout all the old prophets — a right- 
 eous Israel persecuted, suffering, yet reaching 
 its crown of Divine destiny under the adminis- 
 tration of the Messiah and the Lamb; an evil 
 Israel persecuting, doomed to captivity and de- 
 struction; a righteous servant, meek, enduring, 
 smitten and afflicted, making his grave with the 
 wicked, yet seeing his seed and satisfied; slain, 
 yet preserved under the very altar of the living 
 
THE REyELATION 21 
 
 God ; tortured, yet God wipes away all tears from 
 his eyes and he reigns forever and ever. Into 
 which complications and contradictions prophets 
 and kings have desired to look, j^ethave never 
 attained that clearness of vision which it is ours 
 to enjoy. 
 
 We must not leave untouched the probable 
 moral effect of John's work on a persecuted 
 Jewish Christian. Whether he should hold to 
 the Christian faith under its trials or give up 
 that faith and go. back to the faith of his fathers, 
 or rather go over from the persecuted to the 
 persecuting side, that must have been the ques- 
 tion with which a Jew had to struggle. Now 
 read again the whole section and ask yourself 
 what effect it must have had on the mind of the 
 tempted, questioning Jew. To which Israel 
 shall he belong — to that which has the seal of 
 God in its forehead, or to that which, though a 
 dominant force, is yet to be trodden out under 
 foot of the woes executive of the wrath of God; 
 to the Israel "singing the new song," from 
 whose eyes God would wipe away all tears, or 
 to the Israel hiding in the caves and the rocks 
 of the mountains and saying to the mountains 
 and the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the 
 
22 THE REVELATIOhl 
 
 face of him that sitteth on the throne and frona 
 the wrath of the Lamb;" to the Israel who 
 clung with frantic ardor to the temple on earth, 
 onl}^ to be overwhelmed with it in its ruin, or 
 to him who stretched out his hands to the tem- 
 ple seen on high wherein salvation dwelt? It 
 cannot but be that man}^ a pious soul in Israel, 
 pursuing the line of these visions, struck the high 
 road of the moral heroism which overcame all 
 doubts and fears and gave to him, though suffer- 
 ing martj-rdom, the consciousness of holding the 
 victor's palm. 
 
 So stands the account with the section we 
 have before us as to moral intent, and inliuence 
 in the day of its production. 
 
 The interpretation of the symbolism of John 
 is not difficult. Take any symbolism and turn 
 it into its moral or spiritual equivalent. For 
 instance, take the Lamb; it is easy enough to 
 get a proper conception of the meaning of that 
 symbol. Take the delineation in the first chapter 
 of the "one in the midst of the candlesticks like 
 unto a son of man," and you have item after 
 item indicative of majesty. Take the last de- 
 scription of the Saviour in the nineteenth chap- 
 ter, as the warrior upon the white horse, and 
 
THE REVELATION 23 
 
 "the wayfaring man though a fool ought not to 
 err therein." It is as easy of interpretation as 
 the parable of the ten talents. Much of the 
 symbolism may not be so easy of resolution. 
 But we cannot go far astray if we assume it all 
 to be "aids to reflection" on spiritual operations 
 and forces. There is prognostication about this 
 S3^mbolisrn, but it relates not to secular events. 
 It is of that moral cast whose certainties are 
 found by detecting the lines of the gravitation 
 of righteousness and sin. 
 
 We must not leave this section without giving 
 attention to its literary merits. As to form of 
 composition, the Revelation is drama. But it 
 is drama of peculiar kind. It is a drama ex- 
 ecuted by painting, a drama whose action is 
 carried along in its stage scenery. 
 
 The spoken words are often few. You must 
 get the onflow of the action from the painting on 
 the curtains or the scenes which one after an- 
 other are slid along before your view. The art 
 is mimetic, imitative. You have a pantomime — 
 as near as words can do it — a show of all that is 
 done. The actors come forth and do. They 
 do not tell what they are going to do, nor does 
 any one tell what they have done. The trumpets 
 
24 THE REy ELATION 
 
 come forth and sound. You see the trumpeters 
 and you see the effects following. You see the 
 smoke come out of the pit — you see its impalpa- 
 ble dust collect in points of locust size, you see 
 the locusts grow till they become like unto horses 
 prepared for war, armored and falling into line 
 under the command of their abysmal king, 
 Abaddon. Words are few, action has the field. 
 When the words of actors come they are rather 
 refrains in a movement than agents in the prog- 
 ress of the action. True to the Hebrew genius, 
 the exhibitions are repetitive, reinforcing the 
 same principle by action detailed in another way. 
 This is seen in the case of the trumpeters in this 
 section and in that of the angels with the vials 
 or bowls in the second section. We ought to 
 cultivate our imaginations to reproduce for us the 
 scenes in the drama. Again and again for the 
 theater's arch we shall need the whole opposing 
 front of the heavens from horizon to zenith. 
 The arch will be filled with action as we some- 
 times see it to be in an exhibition of northern 
 lights. If the stars are falling, or an angel is 
 flying in mid heaven, do not hesitate to make 
 your theater for the scenic action as large as 
 John made it. John is imaginative everywhere. 
 
THE REVELATION 25 
 
 With him numbers are rhetoric — they designate 
 no exact facts. Witness "the seven spirits of 
 God" and "the twelve thousand sealed" from 
 every tribe of Israel. How little John cares for 
 particulars may be seen from the fact that the 
 tribes of Dan and Ephraim are not mentioned. 
 Manasseh is mentioned and then "the tribe of 
 Joseph." You will never find a guide who will 
 take your imagination on more daring flights 
 than John. You will not find a vision which is 
 not grand throughout and which does not sus- 
 tain its grandeur. To our notions, educated as 
 we are only along the line of the Greek genius 
 for harmony, the appearance of the first charac- 
 ter coming on the stage of the Revelation is 
 weird and strange. Think of the contrast, how- 
 ever, between one whose form is made up of so 
 many symbols of majesty and him who was laid 
 lifeless in the rock-hewn tomb. Dismiss notions 
 of Greek aesthetics and work up along the lines 
 of moral significance and we have in that rep- 
 resentation of "one whose head and hair were 
 white as white wool and whose eyes were as a 
 flame of fire" a figure of surprising moral grand- 
 eur. It will be a new sensation to realize that 
 moral powers can thus be depicted, thus made 
 
 \ 
 
26 JHEREf^EL^TION 
 
 to be seen. This is high art. But there is a 
 higher art still — the art that does not paint — the 
 art that suggests. It is said that speech is silver 
 but that silence is golden. John is daring, but 
 there are themes beyond the compass of his art, 
 and he knows those themes — knows how to al- 
 lude to them and pass without elaboration. 
 
 Taine's criticism of Milton is that he has made 
 out of God, presiding in the councils of heaven, 
 an English baron. Michael Angelo spread on 
 the dome of St. Peter's a representation of God 
 launching the creation and overseeing its opera- 
 tions. That was a daring effort of genius. But 
 the criticism is made, and it must be just, that, 
 in giving form to the Almighty, Angelo's work 
 is after all a degradation of our ideal of God. 
 Now see how John manages the same matter 
 Milton and Angelo have treated. "Behold, there 
 was a throne set in heaven and one sitting upon 
 the throne, and he that sat was to look upon like 
 jasper stone and a sardius,and there was a rain- 
 bow round about the throne like an emerald to 
 look upon." There you have just an indication 
 that there was an occupant of the throne, but 
 there is no description of the indescribable. A 
 ray or two only of the effulgence from the Di- 
 
THE REVELATION Ti 
 
 vine splendor is caught and fixed. There is a 
 gleam, a flash of light, bright and beautiful as 
 a reflection from a jewel, jasper or sardius; be- 
 yond that, imagination is free. You are left 
 there alone. The artist has withdrawn his brush. 
 Where others have failed John has not. He has 
 not compelled the illimitable into limits. A ray 
 or two of the Divine glory is caught. But the 
 golden silence of tongue and brush is preserved 
 respecting the infinite beaut}^ and majesty of the 
 all-glorious. But where John has painted, his 
 work is as far beyond criticism as in the case of 
 refusal to express the ineffable. John does dare 
 to paint the throne and its surroundings, if he 
 pauses in silent, helpless awe before him who 
 sitteth thereon. 
 
 All forces, physical, intellectual and moral, 
 support the throne or render tribute to it. The 
 "four living creatures," representative of intel- 
 ligence and might, the "four and twenty elders," 
 representative of religious and spiritual powers, 
 are all in harmony one with another and under 
 harmonious service to the Supreme Majesty. 
 John has seen far enough into the government 
 of God to represent these agencies as forever 
 active. There are no spent forces about God's 
 
28 THE REyELATIOhl 
 
 throne — no idle powers, once used, then cast 
 aside. The powers look everywhere, they cover 
 all points of the compass and all things lie within 
 the range of their numberless, inspecting eyes. 
 All things are in motion about the throne and 
 all filled with the spirit of adoration. 
 
 "And the four living creatures have no rest 
 day and night, saying. Holy, holy, holy is the 
 Lord God, the Almighty, which was and which is 
 and which is to come. And when the living 
 creatures shall give glory and honor and thanks 
 to him that sitteth on the throne, to him that 
 liveth forever and ever, the four and twenty 
 elders shal fall down before him that sitteth on 
 the throne, and shall worship him that liveth 
 forever and ever, and shall cast their crowns be- 
 fore the throne, saying. Worthy art thou, our 
 Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the 
 honor and the power, for thou didst create all 
 things and because of thy will they were, and 
 were created." 
 
 It is said that science is making the Biblical 
 conceptions of God tame, fiat, beneath the dig- 
 nity of the subject. It may be safel}' said that 
 no science, no combination of sciences has re- 
 duced in rank the conceptions of John respecting 
 
THE REyELATION 29 
 
 the throne of the universe and Him that sitteth 
 thereon. All man's knowledge to the end of 
 time will iind setting in John's picture. 
 
 Wide comparison will bring out the superior 
 (shall we not say supreme?) literary excellence 
 of the Revelation. We know what a master- 
 piece of eloquence is. We have read the oration 
 of Lincoln at Gettysburg; we remember the 
 solidity and solemnity of Webster, as in The 
 Reply to Hayne, and in passages in the orations 
 on Adams and Jefferson, and on the dedication 
 of the Bunker Hill monument; and we recall 
 The Eulogy of Choate on Webster ; but the long 
 roll of mortal speech is sounded with no fuller 
 tone than in many passages of the Revelation. 
 Take this from Chapter vii., after the sealing of 
 the one hundred and forty-four thousand: 
 
 "After these things I saw, and behold, a great 
 mutitude which no man could number, out of 
 every nation and of all tribes and peoples and 
 tongues, standing before the throne and before 
 the Lamb, arrayed in white robes and palms in 
 their hands; and they cry with a great voice, 
 saying, Salvation unto our God which sitteth on 
 the throne and unto the Lamb. And all the 
 angels were standing round about the throne and 
 
30 THE REVELATION 
 
 about the elders and the four living creatures, 
 and they fell before the throne on their faces 
 and worshipped God, saying, Amen: Blessing, 
 and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and 
 honor, and power, and might, be unto our God 
 forever and ever." 
 
 Take this from Chapter xi., where the action 
 of the whole drama comes to final summary: 
 "And the seventh angel sounded, and there fol- 
 lowed great voices in heaven, and they said. 
 The kingdom of the world is become the king- 
 dom of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall 
 reign forever and ever. And the four and twenty 
 elders which sit before God on their thrones fell 
 upon their faces and worshipped God, saying, 
 We give thee thanks, Lord God, the Almighty, 
 which art and which wast, because thou hast 
 taken thy great power and didst reign. And 
 the nations were wroth, and thy wrath came, and 
 the time of the dead to be judged, and the time 
 to give their reward to thy servants the prophets 
 and to the saints, and to them that fear th}^ 
 name, the small and the great; and to destroy 
 them that destroy the earth." 
 
 Milton has attempted some of these pictures; 
 let us look at one: 
 
THE REyELATION 31 
 
 "No sooner had the Almighty ceased but all 
 The multitude of angels, with a shout 
 Loud as from numbers without number, sweet 
 As from blest voices uttering joy , Heaven rung 
 With jubilee, and loud Hosannas filled 
 The eternal regions; lowly reverent 
 Towards either throne they bow, and to the 
 
 ground, 
 With solemn adoration, down they cast 
 Their crowns inwove with amarant and gold." 
 That may be finished, but as for power it fol- 
 lows John with unequal steps, and by a long in- 
 terval. If there is the sedateness of dignity in 
 Milton, there is action living, tense, quivering 
 with passion in John. 
 
 You know how a drama turns off its final 
 action. Flourish of trumpets; discharge of 
 musketry; salvo of artillery; "Exeunt omnes." 
 Compare that with the final action in John's 
 drama. 
 
 Last scene: "Andthere was opened the tem- 
 ple of God that is in heaven, and there was seen 
 in his temple the ark of his covenant. Andthere 
 followed lightnings and voices and thunders, 
 and an earthquake and great hail." 
 
II 
 
 THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTERS XII. -XXII. 
 
 Two principles are to be kept firmly in mind 
 in reading the book of the Revelation; the one 
 is that, if we wish to understand the book, we 
 must reconstruct and reproduce the history of 
 the times in which it was written; the other is 
 that, if we regard the book as prophetic, vatic- 
 inal in character, we must look for its proleptic 
 grasp on the future along the operations of moral 
 forces to moral results. The book is no more 
 an outline of national and secular history in the 
 ages before it to come than the first Psalm or 
 the Beatitudes is such an outline. 
 
 If we hold fast these principles we can con- 
 strue (shall I say reconstruct?) this book to 
 healthful religious uses. If we do not hold these 
 principles we shall drop down to the level of that 
 degradation which has brooded so long and so 
 
 32 
 
THE REP'ELATION 33 
 
 heavily over it and made it the ready reckoner 
 of the fortunes of the nations — the political con- 
 juring book of superstition and ignorance. In 
 literary form this second part follov^'S close upon 
 the mode of development in the first section. 
 You need the same great celestial stage on which 
 to see its action deployed. As in the first sec- 
 tion, so here repetition is brought in to display, in 
 all ways imaginable, the great elements of retri- 
 bution upon wickedness and reward to right- 
 eousness. As there in the case of the trumpeters, 
 witness here what comes in the train of the seven 
 angels with the seven bowls out of which is 
 poured the wrath of God. 
 
 The last half of the book of Revelation is an 
 outlook over the then existing and prospective 
 moral situation from a point of observation in- 
 side the power and influence of the Roman Em- 
 pire, as the former half had been an outlook 
 from a base in the old Jewish regime. This 
 latter half in its main drift follows so closely on 
 the condition of things in the Roman Empire 
 made known to us in history — in fact identifies 
 itself, with such express purpose and so clearl}^ 
 with that condition, that we need have little 
 difficulty in its interpretation. I want to make 
 
34 THE REVELATION 
 
 a Statement radical enough to attract attention. 
 We can read the Revelation in the history of 
 Rome. It is not so marvelous and mystical an 
 affair then as we have thought. Nay, more — for 
 I wish to be more radical still — we can read the 
 Revelation in particular pieces of Roman liter- 
 ature. In fact, we have a Roman and heathen 
 Revelation parallel to the Christian. You can 
 put them side by side and read from the one to 
 the other. Take the correspondence between 
 Pliny the younger and the Emperor Trajan; 
 that will redeem to you the statement that we 
 can read the last half of the Revelation out of 
 heathen Latin literature. 
 
 If these comprehensive (do you say extrava- 
 gant?) statements need modification and eluci- 
 dation, then I will say that the correspondence 
 between Pliny and Trajan discloses such a state 
 of affairs on the heathen side, in the Roman 
 Empire, as will compel the production of the 
 Revelation to set forth the thought and feeling 
 that are at work on the Christian side. The 
 Revelation interprets this correspondence, and 
 this correspondence interprets the Revelation. 
 Whether you take the earlier or the later date 
 for the origin of the Revelation, will make no 
 
THE REVELATION 35 
 
 difference. This Book and this correspondence 
 are substantially contemporary. They came out 
 of influences and events which the same genera- 
 tion felt and observed. The reign of Trajan, 
 as you remember, made the crossing from the 
 first to the second century; beginning in 98 and 
 reaching to 117 A. D. 
 
 Pliny was sent by Trajan as proconsul to the 
 province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. This prov- 
 ince la\^ south of the Black Sea, at its western 
 extremity. You remember it is said, Paul 
 "assayed to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit suf- 
 fered him not." The vision of the beckoning 
 Macedonian took him into Europe. But, though 
 Paul did not go to Bithynia, Christianity some- 
 how did, and that too at an early date in its his- 
 tory, for when Pliny was there he found perverts 
 from Christianity whose apostasy had been of 
 twent}^ years' standing. 
 
 We will turn to the correspondence. 
 
 PLINY TO TRAJAN. 
 
 "It is a rule, sir, which I invariably observe, 
 to refer myself to you in all my doubts; for who 
 is more capable of removing my scruples or in- 
 forming my ignorance? Having never been 
 
36 THE REVELATIO}^ 
 
 present at any trials concerning those who pro- 
 fess Christianity, I am unacquainted not only 
 with the nature of their crimes, or the measure 
 of their punishment, but how far it is proper to 
 enter into an examination concerning them. 
 Whether, therefore, any difference is usually 
 made with respect to the ages of the guilty, or 
 no distinction is to be observed between the 
 young and the adult; whether repentance en- 
 titles them to a pardon; or if a man has been 
 once a Christian, it avails nothing to desist from 
 his error ; whether the very profession of Christi- 
 anity, unattended with any criminal act, or only 
 the crimes themselves inherent in the profes- 
 sion are punishable; in all these points I am 
 greatly doubtful. In the meanwhile the method 
 I have observed towards those who have been 
 brought before me as Christians, is this: I in- 
 terrogated them whether they were Christians; 
 if they confessed I repeated the question twice 
 again, adding threats at the same time; when, 
 if they still persevered, I ordered them to be 
 immediately punished; for I was persuaded, 
 whatever the nature of their opinions might be, 
 a contumacious and inflexible obstinacy certainly 
 deserved correction. 
 
THE REyELATIOhl 37 
 
 "There were others also brought before me 
 possessed with the same infatuation, but being 
 citizens of Rome, I directed them to be carried 
 thither. But this crime spreading (as is usually 
 the case) while it was actually under prosecu- 
 tion, several instances of the same nature oc- 
 curred. An information was presented to me 
 without any name subscribed, containing a 
 charge against several persons who, upon exam- 
 ination, denied they were Christians or had ever 
 been so. They repeated after me an invocation 
 to the gods, and offered religious rites with wine 
 and frankincense before your statue (which for 
 the purpose I had ordered to be brought, to- 
 gether with those of the gods), and even reviled 
 the name of Christ; whereas there is no forcing, 
 it is said, those who are really Christians, into 
 a compliance with any of these articles: I 
 thought proper, therefore, to discharge them. 
 Some among those who were accused by a wit- 
 ness in person, at first confessed themselves 
 Christians, but immediately after denied it; 
 while the rest owned indeed that they had been 
 of that number formerly, but had now (some 
 above three, others more, and a few above twenty 
 years ago) forsaken that error. They all wor- 
 
38 THE REyEL/4TIOhl 
 
 shiped your statue and the images of the gods, 
 throwing out imprecations at the same time 
 against the name of Christ. They affirmed, the 
 whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that 
 they met on a certain stated day before it was 
 light, and addressed themselves in a form of 
 prayer to Christ, as to some god, binding them- 
 selves by a solemn oath, not for the purpose of 
 any wicked design, but never to commit any 
 fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their 
 word, nor deny a trust when they should be 
 called upon to deliver it up; after which, it was 
 the custom to separate, and then reassemble, to 
 eat in common a harmless meal. From this 
 custom, however, they desisted after the -publi- 
 cation of my edict, by which, according to your 
 orders, I forbade the meeting of any assemblies. 
 After receiving this account, I judged it so much 
 the more necessary to endeavor to extort the 
 real truth, by putting two female slaves to the 
 torture, who were said to administer in their re- 
 ligious functions; but I could discover nothing 
 more than an absurd and excessive superstition. I 
 thought proper, therefore, to adjourn all further 
 proceedings in this aflfair, in order to consult 
 with you. For it appears to be a matter highly 
 
THE REyELATIOhl 39 
 
 deserving your consideration ; more especially 
 as great numbers must be involved in the danger 
 of these prosecutions ; this inquiry having already 
 extended, and being still likely to extend to 
 persons of all ranks and ages, and even of both 
 sexes. For this contagious superstition is not 
 confined to the cities only, but has spread its 
 infection among the country villages. Never- 
 theless, it still seems possible to remedy this evil 
 and restrain its progress. The temples, at least, 
 which were almost deserted, begin now to be 
 frequented; and the sacred solemnities, after a 
 long intermission, are again revived; while there 
 is a general demand for the victims, which for 
 some time past have met with but few pur- 
 chasers. From hence it is easy to imagine 
 what numbers might be reclaimed from this 
 error, if a pardon were granted to those who 
 shall repent.'' 
 
 TRAJAN TO PLINY. 
 
 "The mefliod you have pursued, my dear 
 Pliny, against those Christians which were 
 brought before you, is extremelj' proper; as it 
 is not possible to lay down any fixed plan by 
 which to act in all cases of this nature. But I 
 
40 THE REVELATION 
 
 would not have you officiously enter into any 
 enquiries concerning them. If indeed they 
 should be brought before you, and the crime is 
 proved, they must be punished; with the restric- 
 tion, however, that when the party denies him- 
 self to be a Christian, and shall make it evident 
 that he is not, bj^ invoking our gods, let him 
 (notwithstanding any former suspicion) be par- 
 doned upon his repentance. Informations with- 
 out the accuser's name subscribed, ought not to 
 be received in prosecutions of any sort, as it is 
 introducing a very dangerous precedent and by 
 no means agreeable to the equity of my govern- 
 ment." 
 
 When Pagans write in that way. Christians 
 will write the Revelation. There is an issue 
 joined and an "irrepressible conflict" upon it. 
 This correspondence shows you the pagan side 
 in power and carr3nng repressive measures 
 against Christianity to torture and to death. 
 
 Now let us .turn to see how John will treat 
 such condition of affairs. John is a Christian, 
 a philosopher, and an idealist and poet. He is 
 an emperor too. That is, he has a kingdom in 
 view for the establishment and strengthening of 
 which he writes, as much as Trajan had in his 
 
THE REVEL/iTION 41 
 
 letters to Pliny. That it will be well to keep 
 in mind. The Revelation would have been un- 
 written had not John had in mind to strengthen 
 Christians under their trials, tempted, tortured 
 and to die. 
 
 Beginning with the twelfth chapter, you have 
 no difficulty in identifying the woman "clothed 
 with the sun" as the wide religion of God, and 
 her child as Christianity. The dragon that seeks 
 to destroy the woman and her child is wrong 
 and sin. The dragon has two servants — one "a 
 beast with seven heads and ten horns," easily 
 enough identified as the secular power of the Ro- 
 man Empire, and another beast," with two horns 
 like a lamb, but speaking like a dragon," easily 
 enough identified as the pagan religion. The 
 latter beast is subservient to the first. The first 
 beast opens his mouth in blasphemy and makes 
 war upon the saints, and the second beast "ex- 
 ercised the power of the first beast and caused 
 the earth and them that dwell therein to wor- 
 ship the first beast and caused that as many 
 as would not worship the image of the beast 
 should be killed." Now turn to the letter of 
 Pliny and you see all that in action. "The 
 method I have observed toward those who 
 
42 THE REyELATlON 
 
 have been brought before me as Christians is 
 this: I interrogated them whether they were 
 Christians; if they confessed, I repeated the 
 question twice again, adding threats at the same 
 time, when, if they still persevered, I ordered 
 them to be immediately punished. Roman citi- 
 zens possessed of the same infatuation I directed 
 to be carried to Rome. Some denied they were 
 Christians. They repeated after me an invoca- 
 tion to the gods and offered religious rites before 
 your statue, which for the purpose I had ordered 
 to be brought, together with those of the gods. 
 They reviled the name of Christ; whereas there 
 is no forcing, it is said, those who are really 
 Christians into compliance with an}^ of these 
 articles. Some, who are accused, at first con- 
 fessed themselves Christians but immediately 
 denied it; while the rest owned indeed that they 
 had been formerly but now some above three, 
 a few above twenty years ago had forsaken that 
 error. They all worshiped your statue and the 
 images of the gods, throwing out imprecations 
 at the same time against the name of Christ," 
 
 Now if there are not lights and shadows 
 enough playing over the scenes set forth in 
 Pliny's letter to make us see how the Revela- 
 
THE REl^EL/fTION 43 
 
 tion came into existence and what use it was 
 meant to subserve, idealism in us is at low level. 
 Time and space fail to follow out the parallelism 
 between the two documents we have before us. 
 It would take a book to show their inter-inter- 
 pretation. But just imagine a crowd of accused 
 Christians before Pliny. Some are Christians 
 and some are not; some cannot be made to re- 
 cant, and some have recanted and cursed Christ 
 for twenty years. Some are trembling with 
 
 fear they do not want to apostatize from Christ, 
 
 but can they endure torture? They are tem- 
 pested by every emotion and passion known to 
 the human soul. Now Pliny brings before them 
 the statue of the Emperor. "Will you worship 
 this statue? Will you reverence this image of 
 Roman power and religion and revile Christ?" 
 There is Pliny and the forces he represents, and 
 the crowd of the accused standing before him. 
 They must inevitably yield unless other influ- 
 ences can be brought to bear on them. Other 
 influences are brought to bear on them. Let 
 us see what they are. We may regard John as 
 standing beside them telling them what he has 
 seen. It is hard to stand trial before this court 
 on earth. But there is a court on high before 
 
44 THE REl^ELATIOhl 
 
 which not only these alleged criminals but this 
 very court itself must stand in judgment. Pliny 
 asks, "Will you worship this statue of the Em- 
 peror?" 
 
 "I saw an angel flying in mid heaven, having 
 everlasting gospel to preach to them that dwell 
 on the earth, sa3'ing: Fear God, and give glory 
 to him, and worship him that made heaven and 
 earth and the sea and fountains of waters. 
 
 "If any man worship the beast and his image 
 and receive his mark in his forehead or in his 
 hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the 
 wrath of God which is poured out without mix- 
 ture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall 
 be tormented with fire and brimstone in the 
 presence of the holy angels and in the presence 
 of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment 
 ascendeth up forever and ever; and the}^ have 
 no rest day or night who worship the beast and 
 his image and whosoever receiveth the mark of 
 his name. Here is the patience of the saints, 
 here are they that keep the commandments of 
 God and the faith of Jesus." Now remember 
 that it is right in this connection that you read: 
 "I heard a voice from heaven saying. Write, 
 Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from 
 
THE REyELATION 45 
 
 henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may 
 rest from their labors, and their works do follow 
 them." What power can torture and death have 
 over souls to whom such visions and such voices 
 are reality? The images of the Emperor and of 
 the gods are vainly placed before men who catch 
 and trust the conceptions of John. Suppose the}^ 
 are tortured and executed, what of it? You 
 have from Pliny's letter two female slaves under 
 the Roman government— but deaconesses in the 
 church — put to torture before your eyes. What 
 will be the result? Will they recant and revile 
 Jesus? They see something else beside the im- 
 mediate scene before them. They have this 
 vision in their minds: 
 
 ''I saw as it were a sea of glass raiiagled with 
 fire, and them that had gotten the victory over 
 the beast and over his image and over his mark 
 and over the number of his name, stand on the 
 sea of glass having the harps of God. And they 
 sing the song of Moses the servant of God and 
 the song of the Lamb: Great and marvelous are 
 th}' works. Lord God Almighty; just and true 
 are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall 
 not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thj^ name? 
 for thou only art holy ; for all nations shall come 
 and worship before thee." 
 
46 THEREyELATION 
 
 Here is Pliny with his instruments of torture, 
 and here are these two female slaves with this 
 vision as a possession and a conviction. Again 
 we ask: What will be the result? What was 
 the result? Who went to the wall? Plin}^ with 
 his forces, or the two female slaves with the 
 forces dominant in their souls? Who worships 
 the image of the Emperor that Pliny set before 
 his accused? So dominant has their religion 
 become that we may say, who does not worship 
 the God feared and loved b}- the two female 
 slaves? The description of the overthrow of 
 Babylon in Chapter xviii. is not overdrawn as 
 representing the utter wreck of both the secular 
 and the religious powers of which Pliny was 
 agent. 
 
 This second half of the book of Revelation is 
 stamped throughout with the impress of purpose 
 to meet just such exigencies as are revealed to 
 us in this correspondence of the proconsul of 
 Bithynia and the Roman Emperor. 
 
 There is hardly a verse in which adaptation 
 to the then present troubles is not discernible. 
 There were men brought up before Pliny who, 
 he says, confessed and denied in the same breath. 
 We know of the moral weakness out of which 
 
THE RE y ELATION 47 
 
 such action sprang. We can sympathize with it. 
 Yet perdition is in the train of such moral force- 
 lessness. Many when they denied doubtless 
 lied. Many said they had been Christians but 
 gave up that religion long ago. Many doubtless 
 that said this were conscious that it was untrue. 
 Now go to the very last chapter but one, where 
 you have the new heaven and the new earth be- 
 fore you — when the former things are passed 
 away and you think you are dealing with the 
 last things in the infinitely extended future, and 
 every representation is stamped with reference to 
 this trembling, stammering, fearing crowd before 
 Pliny. "He that overcometh shall inherit all 
 things, and I will be his God and he shall be my 
 son. But the timid and the faithless and all liars 
 shall have their part in the lake that burneth 
 with fire and brimstone." It will not do to con- 
 fess and deny before Pliny, and if you save 
 yourself by lying before that tribunal, it will 
 only be to fall under the everlasting condemna- 
 tion of one more dread. The Book from be- 
 ginning to end had a purpose, and that purpose 
 was to meet an issue then pressing. What kind 
 of an issue there was joined, this classic corre- 
 spondence between Pliny and Trajan discloses. 
 
48 THE REyELATIOhl 
 
 In the action of this section it is eas}^ enough 
 to follow the lines of retribution as the angels 
 one after another empty their bowls. At the 
 close of their action you have an entire rear- 
 rangement of the scenes. True to the genius of 
 enforcing by repetition, the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth chapters give a new setting for all 
 that has gone before in reference to the Roman 
 Empire — only here the vision seems to rest 
 rather on the city of Rome than on the broad 
 expanse of the whole Roman state. These two 
 chapters may be considered as an expansion of 
 what is given briefly in the 19th verse of Chap- 
 ter xvi. "The great harlot that sitteth upon 
 many waters" can be nothing else than the city 
 of Rome. This harlot is viewed as the imper- 
 sonation of the inspiration of sin. 
 
 Here it may be said that the attempted identi- 
 fication by ultra Protestantism of this "woman 
 arrayed in purple and scarlet" with the Roman 
 Catholic church is a fetch worthless and un- 
 worthy. John was looking upon the then ex- 
 isting sin of pagan Rome. What that condi- 
 tion was you can learn from Roman authors 
 themselves. Juvenal was a contemporary of 
 John. Juvenal was hard, cold, intellectual, 
 
THE REVELATION 49 
 
 satirical, biting, bitter, but doubtless substantially 
 truthful. The satires of Juvenal may be read 
 as a commentary on John. 
 "Nothing is left, nothing, for future times 
 
 To add°to the full catalogue of crimes; 
 
 The baffled sons must feel the same desires. 
 
 And act the same mad follies, as their sires. 
 
 Vice has attained its zenith." 
 
 To a spiritual optimist like John that could 
 not be the end of things. Vice, however tri- 
 umphant then, must go to the lake that burneth 
 with fire and brimstone; its overthrow is sure 
 and awful. 
 
 Here is a good opportunity to glance at the 
 second of the interpretative principles by which 
 we have been guided. 
 
 There is no book in the Scriptures which has 
 less of prophecy, considered as fortune telling 
 respecting nations or the church, than this. There 
 is absolutely nothing in it concerning Alaric, 
 Attila, Mahomet, Charlemagne, Napoleon, 
 pope, or popes, the Catholic Church or Protes- 
 tantism, or the persons and events, thousand and 
 one, that have been picked out as designated by 
 it. There is a symbolism cast over the future 
 covering this truth and nothing more: 
 
50 THE REl/ELATION 
 
 "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; 
 The eternal years of God are hers. 
 But error wounded writhes with pain 
 And dies amid her worshipers." 
 
 Or this: 
 
 "Though the mills of God grind slowly, 
 Yet they grind exceeding small; 
 Though with patience He stands waiting, 
 With exactness grinds he all." 
 
 We have thrown into the future, in our mis- 
 taken attempts at interpretation, even on moral 
 lines, what was uttered by John with reference 
 to the then present or what is applicable to the 
 always present. Take the first resurrection and 
 the millennium. We put that in the distant future 
 as a historic event. Now the Revelation gives 
 no warrant for any such interpretation, except 
 as 3'ou regard the resurrection as an ever present 
 and so as a possibly existing future fact. Go 
 back to the crowd of the accused standing be- 
 fore Pliny with the alternative of worship of the 
 Emperor's statue or death. Now what will 
 happen suppose the latter is chosen? what will 
 be a reason why the latter is chosen? 
 
 "I saw the souls of them that were beheaded 
 for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God 
 and which had not worshipped the beast, neither 
 
THE REI/ ELATION 51 
 
 his image, neither had received his mark upon 
 their foreheads or in their hands, and they lived 
 and reigned with Christ a thousand years. This 
 is the first resurrection." If we want to know 
 what the first resurrection is, instead of looking 
 ahead to the end of the ages, we must lookback 
 and see what John says will happen to one who 
 is beheaded for the witness of Jesus. He goes 
 to live and reign with Christ an indefinite period. 
 The Greek text reads, "thousand years," with- 
 out limiting article. That is the first resurrec- 
 tion. The value of that teaching for us is, that, 
 if we are true to Christ in our day, at our death 
 we go up to live and reign with Christ, and on 
 us the second death or moral destruction shall 
 have no power. The rest of the dead appear 
 not on the canvas before John. They are not 
 astir. The}^ are not with this glorious army of 
 martyrs. The vision discloses them not. Con- 
 cerning their fortunes till the final judgment 
 assize, when "the dead, small and great, stand 
 before God and the books are opened," the 
 vision is silent. To the question, what were 
 their experiences in that intervening time? — 
 "There lives no record of reply." 
 
52 THE REl/BLATlOhl 
 
 "The rest remaineth unrevealed; 
 He told it not. Something sealed 
 The lips of that evangelist." 
 
 The vision is meant for the comfort of the 
 saints in their trials, is meant to give strength 
 to the timid as they debate the question whether 
 they shall worship the statue of the Emperor or 
 worship God. When you stand looking at the 
 Battle of Gettysburg, on its vast canvas you do 
 not see what is going on at Vicksburg. So the 
 Revelation pictures sometimes confine the view 
 to one set of occurrences, leaving others un- 
 limned, however important they may be. Drama 
 after drama passes in its action before you, with 
 hints here and there that other dramas are con- 
 temporaneously enacting, though upon them the 
 curtain is never rung up. This is the case with 
 the millennium. It is a past and ever present 
 fact. Past historically in the case of all who 
 have died in the faith; present as we pass over 
 to the general assembly and church of the first 
 born whose names are written in heaven. This 
 is the first resurrection — a present spiritual in- 
 stitution and the inheritance of the saints in light. 
 Forms of trial change in the ages. But the re- 
 sults of contests with temptation are the same. 
 
THE REVELATION 53 
 
 There is still a second death and a first resur- 
 rection as the possible outcome of all our con- 
 flicts with sin. Still is the inheritance of all 
 things the portion of him that overcometh. 
 
 The crowning vice of the interpretation of the 
 Revelation has been the attempt to treat the 
 visions as indicating a consecutive order in time. 
 There is no reason wh}^ the final judgment may 
 not be regarded as contemporaneous with the 
 processes of the first resurrection and of the 
 second death. John is as silent respecting any 
 second resurrection for the good as he is re- 
 specting a first resurrection for the wicked. 
 
 The judgment scene in the latter part of 
 Chapter xx. may be the totality of a process a 
 part of which has been seen in another way be- 
 fore. 
 
 Time fails to comment on the literary merits 
 of this section of the Book. Suffice it to say 
 that it secures increasing interest in the prog- 
 ress of the action to the close. Passion and 
 power nowhere rise to heights more sublime or 
 are nowhere longer sustained than in Chapter 
 xviii., in the action grouped around the fall of 
 Babylon the great. That chapter is a master- 
 piece of imagination. Its equal in graphic ela- 
 
54 THE REyELATIOhl 
 
 boration and- in the expression of intensity of 
 feeling is not easil}^ found in literature. In 
 these respects there is certainly no superior. 
 Perhaps you may call that chapter the grand 
 climacteric of the passion of the Revelation. 
 
 When were these descriptions fulfilled ? In 
 their scenic literalness never. But in the spirit- 
 ual realm they are alwa3^s fulfilling. Rome 
 never was overthrown in manner and form as 
 set forth by John. But take the wickedness of 
 that day — how utter its destruction! dead, burnt 
 out, burnt up, gone — gone to the lake that 
 burneth with fire and brimstone — no resurrec- 
 tion awaits it. The passions of a Caesar, of the 
 corrupt populace, extinct as Archean volcanoes! 
 
 One would have supposed that when the wick- 
 edness enthroned and entrenched in the Roman 
 Empire was overthrown and sent to its doom, 
 John would have reached the terminus of hia 
 excursion among spiritual things. But no, John 
 sees an end beyond that end. The beast and 
 false prophet may have received sentence for- 
 ever, but Satan is bound only for an indefinite 
 period. Sin is inveterate. The forms then ex- 
 isting would lose their force and die. But in 
 other days it will in other ways gather head and 
 
THE REyELATION 55 
 
 Still make war upon the saints. But it is a losing 
 battle that it fights. Ultimately all, the deceived 
 and the deceiver, go where the Roman beast 
 and the false prophet have gone, and their ad- 
 juncts Death and Hades are cast into the lake 
 of fire with them. So perishes sin. 
 
 The rest of the book is a detail of the fortunes 
 of triumphant righteousness. The description 
 of the New Jerusalem is of quieter feeling, as is 
 fit, but the eye of man has scarcely seen a beauty 
 or a magnificence in nature which is not put 
 under contribution to the picture. One would 
 say that what is begun with such high colors 
 could not be congruously completed, 3^et it is. 
 The city stands in its perfect beaut3\ The river 
 of the water of life glides through it. The tree 
 of life bears its fruit for it, and "the Lord God 
 is the light of it." The power of that painting 
 over human souls has been felt in the ages past; 
 it will abide on them through time. That scenic 
 beauty will never weather-wear. It is fadeless 
 as eternity. 
 
 From beginning to end the Revelation is sus- 
 tained by the spirit of optimism. No sin can 
 prevail. The ongoing of the universe is against 
 it and will crush it out. No righteousness, how- 
 
56 THE REVEL/iTIOhl 
 
 ever gentle, can be lost. Behind it is the love 
 and might of God. Tennyson has his way of 
 coming at it, and John has his, but both have 
 the same ultimate philosophy — all things rest in 
 God Pantokrator, and move toward ends de- 
 signed by his wisdom and love, in processes 
 directed by his will. 
 
 "That God which ever lives and loves, 
 One God, one law, one element. 
 And one far-off Divine event. 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
III. 
 
 JOB. 
 
 In this outline exposition of the book of Job 
 all questions are dismissed save form and intent 
 of composition. 
 
 In form Job is drama and presents all the 
 difficulties and perplexities of that species of 
 composition. 
 
 The final expositor of Hamlet has not laid 
 down his pen There is much yet to be said 
 about the meaning that Shakespeare had in 
 writing his lines, and there is no end to the pos- 
 sibilities of their suggestion. 
 
 Is not that the mark of a great composition — 
 that it is the perennial fountain of exposition and 
 comment? That it sets and holds men to thought 
 upon it is an indication not of obscurity but of 
 luminousness. It shines out like the sun, many- 
 rayed, in all directions. We approach it now 
 along some lines, now along others. Its genius 
 is that it holds you, come to it howsoever you 
 
 will. 
 
 57 
 
58 JOB 
 
 Job is one of the great writings that provoke 
 thought. System after system can be found in 
 it or raised from it. It is a great composition 
 that can challenge and charm thought for two 
 thousand five hundred years and still find men 
 as eager to search for its truths and suggestions 
 as ever. 
 
 The latest products of printing are treatises 
 explanatory of Job; and they find attent 
 readers. 
 
 This review can only touch upon points. Yet 
 a bird flying over a continent ought to know 
 that there is something there — here and there a 
 noble stream, here and there a mighty forest 
 under whose "tall oaks and gnarled pines" the 
 cool shade is scented by the trailing arbutus and 
 the violet. 
 
 What is the plot of a drama? What is its 
 theme, what is it meant to set forth? You 
 might think that ought always to be clear, but 
 it very frequently is not, and certainly 'is not in 
 Job. 
 
 The prologue opens with one set of questions 
 in dispute, and the main body of the development 
 seems to be occupied with another. There seems 
 to be a mismatch between the point argued by 
 
JOB 59 
 
 Satan against Jehovah and that at issue between 
 Job and his three friends. But that is the art of 
 drama — to throw you off the track for a long 
 time and then to approach the point of interest 
 in an unexpected way. I think we shall get a 
 clue that will guide us with some satisfaction 
 through the book if we regard the main issue 
 as lying in the dispute set forth in the prologue, 
 the discussion between Job and his friends, 
 Elihu included, as incidental. 
 
 The fundamental question of this drama is 
 not the philosophy of human suffering, but, 
 what do men serve God for? Is there any such 
 thing as righteousness per se^ or is it all for a 
 price? To try out that question is the end for 
 which all the rest of the action of the drama is 
 brought on to the stage. Jehovah said there 
 were men that were good for goodness' sake. 
 Satan said there were no such men, that if men 
 are good they are so,only for some ulterior end of 
 pleasure or advantage, that if they are not as 
 bad as they can be, they are as bad as they dare. 
 Jehovah says there is a man. Job, who means 
 to be good through thick and thin ; he loves 
 righteousness for its own sake and hates iniquity 
 in itself. Satan says, with a guffaw, "Doth Job 
 
60 JOB 
 
 fear God for naught? He is having an easy 
 time, you have hedged him in so that every- 
 thing is fortunate for him, but let luck run 
 against him and you will see what his virtue 
 amounts to." Satan, "the accuser of his 
 brethren," is a C3'nic. We understand from 
 the Revelation that heaven is swept clean of 
 such characters now. But he and his, alas! 
 were ''cast down" to the earth. His angels here 
 are sturdy, numerous — 
 
 "Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the 
 brooks 
 In Vallambrosa" — 
 
 people who assert that there is nothing good in 
 man, woman or politics; that everybody is cor- 
 rupt, and for sale; that the good only are those 
 
 "Whose life is like a weel-gaun mill, 
 Supplied wi' store o' water; 
 The heappet happer's ebbing still, 
 And still the clap plays clatter." 
 
 Philosophically you would say that Satan was 
 
 a utilitarian, an egoistic hedonist, that he had 
 
 drunk long and deep from tha wells of Hobbes 
 
 and Bentham ; that what he means is that first, 
 
 last and all the time there are no deeper springs 
 
 in man's nature than pleasure or self-interest; 
 
 that he is incapable of an action whose ulterior 
 
JOB 61 
 
 motive is not one of personal advantage. Hobbes 
 said the word "ought'' ought to be expunged 
 from the language and Satan said it had been. 
 That is the ground on 'which Satan plants him- 
 self in his controversy with Jehovah. It is to 
 try out this question whether there are any 
 springs of reverence, of attachment to righteous- 
 ness in man's nature to which, he will prove 
 true under all circumstances, that the machinery 
 of the drama is set in motion. Satan is balked 
 in his first experiment with Job over this ques- 
 tion, and, on complaint that the trial is not severe 
 enough, gets a carte blanche to proceed to the 
 last extremity but that of life. 
 
 Thus stands the matter in the court of heaven. 
 Now the scene is transferred to the plane of 
 earth. It looks like contretemps, cross purposes, 
 for Job and his friends to fall so long and so 
 ardently to the discussion of the question of the 
 philosophy of human suffering. That is not the 
 question to which our attention has been called 
 in the scene laid in the Divine abode. But 
 consider; how could the drama be otherwise 
 developed? We have had a corner of the cur- 
 tain pulled aside that we might look upon action 
 above that was entirely concealed from those 
 
62 JOB 
 
 below. They did not know what we do; so far 
 as they are concerned the action begins with 
 them in the unheralded disasters that overtake 
 Job. On the face of the case they have nothing 
 to do with anything but the philosophy of those 
 disasters. They know nothing about the scene 
 in the upper realm — nothing about the points 
 and purposes at issue there. They take up their 
 problem from their point of knowledge and pro- 
 ceed to deal with it as best they can. The ques- 
 tion plainly enough before them is, why this 
 disaster,why this suffering, what is its meaning, 
 intent and purpose? 
 
 It is not necessary here to particularize in re- 
 spect to the course of the argument over that 
 question. Long as that argument is, clear 
 through to the end of Elihu's speech it is very 
 simple. The philosophy is such and such only 
 as could come out of the thought of the time. 
 Job's friends had a truth — an important truth, 
 to wit, that sin and suffering are conjoined. 
 That is a good induction in any age. But it is 
 good only for a certain class of facts and cannot 
 be laid down over all. Job's friends seem to 
 have multiplied and replenished the earth with 
 their like. There is many a theologian and 
 
JOB 63 
 
 many a scientist who is simply a case of rever- 
 sion, atavism, to the type of Job's friends, — who 
 has found a principle, raised from observation 
 of a few facts, and who forthwith strains himself 
 to make it cover all the facts of the universe, 
 will they, nill they. Sometimes, however, "a 
 bed is shorter than that a man can stretch him- 
 self on it; and a covering narrower than that he 
 can wrap himself in it." But that made little 
 difference to Job's friends and makes little to 
 their philosophical successors. If the facts do 
 not fit the theor}^, so much the worse for the 
 facts; cast them out, ignore them, embrain them, 
 transmute them into something else. F'tat 
 THEORY, rtiat coelmn. 
 
 The whole section occupied by the discussion 
 of Job and the three friends is relieved from 
 tediousness only by the beaut}' of its illustrative 
 description. Philosophically no advance is made 
 in it. The friends begin by insinuation and end 
 by charge of wickedness on the part of Job as 
 the key to his misery. Job iterates and reiterates 
 denial of their theory as just explanation of his 
 trouble. There is no advance in the philosophy 
 of suffering over this ground — that suffering is 
 and ought to be an adjunct of sin, and over the 
 
64 JOB 
 
 illegitimate conclusion that where there is suf- 
 fering there is sin, till you get to Elihu. 
 
 Whatever the critics ma}^ say about the drop 
 in the literary character of the part of Elihu — 
 whatever they may say about interpolation by a 
 later hand than an original writer — the part 
 borne by Elihu is a necessity in the moral de- 
 velopment of the doctrine under discussion. If 
 Elihu's speeches are an interpolation, then some- 
 body worked over the original drama who had 
 better moral insight than the first author. The 
 position that suffering may not be sign of sin 
 but a means of moral discipline, is a distinct and 
 immeasurable advance on the argument of the 
 three friends.* 
 
 ''Sweet are the uses of adversity," and ''by 
 the sorrow of the countenance the heart is made 
 better," — there is a principle as inherently im- 
 portant, and to observation as widel}^ employed, 
 as the following of sin by suffering. To at- 
 
 * The author of Job was under no obligation to write to suit 
 his modern critics. If he were, he might well have passed all 
 effort to begin with. Suppose the Elihu section is not up in 
 liternry strength and finish to the rest of the treatise, what of 
 it? Passion and power in the Reply to Hayne are not equal 
 in all its parts. It is said that Homer nodded. Perhaps Job 
 did. It is hard to keep protracted and involved composition 
 throughout up to the point of its highest tension. A moral 
 height is gained by Elihu that looks far out over and beyond 
 the fo )t-hills of the previous argument, whatever their beau- 
 ties may be. 
 
JOB 65 
 
 tribute the part of Elihu to a subsequent emen- 
 dator is simply to assert that the original author 
 did not know about a principle of explanation 
 of suffering that v\'as the burden of many a 
 writer and observer before his day, speaker of 
 proverbs, writer of psalms or prophet. Indeed, 
 to this day you cannot do much better with the 
 philosophy of suffering than Elihu did with it. 
 We read to-day as about the best thing we can 
 do to steady mind in affliction: "Now no 
 chastening for the present seemeth joyous, but 
 grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the 
 peaceable fruit of righteousness to them that are 
 exercised thereby." 
 
 It may seem strange that Elihu, on this point 
 of the uses of adversity as discipline, did not 
 lay stress on immortality as laying ground for 
 reconciliation of the difficulties of the problem. 
 Not that the idea of immortality is a solvent of 
 all trouble in the case, but it does present a 
 perspective on whose magnificent stretch the 
 trials of time dwindle into insignificance. It is 
 in view of the opening up of that great realm 
 tjiat Paul puts all the argument he wishes to 
 make, over the question that is debated so long 
 and strenuously in Job, in this succinct form; 
 
66 JOB 
 
 "For our light affliction which is but for a 
 moment worketh for us a far more exceeding 
 and eternal weight of glory: 
 
 "While we look not on the things which are 
 seen but upon the things which are not seen; 
 for the things which are seen are temporal; but 
 the things which are not seen are eternal.'* 
 
 It is safe to say that had the conviction of 
 immortality been as firm with the participants 
 in the debate in Job as with Paul we should 
 never have had this argument over the philoso- 
 ph}' of suffering, at least in this form. One 
 thought would have obviated the necessity of 
 going over all the ground traversed in that book 
 on this philosophy. Man is a great being, with 
 an unbounded future. The gymnastics of time — 
 moral as well as other — develop him and make 
 him fitter to enter with mastery upon his eternal 
 heritage. Huddle existence up together in the 
 years of time, and our suffering fills a large space 
 in it. But let existence be aeonic, let it run limit- 
 less, and the affliction becomes light, a mote in 
 the sunbeam, and we know that it will disappear 
 a speck in the distance, while we are onward 
 bound to "vaster issues." 
 
 But this light did not shine on the problems 
 
JOB 67 
 
 in Job. Existence with the Hebrew as well as 
 the Greek was geocentric — better,perhaps,to the 
 superficies of the earth. To be sure, the Hebrew 
 had his sheol, as well as the Greek his hades, 
 but it was dark and forbidding ground, unil- 
 lumined by any bright flush of day. 
 
 How that matter stood with Job, hear himself 
 say: ''Are not my days few? cease then, and 
 let me alone, that I may take comfort a little 
 before I go whence I shall not return, even to 
 the land of darkness and the shadow of death; 
 a land of darkness as darkness itself; and of the 
 shadow of death, without any order, and where 
 the light is as darkness." 
 
 That men ever believed in the continuity of 
 existence is evident enough over and over again 
 in the book of Job. But the continuation beyond 
 this life was not in desirable conditions. There 
 was no sunshine in that land. Souls went not 
 up and away, but down and below. You need 
 not hunt far in Job to find such idea of immor- 
 tality. You strike it in the very first reply of 
 Eliphaz the Temanite to Job's first lament. 
 
 The famous text, " I know that my Redeemer 
 liveth," we shall not be able to make much out 
 of. In the first place, it is not a Redeemer from 
 
68 JOB 
 
 sin that Job wants. Just what he is asserting is 
 that he has committed no sin or no such sin as 
 alleged by his friends. He is stung to the quick 
 by their indictment and in his exasperation cries 
 out for an Avenger to take his part against such 
 a charge, and in irate hyperbole says that if his 
 flesh should go with his corrupting skin some- 
 body will yet stand up for his vindication on the 
 earth, and he shall see him. 
 
 Job's faith in a vindicator may, however, para- 
 phrase our faith in a Redeemer and in an im- 
 mortality thick sown with blessed privilege and 
 bright with delight. But then, our faith is ours 
 and not Job's. 
 
 Life never leaves us where we started. A 
 drama representative of life will not leave the 
 parties in interest where they started. There 
 will be progress about it. The saint will per- 
 severe to his destination and the sinner to his. 
 But in life, and in drama which is its parable, 
 there are critical periods of trial where the prin- 
 ciples of life will be put to the test — danger 
 periods wherein the good may seem to be con- 
 fused, to falter, and to be near to overthrow. 
 A Psalmist looking back over some such period 
 in his career cried out: "But as for me, my feet 
 
JOB 69 
 
 were almost gone; my steps had well nigh 
 slipped." 
 
 Remember that this drama was writ not to 
 prove that Job was a good man, but to show 
 what a good man will do under trial. How will 
 he be modified by his circumstances? What will 
 he do with the new conditions into which he is 
 brought by the change and progress of events? 
 Will he safely pass through the testing crises, and 
 what are they? Somewhere in his fiounderings, 
 in his attempt to find firm footing before the 
 charges of his adversary friends, as they brought 
 before him the fact that sin finds trial and thence 
 inferred that trial is an index of sin. Job stum- 
 bles on the fact that sin does not always have a 
 hard lot, not always is it true that "the way of 
 transgressors is hard." It was just exactly this 
 fact that the Psalmist whom we last quoted was 
 contemplating : 
 
 "I was envious at the foolish when I saw the 
 prosperity of the wicked. Their strength is firm. 
 They are not in trouble as other men; neither 
 are they plagued like other men." 
 
 The critical period of Job's trial is in his 
 thought and possible action over that fact. It is 
 but one step from the perception of such fact to 
 
70 JOB 
 
 saying, "It does not pay to serve God." Had Job 
 really come to that conclusion Satan would have 
 won his case and could have replied to Jehovah: 
 "There, 3'ou see Job doth not serve God for 
 naught — as soon as his pay for serving you is 
 taken away from him he is ready to curse thee to 
 thy face — ready to become a pessimist." Now, 
 that Job's moral fortunes hung trembling on this 
 pivot is beyond question. Elihu discerned it, and 
 one of Elihu's merits is that he called Job's at- 
 tention sharply to his danger. He tells him that 
 he is "in companj' with workers of iniquity and 
 walketh with wicked men," because he said, "It 
 profiteth a man nothing that he should delight 
 himself with God." 
 
 It was only necessar}^ to go on practically from 
 that position, theoretically assumed, and Satan 
 had his game. 
 
 But not all speculative trouble takes root in 
 character. Much of it onl}' lingers in the realm 
 of temptation and never ripens into fruit. Job 
 was evidentl}^ rudely jostled from his moral 
 equilibrium by the thought of the prosperity of 
 the wicked, but he did not deny God; he still 
 held fast to him whether he was paid or not for 
 his service, held fast still in spite of the blind- 
 
JOB 71 
 
 ing confusion of his own wretchedness to the 
 onward fiow of existence! Sometimes we wish 
 we could stand still in order that we might make 
 adjustment in our trouble. But we cannot stop. 
 Forward march, is the order, and if we do not 
 step we are crowded along. There is merc}^ in 
 the order. If we stood still we should fall. We 
 would like to sit in quietness and enjoy "the 
 luxury of woe." But the rude slamming of a 
 door reminds us that we must arise and put the 
 house in order to stand against the gusts of a 
 summer storm, and, heaven be praised! we can 
 never get back to our reverie of sadness again. 
 
 God does not always temper the wind to the 
 shorn lamb. Sometimes he blows him over a 
 ledge where the force of the wind is broken. 
 Usually something is done. In our temptations 
 other suggestions are pushed along, and in at- 
 tending to them the temptation slides into the 
 past, never to renew its power, — perhaps never 
 to return, or if to return, to find a new and 
 stronger adversary to it in possession of the soul. 
 
 Job was not an irrational man. The speech 
 of Elihu must have influenced him. It had 
 potency to check him so that he must have said 
 with himself: "No, no, I can't quite say that I 
 
72 JOB 
 
 will not serve God unless he give me the reward 
 of prosperity for it — not quite that." 
 
 But Elihu's words have no sooner died away 
 than something else occurs to give him thought. 
 All things are not at a stand-still even over the 
 sands of Arabia. "The voice of the Lord" is 
 heard in thunder. The clouds mount up in 
 blackness on the horizon. 
 
 " His chariots of wrath the deep thunder clouds 
 form, 
 And dark is his path on the wings of the 
 stoim." 
 A tornado comes up apace! What can man 
 do against its might? Yet it is under the con- 
 trol of God. 
 
 "Without his high behest 
 It shall not in the mountain pine 
 Disturb the sparrow's nest." 
 
 May it not be that man's wisdom falls as far 
 
 short of God's wisdom as man's power does of 
 
 his power? Who shall contend with the Almighty 
 
 about anything? who measure himself against 
 
 him in any matter? What is my "iniquity" to 
 
 the perfection — the beauty of the holiness of 
 
 God? 
 
 "Behuld T am vile. 
 
 Infinite Glory of righteousness! 
 
 1 have uttered what I understood not." 
 
JOB 73 
 
 "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the 
 ear; but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore 
 I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes." 
 There is a new attitude! No request for a vin- 
 dicator of the integrity of past days— only the in- 
 spiration of longing for a righteousness that 
 might be. 
 
 Now perhaps we might go back to the begin- 
 ning and run up the curtain on that upper stage 
 and ask the cynic, Satan, how it is with this 
 man Job, who, he said, would not serve God un- 
 less for pay. Tell us how your test has come 
 out. Have things come to pass as you said 
 the}^ would? Is this man in the humiliation of 
 dust and ashes over the feeling of his moral 
 poverty in the sight of God the sort of man you 
 predicted he would be if you could visit him 
 with tribulation .? Does it not look as though 
 there were a root in his nature that you had not 
 calculated upon ; that the man loves righteousness 
 for itself and not for pay? Yet stay a moment 
 longer. The three friends have had time to 
 reflect as well as Job, and things have changed 
 somewhat with them. They say to Job: '^Inthe 
 heat of our argument we charged you with sin 
 wrongfully; whether you are a sinner or not, we 
 
74 JOB 
 
 are, for we have put the worst construction pos- 
 sible on your case; pray for us that impending 
 woe may not strike us." 
 
 Now, Satan, look at this man, still in his 
 misery, not a cloud of misfortune drifting from 
 him, forgetting himself in his anxiety for his 
 friends, "lifting up holy hands without wrath or 
 doubting," and say if man's relations with man 
 are always selfish, if even in his own dire ex- 
 tremity man may not sometimes think of others 
 rather than himself; if the game of life is al- 
 ways — every man for himself; if there may not 
 be genuine unselfish service of man as well as 
 of God. 
 
 And now, Satan, we will ring down the cur- 
 tain on you. Your experiment has failed over 
 both the great realms of religion — the relation- 
 ship which man has to God and that which he 
 has to man. 
 
 Job began a man of integrity and he has come 
 out with a hunger and a thirst for a greater in- 
 tegrity, which will only grow into greater mas- 
 tery of his being as "the years of eternity roll." 
 
 He began with kindness to man and he has 
 come out of his tribulation with undistinguishing, 
 unselfish, forgiving love. 
 
JOB 75 
 
 The book of Job reaches intellectually the 
 conclusion that in suffering as well as in every- 
 thing else there will be elements beyond the 
 power of human resolution. But it reaches also 
 a higher spiritual plane in the conclusion that 
 men can look over any unknown in unselfish- 
 ness and loving trust. It comes fairly into the 
 flush of the dawn of a spiritual day where — 
 "Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done" 
 is sunlight. 
 
 That rare saint, Cowper, breathed the atmos- 
 phere of that high spiritual day: 
 
 "Judge not the Lord by feeble sense. 
 But trust him for his grace; 
 Behind a frowning providence 
 He hides a smiling face. 
 
 "Blind unbelief is sure to err 
 And scan his work in vain; 
 God is his own interpreter 
 And he will make it plain," 
 
IV. 
 
 JONAH. 
 
 I INTEND herein to treat of the literary form of 
 the book of Jonah, and to comment on its ethics. 
 
 In what department as literature does it fall? 
 I think it is plainly comedy. It is meant to be 
 satire, light and kindly, on the Hebrew proph- 
 ets. The idea of satirizing the prophets may 
 strike us unfavorably. It may give a rude jostle 
 to the feeling of reverence which we have for the 
 most prominent characters in the Old Testament. 
 
 But we must give our idea of the Hebrew 
 prophets a much wider range than is common. 
 We have derived our notion of the prophets from 
 the specimens we have in the Bible. But we 
 must remember that they have secured our ven- 
 eration because they are instances of the survival 
 of the fittest out of a very numerous class. The 
 prophet was not so rare a personage in Israel as 
 we are accustomed to think. The function of a 
 Hebrew prophet was in large degree, if not 
 
 76 
 
JONAH 77 
 
 raainly, political. The prophets whose works 
 have survived to us were Israel's statesmen. 
 The fires that burned within them were primarily 
 patriotic. They were not the clergymen of 
 Israel, The priest more nearly represented the 
 minister among us. 
 
 The Catholic church and its congeners, the 
 old churches of the East, call thrir ministers 
 priests. That shows how the analogies lie as 
 between the religious officials of the Hebrew 
 people and the larger divisions of the Christian 
 church. The continuous line in religion, from 
 Israel through to us, is largely by way of the 
 priest. The prophets that have survived to us 
 have come to their prominence in religion be- 
 cause in dealing with their problems of state they 
 tried to find and la}' foundations in everlasting 
 right. There was a right way for the nation and 
 there was aright way for the people of a nation. 
 "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a re- 
 proach unto any people," may well summarize 
 the common spirit in the genius of the Biblical 
 prophets. It is out from that common factor,as 
 they wrought at their various problems of state, 
 that their religious inspiration comes to us. 
 
 But think of the prophets as primarily engaged 
 
78 JOf^AH 
 
 with questions of state and there are some results 
 which we can work out ourselves as inherently 
 likely to ensue. There will be prophets and 
 prophets — prophets of all sorts — prophets false 
 as well as prophets true — prophets of all kinds 
 of burdens, i. e., all sorts of policies for all 
 political exigencies — prophets of wisdom and 
 prophets of folly — prophets of righteousness and 
 prophets of lies. 
 
 Statesmen survive, and so we have the 
 prophets of Scripture. But where there is 
 one statesman there are ten politicians, and 
 demagogues innumerable. You have only to 
 read the Old Testament to find that Israel was 
 distracted by the multitude of his advisers,as we 
 are. There were eras when everybody seemed 
 to have a bee in his bonnet and when all were 
 shouting together their political nostrums. Par- 
 ties were formed, as with us, over questions of 
 political economy or of national or international 
 state-craft. 
 
 The three tailors of Grub Street who issued 
 their manifesto — "We the people of England" — 
 could have found apt precedent, doubtless, in 
 the stirring times of Isaiah and Ezekiel. In 
 Jeremiah you can read: 
 
JONAH 79 
 
 "For every one from the least even to the 
 greatest is given to covetousness; from the 
 prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth 
 falsely. For they have healed the hurt of the 
 daughter. of my people slightl}^ sa3'ing, Peace, 
 peace; when there is no peace. We looked for 
 peace but no good came, and for a time of health 
 and behold trouble. The snorting of horses was 
 heard from Dan, the whole land trembled at the 
 sound of the neighing of his strong ones." 
 
 That does not read so verj' different from ex- 
 periences within our own memory. Some said 
 there would be no war; that the whole matter 
 would be over in sixty days. 
 
 Some said let the erring sisters depart in 
 
 peace, and some said they were even justifiable 
 
 in attempting to break up the nation. So they 
 
 each prophesied in his several way. But there 
 
 were prophets of other vision. 
 
 "We wait beneath the furnace-blast 
 The pangs of transformation; 
 Not painlessly doth God recast 
 And mould anew the nation. 
 
 Hot burns the fire, 
 Where wrongs expire, 
 Nor spares the hand 
 That from the land 
 Uproots the ancient evil." 
 
80 JOhlAH 
 
 We had our prophets and we had to choose 
 among them as did ancient Israel, I do not 
 know that the principles of choice were essenti- 
 ally different in the two cases. 
 
 Back in Deuteronomy you find that Israel had 
 his constitution in the recognition of Jehovah as 
 the governing God of his nation, and that the 
 setting up the worship of any other divinity was 
 treason to the state, because it laid the founda- 
 tion for breaking it up. An act of that sort was 
 just like firing on the flag at Fort Sumter. 
 Down in Isaiah you find exactly the doctrine of 
 Washington's farewell address — "to avoid en- 
 tangling alliances" with other nations. And 
 throughout all the prophets of the Bible you find 
 insistence on the fact which is borne in upon us, 
 that a moral nation is mighty. The prophets of 
 Israel were, then, dealing with problems not es- 
 sentially different from our own and under con- 
 ditions like our own. It was perhaps as hard to 
 tell in that day who was a prophet as it is in ours 
 to tell who is a statesman. It is pretty clear now 
 that Washington was a patriot and a statesman. 
 But in his day there was more than one cabal 
 against him that had the ear of the people. The 
 average prophet of Israel was a politician, the 
 
JONAH 81 
 
 * 
 
 great prophet was a statesman, and the little one 
 was a demagogue. It was aahard, probably, for 
 the people to tell what ought to be done in their 
 national crises as it is now for us to tell what we 
 ought to do with shouting on this hand and on 
 that for free trade and for protection, for high 
 license, low license or no license, for a gold 
 basis and for a silver basis and for no basis at 
 all, for government control and for anything but 
 government control. You have only to read the 
 prophets that have survived to us to be sure that 
 Israel had, as well as we, a din of conflicting 
 interests, policies and nostrums. 
 
 Now give such a state of affairs and a satirist 
 will arise. Some cool head will look over the 
 situation, will see clearly the wrong to be re- 
 sisted, the right to be assisted and the blown 
 bubbles to be punctured. It has always been so. 
 Truth and right have taken as much from satire 
 as from any other intellectual or moral agency. 
 No squadron in the field did so much to over- 
 throw slavery as the Bigelow and the Petroleum 
 V. Nasby papers. They turned the laugh against 
 it, and when an institution gets to be ridiculous 
 its days are numbered. 
 
 Nobody knew how to wield the weapon of 
 
82 ^ JONAH 
 
 satire better than the Hebrew prophets. Juvenal 
 himself pales in causticity before Elijah as seen 
 in his contest with the prophets of Baal. Isaiah 
 the great and the grand — Websterian in his sus- 
 tained power — relieves the "inevitable" onward 
 march of his thought with shafts of ridicule. But 
 there are satirists and satirists. According to 
 theme or condition of the times or trait of nature, 
 you will find this satirist strenuous, that playful. 
 Juvenal bites — he is exactly sarcastic, he goes 
 for the flesh of his victim, he strikes to draw 
 blood. Washington Irving is always sportive, 
 genial — the laugh is as far as he wants to go. 
 
 I think the book of Jonah falls into the class 
 satire of the latter sort. Whoever wrote Jonah 
 meant satire on the prophets as Lowell meant 
 satire on the politicians of the day of the Bige- 
 low papers, only the strokes m Jonah are of 
 lighter touch than even those of Lowell. If any 
 one wants to understand Jonah I would advise 
 him to read the masterpieces of wit till his sense 
 of humor has become supple — read, sa3',"The 
 Vicar of Wakefield," "Knickerbocker's History 
 of New York" and "The Pickwick Papers," for 
 they are specimens of the kindly humorous 
 satire I conceive to be illustrated in the book of 
 
JONAH 83 
 
 Jonah. Whatever be the facts of the history of 
 a man called Jonah, they are treated by the book 
 before us very much as Goldsmith treats Dr. 
 Primrose. You love Dr. Primrose, but he has 
 a genius for blundering. You reverence him 
 for his good will and devoutness, but a smile of 
 sympathy goes over to the side of the "neer-do- 
 weel" prisoners who make up faces at him and 
 play pranks at his expense while he delivers to 
 them long homilies on virtue. But everything 
 goes well in the Vicar of Wakefield, as you 
 know. The good all grow better and the bad 
 repent. The same humorous, kindly spirit seems 
 to dominate over every person and every con- 
 dition in the book of Jonah. Nobody is hurt 
 in it from beginning to end — save one poor little 
 squash vine. Everybody save Jonah is always 
 on his best temper. 
 
 Take the sailors. According to their notions 
 they were in danger of shipwreck because they 
 had a man delinquent to his duty to his God on 
 board their ship. Jonah confessed that he was 
 the cause of their trouble. 
 
 He was, to them, a foreigner. They would 
 hardly be thought under obligations to have 
 much respect or care for him. But the spirit 
 
84 JONAH 
 
 that afterward wrought in the good Samaritan 
 lived in their rough bosoms. They were nobly 
 human. They were not responsible for the sug- 
 gestion to throw him overboard. That was 
 Jonah's own direction. The quaint record runs: 
 "Then they said unto him, What shall we do 
 unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? 
 for the sea wrought and was tempestuous. And 
 he said unto them. Take me up and cast me forth 
 into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you; 
 for I know that for my sake this great tempest 
 is upon you. Nevertheless the men rowed hard 
 to bring it to land, but they could not, for the 
 sea wrought and was tempestuous against them. 
 Wherefore they cried unto the Lord, and said. 
 We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let 
 us not perish for this man's life and la}' not upon 
 us innocent blood; for thou, O Lord, hast done 
 as it pleased thee." 
 
 That is not to be beaten in literature for expres- 
 sion of gentility under difficult circumstances. 
 
 The fish himself is well behaved. After hav- 
 ing given Jonah the hospitalities of the deep for 
 a reasonable length of time, he puts him safe 
 on shore. There is nothing mean about the fish. 
 
 As to the inhabitants of Nineveh — did a re- 
 
JONAH 85 
 
 former ever find people so tractable under his 
 
 hand? 
 
 Surely the prophets who prophesied in Israel 
 for righteousness would have been glad to find 
 something of the "sweet reasonableness" that 
 characterized the Ninevites in the stiff necked, 
 hard hearted and dull minded crowd with which 
 they had to deal. Every one, from king to 
 beggar, fell to in reformation at his best will. 
 They "turned every one from his evil way 
 and from the violence that was in his hands." 
 The world never saw such a renovation in so 
 short a time. The men suffered no grass to grow 
 under their heels till they became good. The 
 women did not stop in their moral house clean- 
 ing to look in the glass or to look at what they 
 had done till they had got everything snug and 
 
 nice. 
 
 So Nineveh easily passed moral muster. A 
 tolerable sort of sinner— those Ninevites, Pity 
 that the stock is extinct; that the only record 
 we have showing the existence of such beings 
 as are willing to repent on notice given exhibits 
 them in the fossil state. Somehow the law of 
 the survival of the fittest ought not to have run 
 against them. 
 
86 JOhlAH 
 
 The character of Jonah is so peculiar that you 
 can hardly suppose it to be drawn except in 
 satire. He is as big a blunderer as Handy 
 Andy. But there is an element of avvryness 
 always about his blundering. While everybody 
 else in the story mentioned is good-natured, he 
 loses his temper, gets moodj^, sour and sulky. 
 
 Told to go to Nineveh, he pulls down to Joppa. 
 When the message again comes to go to Nineveh 
 it evidently discomposes him, and he goes and 
 delivers it in the curtest style possible. All he 
 says is, "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be 
 overthrown.'' It is afterward disclosed that be- 
 fore he went he knew of a contingency, which 
 happening, Nineveh might not be overthrown. 
 He kept this contingency to himself, said nothing 
 about it in the proclamation of his message, and 
 then gets angry because that occurred which he 
 suspected might occur. The contingenc}' was 
 nothing less than the possibility that the people 
 of Nineveh might repent and so escape destruc- 
 tion. But the repentance of Nineveh was not 
 what Jonah wanted. He wanted to see it come 
 down, and because it did not the record runs, 
 "It displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was 
 very angry." So angry that he besought God 
 
JONAH 87 
 
 to take his life from him, saying, "It is better 
 for me to die than to live." When a man is 
 fairly angry about one thing he very quickly 
 gets out of sorts with everything. This fact 
 comes out further along in the little matter of 
 the gourd. When that had withered, "God 
 said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for 
 the gourd? And he said, I do well to be 
 angr}^, even unto death." Did you ever hear a 
 great booby boy (have we not been such our- 
 selves?) when some one spoke kindly to him, 
 in a fit of the sulks blurt out peevishness and 
 stuffiness in reply? Well, that is Jonah's state 
 after the withering of the gourd. 
 
 And now mark you that it is in that state that 
 you leave Jonah. The curtain is rung down on 
 him in that condition. The laugh even of con- 
 tempt is on him. That is a reason why I think 
 he is a figure-head of satire. God sometimes 
 uses a poor stick for a messenger; sometimes, 
 but rarely, a surly, crabbed churl. As I am dis- 
 cussing only the probabilities of the literary 
 mode of the book, I have nothing to do further 
 with the facts or fates of Jonah. In the main 
 he is not a lovely character or we do not catch 
 him in a lovely mood. The best that can be 
 
88 JONAH 
 
 said of him is that he did pa}^ his fare to Tar- 
 shish. In the stress of the storm he told the truth 
 to the sailors. He did not, however, tell what 
 he knew to be the whole truth in his proclama- 
 tion to Nineveh. 
 
 There is one portraiture more in this book 
 at which we must look, and it is that of God. 
 We are no longer students or even readers of 
 the Old Testament — more's the pity. I know 
 not how it is that we have dispensed so easily 
 with the Old Testament, for therein are delinea- 
 tions of the Deity that one does not well see how 
 the human heart can forego. God comes out 
 everywhere in the book of Jonah, tender, gentle, 
 with the heart of a mother. 
 
 You might suppose that the wrath of God 
 would relentlessly pursue one who ran away 
 from his plain duty. 
 
 But after giving Jonah strange experiences 
 and time to think the matter over, God simply 
 suggests the old duty again: "Arise, go unto 
 Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the 
 preaching that I bid thee." (Septuagint aorist, 
 '^ which I before bade thee.") But no word, no 
 hint of reproach for the deflection from the 
 former command. 
 
JONAH 89 
 
 The next stroke of the brush on the picture is 
 one put on by the Ninevites. 
 
 Paul in his speech at Athens uses the expres- 
 sion: "That they should seek the Lord, if haply 
 they might feel after him and find him/' Paul 
 might well have caught up his expression from 
 the description of the mental process of the king 
 of the Ninevites: "Let them turn every one from 
 his evil way and from the violence that is in his 
 hands. Who can tell if God will turn and re- 
 pent and turn away from his tierce anger, that 
 we perish not?" For this thought remember, 
 too, that they were indebted to no suggestion of 
 Jonah. Respecting that condition of affairs the 
 author of the book writes thus: "And God 
 saw their works, that they turned from their 
 evil ways; and God repented of the evil he 
 said he would do unto them, and he did it not." 
 The next touch upon the picture is laid on by 
 Jonah: "O Lord, was not this my saying when 
 I was yet in my country?" 
 
 That is to say, I knew beforehand that you 
 would pardon the penitent. "Therefore I fled 
 before unto Tarshish; for I knew that thou art 
 a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger and 
 of great kindness, and repentest thee of the 
 
90 JONAH 
 
 evil." To that accusation the Lord simply re- 
 plied like a mother to a pouting child: "Doest 
 thou well to be angry?" Then followed a little 
 schooling, tenderlj' Executed, as related in the 
 gourd episode, and to Jonah's continued and 
 increased ill-temper a repetition of the gentle 
 question: "Doest thou well to be angry for the 
 gourd?" To Jonah's response, pettish to silli- 
 ness, you find this reply which closes the book: 
 "Then said the Lord: Thou has had pity on 
 the gourd for which thou hast not labored, 
 neither madest it grow, which came up in a 
 night and perished in a night; and should not I 
 spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more 
 than six score thousand (120,000) persons that 
 cannot discern between their right hand and 
 their left hand (babies), and also much cattle?" 
 Now I want to fasten attention on that por- 
 traiture of God on two points. Please remem- 
 ber that it is from the Old Testament that you 
 get the description of God as "the Lord, the 
 Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-sufTering, 
 and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping 
 mercy for thousands and forgiving iniquity, 
 transgression and sin;" and then ask yourself if 
 that wealth of tenderness of spirit was not ex- 
 
JONAH 9^ 
 
 hibited without break to Jonah ; if long-suffering 
 toward one unworthy of graciousness was not 
 just what was shown throughout all his experi- 
 ences. Could love leave a bad disposition more 
 tenderly than by a question which would set it 
 thinking? Farewell, Jonah, how did you an- 
 swer that question? Why is it unanswered? 
 Why just there did the old Hebrew author lay 
 down his pen? Yet stay, we will give Jonah one 
 chance for moral standing. If, after his dis- 
 cipline was over, he repented and wrote this 
 book about himself he shall rank among the 
 good that are very great. A man that satirizes 
 his own sin is out of its toils. One who can 
 see his own meanness and without flinching set 
 it forth, is worthy of the highest honor in the 
 kingdom of God. Were you so great, Jonah ? 
 Then pass up to imperishable moral grandeur. 
 The next time, my friend, you are in a city 
 of six hundred thousand to a million of inhabit- 
 ants, and, "in the silent midnight watches," 
 ask yourself the question whether there is at the 
 heart of things any sympathy with the actual or 
 possible sufferings of its one hundred and twenty 
 thousand infants, it may steady your mind over 
 a tendency to a depressing skepticism to remem- 
 
92 JONAH 
 
 ber the firm answer given to your query accord- 
 ing to the book of Jonah, on the banks of the 
 Tigris, five and twenty centuries ago. 
 
 Nay more, you will think of the same answer 
 when the storms of winter beat, and your ques- 
 tion runs out to include all sentient beings. 
 Back from Nineveh of old, over the long reach 
 of time, will come the loveliest picture ever 
 limned by man, of One "whose tender mercies 
 are over all his works." Instead of an idle grin 
 when the book of Jonah is mentioned, cannot we 
 substitute emotions that come from the convic- 
 tion that in that book we have a masterpiece of 
 literature, and a representation of the character 
 of God that by its very forth-setting, in its sim- 
 plicity and loveliness, will forever charm and 
 capture the human heart? 
 
ISAIAH. 
 
 Question of -the duplicate or composite au- 
 thorship of the writings grouped under the title 
 Isaiah, are deferred for treatment later on. I 
 deal here with the book of Isaiah as it stands 
 before us in the Bible, and as it comes to us out 
 of tradition, as a literary unit. 
 
 The apostle Peter, for some purpose that he 
 had before him, uses the expression: "The 
 world that then was." That is just the expres- 
 sion we want to employ if we turn our thoughts 
 on the times of Isaiah. "The world that then 
 was!" Think where you would be, and who 
 would be your companions, and what would be 
 going on around you, if you could be transported 
 back into the eighth centurj' before Christ and 
 look on the world that lay before the vision of 
 Isaiah. You would not only be under other 
 skies, but other nations and even other races 
 would be the prominent actors on the historic 
 93 
 
94 ISAIAH 
 
 Stage. You must go up past the history of any 
 and all of the nations of modern Europe, past 
 Roman and Greek history, and you would find 
 yourself in that strange old world where Egyp- 
 tians and Assyrians and Chaldeans are acting 
 the drama of individual and national life. The 
 Semite and the Hamite are on the stage. The 
 children of Japheth are still largely nomads, 
 hovering on the borders of the great Nilitic and 
 Mesopotamian civilizations. 
 
 Away at the east, and perhaps here and there 
 among Semites and Hamites, can be seen a 
 fringe or an outcrop of that primitive Turanian 
 stock concerning whom we may ask, whose 
 children are they? and hear our question die 
 away answerless in the distance. 
 
 Some of the historic landmarks of the life of 
 Isaiah are clear. He wrote in "the days of 
 Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of 
 Judah." The death of Hezekiah is placed in 
 the year 698 B. C. But the historic circum- 
 stances are such that Isaiah, if then living, must 
 have been a very old man. We shall not be 
 greatly in error if we place his birth about 780 
 B. C. We may regard the period of his man- 
 hood's activity as about synchronous with the 
 
ISAIAH 95 
 
 latter half of the eighth century B. C. But this 
 is about as far back as we can go and get solid 
 footing in the history of the nations. Isaiah's 
 birth dates probably about the time of the first 
 Greek Olympiad, 776 B. C. The Greeks have 
 aggregated into some little states, but their his- 
 toric attitudes and actions are not clear. It is 
 two centuries after Isaiah's time before you strike 
 the days of Solon and Pisistratus. According 
 to legend, Rome was founded in 753 B. C. 
 Isaiah was then in full manhood and had put 
 forth some of his prophetic writings, and might 
 even then have composed some of his historic 
 work; for he seems to have written chronicles 
 of the kings contemporary with himself — possi- 
 bly his history took a wider range. 
 
 But generations are to pass awa}^ before you 
 come \o Roman history upon which you can 
 place dependence. In Isaiah's time, Egypt and 
 Assyria divided the scepter of the then civilized 
 and historic world. Some minor nations existed 
 here and there, but rather b}' the sufferance of 
 these great powers than otherwise. Damascus 
 was a city and a kingdom, but it owed any in- 
 dependent life to its isolation, as did also the 
 kingdoms of Israel and Judah. At one time in 
 
96 ISAIAH 
 
 the later years. of Isaiah, Babylon came forth to 
 dispute the supremacy with Nineveh. Mero- 
 dach Baladan established and for a while main- 
 tained the independence of Babylon, But his 
 later career was disastrous. The Assyrian at 
 Nineveh was the stronger, and the ascendency 
 of Bab3''Ion must lie in abeyance. 
 
 In Egypt such kings as Necho I. and Psam- 
 metichus reigned. Necho II. reigned toward 
 the end of the century in which Isaiah died. 
 He certainly has been excelled by few monarchs 
 in enterprise. He caused the whole division of 
 Africa to be circumnavigated. There is no rec- 
 ord of a re-performance of that feat from the 
 time of Necho II. to that of Vasco de Gama, 
 A. D. 1497. Necho's sailors were three years in 
 making the voyage from the head of the Red 
 Sea round to the mouth of the Nile. Herodotus 
 tells the story, but refuses it his credence because 
 the sailors said that when they doubled the ex- 
 tremity of the continent they had the sun on 
 their right or north of them. 
 
 It may well be that the massive stone works, 
 whose recent discovery in Mashonaland aston- 
 ishes us, are the result of the enterprise proceed • 
 ing from Egypt or Arabia in this era. 
 
ISAMH 97 
 
 There reigned in Nineveh during the lifetime 
 of Isaiah such sovereigns as Tiglath-pileser, 
 Shalmaneser, Sargon, and Sennacherib — men 
 of capacit}^ for all affairs from war to literature. 
 They carried on campaigns east and west, and 
 patronized learning at home. Much of the 
 sculpture now exhumed from the site of ancient 
 Nineveh to startle and charm us with the power 
 of its expression and the nicety of its execution, 
 dates from their reigns. We are also finding the 
 libraries they founded, and can read on their 
 brick tablets the history of their exploits and 
 also the philosophy taught in the schools of their 
 times. We read in the Bible about the destruc- 
 tion by pestilence of the army of Sennacherib, 
 or perhaps rather of a detachment of it, as it 
 lay among the hills of Judea for the purpose of 
 besieging Jerusalem. The germ theory of dis- 
 ease granted, this miracle becomes a tame prob- 
 ability, from corrupted water suppl}^ 
 
 We take on all the prejudices of the people 
 and prophets of Judah against Sennacherib. 
 There are few of us who have not committed: 
 
 "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the 
 
 fold. 
 And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and 
 
 gold. 
 
98 ISAIAH 
 
 The might of the gentile, unsmote by the sword, 
 Hath melted like snow in the glance of the 
 Lord." 
 
 We now have the privilege of reading the 
 library of Sennacherib, and we find that certainly 
 in some respects he was a gentleman. It is of him 
 we have the record that, finding some army officer 
 had in some way aspersed him, he said he would 
 pay no attention to him; that he was a person 
 of low breeding and mind, and no gentleman 
 would take any notice of what he said. You 
 find back here the truth illustrated: "In all 
 ages every human heart is human" — even that 
 which beats beneath the crown of a king. 
 
 Think not enterprise and pluck and daring 
 are the ofTspring of these later modern times. 
 There was much going on within and among 
 the nations then. Vast armies were raised, 
 equipped and supported for war. Merchant 
 caravans went in and out of Nineveh to and 
 from the frontiers of China and India for trade. 
 Trains of dromedaries and camels and horses 
 and asses were winding through mountain de- 
 files and across deserts ir every direction, and 
 vessels were tempting the perils of unknown 
 waters. 
 
ISAIAH 99 
 
 The nations were bravel}^ astir. They had 
 their ambitions and their dreams of manifest 
 destiny. Judah was caught by the spirit of the 
 times and whirled along in the way it led. 
 Whereto tends the spirit of the age? a philoso- 
 pher would have asked, and, what are the por- 
 tents for my land? would be the inquisition of a 
 patriot. 
 
 Given stirring times, and great men will ap- 
 pear in them. Some will lead the forces of the 
 day, and some, more scholarly and thoughtful, 
 will tell whereto the forces lead. Of this latter 
 class was Isaiah, the Seer. If persistence in in- 
 fluence is any criterion by which to judge, count 
 off a dozen of the world's great men and among 
 them you must put Isaiah. But who was he? 
 We cannot give much of an answer to that 
 question, except by putting in evidence his liter- 
 ary work. His father's name is given and that is 
 all you can find of his ancestral genealogy. He 
 seems to have had children, to whom he gave 
 names carr3Mng in them the core of his political 
 philosophy, insights and vaticinations. But of 
 them we hear nothing. The}^ bore the names 
 their father gave them, but they seem to have 
 inherited none of his genius. As to official rank, 
 
100 ISAIAH 
 
 he seems to have been no more than a court his- 
 torian. What became of him? No one knows. 
 There is a dim tradition that it is to him that the 
 author of the Hebrews alludes as he describes 
 the sufferings of the old martyrs — "They were 
 sawn asunder." That would seem to be the best 
 that his contemporaries, after his long life, could 
 think of to do with him. While he lived he 
 was "a voice crying in the wilderness." There 
 is one touch of his writings which shows he 
 must have been a much hated man. He paints 
 the scorn and derision with which his words 
 were received. 
 
 You can see the very upturned noses and up- 
 lifted brows and side rolling eyes of the crowd 
 as they express contempt for his utterances. 
 Let me paraphrase a little and you can see 
 this, and see also the clear conception and the 
 steady will by which he was supported. 
 
 "To whom will he teach knowledge, ana to 
 whom will he impart instruction? That fellow 
 is just fit to teach weaning babes — those just 
 taken from the breast. It is a perpetual drizzle 
 of the same thing right over and over, precept 
 upon precept, precept upon precept, command 
 upon command, command upon command, a 
 little here and a little there." 
 
ISAIAH 101 
 
 The original of this is said to be a piece of 
 word painting describing the very jabber of the 
 crowd in their contemptuous comment on the 
 speeches of the prophet. But there is pluck in 
 the man, for he catches up their very balderdash 
 and hurls it back upon them. "It may be with 
 stammering lips and a strange tongue that I 
 speak to this people. But there is one who says: 
 This is the way of rest; give rest to the weary. 
 This is the way to safety. But you will not 
 hear. You shall find the very word of Jehovah 
 shall come to you: Precept upon precept, 
 precept upon precept, command upon command, 
 command upon command, a little here and a 
 little there." 
 
 Silence has settled now on all the jeering of 
 that crowd. But the voice of "the one crying 
 in the wilderness," w»ith his "stammering lips" 
 and his "strange tongue," fills the earth. 
 
 First and foremost, Isaiah was a politician and 
 a statesman. It happened then, as it does now, 
 that the first men were not called to fill the first 
 places. But then, as now, a patriot's light could 
 not be hid. Isaiah had a manifest destiny before 
 his view for his nation. He had a definite policy 
 both for the people at home and for their con- 
 
J 02 ISAUH 
 
 nections with surrounding nations. His home 
 policy in the humane sense was democratic to 
 the core. A man was a man whatever his 
 fortunes. His home policy may be defined as 
 an effort to make the most and the best of every 
 man. The quiver of those who have fought the 
 battles of personal liberty — of individual liberty, 
 has always been stuck full oL arrows from the 
 armory of Isaiah. Whittier, as the poet-prophet 
 of the rights of man, had his prototype in Isaiah. 
 A generation ago, and especially during the 
 war, this had some meaning to us: 
 
 "Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a 
 trumpet, and show my people their transgres- 
 sion, and the house of Jacob their sins. Yet 
 they seek me daily, and delight to know my 
 ways, as a nation that did righteousness, and 
 forsook not the ordinances of their God; they 
 ask of me the ordinances of justice; they take 
 delight in approaching to God. 
 
 "Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and 
 thou seest not? Wherefore have we afflicted 
 our soul, and thou takest no knowledge? 
 
 "Behold, in the day of your fast ye find 
 pleasure, and exact all your labors. Behold, ye 
 fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the 
 
ISAMH 103 
 
 fist of wickedness; ye shall not fast as ye do 
 this day, to make your voice to be heard on 
 high. Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a 
 day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow 
 down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sack- 
 cloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this 
 a fast, and an acceptable day unto the Lord? 
 Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose 
 the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy 
 burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and 
 that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy 
 bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the 
 poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou 
 seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that 
 thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? 
 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, 
 and thy health shall spring forth speedily; and 
 thy righteousness shall go before thee; the 
 glory of the Lord shall be thy rearward. Then 
 shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou 
 shalt cry, and he shall sa}', Here I am. If thou 
 take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the 
 putting forth of the finger, and the speaking of 
 vanity; and if thou draw out thy soul to the 
 hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall 
 thy light rise in obscurity, and th}'- darkness be 
 
104 ISAIAH 
 
 as the noon day; and the Lord shall guide thee 
 continually." 
 
 It is much to have supplied freedom with its 
 watchwords and battle-cries in its contests 
 through the ages. Long j^ears ago, when the 
 blood of men quivered and throbbed with pas- 
 sion for human rights, when we had not sunk 
 to the low level of this dead day when there is 
 no conscience on that subject, when the highest 
 moral aspiration men seem to have is to grasp 
 some one by the throat, saying, "Pay me that 
 thou owest, and a little more," I heard William 
 Lloyd Garrison. The point and fire of his ut- 
 terance came to climax in quotation from Isaiah : 
 
 "Wherefore hear the word of the Lord, ye 
 scornful men, that rule this people. Because ye 
 have said. We have made a covenant with death, 
 and with hell are we at agreement; when the 
 overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall 
 not come upon us; for we have made lies our 
 refuge, and under falsehood have we hid our- 
 selves. Therefore thus saith the Lord God, 
 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and right- 
 eousness to the plummet, and the hail shall 
 sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters 
 shall overflow the hiding place, and your cove- 
 
ISAIAH 1C5 
 
 nant with death shall be disannulled, and your 
 agreement with hell shall not stand; when the 
 overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye 
 shall be trodden down by it. From the time 
 that it goeth forth it shall take you; for morn- 
 ing by morning shall it pass over, by day and 
 by night; and it shall be a vexation only to un- 
 derstand the report. For the bed is shorter than 
 that a man can stretch himself on it; and the 
 covering narrower than that he can wrap him- 
 self in it. For the Lord shall rise up as in Mt. 
 Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of 
 Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange 
 work, and bring to pass his act, his strange 
 act.-' So spake this old Israelite patriot, with 
 "thoughts that breathed and words that burned." 
 But Isaiah was something more than a home 
 politician, he was a statesman of international 
 magnitude. His foreign policy was that of 
 Washington. The government was to avoid 
 "entangling alliances" with any of the nations 
 round about. "Woe unto them that go down 
 to Egypt for help, and stay on horses and trust 
 in chariots," is familiar. But it indicates the 
 genius of his whole system. Judah would go 
 down with the going down of any nation with 
 
106 ISAIAH 
 
 whom it might be allied. Let the nations round 
 about fight their own battles. If the best were 
 done for every man, and every man made the 
 most and the best of himself, and all were in- 
 spired with a patriotism which rested in recog- 
 nition of Jehovah and in obedience to him, and 
 in loving enthusiasm for his righteousness, the 
 nation might abide in security in its hill fast- 
 nesses. 
 
 This was Isaiah's international policy. It did 
 not prevail, and the history of Israel became 
 what it was — foreign alliances, failure therein, 
 conquest, captivity, deportation, dispersion. 
 
 But Isaiah's vision was not confined to the re- 
 lations of Judah to other nations. He looked in 
 on those nations themselves and had mastery of 
 their politics. He seems to have understood the 
 forces that were operating in Egypt and Assyria 
 and in the lesser states, and to have clearly dis- 
 cerned whereto they were leading. His "bur- 
 dens" respecting all the nations (for he allowed 
 the aflairs of no one to escape his inspection) 
 are the result of his convictions respecting the 
 set of the tide of destin}' within and around 
 them. You feel as you read his prophecies 
 respecting Nineveh and Babylon and Egypt — 
 
ISAIAH 1(.7 
 
 here is a man who looks in on the problems of 
 these nations as Edmund Burke looked in on 
 the French Revolution, or Charles Sumner on 
 American slavery. In one of Mr. Webster's 
 greatest speeches, that on the Revolution in 
 Greece, he causes to pass before you a summary 
 of all European politics of that date. But if you 
 will read the collected woiks of Isaiah you will 
 find the same kind of work done for you re- 
 specting the politics of the civilized world in 
 the eighth century before Christ. You will see 
 the things that are about to be in those nations 
 according to the vision of a cosmopolitan states- 
 man. This is to be said for Isaiah too — intense 
 Judaist patriot that he is, his sympathies are not 
 confined to his own nation but embrace all peo- 
 ples. 
 
 Israel has the most precious inheritance, to be 
 sure, but Israel holds it in trust for all mankind. 
 
 There is hardly a generous, heroic impulse for 
 the welfare of men but that can find its coin of 
 expression already minted in the words of Isaiah. 
 Isaiah is an optimist, not for Israel only, but for 
 man. "I have been found by those who sought 
 me not. Every valley shall be exalted and every 
 mountain and hill be made low, the crooked 
 
108 ISAIAH 
 
 shall become straight and the rough places plain, 
 for the glory of Jehovah shall be revealed, and 
 all flesh shall see it together." 
 
 If ever there is ''the parliament of man, the 
 federation of the world," it will go to Isaiah for 
 a design and motto for its seal. [Design: Beasts 
 wild and tame tethered together; a little child 
 leads them. Legend: They shall not hurt nor 
 destroy. (?)] The last ideal of philosophy — the 
 full, sympathetic, co-operating brotherhood of 
 man — finds its expression. 
 
 "The wolf aiso shall dwell with the lamb, and 
 the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the 
 calf and the young lion and the fatling together; 
 and a little child shall lead them. And the cow 
 and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall 
 lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw 
 like the ox. And the sucking child shall play 
 on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child 
 shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They 
 shall not hurt nor destroy, in all my holy moun- 
 tain." 
 
 I want to call attentio.n to the one solitary 
 cause out of which all this is to spring: "For 
 the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the 
 Lord as the waters cover the sea." That one 
 
IS/IMH 109 
 
 conception of the one governing God, realized, 
 that shall mould men to the last blessed result of 
 universal love. 
 
 Isaiah knew the necessity of theism as a basis 
 for philanthropy. 
 
 I would like to speak of Isaiah as a poet, but 
 the topic is difficult to treat. It is hard to define 
 poetry, hard to detect and understand it in un- 
 familiar forms clear across race lines. We ought 
 to enlarge our conception of poetry. Poetry 
 may exist in prose as well as under rhyme and 
 meter. Whatever can carry the feelings and 
 satisfy the imagination is of poetic order. Isaiah 
 is to be rated as one of the first of poets, not be- 
 cause he wrote according to the laws of old 
 Hebrew parallelism, but because he carries the 
 imagination and the feelings on the tide of his 
 speech. 
 
 You will detect this element of force in all 
 that I have before quoted. And you have only 
 to open Isaiah at random and read, and you will 
 soon see that you are caught and borne onward 
 in poetic onflow. 
 
 "Alas! a tumult of many nations! 
 
 Th^y rage with the raging of the sea. 
 
 Alas! a roaring of kingdoms! 
 
 They roar with the roaring of mighty waters. 
 
110 IS/ilAH 
 
 Like the roaring of mighty waters do the nations 
 
 roar. 
 He rebuketh them and they flee awa}^ 
 Driven like the chaff of the mountains before 
 
 the wind, 
 Like stubble before the whirlwind. 
 
 "Ho, thou land of rustling wings 
 
 Beyond the rivers of Ethiopia I 
 
 That sendest thy messengers upon the sea. 
 
 In reed boats upon the face of the waters. 
 
 Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation tall and 
 
 fair, 
 To a people terrible from the first and onward, 
 To a mighty, victorious people. 
 Whose land is divided by rivers." 
 
 We can feel and see the course of thought and 
 action here. 
 
 But there is one other test. Music is allied 
 to poetr3\ If there is poetry anywhere in lan- 
 guage, music will detect it and use it. Have you 
 ever heard the oratorio of the Messiah? Well, 
 please to remember that oratorio — perhaps there 
 is no greater musical composition of man — goes 
 to Isaiah for its language of expression, owes 
 its existence to the inspiration of that language, 
 was born to try to express the Isaian idea. The 
 soul of the great musician met its kin onl}^ in 
 the poetry of the soul of this old Hebrew 
 prophet. 
 
ISAIAH HI 
 
 Yes, hear the oratorio, and as you are rapt 
 by the great chorus, "For* unto us a child is 
 born, unto us a son is given; and the govern- 
 ment shall be upon his shoulders; and his name 
 shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The 
 Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The 
 Prince of Peace," realize that music and poetry 
 have never met before and probably never will 
 again on a higher plane; and send back to the 
 old Hebrew prophet-poet a heart pulsation of 
 gratitude for the enobling rapture which is yours 
 to enjoy and henceforth is to delight and sanctify 
 the children of men. 
 
 But what shall I say about this "master in 
 Israel" in religion? He goes by the name of 
 the evangelical prophet — the gospel prophet. 
 What good news is there in religion which he 
 did not proclaim? No apostle of Christ has ex- 
 plained the principles of his religion better than 
 this prophet did seven hundred years before 
 Christ appeared. In fact, you turn to the writ- 
 ings of this prophet rather than to any New 
 Testament description for a summary of the 
 fates and fortunes of the Saviour. The fifty-third 
 chapter of Isaiah has dictated to Christendom its 
 conception of Christ. You think of the Saviour 
 
112 ISAIAH 
 
 in Isaiah's terms rather than those of any of his 
 contemporaries or of his successors. Whether 
 men have rightly interpreted his meaning or 
 not, the phrase of Isaiah has held the field. That 
 is a marvelous piece of writing — the fifty-third 
 chapter of Isaiah: 
 
 "Who hath believed our report? and to whom 
 is the arm of the Lord revealed? 
 
 "For he shall grow up before him as a tender 
 plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; he 
 hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall 
 see him, there is no beauty that we should de- 
 sire him. 
 
 " He is despised and rejected of men ; a man of 
 sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid 
 as it were our faces from him; he was despised, 
 and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne 
 our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did 
 esteem him stricken, smitten of Godjand afflicted. 
 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he 
 was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement 
 of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes 
 we are healed. All we like sheep have gone 
 astray; we have turned every one to his own 
 way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity 
 of us all. 
 
ISAIAH 113 
 
 "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet 
 he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a 
 lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his 
 shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth." 
 
 It is not to be wondered at that seven hundred 
 years afterward an officer of the court of Ethio- 
 pia said to Philip: "I pray thee, of whom 
 speaketh the prophet this? of himself or of some 
 other?" It has been the standing question of 
 six and twenty centuries. No language uttered 
 by man has provoked more thought than this 
 familiar yet strange utterance of Isaiah. You 
 may say the whole body of theology for eighteen 
 centuries has grown out from it and been grouped 
 around it. 
 
 But if theology has depended upon the fifty- 
 third of Isaiah, religion certainly has upon the 
 fifty-fifth. What would be the function of a Chris- 
 tian minister to-day if he could not give this in- 
 vitation ? "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye 
 to the waters, and he that hath no money, come 
 ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk 
 without money and without price." In what lan- 
 guage can a Christian minister frame expostu- 
 lation other than this? "Wherefore do ye spend 
 money for that which is not bread? and your 
 
114 ISAIAH 
 
 labor for that which satisfieth not? hearken dili- 
 gently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, 
 and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline 
 your ear, and come unto me; hear, and your 
 soul shall live." 
 
 How shall a Christian minister frame an ex- 
 hortation except in these terms? "Seek ye the 
 Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him 
 while he is near." 
 
 The gospel, if it is gospel at all, is a procla- 
 mation of the forgiveness of sins. Has that 
 proclamation ever been put in a way better than 
 this to cheer and strengthen and encourage a 
 downcast, sin-troubled soul? "Let the wicked 
 forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his 
 thoughts; and let him return unto the Lord, and 
 he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, 
 for he will abundantly pardon." Put that with 
 this from the first chapter: "Though your sins 
 be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; 
 though they be red like crimson, they shall be 
 as wool," and you have the full gospel of the 
 forgiveness of sins. 
 
 There is a political stamp upon the religion 
 of Isaiah and it comes about in this way — it is 
 so feasible "to cease to do evil and to learn to 
 
ISAIAH 115 
 
 do well," and God's tender mercies are so 
 abounding that there is no reason why any man 
 should die. Everybody can be saved and Isaiah 
 wants to save everybody. He wants to gather up 
 all the people, not simply to pluck a few brands 
 from the burning, but to save the nation. " O God, 
 give me Scotland or I die!" cried John Knox. 
 That was the feeling of Isaiah — "I want Israel, 
 all Israel; yea, even I crave the world for right- 
 eousness." 
 
 So you can see how religion and patriotism 
 and philanthropy came to be welded together in 
 the soul of this great man. 
 
 But time runs against us. We must leave our 
 subject, great and absorbing as it is. How ut- 
 terly inadequate is such a sketch to give com- 
 prehension of this great prophet of Israel! 
 
 A lecture on the anatomy of the human hand 
 fails to set forth the significance of the hand of 
 your friend. To know that, you must grasp it 
 in connection with the life to which it belongs. 
 You must know the meaning of the heart pulsa- 
 tions that send forth to it its power of cunning 
 mystery or ministry of love. The hand has 
 significance only as you have it in connection 
 with the total personality — mind, disposition, 
 sentiment — to which it belongs. 
 
116 ISAIAH 
 
 We snatch a verse or a chapter from out the 
 works of the great poet, prophet, statesman, and 
 say, Behold Isaiah! Oh, no! You cannot be- 
 hold Isaiah unless you restore his whole problem. 
 You need to construct the living man — need to 
 see him in connection with the politics and 
 moral condition of his nation — need to know the 
 setting of that nation amid the surrounding na- 
 tions — need to know the mental and moral 
 forces at work among all the then civilized na- 
 tions of the earth — need to cast a sharply scru- 
 tinizing glance on the dark, portentous outlying 
 barbarisms whose troops of horsemen sometimes 
 alread}^ ride up to the gates of cities plethoric 
 with wealth — need some such broad outlook be- 
 fore the foundations of acquaintance with Isaiah 
 can be laid. 
 
 No text or section of his writings can reveal 
 him. We want the whole man in the totality of 
 his relations. 
 
 Some one goes down to Nahant, stoops down 
 and takes up a handful of water. It came from 
 the sea, but it is not the sea. Look up and out; 
 there, farther than the eye can pierce, farther 
 even than imagination can steadily guide, lies 
 the sea, "the restless, seething sea," the sea 
 
ISAIAH 117 
 
 Stretching its long arms out and clasping the 
 full earth round, tumbling in its own freedom, 
 heaving with its own might, billowing, welter- 
 ing, the unfathomable sea,the universal sea — one 
 great whole. 
 
 It is as useless to try to cramp Isaiah into 
 miniature sketch as would be the attempt so to 
 treat the sea. Yet he is happy who often looks 
 out on the sea, and Isaiah. 
 
 Voice of one crying in the wilderness! un- 
 heeded in thine own time, thou art not unheard 
 in this. Thou hast our hearts to-day, and shall 
 yet have as thine own the love and the rever- 
 ence of the children of men. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 Up to date, I am not carried by the higher 
 criticism on Isaiah. I will mention some of the 
 reasons that weigh with me in reaching this de- 
 cision. 
 
 Strike out "Cyrus," as a proper name, and 
 insert in lieu thereof "Kurush," or "Koresh," 
 as a general term, like Pharaoh, Tzar or 
 Konig, and you have knocked the blocking 
 from beneath the main contention of the higher 
 criticism. But so to treat the term "Cyrus," 
 
118 ISAIAH 
 
 is only to do what has ah'eady been done with 
 "Tartan," and "Rabshekah." They are not 
 proper names, but designations of offices. The 
 Revised Version so treats these names, and lays 
 the foundation for similar treatment of "Cyrus," 
 by its marginal reading, "Kurush." 
 
 Of course this argument cuts both ways. It 
 not onl}^ overturns a main pillar of the higher 
 criticism, but it gives the coup de main to the 
 old argument for inspiration from the fact (as- 
 serted) that Cyrus was called by name, by the 
 prophet Isaiah, generations before he was born. 
 But that was an inherently unworthy argument, 
 since it put inspiration in the attitude of playing 
 a game of historic bopeep. Cyrus was not such 
 a providential man either generally, or specific- 
 ally so far as the Jews were concerned, as that 
 he should be singled out as the solitary, or even 
 the leading instance of this sort of vaticination. 
 On the face of the case, Darius was as worthy 
 of pre-mention as Cyrus. 
 
 If Chapter xxxix. of Isaiah is good for any- 
 thing as history, then, in the lifetime of the first 
 Isaiah, Merodach-Baladan, king of Babylon, 
 made an alliance with Hezekiah, king of Judah. 
 
 Sayce is authority for saying that at that time 
 
ISAMH 119 
 
 Merodach-Baladan was in alliance with powers 
 beyond the Tigris — (Kurushes?). Granted that 
 the first Isaiah knew anything about the politi- 
 cal combinations of his time, and you have a 
 foundation laid for all that is said about a 
 ''Kurush." In his exultation in God, Isaiah 
 cries out: "He saith of the deep, B^dry;" "He 
 saith of a Kurush, You are my shepherd." 
 
 The philosophy is: "Man's extremity is God's 
 opportunity" — a Kurush from beyond the Tigris 
 can "perform all my pleasure." 
 
 Out of general conditions special agencies 
 will be found. 
 
 This treatment of the term "Cyrus," reduces 
 the section xl.-lxvi. to harmony with itself,for 
 Cyrus is the solitary proper name in the whole 
 section. Generalize this name and you have 
 taken away the force of the argument for a 
 second Isaiah, derived from the fact that the 
 author seems personally acquainted with the 
 historic C3'rus. 
 
 It is only necessary to suppose that Isaiah of 
 Jerusalem, as Matthew Arnold calls him, knew 
 what was going on about him to lay a founda- 
 tion for this reference to a "Kurush," or for 
 any other coloring in respect to time or event 
 
120 ISAIAH 
 
 of seemingly later date. Is it not better to load 
 a good deal more on Isaiah's knowledge and 
 less on his subjective psychoses or on inspira- 
 tion? Isaiah ought to be regarded as the 
 Edmund Burke, the Daniel Webster or the 
 James G. Blaine of his time — a man* who knew 
 the forces working in his own nation and in the 
 nations round about, and whereto they tended. 
 When the Turks had taken Adrianople and 
 the adjacent territory in Europe, it would not 
 have required extraordinary mental processes to 
 come to the conclusion that Constantinople must 
 also fall; though it was a hundred years before 
 that event happened. The problem before 
 Isaiah in respect to Jerusalem was substantially 
 the same after the fall of Samaria as that of 
 Constantinople after the fall of Adrianople. 
 Jerusalem must go the same way Samaria had 
 gone. The power is in the East; Jerusalem is 
 foredoomed; it is only a question of time when 
 the end will come. As to the powers in Meso- 
 potamia — Babylonia, properly called (Sayce) — 
 it is only a question of time also in regard to 
 them when their overthrow must come. East 
 of the rivers was the coming power. The Per- 
 sian stood to Nineveh and Babylon much as 
 
ISAIAH 121 
 
 the Goth did to Greece and Rome when he was 
 crowding on the Danube. 
 
 The wild, strong men, in either case, stood 
 facing the rivers, and it would scarcely take 
 Divine revelation or even inspiration to tell 
 what would happen. The destiny was manifest. 
 The strong son of the earth beyond the Tigris 
 will bear sway over all. Jerusalem will fall, 
 and Babylon will fall. 
 
 Why not let Isaiah know something about 
 these -prophetic conditions and let him speak 
 out of his knowledge? So he may utter the 
 decrees of God. 
 
 There are indications that Isaiah was a man 
 of wide and close observation. "Ho, to the 
 land rustling with wings, beyond the rivers of 
 Ethiopia'' — is a touch Isaiah could hardly have 
 laid on his canvas, had he not snared and 
 speared fowl on the hills and in the lakes of 
 Abyssinia, as they converge there for a winter- 
 home in their retreat from Europe and Armenia. 
 If he had been in Abyssinia, there is no reason 
 why he should not know about a Kurush beyond 
 the Tigris, because he had ridden a camel in 
 his retinue in Persia or Bactria. 
 
 Widen out this man Isaiah, let him know 
 
122 ISAIAH 
 
 something b}^ observation and experience, and 
 you have diminished the difficulty of interpreting 
 the works that bear his name, and taken away 
 most of the force of the objections to their unity. 
 We should make of him a greater man than we 
 have hitherto allowed him to be. He was prob- 
 abl}^ a cosmopolite in fact before he became such 
 in theory. That is the natural order for devel- 
 opment like his. 
 
 One objection raised by some of the higher 
 critics to the assignment of the sections xl.-lxxvi. 
 to Isaiah of Jerusalem, is so simple as to be 
 charming. The objection is that Isaiah in the 
 time of Hezekiah could not have treated of a re- 
 turn when no captivity had taken place. It is even 
 laid down as a canon that prophec}' can speak 
 only in the future tense, not in the future perfect. 
 It seems a little strange that Divine inspira- 
 tion cannot do as much as the natural faculties 
 of man can, a little strange that it could not run 
 along the grooves of those faculties. We have 
 a future perfect tense and we are all as volu- 
 able in it as we are in the future. We work not 
 only the future tense, but a future perfect and a 
 paulo-post future perfect in vista unlimited. 
 There are few of us who have lived half a cent- 
 
ISAIAH 123 
 
 ury that long before the war did not prophesy 
 the destruction of slavery and then tr}- our powers 
 on the problems that would be subsequent. 
 There is a goodly number, I imagine, who have 
 not been deprived of the comfort of saying, "I 
 told you so," with reference to something on 
 the line of these subsequent problems. But 
 more, the objection is not intelligent. "Salva- 
 tion by the remnant" is a distinguishing ele- 
 ment in the works of Isaiah of Jerusalem. To 
 write the second section, xl.-lxvi., he had only 
 to elaborate a theme already burnt in upon his 
 soul. 
 
 Arguments for diversity of origin of the book 
 of Isaiah from literar}^ considerations, as style, 
 etymology, are risky. Three thousand years 
 from this time it will probably be argued from 
 literary characteristics that Tennyson could not 
 have written "The Northern Farmer," and "In 
 Memoriam." 
 
 But no matter what the literary diversities 
 may be, there is something that runs beneath 
 them all and overcomes all their force. There 
 is a psychological unity from I. to LXVI. 
 The essential ideas that underlie the works of 
 the first Isaiah, underlie the work of the second 
 
124 ISAIAH 
 
 also. The scribes, if such there were, who put 
 the works of these two men together and abol- 
 ished one of them were well witted. There is 
 need of but one. The essential ideas of the 
 second Isaiah in the great " Song of the Return" 
 were reached over and over again by the first. 
 The formula of the first Isaiah is: captivity 
 (predicted), return, consequences — universal 
 righteousness. The formula of the second is: 
 captivity (assumed), return, consequences — uni- 
 versal righteousness. 
 
 In both the Messianic conception comes in as 
 a means to the end involved in the universal 
 ethical consequences. Suppose in the one place 
 the Messianic idea is of a king, in the other that 
 of a servant — what of it? The two conceptions 
 are not inherently inconsistent. It may be the 
 function of a king, sometimes to serve. "Ich 
 dien," is the motto of the Prince of Wales. A 
 crown may be fore-doomed to tragedy. There 
 is no reason why the same mind might not have 
 entertained even diverse ideas in different stages 
 of its career, or developed now one function of 
 a Messiah and now another. The conception of 
 a king might suit "the fiery heart of youth;" 
 something less forceful and strenuous, more 
 
ISAIAH 125 
 
 spiritual, the pensiveness of mellow age. The 
 two ideas are easily adjustable when viewed in 
 the large, indefinite way in which they are treated 
 by Isaiah. 
 
 Why should not Isaiah of Jerusalem have 
 sung the "Song of the Return?" He was so 
 impenetrated with its ideas that he named his 
 son "Shear-Jashub," "Remnant shall Return." 
 Of all men of all time such a man was the man 
 to write this song. Section xl.-lxvi. is merely 
 "Shear Jashub" expanded. Why does not the 
 rule here apply, that when you have a sufficient 
 cause for an effect, one more natural than any 
 other, you can rest? The "Song of the Return" 
 is wrought in miniature again and again in the 
 first section. 
 
 It may be asserted that it would be a psycho- 
 logical impossibility for the "Song of the 
 Return" to have been written at the time the 
 captivity was verging to its close without more 
 marks of time, place, manner and condition be- 
 ing left upon it. The total work is contempla- 
 tive, indefinite, philosophical — such a work as 
 one would write for an exigency conceived to 
 lie in the future, not for one then pressing. So 
 indefinite is this poem, that there is not a mark 
 
126 ISAMH 
 
 about it to tell where it was written, whether in 
 Jerusalem, Babylon or Damascus. It would 
 be impossible for an old man even, writing at 
 the time of the return, or on the eve of its activ- 
 ity, not to have caught up some thrill from the 
 pulse of the time, and to have made a call on 
 the Jews for some specific acts that would tend 
 to secure the success of the return. 
 
 Read this section to a camp of over-land 
 pioneers of forty-eight on the plains bound for 
 California, or of fifty-nine bound for Pike's 
 Peak, and tell them it was a call upon a people 
 to execute a journey under circumstances simi- 
 lar to their own, and you would get the reply: 
 "Go to, now, there is nothing natural in all 
 this, nothing that sounds of teamsters driving in 
 the oxen. There is not even the primitive call 
 in it to get up a company." And your critics 
 would be right. There is not a thing about the 
 section from beginning to end adapted to a liv- 
 ing, pressing exigency. 
 
 Given a time when an "enterprise of great 
 pith and moment" was crowding to the front, 
 or was on the field, in view of its demands, the 
 very splendor of the section becomes failure, 
 profound and melancholy. Instead of hitting 
 
ISAIAH 
 
 the exigency of the return, the "Song of the 
 Return" always ricochets over the return to 
 come down on the great universal ethical effects 
 beyond. The work is such as a man would do 
 who was contemplating a disaster to his nation, 
 and yet could not give up the thought that there 
 was something about that nation that would sur- 
 vive and ultimately bless all mankind. Isaiah 
 had optimism enough about him to believe 
 
 "That good shall fall 
 At last, far off, at last to all, 
 And every winter change to spring." 
 
 But just what distinguishes Isaiah is the "far- 
 offness" of his contemplated events. No man 
 would be writing in this way in Jerusalem be- 
 leagured, or in Babylon with the invincible 
 Cyrus bearing down upon or in possession of it. 
 But a man would write in Isaiah's way who was 
 contemplating disaster and discipline as a neces- 
 sity for Jerusalem in the retributive and right- 
 eous government of God, out from which must 
 still come blessing to Zion and to men. 
 
 It would take comment on the whole section 
 in minuteness to bring out the force of the fore- 
 going suggestion. But read Chap, liii.— •" Who 
 hath believed our report?'- and Chap. Iv.—" Ho, 
 every one that thirsteth," and Chap. Iviii. — 
 
128 ISAIAH 
 
 "Cry aloud, spare not," and see how malapropos 
 they are to a call to go up to Jerusalem and re- 
 build its walls. In such state of affairs, even the 
 very first word in the section — "Comfort yQ my 
 people" — is a false note. 
 
 The people with whom Zerubbabel, Ezra and 
 Nehemiah wrought did not need comfort, they 
 needed a gad. The generations on the stage 
 with them had been born in Babylonia. What 
 was Jerusalem to them or they to Jerusalem? 
 They were adjusted to Babylonia. They had 
 thrived there. The Jew has always been realis- 
 tic enough to adapt himself to circumstances. 
 To sacrifice himself by going back to Jerusa- 
 lem, must have seemed to him unpractical ideal- 
 ism. It is unthinkable, that a great man living 
 in the time of the captivity should not have ut- 
 tered a call for some specific acts adapted to the 
 return, even that he should not have appealed to 
 specific men to have ideals worthy of their 
 fathers. There is nothing of all this in the 
 "Song of the Return." It is as oblivious of 
 particulars respecting the return as it is of those 
 pertaining to the captivity. On the theory of 
 the higher critics, the greatest man of the day 
 sails in the air over this crisis and never once 
 touches the earth to adapt himself to it. 
 
ISAIAH 129 
 
 Credat Jiidceiis Amelia! 
 
 When 3'Ou come to the matter of the further 
 disintegration of Isaiah so as to make his works 
 a collection from various writers at different 
 times, I can only say that I am not impressed 
 with the soundness of the philosophy or scholar- 
 ship which attributes the great literary results 
 which mark history to "the fortuitous concourse" 
 of intellects. "Every house is builded by some 
 man." 
 
 The masterpieces of literature are the outcome 
 of the activity of the world's great minds, not 
 the collected dribbling of an infinity of small 
 ones. The majestic harmony of Isaiah through- 
 out never tumbled together out of a tendency, 
 it was born of the travail of one great soul. 
 Isaiah of Jerusalem could write what passes 
 under his name. There is not only no evidence 
 to show that any one else did write anything 
 attributed to him, but that there was any one in 
 being who could write it. 
 
 The Ncte on Isaiah was published in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. LH, 
 p. 347, April, 1895. 
 
VI. 
 
 IMPRECATORY PSALMS. 
 
 What are called Imprecatory Psalms are often 
 considered a great stumbling block to religion. 
 We take for consideration the moral difficulties 
 presented by such Psalms. If all our troubles 
 are not met we may strike a drift of thought 
 that may tend toward the resolution of many of 
 them. Expressions that are thought imprecatory 
 may often be no more than the utterance of the 
 longing of a soul for the execution of justice 
 upon wrong-doing. To prayer of that sort no 
 one ought to be a stranger. There is a basis for 
 such prayer in our very nature to which the 
 Christian religion has never set itself in antag- 
 onism. It is from the pen of the very apostle 
 of love that we get a representation of saints, 
 beneath the altar of God, crying: "How long, 
 O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and 
 avenge our blood on them that dwell upon the 
 
 earth?" 
 
 130 
 
IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 131 
 
 There may be a desire for justice without any 
 malevolent feeling running along with it. 
 
 Out of the one hundred and fifty Psalms there 
 are not more than four whose imprecatory ex- 
 pressions may not at once be referred to this 
 desire for justice, and so not only be tolerable 
 but laudable in their character. 
 
 There are, however, a few that in some ex- 
 pressions seem to go beyond this, and that may 
 seem to us to be charged with the spirit of 
 malevolence. But perhaps in ultimate analysis 
 these few exceptional cases can be referred to 
 the same great inclusive rule. If they cannot, 
 that will furnish a reason for setting them aside 
 — not for neglect of the great mass not so tainted 
 with malevolence. For purposes of such analy- 
 sis let us examine the extremest case. 
 
 Psalm 137 begins: "By the rivers of Baby- 
 lon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we 
 remembered Zion." This Psalm is, of course, 
 a Psalm of the captivity. It ends: "O daughter 
 of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy 
 shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast 
 served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and 
 dasheth thy little ones against the stones." No 
 other Psalm presents more difficulties than this. 
 
132 IMPRECATORY PSALMS 
 
 What can cast light on this case will be likely 
 to illuminate any other. In fact, any treatment 
 we give this case will be applicable to the diffi- 
 culties that spring out of the directions, as from 
 the Lord, to the Israelites in their wars with the 
 Canaanites. The philosophy that covers the one 
 case will cover the other. 
 
 Let us bear in mind a few fundamental princi- 
 ples. No principle is more widely accepted in 
 religion than that of the progressiveness of reve- 
 lation. The times of ignorance God overlooks, 
 is a good Biblical statement of the principle. 
 
 The alteration in the moral horizon of men 
 which the providential working of this principle 
 makes, is too frequently lost from sight. Within 
 a generation often you see a new moral heavens 
 and earth. We do not think it right to make the 
 social use of rum that our grandfathers did. It 
 would be sin for us to do as they did, but does 
 it follow that it was sin in them to do as we do 
 not? You get an answer to such question by 
 applying the principle of the progressiveness of 
 revelation to the case. The sin in the use of rum 
 had not come up to the moral perception of our 
 grandfathers as it has to us. Men are judged 
 by the light they have, not by the light which 
 afterward appears on the moral horizon. 
 
IMPRECATORY PSALMS 133 
 
 Now we are in position to lay down some 
 ethical corollaries. The disposition to do right 
 is the essential characteristic of religion. The 
 perception of what is right is a measure of the 
 stage of ethical civilization. In this connection 
 it may be said that Buckle is right in his major 
 premise, that all progress is through intellectual 
 process, but stupidl}' wrong in his minor premise, 
 that there is no intellectual element in morals 
 and religion, and hence his conclusion that there 
 is no progress in murals and religion falls. 
 There is as much progress in the intellectual 
 perception of the application of the principles of 
 morals and religion as in any other department 
 of human activity. 
 
 If men still living can remember the invention 
 of railway locomotion, and telegraph and tele- 
 phone communication, they can also remember 
 how in morals we have moved away from the 
 generation preceding in estimate of the wrong 
 in human slavery and in the use of intoxicant 
 drinks. 
 
 Now the Christian religion does not teach us 
 that we are to imitate the civilization of the 
 worthies of old. The Christian religion does 
 not teach us that their perception of vyhat is 
 
134 IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 
 
 right is to be a guide for us. The disposition 
 with which the prophets and psalmists ap- 
 proached the questions which pertain to God 
 and societ}' is an imitable thing. For instance, 
 Abraham was called the "friend of God." He 
 was so called because his disposition was right 
 toward God. He was willing to do and meant 
 to do what God wanted him to do, just so far 
 and just so fast as God made it known to him. 
 But Abraham was a polygamist. Polygamy to 
 us is sin. Was it to Abraham? The perception 
 of what was right in the matter of the relations 
 of the sexes to each other had not dawned upon 
 his mind. God had not revealed it to him, nor 
 had the civilization of his times wrestled with 
 that problem. Such was Abraham's disposition, 
 however, toward God, that we feel sure if God 
 had revealed to him or impressed upon him the 
 perception of the right on this subject which 
 we have, he would gladly have held to the theory 
 and practice which we do. 
 
 But his disposition was perfect, for he did the 
 best he could according to the light he had. 
 
 The matter of the separate individualit}^ of 
 women and children is one that we think per- 
 haps very clear, but it is an idea that man has 
 
IMPREC A TOR Y PSALMS 135 
 
 been very slow in acquiring. The old idea was 
 either that a wife and children were a man's 
 property or that the}^ were parts of himself. 
 They were regarded as so identified with him 
 that the same treatment that was due him was 
 due them also. The punishment that was due 
 a man was regarded as not fully inflicted till it 
 had fallen on his wife and children. Wife and 
 child in ancient times were property. To this 
 day the property of an enemy is subject to de- 
 struction. 
 
 Now, it is all very easy to throw up both 
 hands here and shout, "Barbarous I" But what 
 do you mean by barbarous ? To be barbarous is 
 not necessarily sinful. Do you mean that all 
 mankind have meant to do wrong in this matter 
 of the individuality of women and children? 
 We need not judge antiquity so harshly. It is 
 better to think that men did not perceive the 
 right rather than that perceiving it they with- 
 stood it. Read "Maine's Ancient Law," and 
 you will see how widely in ancient society the 
 father had the absolute right of life and death 
 over the child. It could hardly be, but that 
 whatever right the father had, would be conceived 
 as falling to his captors in war. That would be 
 
136 IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 
 
 unethical judgment for us, but was it necessarily 
 so in ancient society? 
 
 It may be worth our while to see how far down 
 the ages this mergence of the identity and fates 
 of women and children in the fortunes of the male 
 head of the family has traveled. According to 
 the historian Green, "Mine is the calf that is 
 born of my cow," is what the old Saxon said 
 when he wished to sell his child into slavery. 
 Wife and child, cow and calf were on equal 
 footing as propert}^ with the Saxon. 
 
 The advocates of the rights of woman will tell 
 you that this low estimate of woman persists yet 
 in some very obnoxious forms. A generation 
 only ago, in many respects, such a being as a 
 married woman was unknown to the law. This 
 same principle of mergence of wife and child in 
 the husband and father has hovered over our 
 civilization in some very severe aspects to a 
 very late date. 
 
 Take up the Constitution of the United States, 
 and you read a prohibition upon both the gen- 
 eral government and the government of the 
 states against passing bills of attainder. What- 
 ever attainder was, it is certain that its principle 
 was still so mingled in the elements of our civ- 
 
IMPRECATORY PSALMS 137 
 
 ilization that those who framed the Constitution 
 feared that it would crop out in actual result. In 
 fact, it had cropped out, and bills of attainder 
 had been passed by several colonies during the 
 revolution and the existence of the Confedera- 
 tion. 
 
 But what was the effect of a bill of attainder? 
 Its very principle was to involve afamil}^ in the 
 ruin of its male head. It worked corruption of 
 blood, as it was called, as well as confiscation 
 of property. That is, it made the children in- 
 capable of receiving anything through their 
 attainted father. Neither rank nor property 
 could come to them through him. Well, this 
 was involving the innocent in the fate of the 
 guilty. But almost within the lifetime of a cen- 
 tenarian that kind of principle was enacted into 
 law by the assembled legislative wisdom of a 
 Colony, in fact by our Revolutionary Fathers. 
 
 Blackstone says of the attainted person: 
 "When it is now clear beyond dispute that the 
 criminal is no longer fit to live upon the earth, 
 but is to be exterminated as a monster and a 
 bane to human society, the law sets a note of 
 infamy upon him." That is as strong language 
 as David used towards his enemies. But is it 
 
138 IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 
 
 necessary to charge attainder as sin against 
 English and American society of a century ago? 
 There was a writ of attaint still English law, 
 when Blackstone wrote, that ran against a jury 
 who had found a false verdict. Now it would 
 seem that if there was anything for which a 
 man's wife and children should not suffer, it 
 would be a crime that he might commit while 
 he was away from them shut up on a jury. But 
 this judgment of attaint, according to Black- 
 stone, ran thus: "That the jurors should lose 
 all right at law and become forever infamous; 
 should forfeit their goods and the profits of their 
 lands; should themselves be imprisoned and 
 their wives and children thrown out of doors; 
 should have their houses razed, their trees ex- 
 tirpated." That kind of thing within two cen- 
 turies was liable to be enforced as English law. 
 It has been English law till within a generation, 
 that a defendant summoned into court might 
 throw down his glove and demand that the 
 plaintiff fight him. Wager of battle as a method 
 of deciding legal disputes between man and man 
 stood in English law to the middle of this cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Now it will hardly do to say that there was 
 
IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 139 
 
 no religion, no disposition to do right in En- 
 gland, when wager of battle was an existing 
 legal practice. Why, the very formula with 
 which a matter was committed to this method 
 of settlement was: "God defend the right." A 
 poor way of getting at the right, we say — to ex- 
 pect it to come out of the physical prowess of 
 the burliest bull}', but it would be hard to prove 
 that we have an-y more attachment to the right 
 than the generations who tried to find it b}'' the 
 hazard of battle. There has come up to our 
 horizon a perception of better methods of de- 
 termining what is right, and in this consists such 
 superiority as we may have over our ancestors. 
 We are not to charge our Revolutionary 
 Fathers who enacted bills of attainder, or the 
 body of the English people among whom the 
 action of attaint or wager of battle prevailed, 
 with wickedness and malevolence. They sim- 
 ply had not a clear conception of the idea of in- 
 dividuality, in cases of attainder and attaint. 
 They had not got out from under the shadow of 
 the view of the past that you might chase a 
 criminal for punishment into all that belonged 
 to him, and into all that were nearly related to 
 him. 
 
HO IMPRECATORY PSALMS 
 
 Doubtless such laws furnished opportunities 
 for the exercise of malevolence. I would not 
 say that it was not often exercised under them. 
 But he would be a bold man who should charge 
 malevolence upon the whole civilization out of 
 which these laws sprung, who should say that 
 malevolence necessarily inhered in it, so that no 
 one could seek the execution of such laws unless 
 he were malevolent. What we consider cruelty 
 is simply part and parcel of an ancient concep- 
 tion of justice. Here is an illustrative extract 
 taken from the Contemporary Review, Septem- 
 ber, 1876: ''For less favored convicts (than those 
 guilty of high treason) it was till 1814 ordered, 
 that the}' should be drawn on a hurdle to the 
 place of execution and there hanged by the 
 neck, but that they should be taken down again, 
 and that when they were yet alive their bowels 
 should be taken out and burned before their 
 faces, and that afterward their heads should be 
 severed from their bodies and their bodies be 
 divided into four quarters and their heads and 
 quarters be at the king's disposal." This law 
 till 1814! 
 
 When you pass over to consider the laws of 
 war of ancient times you see the condition of 
 
IMPRECA 7 OR Y PSALMS 141 
 
 the mergence of the rights of women and chil- 
 dren more clearly brought out. Ancient war 
 meant extermination. In the early stages of all 
 civilizations a man was not considered dead till 
 his wife and child or wives and children were 
 killed. Objection is raised against the Israelites 
 because they were to go into Canaan on the 
 principle of extermination. There was no nation 
 under heaven that did not carry on war on that 
 plan in their day. The Canaanites did it. They 
 would have cut the throats of every Jewish wom- 
 an and child they could capture, and any com- 
 mand, as Divine authority to the Jew to do the 
 same thing, was only saying that they might 
 have the privileges of the laws of war of their 
 times. To have demanded anything less of the 
 Israelites when they must necessarily go into 
 war would have seemed to them like being com- 
 manded to whip an enemy with their hands tied 
 behind their backs. When God got ready to 
 "let slip the dogs of war" he let slip such dogs 
 as were on hand; he did not wait to develop a 
 new breed. 
 
 Professor Schurman of Cornell, in his book 
 "The Ethical Import of Darwinism," puts the 
 matter under view thus: "Life has no sacred- 
 
142 IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 
 
 ness per se among savages; and children, and 
 old men as useless members of the community, 
 are, under the stern law of necessity, or of cus- 
 tom crystallized from it, frequently put to death. 
 This, however, must not be confounded with 
 murder, since among primitive peoples children 
 fall under the category of property, and are, 
 therefore, like slaves or other chattels, at the 
 absolute disposition of the head of the house, as 
 is forcibly illustrated in Roman law. In time 
 of war Christian nations think it right to kill, 
 and the normal condition of the savage is one 
 of war with the rest of mankind as enemy. 
 Women and children were regarded as property 
 before they were regarded as persons." 
 
 When we sent our soldiers out to fight the late 
 civil war, are we to suppose they had any malev- 
 olent feelings towards the individual persons 
 against whom they leveled their muskets? It is 
 not necessary to attribute that feeling to them 
 any more than it is to attribute malevolence to 
 a sherifT toward a person whom he executes. 
 So even when a war of extermination was car- 
 ried on, it is not necessary to assume that any 
 more wickedness lay beneath it than beneath 
 the effort of our own brothers and sons to shoot 
 
IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 143 
 
 their antagonists in the late rebellion, when you 
 come to consider the idea of the times as to 
 mergence of women and children in the men— 
 to consider that in the wife and child men saw 
 the enemy, as well as in the man himself. 
 
 War furnishes occasion for malevolence, but it 
 does not necessarily inhere in war. A man can 
 kill according to the laws of war which now 
 prevail, without being charged with sin in the 
 sight of God. A man could kill according to 
 the laws of war in the days of the Israelites with- 
 out being charged with sin in the sight of God. 
 But we can turn our backs in contempt upon 
 the horrid laws of war of the Jews, and con- 
 gratulate ourselves that we have progressed in- 
 finitely beyond them, can we not? Have we 
 made so very great progress? We shell cities 
 to-day, careless whether in the operation we 
 shiver women and children or not. And we 
 have not the excuse that our civilization merges 
 a wife in her husband, and that we do not know 
 any better, for we do. The religion of our war 
 differs from the religion of the Israelites only 
 in the element of distance. We can kill our 
 women and children a mile or nine miles ofl, and 
 so we seem very humane in comparison with 
 
144 IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 
 
 those who had to do it hand to hand. We have 
 added to our religion of war just what religion 
 there is in powder; that is all. 
 
 Doctor Bartol, in a recent number of the 
 "Forum," says: "The warlike and warring 
 nation hails with joy every invention of chasse- 
 pot, needle gun, minnie ball, rifled cannon, 
 monitor or torpedo. Charles Sumner and 
 Francis Wayland both argued that the distinc- 
 tion which makes some lethal instruments legit- 
 imate, and brands others with immorality and 
 shame, is absurd. The whole difficulty resolves 
 itself into the question whether war is justifiable 
 at all or not. If it is justifiable at all, then it is 
 justifiable to carry it on according to the civili- 
 zation of particular times." 
 
 Whether war is justifiable or not depends en- 
 tirely upon the importance of the cause at stake 
 in it. Men have always so judged and so they 
 always will, so long as these two opposite prin- 
 ciples of love for the right and of selfishness are 
 struggling together for the possession of human- 
 ity. There was grim sense in the telegram sent 
 by the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac at a 
 reunion in Boston a few years ago to the Peace 
 Society then holding a session in New York. 
 
IMPRECA TOR Y PSALMS 145 
 
 The Peace Society telegraphed to the arm}^ 
 men: "Let us have peace." And the army 
 men replied: "We will have peace if we have 
 to fight for it." 
 
 To say nothing of other wars, take the civil 
 war in France when the Commune got posses- 
 sion of Paris. It was justifiable, it was right for 
 the national government, at whose head stood 
 Thiers, to drop its shells into Paris. If they 
 fell among women and children, so must it be. 
 Women and children will hereafter live in 
 greater safety by all the destruction wrought by 
 the shells which overthrew the Commune. In 
 like manner it can be shown that the wars of 
 the Israelites were seeds of peace, of morals and 
 civilization for all after-coming humanity. Their 
 wars will stand justified by the cause they rep- 
 resented. The Israelites stood even then for 
 more humanity in war than the surrounding na- 
 tions. "Behold now, we have heard that the 
 kings of Israel are merciful kings" is testimony 
 that comes to us from the neighboring nations 
 as to the reputation they had gained among 
 them. 
 
 They stood for the principle of the sacredness 
 of the life of a child. In war though they might 
 
146 IMPRECATORY PSALMS 
 
 pray that their enemies' children might be 
 dashed against the stones, yet remember that not 
 in war, but in peace, those nations took those 
 same children, their own too, and burned them 
 to ashes in the arms of their gods. The wars of 
 the Israelites were better for humanity than the 
 peace of their neighbors. 
 
 The Israelites stood for the inviolable purity 
 of woman. The nations by whom \\\Qy were 
 surrounded taught prostitution as a religious act 
 and used it as an arm of war. To the Israelite 
 prostitution was a crime; to the Canaanite a 
 celebration in his so-called religion, without 
 which no woman was assigned to a husband. 
 The wars of the Israelites were better for woman 
 than the peace of the surrounding nations. 
 
 The Israelites so 'stood for the principle of 
 individuality that at the time of Christ no other 
 nation so fully recognized the right of a man to 
 himself when he became of age. 
 
 In the later days of their nationality they were 
 first on the road in the emancipation of woman, 
 by declaring as no other nation did the sub- 
 stantial equality of woman with man, in their 
 established social custom that no man should 
 have but one woman to wife. Can there be 
 
IMPRECATORY PSALMS 147 
 
 such a thing as righteous prayer to God for the 
 success of arms in a holy cause? Look again at 
 the prayer of these sad captives by the rivers of 
 Babylon, and consider that all they prayed for 
 was what was allowed by the laws of war of 
 their time, that that differs not at all from what 
 we do when we bombard a town even in our 
 own day. 
 
 It is one thing to bear malice to individuals, 
 it is quite another to be attached to a cause 
 which one feels must succeed even at the ex- 
 pense of war. 
 
 The role of suffering is not always to be 
 played. We are to suffer wrong rather than to 
 do wrong. But there are times when forbearing 
 to smite ceases to be a virtue. There are times 
 when the right must pray to b^ might, when it 
 must put on the nerve to make itself might, 
 whatever stands in the way. 
 
 Men in this situation may be obliged to bom- 
 bard towns, not because the}^ would kill women 
 and children, but that women and children may 
 not be killed. If it be necessary for the peace 
 of nations for many generations, that another 
 nation be chastised, the work must be done. 
 We have not yet found how to do this kind of 
 
148 IMPRLCAIORY PSALMS 
 
 work so delicately as not to hurt anybody. So 
 long as we have not, we are in no position to sit 
 in judgment on those in ancient times who were 
 in the same darkness as ourselves. If you want 
 to get a right point of view of the matter,instead 
 of sitting down to cool criticism of it in your 
 comfortable parlors, or approaching with the 
 careless levity that loves to turn a handsome 
 point in a village debating society, go down to 
 Andersonville and see if you think that prayer 
 would rise in essentially different shape from the 
 hearts of your own brothers, husbands, fathers, 
 sons, as haggard and wan they staggered to the 
 filthy streams, uncertain whether they would 
 drink from them, or the bullet of the guard 
 would spill their blood in them, or as with their 
 weak hands they dug holes in the earth to shelter 
 themselves from the burning sun or the storms 
 of heaven. Look in there, and you have a differ- 
 ent impression of the Divine heart from what I 
 have, if you suppose that their prayers to the 
 extent of the laws of war were heinous in the 
 Divine eyes. You have a different notion of 
 righteousness from what I have, if you suppose 
 it was a sin for thosemen, conscious of what they 
 stood for in the civilization of humanity, to 
 
IMPRECA TOR Y PSAL MS \ 49 
 
 pray that shells might fall into Richmond, even 
 if women were involved in its destruction, and 
 those women essentially combatants, not non- 
 combatants. A clean sweep of non-combatants 
 even might seem to them necessary that Ander- 
 sonvilles and their like might be no more, and 
 that women and children to all coming time 
 might be wrung no more with anguish over 
 kindred barbarities. 
 
 In this light go back to the captives of Baby- 
 lon. Remember that they are captives of war, 
 that they and their children are held in contact 
 with unspeakable moral abominations; then if 
 you insist that there is sin in their prayer, you 
 must take it upon yourself to decide that they 
 had a moral light on war that the civilized and 
 Christianized nations of the earth have not yet 
 attained, and that they loved the little children 
 of Babylon less, rather than Zion, and what it 
 stood for, more. 
 
VII. 
 
 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF 
 ST. PAUL. 
 
 We are now in an era of archaeological 
 "finds." 
 
 Within a few years the mummy of the Pharaoh 
 who exchanged living glances with Moses has 
 been identified. We may say we probably have 
 the skull of Sophocles and the tomb of Aristotle. 
 Lost Greek and Latin treatises are restored. 
 Documents of the early Christian literature, of 
 the first and second centuries, which we have 
 heard of only by "the hearing of the ear," or 
 of which we have had only snatches quoted by 
 later authors, are brought out from, perhaps, 
 palimpsest hiding, in full, to the delight of 
 scrutinizing eyes. Some of these documents are 
 not only interesting in themselves, but they are 
 of great value in the determination of the ques- 
 tions that have arisen concerning the authorship 
 and the date of origin of the gospels and of the 
 150 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 151 
 
 Other components of the New Testament. Here 
 is a document, the Gospel of St. Peter, re- 
 cently brought to light in Egypt, that was, in 
 fair certainty, afloat by the middle of the second 
 century. It is valuable as proving the earlier 
 existence of our gospels. It is especially valu- 
 able as forming an additional link in the chain 
 of evidence which is invincibly compelling the 
 conviction that the Gospel of John was in exist- 
 ence at the close of the first century. The "the- 
 osophist" of the second century, as the author 
 of this gospel, must retire from the stage to give 
 place to the historically accredited author, John, 
 if fair weight is given to this and kindred pieces 
 of evidence. 
 
 Professor Thayer, formerly of Andover, now 
 of the Harvard Divinity School, a ripe scholar, 
 and of judicial bent, says of the evidence afforded 
 by the Gospel of Peter: "Half a century of 
 discussion is swept away by the recent discovery 
 at a stroke. Brief as is the recovered fragment, 
 it attests indubitably all four of our canonical 
 books." All the "finds" of the day seem to he 
 in the direction of the confirmation of the history 
 of the gospels as we have usually understood. 
 They all fall one way. So much has been found 
 
152 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 recently by archaeological researches that it is 
 now getting to be a proverb in that realm that 
 "anything may happen." 
 
 It takes one's breath away to think that we 
 may yet look upon the ashes of St. Paul. If 
 we go no further than we now are, we probably 
 know the exact spot of his final burial. Lanci- 
 ani, whose record of recent archaeological re- 
 searches in Rome we can now read in English 
 editions, and whose own work is brilliant and 
 valuable, has within two years looked upon an 
 inscription of the century of Constantine, which 
 purports to cover the spot where the body of St. 
 Paul lies. There is no reason now known why 
 this inscription should not be true. The early 
 Christians were careful about the sepulture of 
 their martyrs. 
 
 Tradition from the days of Constantine has 
 asserted the tomb of Paul to be at this particular 
 spot. Now Lanciani finds the inscription to 
 verify the tradition. Here I want to call atten- 
 tion to the force of tradition. Tradition is usually 
 •'the survival of the fittest" on the historic line. 
 Men have always written, and told the truth 
 from mouth to mouth, pretty much as they do 
 now — nine times the thing that is, to once the 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 153 
 
 thing that is not. It must have been so, or the 
 race itself could not have survived. "Say so" 
 has always given title to land. Tradition before 
 the fourth century is as likely to be right as that 
 subsequent to that date. Constantine was as 
 likely to be correct with regard to the body he 
 so carefully and expensively buried as the later 
 ages in regard to the location of Constantine's 
 memorial church. But in re the sepulcherof St. 
 Paul, see Lanciani, "Pagan and Christian 
 Rome." 
 
 I wish to treat rather of what I will call — a 
 missing chapter in the life of St. Paul. 
 
 The book of "The Acts of the Apostles" 
 closes with Paul under arrest at Rome, awaiting 
 trial before the Emperor. Two years are thus 
 spent. To cover all that period, Luke (for we 
 will assume him to be the author of the Acts) 
 simply says that Paul was preaching and teach- 
 ing in confidence and without hindrance, and 
 there his record shuts down. The question is, 
 can we trace Paul's life more fully or further, 
 and if we can, what are our sources of informa- 
 tion? It will readily occur that if Paul wrote 
 any letters during the two years or afterward, 
 these might give us some additional light. 
 
154 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 Now there are several Epistles which on their 
 face show that they were written while he was 
 bound at Rome. It is but little light that these 
 letters give, for they were written not so much 
 to chronicle his own affairs, as to correct, com- 
 fort and strengthen the churches to whom the}^ 
 were directed. But there are now and then in- 
 cidental allusions to himself in them. These 
 references perhaps show but little more than 
 that the summary Luke has given of those two 
 years is correct. But as one instance,' we know 
 that Paul made converts to Christianity in Nero's 
 own household. See Philippians I. 13, 14, 
 22. We can well believe this, for we can 
 see pretty clearly how it might come about. 
 
 Nero's mistress, Poppea (perhaps we may 
 call her his wife according to Roman law, for 
 he had murdered his former wife Octavia, after 
 he was divorced from her), was a Jewess. Many 
 Jews would naturally be in her body of attend- 
 ants in the imperial household. With these Paul 
 would be likely to communicate and through 
 them have access to the gentiles of the court. 
 For he was a prisoner of state and would be 
 likely often to be brought, by the guard who was 
 set over him, into the quarters about the palace. 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 155 
 
 We have seen what influence Paul acquired 
 over Julius, the Roman centurion who took him 
 to Rome, and from the glimpse we get in the 
 letters written during the imprisonment his nat- 
 ural force seems not abated. Besides these 
 letters there are some things we can construct 
 out of the known course of Roman law. We 
 can tell with some degree of accuracy what was 
 the course of trial in his case. 
 
 Profane history gives us the forms of proced- 
 ure in the case of Roman citizens accused of 
 capital crimes as Paul was. However unjust the 
 final decision might be, these forms were ob- 
 served somewhat scrupulously even by the most 
 abandoned of the Emperors. 
 
 From our knowledge of the Roman law we 
 know that Paul was not put to death by torture 
 when the end came. 
 
 Roman citizens were put to death by decapi- 
 tation. We know the customary ground outside 
 the walls on the road to Ostia where these exe- 
 cutions took place. Thus we have a clue of a 
 very high kind of probability in the known 
 course of Roman law. 
 
 Then we have another source in tradition. 
 We popularly class under the term tradition 
 
156 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 everything pertaining to the subjects treated in 
 the Scriptures, that is outside our canon. This 
 term is often stretched over not onlj^ that mass 
 of floating material that passes from mouth to 
 mouth and is never committed to writing, but 
 even over the writings of the early church 
 fathers; of course this is done in order to dis- 
 tinguish clearly between the inspired canon and 
 all other sources of information. But care should 
 be taken, in exalting the canon, not to degrade 
 history. 
 
 The writings of these early church fathers, if 
 they are not inspired as we hold our Scriptures 
 to be, yet have a place in history and are to be 
 treated as all other historical documents. If the 
 works are genuine their statements are to have 
 the same credit as is accorded to all other an- 
 cient histories. It is to be regretted that we are 
 not better acquainted with this class of works, 
 which sprang up under the tuition of the Chris- 
 tian church in its early daj's. We know some- 
 thing about the events that are covered by our 
 Scripture record, but at the end of the New 
 Testament history the night shuts down upon 
 us, and almost all that is this side is a blank. 
 
 We have then this third source of aid in our 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 157 
 
 attempts to construct the remainder of the life of 
 St. Paul, to wit: early church histor}-. From 
 their own contents we can make out that the 
 letters to Philemon, to the churches at Colosse, 
 Ephesus and Philippi, were written during the 
 imprisonment at Rome, the account of the be- 
 ginning of which is given us in Acts. The two 
 epistles to the Thessalonians, the two to the 
 church at Corinth, the one to the Romans and 
 the one to the Galatians, were written before 
 this imprisonment. There remain the two 
 epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, com- 
 monly called the Pastoral Epistles, the time of 
 whose writing is to be accounted for. A slight 
 examination of their contents reveals the fact 
 that they were written under different circum- 
 stances from any that had occurred up to the 
 end of the imprisonment spoken of in the Acts. 
 These epistles reveal the fact that they were 
 written late in the life of their author, and two 
 of them, the one to Titus and the first to Tim- 
 othy, were written when Paul was not in prison 
 at all. The second to Timoth}^ reveals the fact 
 that Paul was in prison, but in very different 
 situation from that spoken of by Luke and re- 
 vealed in the epistles that we know he sent 
 
158 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 forth at that time. The terms, too, in which Luke 
 describes the duration of that imprisonment, im- 
 ply a termination of it by release and not by 
 death. 
 
 Instead of translating : "Paul dwelt two whole 
 years in his own hired house," we should trans- 
 late: "The two-year period the whole of it." On 
 the face of our text, then, the implication is a fair 
 one that this two-year period was terminated 
 when Luke wrote, and, if Paul were put to death 
 then, it is impossible to conceive why Luke 
 should not have mentioned it. We are perhaps 
 now prepared to look into early church history. 
 Clemens Romanus, who was the first elder or 
 presbyter or bishop of the church at Rome, was 
 a disciple of Paul. He is mentioned by Paul in 
 his letter to the church of Philippi. Clement 
 wrote an epistle to the church of Corinth that 
 has survived to this time, and is one of the most 
 interesting documents which we possess in con- 
 firmation of our Scriptures. He being in Rome, 
 and writing from Rome to the church at 
 Corinth, says "Paul preached the gospel in the 
 east and in the west, and that he had instructed 
 the whole world in righteousness and that he 
 had gone to the extremity of the west before his 
 martyrdom." 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 159 
 
 Now from Rome, '4he extremity of the 
 west" could have been nothing short of the 
 shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Other Roman 
 writers can be shown to have used commonly 
 this expression, "the extremity of the west," for 
 the regions bordering on the ocean. Now bear 
 in mind that Clement is Paul's own disciple, is 
 contemporary with him and is known to have 
 survived him, and that there is not a lisp of his- 
 tory to contradict him, but that subsequent ref- 
 erences to the matter by the fathers all confirm 
 him, and we are justified in saying that Paul 
 must have been released on this first imprison- 
 ment and have made his way to the west, prob- 
 ably to Spain, as he intended to do if he should 
 have opportunity. Another document of high 
 historical repute has some testimonj- on the mat- 
 ter. It is what is known as Muratori's Canon. 
 This docum.ent was a compilation of the books 
 of the New Testament, with comments upon their 
 history. Its author is unknown. Its date is 
 fairl}^ fixed at about one hundred years subse- 
 quent to the time of Paul. In this document 
 it is said, in the account of "The Acts of the 
 Apostles," that "Luke relates to Theophilus 
 events of which he Vv^as an ej-e-witness, as also 
 
]60 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 in a separate place he evidently declares the 
 niart3'rdom of Peter, but omits the journey of 
 Paul from Rome to Spain." 
 
 Just about one hundred years after the com- 
 pilation of this Muratori Canon, Eusebius comes 
 on the stage. He has earned the title, ''The 
 Father of Ecclesiastical History." He was an 
 industrious scholar and ransacked the world for 
 every fragment of church history. He says: 
 "After defending himself successfully, the re- 
 port or history runs, that he (Paul) went forth 
 again to preach the gospel. And coming again 
 to the city (Rome), he suffered martyrdom under 
 Nero." Some fifty years later than Eusebius, 
 Chrysostom,one of the most eloquent and learned 
 men in the whole history of the church, says 
 that Paul, after his residence in Rome, departed 
 to Spain. Jerome, a contemporarj^ of Chrysos- 
 tom and a critical scholar, writes: "Paul was 
 dismissed by Nero that (result) he might preach 
 Christ's gospel in the west." Conybeare and 
 Howson, from whom I take these citations of 
 history, say: "Against this unanimous testi- 
 mony of the primitive church there is no ex- 
 ternal evidence whatever to oppose." Now if it 
 were a matter of secular history that we were 
 
A MISSING CHAP TER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 161 
 
 considering, the view that we are taking would 
 seem to be settled bej^ond a doubt. Its basis is 
 not oral tradition, but historic record that goes 
 clear back to contemporaries of St. Paul himself. 
 There is no reason why a fact thus verified 
 should not be received as veritable history. Be- 
 cause Clement's works are not in the canon, 
 his statement of facts is not to be denied unless 
 we have counter statements on which to found 
 a denial. 
 
 The statements of Tacitus and Pliny are the 
 foundation of Roman history. Like them 
 Clement was a Roman, and we are to receive 
 his statements as fact when we have no counter- 
 vailing authority; unless we are prepared to 
 take the ground that a heathen Roman could 
 write reliable history while a Christian Roman 
 could not. There is a psychological probability 
 that comes in to reinforce this history. Paul, 
 to put it mildly, was a somewhat strenuous and 
 willful man, and he would be very likely to exe- 
 cute what he projected. 
 
 I will now give the general drift of the con- 
 clusions of scholars on the problem. We are 
 quite sure that Paul's martyrdom did not take 
 place till the last year of Nero's reign, the year 
 
1G2 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 68 A. D. His release from the first imprison- 
 ment is located in the year 6;^ A. D. There 
 are then about five years to be added to the end 
 of the history in the Acts before the termination 
 of Paul's career. In this time we may place the 
 journey to Spain, How many times he was 
 over the old ground in Asia Minor and Greece 
 we do not know, but we know that he was once 
 there toward the end of his life, for the first 
 letter to Timothy reveals that fact, also the one 
 to Titus. 
 
 If one will study the matter thoroughly enough 
 he will be convinced that the latter days of Paul 
 were passed under a black cloud and that he 
 went down in storm. When we see him in the 
 east again, as we do in the first letter to Tim- 
 othy and the one to Titus, we find matters in 
 very different shape from what they were when 
 he left. the region seven or eight years before. 
 There had sprung up the germs of all those 
 heresies that for the next hundred years dis- 
 tracted and enervated the churches in that re- 
 gion. We think we have some wild religious 
 notions now, and some are disposed to pride 
 themselves on actually bringing forth some new 
 and very shining lights in religion. But the 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 1«3 
 
 ground of error has been thought over as well 
 as the ground of truth. 
 
 These popular new lights can be shown to 
 have tried their powers upon the church in that 
 day as well as in this. Error has its fathers as 
 well as the truth, and the onl}^ question between 
 them is the one of respectability of ancestry 
 and the healthfulness of influence in human his- 
 tory. Philosophies that boast their origin with- 
 in the present generation can be shown to have 
 been as subtly advocated then as now. We 
 have no conception of the activity of mind in 
 those days and regions, and of the rank growth 
 to which every species of theory, from partially 
 to palpably false, in religion attained. Every- 
 thing was there represented, even down to that 
 teaching which maintains that moral corruption 
 that "smells to heaven" in oflensiveness is sweet 
 as 
 
 "Sabean odors from the spicy shore 
 Of Araby the blest," 
 
 or that when a man plunges into debauchery to 
 rottenness he is gently and tenderly threading 
 his way to all perfection and bliss under the 
 light of the God-principle within him. The 
 whole kennel of heresies seems to have been 
 
164 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 let loose in the east upon young Christianity at 
 once, and they seemed fairly to drown its still 
 small voice with their wild, discordant ululation. 
 It was doubtless to steady the Christian church 
 in the east that ten to twenty years or so later 
 than this time John put forth the Apocalypse 
 and his version of the gospel. 
 
 In the state of the churches of the east at that 
 time we get a clue to the peculiar mould of 
 thought in which that gospel is cast, and which 
 so markedly distinguishes it from the three Syn- 
 optics. At some time when the heat was fiercer, 
 John sent into the same quarter from his lone 
 retreat in Patmos those weird, rein-trying letters 
 of the Apocalypse wherein is set forth what the 
 Spirit saith to the churches, with forecast of con- 
 flicts yet to be, and of the ultimate triumph of 
 the kingdom of Christ. 
 
 It is now in the presence of the beginning of 
 all this commotion that Paul stands. The change 
 has already begun. False teachers are going 
 up and down the churches pursuing "fables and 
 endless genealogies." The church meetings are 
 turned into occasions for disputation instead of 
 the exercise of the stewardship of God unto 
 faith. The babblers have done their work all 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL J 65 
 
 too well. Old friends are estranged. All Asia 
 has an averted face. Were Paul a younger man 
 we can conceive with what ardor he would have 
 flung himself into the contest, for he was a man 
 of undaunted nerve in the strength of his day. 
 But he is now an old man and he seems to have 
 known it. There is, perhaps, in the second 
 letter to Timothy a tinge of the melancholy 
 which often comes to tense natures with failing 
 vitality. Nature is exhausted, and the sword of 
 the headsman probably anticipated but a few 
 months the on-coming of the end of which 
 omens were fast writing up in his physical 
 system. 
 
 He has planted all over the east and the west, 
 but somebody else must water. Instead of a 
 disposition to take the field on the offensive once 
 more, he seems to have been disposed to pause 
 now and entrench. The contest is not to be 
 abandoned, but it is to be carried on under other 
 leaders. He seems at this time to have given 
 over his special command to Timothy and Titus. 
 And after he had parted with them on their fields 
 of labor he sent each of them a letter detailing 
 the plan of their operations from the point of his 
 spiritual enlightenment and experience, and 
 
IGfi A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 these letters have ever been guides to the church 
 as to spirit, doctrine and practice. Paul seems 
 to have made but flitting visits in this last jour- 
 ney through the east. We hear of him in Ephe- 
 sus, in Crete, in Macedonia, at Nicopolis, but 
 get no knowledge of any lengthened stay in any 
 of those places. And now we verge toward the 
 end. The probabilities are that he passed the 
 winter of 67-8 in Nicopolis of Epirus and was 
 there arrested, and on the opening of navigation 
 in the spring was conveyed to Rome. Out of 
 this imprisonment we have one solitary voice, 
 the second Epistle to Timothy. 
 
 Read it and you will see that it could never 
 have come out of the same conditions which we 
 know attended the imprisonment, and from which 
 so many epistles were sent forth to the churches. 
 Then read contemporary history and you will 
 be confirmed in our conclusion and get a key to 
 the reason of the difference. 
 
 We know well enough that the two-year period 
 of which Luke speaks terminated in 63 A. D. 
 Up to that time there was no reason wh}' 
 such rigorous confinement should have been vis- 
 ited upon Paul as seems to be set forth in the 
 last letter to Timothy. After that time circum- 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 167 
 
 Stances were greatly changed. In the summer 
 of 64 A. D., the great fire occurred in Rome. 
 Suspicion fell on the Jews and on Nero both, as 
 the authors of that calamity. To shield himself 
 Nero was willing to punish anybody, and would 
 doubtless have availed himself of the suspicion 
 against the Jews, but Poppea defended in that 
 quarter. Up to this time the Christians had been 
 regarded simply as Jews. A Roman converted 
 to Christianity was regarded by the Romans as 
 a proselyte to Judaism. But now the Christian 
 sect began to loom up in importance. Hatred 
 of it on the part of the Jews and their eagerness 
 to save themselves soon diverted to this sect the 
 public attention, and succeeded in fastening upon 
 it the charge of the guilt of that terrible confla- 
 gration. And then commenced that persecution 
 of the Christians which continued with unabated 
 fury so long as Nero lived. The Roman histo- 
 rians themselves gave the particulars of this per- 
 secution. Among other methods of torture and 
 death, Tacitus tells us that Nero was accustomed 
 to light up his circus grounds at night by setting 
 fire to the bodies of Christians after they had 
 been swathed in sheets saturated with pitch, and 
 that he drove his own chariot in the games 
 when his grounds were thus lighted. 
 
168 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 And thus a "vast multitude," says Tacitus, 
 perished. From this kind of torture Paul's citi- 
 zenship must have saved him. But it could not 
 save him from rigorous confinement and death. 
 He had a first hearing. He seems to have 
 conducted his case with so much vigor as to 
 delay decision for a while. But the furnace 
 is at white heat and he foresees that he is never 
 to come out of it alive. 
 
 "On some fond breast the parting soul relies.'' 
 No one was dearer to him than Timothy. Tim- 
 othy had wept over him when they last parted. 
 Paul must see him once more and have him with 
 him at the end, if he can; so he exhorts him to 
 come with all speed. Perhaps his second hear- 
 ing may be delayed till winter comes on. The 
 blood of an old man towards seventy years of 
 age is thin. There is a cloak at Troas, away 
 over the ^gean, that would keep off the chills 
 of winter nights. The monotony of his dungeon 
 would be broken if Luke and Timothy could 
 read to him out of his well worn papyrus rolls 
 and select parchments, over which he had pored 
 so much that years before Porcius Festus told 
 him they had made him mad. "Take these and 
 come shortly," runs this last letter to Timothy. 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 189 
 
 It is possible, though doubtful, whether Timothy 
 ever reached Rome in season to see him, for be- 
 fore the first summer month had expired, both 
 Paul and Nero had gone to their account. 
 
 It is not wonderful, as Paul looked back over 
 his career, that he said, "I have fought a good 
 fight." From the time when he fell blinded by 
 the vision of the Lord of Glory on the road to 
 Demascus, up to this last moment, his life was 
 one unbroken contest. Put on the additional 
 five years of hardship and care we have this 
 morning been considering, and Paul would seem 
 to be one of the heroes of human achievement 
 and endurance. And now, though the night 
 was settling in thick and black, there is no fal- 
 tering, but he reaches forward in the darkness to 
 touch the '^ crown of righteousnes" which he 
 knew the Lord was holding ready to give him. 
 
 I can do no better in closing than to give you 
 Conybeare and Howson's description of Paul's 
 execution. You may think it fanciful in some 
 respects, but the more critically you read his- 
 tory the more you will be convinced that the 
 picture can scarcely be other than the fact. 
 
 "The privileges of Roman citizenship ex- 
 empted St. Paul from the ignominious death of 
 
170 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 lingering torture, which had been lately inflicted 
 on so many of his brethren. He was to die by 
 decapitation, and he was led out to execution 
 bej'ond the city walls upon the road to Ostia, 
 the port of Rome. As the martyr and his ex- 
 ecutioners passed on, their way was crowded 
 with a motley multitude of comers and goers be- 
 tween the metropolis and its harbor; merchants 
 hastening to superintend the unloading of their 
 cargoes, sailors eager to squander the profits of 
 their last voj^age in the dissipations of the capi- 
 tal, officials of the government charged with 
 the administration of the provinces or the com- 
 mand of the legions on the Euphrates or the 
 Rhme, Chaldean astrologers, Phrygian eu- 
 nuchs, dancing girls from Syria with their painted 
 turbans, mendicant priests from Egypt howling 
 for Osiris, Greek adventurers eager to coin 
 their national cunning into Roman gold; repre- 
 sentations of the avarice and ambition, the fraud 
 and lust, the superstition and intelligence of the 
 imperial world. 
 
 "Through the dust and tumult of that busy 
 throng the small troop of soldiers threaded their 
 way silently under the bright sk}/ of an Italian 
 midsummer. They were marching, though they 
 
A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 171 
 
 knew it not, in a procession more truly triumphal 
 than any they had ever followed in the train of 
 general or emperor along the sacred way. Their 
 prisoner, now at last and forever delivered from 
 his captivity, rejoiced to follow his Lord without 
 the gate. The place of execution was not far 
 distant, and there the sword of the headsman 
 ended his long course of suffering and released 
 that heroic soul from that feeble body. Weeping 
 friends took up his corpse and carried it for 
 burial to those subterranean labyrinths where, 
 through many ages of oppression, the persecuted 
 church found refuge for the living and sepul- 
 chers for the dead. 
 
 "Thus died the apostle, the prophet and the 
 martyr, bequeathing to the church in her govern- 
 ment and her discipline the legacy of his apostolic 
 labors, leaving his prophetic words to be her liv- 
 ing oracle, pouring forth his blood to be the seed 
 of a thousand martyrdoms, Thenceforth among 
 the glorious company of the apostles, among the 
 goodly fellowship of the prophets, among the 
 noble army of martyrs his name has stood pre- 
 eminent. And wheresoever the Holy Church 
 throughout all the world doth acknowledge God, 
 there Paul of Tarsus is revered as the great 
 
172 A MISSING CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL 
 
 teacher of a universal redemption and a catholic 
 religion — the herald of glad tidings to all man- 
 kind." 
 
VIII. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY FROM 
 ABRAHAM TO CHRIST. 
 
 The main intent and purpose of the Bible is 
 evidently to be a guide to moral truth and life. 
 But I turn aside from that prime object to con- 
 sider a collateral affair, to wit, the historic truth 
 of the Scriptures. It is said, and truly said, that 
 religious truth is religious truth no matter what 
 its setting may be in history or in literature. 
 The Sermon on the Mount, it is said, would save 
 men, if its principles were followed, no matter 
 where that sermon might be found — whether in 
 " Robinson Crusoe," "Thirty Thousand Leagues 
 under the Sea," or in the "Moon Hoax." 
 
 Truly enough moral truth is moral truth and 
 it makes its appeal to the moral sense on its own 
 merits, irrespective of questions of origin. No 
 matter where it came from, granted it be moral 
 truth, we are under obligation to adjust our- 
 selves, our thought and our conduct, to its pre- 
 cepts and spirit. But after all, we are creatures 
 173 
 
174 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 of association. The activity of mind runs in 
 grooves cut for it by association. One thing 
 suggests another,even in some widely separated 
 department, if the two things in use have been 
 connected together. 
 
 The moral truth of the Scripture has always 
 been associated by us with a certain course of 
 history. The moral truth and the history have 
 been inseparably blended. Utter a Scripture 
 moral truth and you call up its primitive historic 
 setting, "To obey is better than sacrifice, and 
 to hearken than the fat of rams," calls up the 
 history of Samuel, the seer. The recitation of 
 certain historic events has always sprung upon 
 our thoughts certain moral truths therewith con- 
 nected. But we are invited to try the experi- 
 ment of separating these two departments; we 
 are asked to abstract the moral truth from the 
 Scriptures, confine our attention to that and let 
 the historic setting go. We are told that that 
 history is valueless — even that it is not trust- 
 worthy and we had better set it aside. 
 
 For us it will be a new experiment to try to 
 hold attention to moral truth when we give up 
 the history with which it has been associated. 
 Theoretically the abstraction of the moral truth 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 175 
 
 can be made, but practically will it? When men 
 have lost confidence in the history of the Bible, 
 will they for a long time pa}' reverence to its 
 moral truth? If, when you speak of the Bible, 
 the first suggestion to a mind is that it is a great 
 aggregation of historic falsehoods, will that mind 
 easily right about face from that suggestion to a 
 reverent attitude to its moral truth ? The same 
 fountain does not send forth bitter water and 
 .weet in that way. 
 
 Mind will not on the average work in that 
 wa}'. When Biblical history becomes an old 
 wives' fable, the Sermon on the Mount will be- 
 come an old wives' fable, whatever remnants of 
 conscience may be living to the contrary not- 
 withstanding. 
 
 The Bible does not teach science, that is true. 
 It may be said that the Bible does not teach his- 
 tory. But history does lie so plainly on its face 
 ' — history is so inwoven, warp and woof, into its 
 very structure that you may say, if you cannot 
 find a reliable line of history set forth in it, then 
 it is in larger part a very hollow, false affair. 
 
 We need, then, to do some very plain work 
 with this historic aspect of the Scriptures. We 
 cannot here and now make an argument to sus- 
 
176 . BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 tain the historic truth of the Scriptures, for 
 this comment is intended to apply to all the 
 Scriptural history from Christ back to Abraham. 
 I certainly could not prove up that line in one 
 discourse. The most I can do is to give an opin- 
 ion, to express a personal conviction, to utter 
 a judgment, the result of what study has brought 
 me up to this date. 
 
 If I say a thing is thus and so, you will under- 
 stand that so the case has been made up to my 
 mind. I have no conclusions of judgment that 
 sit more firmly in my mind than these I shall 
 give respecting the trustworthiness of Scripture 
 history. 
 
 From Christ back to Abraham I think we 
 have a thoroughly reliable biographical history. 
 I prefer to call this portion of Biblical history 
 biographical, because it stands in contrast with 
 a history which lies behind the period under 
 view, and because it deals with the fortunes of 
 individual men, and because inherently it is bio- 
 graphical as distinguished form race or national 
 histor}^ The history runs over a large section 
 of the fortunes of the people, to be sure, but all 
 along the eye is made to rest on prominent char- 
 acters, and where they fail the history fades in 
 respect to definiteness of outline. 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 177 
 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob come before you 
 as individual men. The stream of tribal history 
 sinks from view till Moses and Aaron appear. 
 The heroic age has its leaders in Joshua, 
 Jephthah, Gideon, Samson. Prophecy you do 
 not see as a movement, but you do see Samuel, 
 Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel. 
 
 The history of the kingdoms is a history of 
 their kings. David, Solomon, the Jeroboams, 
 Ahab, Hezekiah, and the poor miserable 
 wretches Jehoiakin and Jehoiachin and Zede- 
 kiah, whom one after another Nebuchadnezzar 
 carried off in chains to Babylon, were real flesh 
 and blood men whose fortunes make up the core 
 of the history of the kingdoms of Israel and 
 Judah. 
 
 When you come to the New Testament, the 
 gospels are certainly a biography of Christ fully 
 as much as they are a summary of moral truths. 
 In fact, the moral truths of the gospels are 
 mainly Christ's moral truths. You cannot deny 
 this historic fact any more than you can deny 
 the absoluteness of the spiritual truth of the be- 
 atitudes. I mean, there was an individual who 
 was called Jesus who lived, uttered his body of 
 doctrine, went about among men as a religious 
 
178 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 teacher, and had a wonderful career as a healer 
 of physical, mental and moral disease. So the 
 gospels are biographical history. The rest of 
 the New Testament is largely biographical, pre- 
 eminently concerned with the history and opin- 
 ions of one man — Saul of Tarsus. Now, wherever 
 this long record from Abraham to Christ goes 
 outside the race limit immediately in its purview, 
 it is there eminently biographical. You touch 
 a real historic character when you come across 
 Hiram, king of Tyre, real men where you read 
 of Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, Senna- 
 cherib, Pharaoh Necho, Nebuchadnezzar. 
 
 In the New Testament you strike every Caesar 
 from Augustus to Nero, and strike them right as 
 they stand in history. You do not get a broad 
 view of the Roman government, but the most 
 prominent personages of that government do 
 come up as individuals before you. 
 
 Now, why do I take pains to assert such com- 
 mon knowledge as this? I do not know of any- 
 thing more unhealthy, intellectually, than a 
 condition of mind which either ignores or denies 
 all this. A man is a prett}- solid fact, and if a 
 man has lived and made a demonstration on this 
 earth it is a tremendous plunge toward or into 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 179 
 
 the abyss of ignorance to deny the fact, to re- 
 solve the man into some fiction of the imagina- 
 tion, to make him a mere figure-head for a men- 
 tal tendency or result. It is one of the most 
 fearful and lamentable of degradations that can 
 befall a man or a people, to lose the historic 
 sense. That has been done in India. To a 
 Hindoo there is no such thing as history. He 
 has lived so long in his imagination, so much in 
 philosophy, that he has no reliable sense in "his- 
 tory — in the history of his own race or of any 
 other people's. Back beyond a generation or 
 two everything fades out into the mist and cloud- 
 land of fancy. Actual men disappear from his 
 historic perspective, and the creations of the 
 most grotesque imagination take their place. 
 It is said we must have an oriental Christ as 
 well as an occidental. I am anxious to find out 
 along what lines that oriental Christ is to be 
 drawn. If the orientalizing is to bring out to 
 us a more vivid sense of Christ's personality and 
 habits of life, better information of the manners 
 of his time; if it is to give us higher, purer,more 
 refined conceptions of him resting on sustaining 
 fact, then speed the process of orientalization. 
 We have much to learn along these lines. But 
 
180 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 if the orientalizing is to be carried out along the 
 lines of oriental historic notions, then spare us 
 the process and the results. If an oriental Christ 
 is one cut away from solid history and con- 
 signed for development to the aerial realms of 
 oriental fancy, if Christ's personality is to be 
 sunk from sight, if the three and thirty years of 
 that life in Judea and Galilee are to be filled with 
 such wild whimseys as the oriental mind has 
 grouped around Buddha, then we want nothing 
 of orientalism. An occidental fact is at any time 
 to be preferred to an oriental fancy, however 
 charming that fancy may be. A Hindoo has no 
 more sense of history than a South Sea Islander 
 has of music. The orientals need occidental- 
 izinof as to a historic sense as much as the occi- 
 dentals need orientalizing in facileness of imagi- 
 nation or vividness of spiritual perception. We 
 all are members one of another. Some occi- 
 dentals are completely orientalized. 
 
 We have been through with the process of 
 orientalizing Christ, historically, in Strauss and 
 Renan. The process consists in evolving Christ 
 from the inner consciousness, and that, too, not 
 the moral consciousness but an intellectual, 
 stuffed full of preconception. If the Christ so 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 181 
 
 evolved does not agree with the history, so much 
 the worse for the history. The evolved — the 
 suppositious Christ must stand though all history 
 fall. Strauss' fundamental preconception is that 
 a certain class of asserted facts could not have 
 happened, therefore they did not. Strauss as- 
 sumed to judge of the possibilities of Divine ac- 
 tion in the universe. That is simply to cast out 
 history at the outset; it is to cease the attempt 
 to find the history that has been, in order to con- 
 struct it at individual option. That is orientalism 
 in full bloom. 
 
 Of Kenan's "Life of Christ," Constantine 
 Tischendorf — a student, not an inventor of his- 
 tory — writes thus: "This work has nothing in 
 common with those that loyally and honestly 
 inquire into the facts of the case. It is written 
 on most arbitrary principles of its own, and is 
 nothing else but a caricature of history from be- 
 ginning to end." 
 
 Of course it is a question of fact who the 
 orientalizers are. On that issue I think good 
 scholarship will conclude that Strauss and Re- 
 nan are the romancers, that the writers of the 
 New Testament state facts. We will take on 
 all the orientalization of Christ that will stand 
 
182 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 to history. Meantime all lovers of truth must 
 try to infuse into the oriental mind an occidental 
 reverence for a historic fact. 
 
 I am treating the long line of Biblical history 
 which I have before me with the greatest free- 
 dom. 
 
 I will not try to protect a point of it b}^ the 
 aegis of inspiration. I look at the record simply 
 as a plain statement of historic fact, and what I 
 want to impress is, my conviction that the great 
 sweep of this record is veritable history. I am 
 willing to allow for corruptions in transcription, 
 such as the incorporation of comments on the 
 margins of old manuscripts into the text, as in 
 the case of the three witnesses in John's first 
 letter, and the story of the angel troubling the 
 pool in John's Gospel. I am willing to allow 
 for errors of transcription of numbers — some 
 errors even of historic statement. I will allow 
 all that fair, honest, sound criticism shall agree 
 to. Books may have been attributed to persons 
 not their authors, as I think is probably the case 
 with the letter to the Hebrews — that it is not 
 Paul's. Two prophets may have written Zech- 
 ariah, and two Isaiah, and much of the so-called 
 priest's code may be of later authorship than the 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 183 
 
 time of the Exodus. Give whatever the facta 
 finally shall compel, and you have not disturbed 
 in any appreciable degree the common concep- 
 tion of Scripture history. 
 
 We may modify our notions of many facts, 
 but the facts themselves we shall not cast out. 
 For instance, we may give up the idea that there 
 was anything supernatural about Paul's reviving 
 the young man who fell out of the window while 
 he (Paul) was preaching. 
 
 But that there was such a man as Paul, that 
 he had such histor^^ as the New Testament sets 
 forth, and that he brought back to consciousness 
 a young man who fell out of a window while he 
 (Paul) was preaching at Troas, we have every 
 reason to hold as we shall hold that Jamestown 
 was settled in 1607. In fact, stop one moment 
 on that word Troas. Somehow we think that 
 profane history is trustworthy, while sacred has 
 a cloud of suspicion upon it. Now whether any 
 such person as Priam ever dwelt in Troy is a 
 fact under suspicion. But there is no question 
 that a young man by name of Eutychus fell out 
 of a window in Troas. 
 
 We may pause in mental helplessness before 
 Tnuch of the miracle related in the New Testa- 
 
184 BIOGRAPHICAL HIS TOR Y 
 
 ment. There we may have to pause for all time, 
 unable to resolve the difficulties which the facts 
 present, but that will not lead us to deny the 
 facts. What the resurrection was we may never 
 know — never until we have experienced it our- 
 selves — but that can never obliterate the fact 
 that Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius 
 Pilate, that his body was placed in a tomb from 
 which it came forth neither friend nor foe could 
 tell how, and that from that disappearance to 
 sense began a new moral movement among men 
 — a resurrection of souls as deepl}^ mysterious, 
 as significant as any resurrection of bodies. 
 
 Because there is much there that is inexplica- 
 ble we are not going to be guilty of the supreme 
 idiocy of denying the historic facts. So with the 
 Old Testament history, we shall have to leave 
 much unexplained. Precisely what of miracle, 
 if any, there was about the plagues of Egypt; 
 what of miracle, if any, about the going forth of 
 the Israelites, may be left in doubt. 
 
 But that Israel served in Egypt, and that the 
 Lord brought him out thence with a mighty 
 hand and finally established him in the land of 
 Canaan, is no subject of doubt at all. A man 
 who has any difficulty on such a matter would 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 185 
 
 be green enough to grin incredulity over the 
 stor}" of the Mayflower and the landing on 
 Plymouth Rock. 
 
 The men who have made history a specialty 
 do not come up with historic uncertainty over 
 the whole line from Abraham down. Take the 
 case of George Ebers — Egyptologist and nov- 
 elist. Wherever his themes come in contact with 
 the Biblical record, whether at a point before 
 the Exodus or down at the date of the carrying 
 away into captivity in Babylon, he accepts the 
 Scripture history as valid. It furnishes him 
 some of his reference points that give form, lo- 
 cality and clear coloring to his stories. 
 
 Testimony of such sort is the most powerful 
 that scholarship can give. A man need not be 
 quite overcome with historic doubts when 
 George Ebers finds solid ground. 
 
 Just here it is well to get a clear idea of what 
 is meant by the composite authorship of the 
 Pentateuch as maintained by Robertson Smith, 
 Kuenen, and other of the critical investigators 
 of the text of the Old Testament. That criticism 
 will not start an essential historic fact of the Old 
 Testament from its base — not, one. It may prove 
 that certain ceremonial directions in the Eeviti- 
 
186 BIOGRAPHICAL HIS TOR Y 
 
 cal law do not date from the day or pen of Moses, 
 but belong to later dates, down to the time 
 of the restoration from the captivit}^ But this 
 neither destroys the historic standing of Moses 
 nor of the captivity. That the directions for cer« 
 tain ceremonial observances have been entered 
 in the records along with Mosaic statutes makes 
 nothing against the trustworthiness of the his- 
 tory of Moses — of the account of his great dem- 
 onstration in bringing out of Egypt the people 
 of Israel and of establishing them as rulers over 
 the country east of the Jordan. 
 
 To illustrate: Illinois was admitted to the 
 Union in the year 1818. It then adopted a 
 body of statute law. But you can find section 
 after section in the revised statutes of Illinois, 
 which was made law within ten years, carried 
 up and put in juxtaposition with sections of the 
 statutes of 1818. 
 
 Suppose the later origin of these latter sec- 
 tions is proved, would that overthrow the fact 
 that Illinois was received into the Union in x8i8, 
 and that it then adopted an outline of statutory 
 law? The fact is that the higher criticism does 
 not cast doubt on the main sweep of Biblical 
 history. It confirms it. That criticism may be 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 187 
 
 true or it may be false, it may be partially true 
 or false, the main drift of historic assertion in 
 the Bible back to the time of Abraham will 
 stand just as you have always read it, just as 
 you and all common-sense people have under- 
 stood. That criticism goes to this point mainly 
 — whether you have in the Pentateuch the Stat- 
 utes of Israel or the Revised Statutes of Israel. 
 Suppose you go a step further and show that 
 the history is itself a revision — or a redaction — 
 does that militate against the verity of the his- 
 tory? Does Charles V. pass into the land 
 of fancy because Prescott revised Robertson's 
 history of Charles V. ? 
 
 Some critics recently put out before the pub- 
 lic the statement that the Old Testament was 
 "full of old wives' fables, which would finally 
 drop out as a tadpole loses its tail." I feel like 
 calling for justification of such remark so far 
 as the biographical history of the Old Testament 
 back to the time of Abraham is concerned. In 
 the first place, if the Old Testament were full of 
 fables that would be no reason for their being 
 dropped. Read ^sop and you will see that 
 about the best wisdom man has is in the form of 
 fables. 
 
188 BIOGRAPHIC/IL HISTORY 
 
 To toss the Old Testament away in contempt 
 because it is full of fables would be a procedure 
 of dense ignorance, would simply betray lack of 
 ability to perceive intellectual and moral truth 
 in one of its most apprehensible and portable 
 forms. The fable of the Sun, the Wind and the 
 Traveler is one that we do not want to dispense 
 with quite yet; nor that of the Oak and the 
 Reed; nor even that of the Fox and the Grapes. 
 If you find a fable do not hasten to throw it away, 
 but inspect it carefull3^ for you will find the rich- 
 est of human wisdom written in it. But as mat- 
 ter of fact the only fable I know of in the range 
 of Biblical history before us is Jotham's very 
 beautiful and significant tale in the ninth chapter 
 of Judges, about the trees going forth to appoint 
 a king, and passing by the vine and the olive to 
 anoint the bramble. Something that may have 
 application in American politics. That is the 
 only fable that I remember in this long line of 
 history we have before us. That something 
 which we have regarded as history may turn 
 out to be some other species of writing is no 
 reason why we should lose faith in the trust- 
 worthiness of Old Testament history — no reason 
 why we should set aside as an old wives' fable 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 189 
 
 the document we formerly considered as histor- 
 ical. 
 
 For instance, time has been when the historic 
 verity of the transactions narrated in the book 
 of Job would have been stoutly insisted upon. 
 
 But Job has not become a subject of sport by 
 being regarded as pure drama. Better study 
 that drama instead of "shedding it as a tadpole 
 does its tail." Better study the historic allusions 
 that mark the time and place of its composition. 
 We shall find that they will bring out some- 
 thing which we shall want to hold as history. 
 There is another book about which mind is in a 
 transitory state — the book of Jonah. What if 
 the whole book is drama or epos as much as 
 Job? Our misunderstanding of a book is no 
 reason for casting it away. The book of Jonah 
 is still one of the most exquisite analyses of the 
 working of the human mind under a sense of 
 duty, at the same time wrestling with its own 
 counter temptations, with its passions, its fitful 
 moods. Make a fable of the book of Jonah if 
 you please, and then you had better attend to its 
 moral. It is no objection to Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
 Progress that its characters are so lifelike that 
 you think them almost veritable living beings. 
 
190 BIOGRAPHICAL HIS TOR Y 
 
 It ought to be no objection to Jonah that it has 
 the same vivid excellence you praise in Bunyan. 
 But Jonah is true in its historic allusions to the 
 dim old time in which it appeared. Before Rome 
 was, here was Tarshiah and there was far Nine- 
 veh. In that morning twilight of history ships 
 went from Joppa to Tarshish, and Nineveh was 
 the seat of empire in the east. 
 
 If a man is obliged to alter his own notions of 
 the character of writings, that ought not to de- 
 grade the writings. 
 
 Let them be judged by their original intent. 
 Instead of the flirt of conceit when a man 
 changes his views of ancient writings, let him 
 clothe himself with the garments of humiliation 
 for his former misconceptions of them. 
 
 It is not necessary to bar the actuality of the 
 personal fortunes of Job or Jonah. On the doc- 
 trine of probabilities almost anything may once 
 happen, and nobody is in position to deny the 
 possibility of the occurrences set forth in each. 
 Before it happened nobody would have given 
 anything for the chances of the life of the man 
 through whose head a crowbar, or tamping iron, 
 "three feet and seven inches in length and one 
 and one-fourth inch in diameter" was driven by 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 191 
 
 a discharge of powder while he was blasting 
 rocks. The iron entered beneath the jaw and 
 came out through the top of the head, "covered 
 with blood and brains." Yet this man lived 
 twelve and a half years after this event, with no 
 essential "impairment" of his functions, physical 
 or mental. No man is in condition to say that 
 the possibilities of life, under suspended anima- 
 tion, were drawn on more heavily in Jonah's 
 case than they were in the case of this man with 
 this blunt iron instrument crashing through his 
 brains. The Jonah story may be true without 
 any miracle in it other than the miracle which 
 abides in all extraordinary transactions in nature. 
 I have turned aside to discuss these collateral 
 cases, but they do not belong to the grain of 
 the history before us. Job and Jonah are episodic 
 in nature — by-plays — they are not invertebrated 
 in the Biblical history. Nothing depends upon 
 them, nothing grows out of them. They are 
 but rills, or mere eddies if you please, in the 
 strong historic stream that flows from Abraham 
 to Christ. I also want to save the point of error 
 in some chronicle in this history here and there. 
 Some error of some minor historic importance 
 may have been put originally in the text or may 
 
192 BIOGRAPHICAL HIS TOR Y 
 
 have crept in, in the course of transcription of 
 manuscripts. Give what may be necessary to 
 square with the facts in all such cases — that 
 will not break the line or cast doubt on its main 
 drift. 
 
 There is one very popular error just now 
 against which young people should be on their 
 guard. The tendency in certain quarters is to 
 resolve all ancient history into sun myths. Now, 
 that there are such things as sun myths is true 
 enough. The death and resurrection of Osiris 
 is an unquestionable sun myth. Osiris going 
 down to death, going down to the under world, 
 is the setting of the sun ; the resurrection of 
 Osiris is the sun rising. So there are sun myths 
 setting forth the contests of the sun and the ele- 
 ments, the defeats and successes of the sun as 
 witnessed in the changes of the seasons. 
 
 With some people it is only necessary for one 
 idea to get lodged in the mind, and forthwith by 
 it they have a solvent for every difficulty. Sin, 
 sickness and the hues of a sunset sk}' with man}^ 
 are all owing to electricity. Now there are 
 certain people of the much speaking and scrib- 
 bling kind who happen to have heard of a sun 
 myth, and they apply it to all Old Testament his- 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 193 
 
 tory. The story of Abraham is a sun myth. 
 The story of Samson is a sun myth. One is 
 weak in the historic sense who cannot discern 
 the difference between fact and fancy better 
 than that. The loosest kind of addle-headed- 
 ness is that which lets facts slip away in a gen- 
 eral swash oT idealization. If Abraham was a 
 sun myth, then General Washington was. Wash- 
 ington had his advances and retreats, just as the 
 sun does in the seasons. Valley Forge repre- 
 sents the sun in winter, and Yorktown a July 
 sun victorious over frost and snow, or the ripe 
 sun of autumn "bringing in the sheaves." As 
 for Samson, there is no more reason for deny- 
 ing his historic character than there is for deny- 
 ing the historic standing of Milo of Crotona or 
 of Doctor Winship of Boston. That Samson 
 capered up and down the hills of Palestine and 
 cut up grim pranks on the Philistines is doubt- 
 less fact. When you make Samson a sun myth 
 you may turn over to the same sort of literature 
 Miles Standish and Daniel Boone. 
 
 Embellishment may have crept into the story 
 of Samson here and there; perhaps it was not 
 forty foxes that he caught— perhaps only thirty- 
 seven, maybe only one — we will not haggle for 
 
194 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 a fox or two, if any one can show corruption of 
 numbers; we may have read his songs, or songs 
 about him, into prose; but you cannot work out 
 of history this strong man and grim joker who 
 hewed out a path for monotheism with the jaw- 
 bone of an ass. 
 
 Therenever was a more realistic people on 
 the face of the earth than the descendants of 
 Abraham. Here they are, and they have had 
 an uninterrupted national history as long as an}^ 
 other race of people existing on the earth. They 
 have always had profound reverence for facts. 
 They have always been hard-headed enough to 
 know the real from the ideal. You cannot im- 
 pose upon a Jew to-day a bogus coin. The old 
 historians of Israel seem to have tried the ring 
 of facts as well as the modern Jew trader the 
 ring of metal. As a consequence you have a 
 long and a reliable reach backward over time 
 in Jewish biographical history. 
 
 Od€ further word. The term tradition is in 
 ill repute; we ought to keep distinct two mean- 
 ings in that term. Tradition is a poor founda- 
 tion for morals. That is to say, we ought not 
 to adopt a course of moral action merely be- 
 cause it is traditional — because our ancestors 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 195 
 
 have so thought and acted. "You have made 
 the word of God void through your traditions," 
 covers the ground of this meaning. 
 
 But tradition on historic ground ought to have 
 an acceptable sense. It is or may be there 
 equivalent to history — what is handed down to 
 us from former generations. There is no history 
 covering so great extent of time so valuable as 
 the tradition of Israel in our Scripture. 
 
 NOTE I. 
 
 « 
 
 The Pentateuchal question is now in the field 
 with its marked tendency to the disintegration 
 of Moses and of all his works. It is premature 
 for one to predict what will be the exact or even 
 proximate result of this inquisition. The cases 
 may not be quite parallel, to be sure, but one 
 cannot help remembering what has been the re- 
 sult of the attempt at destructive criticism of the 
 New Testament. The end has been a plain non- 
 suit of the disintegrators. Just now new items 
 of testimony are coming in on that elder ques- 
 tion, and they all bear heavily in the direction of 
 the justice of the judgment that had been ren- 
 dered. In the Johannean controversy the " theos- 
 ophist of the second century" has been relegated 
 
196 BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 to the cloud-land of the fancy of his creators. 
 John holds the field with confirmed title much 
 as tradition gave him to us. 
 
 The so-called higher criticism will yet have 
 to settle accounts with the archaeologist. The 
 indications of the day are that the spade of the 
 objectivist will triumph over the pen of the sub- 
 jectivist. 
 
 After all allowances are made as hereinbefore 
 set forth, we shall probably get Moses pretty 
 much as we have him — the founder of the He- 
 brew nation, the moral, civil and criminal legis- 
 lator for a people. It will probably be found 
 that he was the author of a very much larger 
 section of the religious ceremonial law than even 
 conservative higher critics allow. Primitive 
 peoples are nothing if not elaborate in their re- 
 ligious rituals. Moses would have been a 
 blunderer if he had left Israel without ornate 
 ceremonies for his religion. 
 
 NOTE II. 
 
 Goldwin Smith subscribes to the reduction of 
 Abraham to a myth. If there is anything that 
 would naturally be regarded as a myth in the 
 history, of Abraham, it is the stor}^ of the war 
 
FROM ABRAHAM TO CHRIST 197 
 
 between the kings of the vale of Siddim and of 
 the neighboring regions on the one hand, and 
 on the other those of the far east. But Chedor- 
 Jaomer and Tidal king of nations appear to be 
 verified b}' the spade. Aher that it seems sim- 
 ple to balk at the historicity of Abraham. 
 
IX. 
 
 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC. 
 
 We have treated of the Biographical History 
 of the Bible from Christ back to Abraham. 
 
 We will now look at an earlier history which 
 the Bible puts before us, which I think may 
 well be termed — History, Tribal and Synthetic. 
 The significance and appropriateness of the title 
 I have chosen will readily be seen. We are to 
 deal less with individual men, more with tribes, 
 peoples and races. Our attention is drawn not 
 to leading personages in a nation, but to groups 
 of peoples — to nations and tongues. 
 
 Before engaging in the discussion of the main 
 topic I wish to utter a word on a related matter. 
 
 In order to detract from the merits of the 
 Bible we are told very frequently that we have 
 our sacred books and that other nations have 
 their sacred books, and it is very likely said 
 that the books of other nations are as good for 
 them, and perhaps might be for us, as the books 
 
 198 
 
HIS TOR. Y, TRIBAL AND S YNTHE TIC 199 
 
 to which we give so much reverence. I can 
 never traverse that objection to the Bible, or 
 depreciation of it, without stopping to say, our 
 sacred books are not ours. We never have had 
 anything that we called sacred books, and if we 
 did have, we gave them up long ago for the 
 sacred books of a people and a race very widely 
 separated from ourselves. Our ancestors took 
 up these books — borrowed these books, because 
 they seemed to them the best books that had 
 ever been brought to their notice. Yet they 
 came from far to us as respects space, time and 
 race. So that in lauding the Bible we are not 
 praising our own books. We are speaking of 
 books which have found us rather than we 
 them. Our missionaries will do well to get 
 possession of this idea, so that in going among 
 non-Christian peoples they could be divested 
 utterly of the suspicion that they were recom- 
 mending their own wares. If a man goes 
 among the heathen the first thing he wants 
 to do is to impress upon them that the Bible that 
 he brings is something he has found, that neither 
 he nor his people had anything to do with the 
 composition of a line of it, but that he and his 
 people had found this treasure, which had been 
 
200 HISTORY, TRIBAL Al^D SYNTHETIC 
 
 given them by another people, so good that they 
 wanted to put it in the hands of all peoples on 
 the face of the earth. There is not as clear-cut 
 conception as there ought to be that the Bible is 
 not our book save b}^ adoption. 
 
 "God shall enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell 
 in the tents of Shem." The children of Japheth 
 are the rulers of the world, yet every soul of 
 them, save the Brahmin of India, from farthest 
 Caspian to "where rolls the Oregon," has 
 adopted a Semitic religion. 
 
 The induction from history is that the process 
 is simply dela3^ed in the case of the Brahmin. 
 
 There is something weird in the anticipatory 
 conception, in an early age of human history, 
 of a process on which we look as accomplished 
 fact. 
 
 But this is not the main thought I have here. 
 I cannot stop here to compare the Scriptures 
 with the writings called sacred or otherwise of 
 other peoples in other respects. But what I do 
 wish to say is, that sacred books other than the 
 Bible have no historic character or will not bear 
 examination in the forum of history. They do 
 not carry history. The Vedas of the Hindoos 
 are poetry and philosophy. The writings of 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 201 
 
 Confucius were mostly of a political character. 
 You will not find the sacred books of any of the 
 heathen peoples that will give a course of his- 
 tory, of biographical cast like that in the Bible 
 from Christ back to Abraham. Then you will 
 not find one of them that will give you a sweep 
 over national histories like that to which your 
 attention is called to-day. If such work is at- 
 tempted by these other sacred books, the attempt 
 will not stand a moment's examination. Who- 
 ever is deceived by the attempt, so far as history 
 is concerned, to muddle minds by heaving the 
 Bible into a heap with the sacred books of the 
 heathen nations, is not wise. If the Bible is not 
 distinguished from all these other sacred books 
 b}' its monotheism and morality, it is by the 
 trustworthiness of its historic record. Just as 
 far back as research has been able to push in- 
 quisition, so far has the Bible history been found 
 reliable. 
 
 We want now to get an outline view of the 
 tribe and race histories of men as they are set 
 forth in the book of Genesis. And now bear in 
 mind where we are. We have pushed reliable 
 biographical history back to the eleventh chap- 
 ter of Genesis. Historic troubles of any essen- 
 
202 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 tial importance which we may have, will lie 
 before that point and date. 
 
 We have found marked men dotting the whole 
 line under view — men who cannot be puffed out 
 of the realm of fact into sun myth or the smoke 
 evolved from anybody's inner consciousness. 
 
 And now a word as to disposition, as to atti- 
 tude of mind respecting the record that lies be- 
 fore us. An old chronicle, 3^et covering time 
 of very much later date than the time we con- 
 sider, says of the matters treated in it, "These 
 are ancient things." We approach something 
 very ancient. The events of which the record 
 treats lie back in the dimness and obscurity of 
 early human history. The record itself must 
 be very old — so old that we have no tradition 
 who wrote it. If Moses had anything to do with 
 it he could have been only a late editor. Some 
 similar traditions on other historic lines can be 
 traced back to a pre-Hebrew period. The type 
 of mind — of race, methods of thinking out from 
 which the record came was very different from 
 our own. It would conceive and state facts in 
 a very different way from that we should em- 
 ploy — especially facts of synthetic order such as 
 would set forth type experiences or the origin, 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 203 
 
 the fates and fortunes of races and of groups in 
 races. The special may stand for the general — 
 a name for a nation. Now we need to be doubly 
 on our guard as to our own mental moods to- 
 wards a record, behind which lies such a state 
 of facts. It is easy enough when we come to 
 something obscure — something that taxes our 
 knowledge, that tries our powers both of analy- 
 sis and of synthesis — it is easy enough to cry 
 out, "An old wives' fable," and toss the record 
 away. But in so doing we should in all prob- 
 ability^ only be exposing ourselves to the con- 
 tempt of the studious and the thoughtful. If we 
 should find a fable here in this old record we 
 would reverently pause upon it to detect, if we 
 could, the sort of moral and philosophical 
 thought the men of those ancient times had be- 
 fore their minds, and embodied in fable. That 
 were worth our while, were it not, to look in 
 upon the problems of moral and philosophical 
 thought upon which the sages of primal times 
 were engaged? 
 
 We will reverently treat a fable. But we 
 shall find little or nothing of that in the section 
 of the record we are treating; for a fable is not 
 often the medium of historic truth; it is rather 
 
204 HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 
 
 a mode of conveyance of that which is philo- 
 sophical or ethical. We may find the myth or the 
 story which in concrete form conve3?s to us tribal 
 or race history. Here let us be reverent as be- 
 cometh students seeking to trace the path of 
 any single ray of light that might guide us back 
 into primitive times. There are difficulties con- 
 nected with the interpretation of this old record. 
 But I am sure that scholarship is showing that 
 our difficulties spring from our ignorance, not 
 that this record is inaccurate or of trifling char- 
 acter. 
 
 Now let us take a station where we can see at 
 once what is the main character of the section 
 of the record we have in view. In the eleventh 
 chapter of Genesis you strike Abraham. Script- 
 ure history this side of him is predominantly 
 biographical, prior to him synthetic, generic, 
 tribal, national. 
 
 Take the tenth chapter of Genesis, for exam- 
 ple. Pass to the enumeration of the sons of 
 Ham. You find Mizraim given as a son of Ham. 
 But Mizraim is a plural and stood for both 
 Egypts, upper and lower. That you are deal- 
 ing under that term with tribes or nations is seen 
 plainly enough when you read lower down — 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 205 
 
 "And Mizraim begat Ludim, and Anamim, and 
 Lehabim, and Naphtuhim, and Pathrusim, and 
 Casluhim (out of whom came Philistim), and 
 Caphtorim" — for those terms are all plurals 
 ("im" is a Hebrew plural), the designations of 
 peoples sprung from Egyptian stock. 
 
 Take another case; take the genealogical 
 history of Canaan, another son of Ham. "And 
 Canaan begat Sidon his first-born, and Heth, and 
 the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgas- 
 ite, and the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the 
 Sinite, and the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and 
 the Hamathite." Then take the concluding 
 comment, which is applied as a common formula 
 to the history of the descendants of Japheth and 
 Shem as well as Ham — "These are the sons of 
 Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in 
 their countries, and in their nations," — and 
 you have something before you which teaches 
 that you are dealing with history of a very gen- 
 eral character. 
 
 We are no doubt in this tenth chapter of 
 Genesis dealing with tribal designations, as we 
 are when in Caesar we read of the Suevi,^dui, 
 Belgae, Segusiani, Aquitani, Sequani, Helvetii. 
 Indeed, it may be maintained with much plausi- 
 
206 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 bility, to use no stronger term, that in all the 
 names, even to Shem, Ham and Japheth, we are 
 dealing with tribe or race names rather than 
 with those of individuals. Take such a case as 
 that ''Canaan begat Sidon his first-born/' Now 
 Sidon,as we know, was the name of a Phoenician 
 city, and the probability is that the intent of the 
 author of the record was to say that Sidon was 
 the first offshoot of the Canaan stock, as the 
 Jebusite and the Amorite and the Hivite were 
 subsequent tribal dispersions. The difficulties 
 on this supposition are not greater than will oc- 
 cur in an attempt to construe any of these names 
 as limited in application to an individual. The 
 tribe name may well have been derived from 
 that of an individual. But even to Shem, Ham 
 and Japheth we have here probably national or 
 race designations. The difficulty in this old 
 record is to tell when you are dealing with an 
 individual or with a race or tribe name. Some- 
 times you seem to be dealing with one and the 
 next instant it slides into the other. But what 
 else could ^^ou expect with "ancient things?" 
 
 You can illustrate from the Bible itself. 
 
 When Israel is mentioned you will have to 
 study the context to determine whether Jacob 
 
HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 207 
 
 the individual, or the thousands upon thousands 
 of his descendants in their national capacit}' are 
 signified. This repeated reference to families, 
 tongues, countries and nations compels the con- 
 clusion that race problems are what are partic- 
 ularly in view. We need not make a stumbling 
 block out of the statement that Sidon was the 
 first-born of Canaan, any more than we need to 
 put one in the way when 3'ou read in Hosea, 
 "When Israel was a child, then I loved him and 
 called my son out of Egypt." 
 
 The synthetic method here employed may be 
 illustrated in this way on our own race line: 
 And Japheth or Aryan begat Hindoo and Teuton 
 and Slav, and Greek, and Roman, and Kelt. 
 And Kelt begat Gaul and Briton, and Irish, and 
 Welsh, and Gael. And Teuton begat German 
 and Dutch and English. These are the sons of 
 Aryan after their families, after their tongues, 
 in their lands, in their nations. 
 
 The wonderful thing about this tenth chapter 
 is its accuracy. Mr. Gladstone says that this 
 chapter is the most valuable summary of ethnog- 
 raphy known to man. 
 
 Read Caesar's Commentaries and you are 
 struck with the remarkable familiarity they ex- 
 
208 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 hibit with the location and affinities of the tribes 
 in Germany and Gaul, with whom Caesar came 
 in contact or respecting whom he gathered in- 
 formation. 
 
 You call that histor}^, and jou cause your 
 children to read Caesar as an introduction to 
 the Latin language and as a foundation of 
 modern west-European history. You bring no 
 railing accusation against Caesar as superstitious 
 — easily imposed on — as the dupe of the story- 
 telling propensity of a credulous age and of 
 barbarous tribes. But now turn back to the 
 tenth chapter of Genesis and you find Caesar's 
 work done, one cannot say how many centuries 
 before his time, from a Mesopotamian center of 
 outlook, as his from one in Germany and Gaul — 
 done as minutely and as accurately in its mi- 
 nuteness as his work was done. There is one 
 element in which the old historian excels Csesar, 
 and it is an element of supreme import. Caesar 
 never attempted to solve the ultimate race prob- 
 lem of the peoples of whom he treated, and the 
 author of Genesis X. did. The latter, in treat- 
 ing of his tribes, has indicated their kinship and 
 traced out their origin. He has attempted to 
 refer to an ultimate unity all the races of men 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL /IND SYNTHETIC 209 
 
 with which one would come in contact as he 
 went out from a Mesopotamian center to the four 
 quarters of the compass. An attempt one would 
 think sufficiently ambitious to begin with — cer- 
 tainly of immense importance, if it were success- 
 ful, to end with. Well, the wonderful thing is 
 that the attempt well stands the rack of modern 
 investigation. It ma}^ safely be said that from 
 the ancient age in which this race chronicle in 
 Genesis was written to a time within the mem- 
 ory of men still living, it was not possible for 
 a child of Japheth to tell whether it was correct 
 or not. But now the door to verification is flung 
 wide open, and entrance through the door has 
 brought out such results as you have heard em- 
 bodied in the opinion of Mr. Gladstone. 
 Philology is a late born science. That the his- 
 tory of men, of their race relations, can be shown 
 by the study of their language is an achieve- 
 ment, we may say, of the scholarship of this 
 centurj'. At any rate, wide confidence in the 
 trustworth}^ result of philological investigation 
 is a growth in this century. But now philology 
 with its keen detective apparatus turns back 
 upon the race problems set forth in the tenth 
 chapter of Genesis and declares that they were 
 in the main correctly solved. 
 
210 HISTORY, TRIBAL AhID SYNTHETIC 
 
 This curious fact lies on the face of that chap- 
 ter also. Our late science was an old science. 
 It is expressly said that the classification in 
 Genesis was on philological grounds — that the 
 tribes were assigned relationship from philolog- 
 ical considerations. Language was made the 
 base of classification. Now look at the magni- 
 tude of that problem. When the tenth chapter 
 of Genesis was written the varieties of Semitic 
 and Aryan stocks were spread abroad on the 
 face of the earth — not as widely as now, to be 
 sure, but yet on those base positions from which 
 their subsequent movements can be traced — yet 
 this whole complex position is sifted into proper 
 elements and then a correct sj^nthesis made of 
 them. The sons of Japheth, or peoples, we 
 should say, of Indo-European origin, are grouped 
 together by their tongues, in their nations, and 
 the work seems to be correctly done. Consider 
 that they had not only built up different nations 
 but different "tongues." The old Aryan tongue 
 had, as our modern scientists would say, differ- 
 entiated into several distinct stocks of language. 
 
 The sons of Japheth are located just where 
 they should be, as inhabitants of the "Isles." 
 They stand at the entrance of the ways leading 
 
HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND SYN THE TIC 21 1 
 
 from Europe into Asia. The quite recent theory 
 that the original home of the Aryan was in 
 Europe rather than in Asia, receives confirmation 
 rather than contradiction from the location of 
 the Japhethan tribes set forth in this tenth 
 chapter of Genesis. There is in it, too, a glance 
 over on the eastern Aryan in "Madai" (Medes), 
 disclosing a knowledge at some early day of 
 linguistic relations which the philological science 
 of this century adopts as true. The Aryan is 
 caught in this chapter on his march to the east 
 and south in Asia, or some laggard band on that 
 traiL A fact most worthy of attention. 
 
 The same work of grouping, together the 
 Semite nations by their tongues is done also. 
 And there appears to be no confusion in this 
 complex problem. Modern investigation con- 
 firms the correctness of this work. 
 
 We may well stand in awe before the majesty 
 of the knowledge set forth in the tenth chapter 
 of Genesis! What old Csesar was it that had 
 skirmished round over the then known world 
 from the Tigris valley on the east to the Greek 
 Isles on the west, that had basked in the torrid 
 heats of upper Egypt and frozen in the snows of 
 the Caucasus? What inquisitive old Herodotus 
 
212 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYh'THET IC 
 
 was it that had gone over all the ground, learned 
 languages and dialects and referred the peoples 
 speaking them to their proper origins — analyzed, 
 combined and reduced the whole problem to a 
 few simple elements that stand indestructible 
 as the pyramids? You are called upon to do 
 two things, to reverence the solid scientific char- 
 acter of the ancient scholarship behind this rec- 
 ord, and to reverence the trustworthiness of 
 ancient tradition. 
 
 This chapter does not resolve the whole human 
 situation. If it did, why is it the tenth and not 
 the second chapter of Genesis? There is a 
 wider reach to the human race than that covered 
 by this chapter. That problem is deep, dark and 
 wide. Foundation is laid for it in the chapters 
 preceding this. Archaeology and geology 
 combined are on the road to do for the human 
 history set forth in those previous chapters just 
 what philology has done for this. 
 
 Philologically, certainly Ham is a puzzle. 
 On what principle peoples are grouped together 
 as children of Ham is not clear. Why the 
 Eg3'ptians should be classed with the Phoeni- 
 cians and the Canaanites is not onl}' not apparent, 
 but on its face presents a difficulty which seems 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 213 
 
 irresolvable. The Egyptians did not speak a 
 Semitic language and the Phoenicians and the 
 Canaanites did. The latter on linguistic grounds 
 should be classed with the children of Shem. 
 But a key to a solution of this philological diffi 
 culty may be found from extra Biblical sources. 
 There may be a history behind the history dis- 
 closed in the Bible. Indeed, there are hints in 
 the Bible of such history not by it elaborated. 
 
 Briefly, Ham seems originally to have been 
 Turanian and then to have included all the 
 Semitic hybrids that came out of the successive 
 immigrations into lands inhabited by Turanian 
 peoples. 
 
 Abraham seems not to have been a lone 
 pianeer to the land of Canaan, but to have fol- 
 lowed in the wake of an overfiovv of his race-kin- 
 dred sufficient to have impressed its tongue on an 
 original Turanian stratum before he arrived in 
 the country. This emigration had force enough 
 to impress its tongue, but not enough to impress 
 its religion on the primitive people. You can 
 find illustrations of such result in mixing popu- 
 lations, or of something akin, throughout history. 
 Anglo-Saxon customs and laws survive beneath 
 the imposition of the Latinized French tongue 
 
214 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 of the Norman. A reason why such insistence is 
 placed on the non-confusion of Israel with the 
 surrounding nations may be that there was a bad 
 example before their own ej^es of the degradation 
 in that way of .their own kith and kin. 
 
 Religion would seem to have had some influ- 
 ence over this classification in the tenth chapter 
 of Genesis. Though the tongue might be Sem- 
 itic, the prevailing blood and custom of Phoe- 
 nicia and Canaan was not, and so all its inhabi- 
 tants were swept into an "omnium gatherum" 
 under Ham, as a sort of waste-basket for all the 
 nations not Semitic or Japhethan. 
 
 To a dweller in Mesopotamia the phenomenon 
 of a hybrid people, the result of a union of sons 
 of Japheth with Turanians, would not be a promi- 
 nent matter, and so no notice is taken of such 
 fact; and yet we know that there was such union 
 in Phrygia. The western blood finally became 
 dominant in Phrygia, as the Semitic in Israel in 
 Canaan. But in neither case was the victory 
 clear. Influences from the underlying Turanian 
 stratum persisted till very late dates in both 
 lands. Superstition, dark and forbidding, was a 
 common characteristic of this Turanian or 
 Hamitic influence.- 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 215 
 
 We regard the Turk in Asia Minor and Syria 
 as an interloper, but he is onlj' there coming to 
 his own. His kin, so archaeology says, were 
 first on the ground. The Turkish Empire, as 
 it lies down over western Asia, covers ground 
 over portions of which you can pick out race 
 dominance in something like the following 
 order: 
 
 Turanian — Primal. 
 
 Aryan — Western. 
 
 Turanian — ^Hittite. 
 
 Aryan — Cimmerian. 
 
 Semite — Assyrian. 
 
 Aryan — Greek. 
 
 Aryan — Eastern, Persian. 
 
 Aryan — Greek. 
 
 Aryan — 'Roman. 
 
 Semite — Saracen. 
 
 Turanian — Turk. 
 
 The elements out of which such a history 
 could be divided were under the vision of this 
 ancient ethnologist, and its components indi- 
 cated. 
 
 In the old record the inferiority of Canaan or 
 Ham or the Turanian to the Semite and the 
 Japhethan is predicted. Canaan is to be a serv- 
 
21 6 HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 
 
 ant of both Shem and Japheth. Well, that is 
 history. On the old common ground in the east 
 the Semite forged ahead to supremacy. The 
 sons of Japheth in like manner became domi- 
 nant over the primitive stocks whenever they 
 came in contact with them. The present ex- 
 ception to this law seems to be the rule of the 
 Turk in Asia Minor. But it is an existing faith 
 that the days of the exception are numbered. 
 The exception is more apparent than real, for 
 the Turk has been mothered for centuries from 
 slaves bought from Semite or Japhethan stock. 
 But if Ham is a puzzle we shall find more per- 
 plexity as we go further back. We have a record 
 of a peopling of the earth in a time long anterior 
 to that of Noah. It does not look credible that 
 so much pains would be taken to preserve a his- 
 tory of individuals and clans, all of whom and 
 all of whose progeny was swept from the earth 
 in order to make an entire new beginning with 
 Noah. On the face of the matter it would seem 
 improbable that such particulars could have sur- 
 vived through the Noachian conditions. The 
 uselessness of such particulars is apparent, and 
 the useless ought not to survive here any more 
 than elsewhere. There is light on all this per- 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 217 
 
 plexity in one theory of the nature and purpose 
 of this ancient record, or of these ancient docu- 
 ments, if one prefers the compilation hypothesis 
 of origin. 
 
 The theory may be briefly stated to be this: 
 descent in time Jrom the general to the -partictc- 
 lar. If one will work by that principle as he 
 reads this record from its beginning to Abraham, 
 he will find much will become luminous which is 
 otherwise dark. We begin with the history of 
 man generic. He goes out from some primal 
 home and settles on all the face of the earth. 
 We leave this broad view to come down to the 
 contemplation of the particular tribes raying out 
 from, or located around a Mesopotamian center. 
 Then we dismiss all these to have our attention 
 held to one man who comes from Semitic stock, 
 and to the fortunes of his progeny. On this view 
 we may assume the history of Noah and his 
 family to be only a local particularization in the 
 general field. Its horizon scarcely extended be- 
 yond the Tigris on the east, the Caucasus on the 
 north, and Arabia and the Nile valle}^ on the 
 south. 
 
 In support of this method of explanation is 
 the known fact that the children of Japheth and 
 
218 HIS TOR r, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 
 
 of Shem, wherever they went, found the ground 
 occupied before them. The Aryans and the 
 Semites in their migrations found earlier peoples 
 emigrants, like themselves, from somewhere. 
 This is further supported by the fact that the 
 enumeration of peoples, nations and tribes does 
 not include the whole family as it was known 
 to exist, certainly as earl}^ as the days of Abra- 
 ham. 
 
 The Negro, the Chinese and his related Mon- 
 gol are not known in the tenth chapter of Gene- 
 sis. They are not therein provided for, except as 
 offshoots from them come into the Mesopota^ 
 mian field of view and furnish an underlj'ing 
 stratum of population which in that field is swept 
 into the family of Ham. There is nothing for 
 it but to hold that the tenth chapter of Genesis 
 is not exhaustive of the human problem. It is 
 limited in its scope. It is correct inside its limi- 
 tations, certainlj', so far as Semite and Aryan are 
 concerned. But it cannot be stretched to cover 
 humanity. On this ground the history antece- 
 dent takes on usefulness and purpose. We get 
 out of that, just what archaeology is showing 
 us to be the fact, a source of origin for all the 
 Turanian or allophylian races which we find in- 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 215> 
 
 habit or have inhabited the earth. This old 
 record itself then throws their beginning back 
 of the origin of the Semitic and Aryan races. 
 We need the chapters anteceding the tenth to 
 account for known facts. They lay a foun- 
 dation for the origin of races known to be omitted 
 from that chapter. They furnish a ground of 
 support for the hypothesis toward which the 
 sciences are tending, that the Semitic and 
 Aryan races are derivatives, "sports" from some 
 older stock. 
 
 Minor questions of criticism will find adjust- 
 ment as they may, this more important matter 
 finding settlement. 
 
 We have found in the tenth chapter individ- 
 ual names to cover tribe life; why may not this 
 mode of treatment well have been followed in 
 the preceding chapers in what looks like a list 
 of patriarchs of extreme longevity? As conser- 
 vative a scholar as Professor Green of Prince- 
 ton adopts this view. The formula of interpre- 
 tation is: such a dynasty lasted so many hun- 
 dred years, when such a man appeared. 
 
 This is simply to follow the light afforded by 
 the old historians in their treatment of the dynas- 
 ties of Egypt. 
 
220 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 We cannot well spare even a difficulty from 
 this old record. We ma}^ be sure there is some- 
 thing behind it which we cannot afford to lose. 
 If we take Adam as a synthesis or as giving a 
 typical experience, questions like "Where did 
 Cain get his wife, or with whom did he build a 
 city?" will be answered by saying, he got his 
 wife and built a city as every one else has, 
 from the people round about him. Again, 
 the very difficulties of the old record are full 
 of suggestions which we cannot well spare. 
 
 The compilation theory of the origin of the 
 chapters in Genesis, introductory to the bio- 
 graphical history, certainly receives confirmation 
 from the setting and character of the story, in 
 the eleventh chapter, of the building of the 
 tower of Babel and of the confusion of tongues. 
 That story seems an insertion not necessarily 
 connected with what goes before or what follows. 
 It is such sort of story as would be likely to 
 come into existence as a new people in their 
 migrations stumbled upon some old abandoned 
 ruin testifying to the existence there of a prior 
 population. Conquering Semites might have 
 received it from subjugated Turanians. 
 
 The trouble in the case is the locus in quo of 
 
HISTOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 221 
 
 place and time. But the truth of the story is 
 not improbable. Man is a builder,and a builder 
 under the influence of strange notions. It is not 
 quite so eas}^ to tell what primitive men would 
 do, nor by what motives they would be influ- 
 enced. Perhaps you can narrow the matter down 
 by saying you cannot tell what motives might 
 run in the head of one man who happened to be a 
 ruler over the rude peoples of early days. There 
 is no reason why he should not try to build an 
 Eiffel Tower as well as a Frenchman. Use and 
 wont are powerful with barbarians. Because 
 one generation worked on a tower would have 
 been a sufficient reason for the next to continue 
 the work. The philosophy beneath this story 
 is certainly good enough to make it probable fact. 
 Confusion of tongues would tend to dispersion 
 and dispersion would tend to confusion of 
 tongues. Either as cause would produce the 
 other, aud the effect would double back and re- 
 produce the cause. The philologists have in- 
 vented no better theory of the origin of language 
 than this Babel story. In fact philology has no 
 other theory than that embodied in this story. 
 Necessity compels men to depart out of the coun- 
 tries to which the}^ gravitate under the gregari- 
 
222 HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 
 
 ous propensity where they would speak one lan- 
 guage. 
 
 As they go forth they meet with different ex- 
 periences, and out of such variety of experience 
 must come variety of language. The experience 
 of men in valleys will call for different words 
 from that of men in mountain countries. Differ- 
 ent horizons will provoke different thoughts and 
 consequent different expressions, and here you 
 have the beginnings of dialects and languages. 
 The phenomena of the growth of provincialisms 
 upon which we ourselves can look is a reflec- 
 tion of a process which must have worked to 
 rapid results and results of great magnitude 
 with primitive migrating man. The story of the 
 confusion of tongues, then, is not a wild inven- 
 tion of the fancy of untutored man; it is a syn- 
 thesis which holds within itself a credible mode 
 of origin of every dialect of every language 
 spoken by man. 
 
 The fact of the diversification of the tongues 
 of all stocks, Turanian, Semitic, Aryan, is a fact 
 not to be disputed, and the further fact that that 
 variance has come, in the main, from dispersion 
 is equally indisputable. The Babel story may 
 have had only a local application in its incep- 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 223 
 
 tion. But even so, it is a type story that can be 
 laid down over universal human experience. 
 
 Even the dramatic elements of the local story 
 might have had foundation in fact. Men might 
 well have begun a tower on which generations 
 spent their united force, but in which they 
 finally ceased to have a common interest be- 
 cause, through their dispersion, they ceased to 
 have upon them the influence of the unifying 
 power of a common tongue. 
 
 The sovereign question to be kept in view in 
 our treatment of this old record is: What did the 
 writers thereof mean, what ground did they in- 
 tend to cover, what was the -point 0/ view from 
 which they drew up or compiled their history, 
 what, if any, were the limitations incident to 
 their work? The Babel story is on its face 
 local, of limited application. We have found 
 the location of the sons of Japheth, Ham and 
 Shem to be true for a Mesopotamian center, 
 but that the record is limited to an outlook from 
 that center. It does not exhaust the problem of 
 humanity. It falls far short of that. The 
 chronicles in the antecedent chapters imply as 
 much. 
 
 Now, in coming to the treatment of the flood 
 
224 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 we have an* induction from the old record itself 
 which raises a presumption not easily to be set 
 aside, gives it -prima Jacie standing, that in that 
 event we are dealing with an operation of nature 
 limited and local. We all give description in 
 universal terms of what passes beyond the bounds 
 of our knowledge and experience. The tale of 
 the flood is probably but a reminiscence of the 
 fortunes of a few individuals. Even so it may 
 be a type of human experience of very wide 
 range, as we have found the Babel story to in- 
 dicate forces operant throughout humanity. 
 
 We ma}' say at once: Given the glacial epoch 
 and man contemporary with any of its condi- 
 tions, at the beginning, middle or at its close, 
 and the story of Noah must come. But we shall 
 have to give the glacial epoch, and that too not 
 only with floods resulting from the melting of 
 the ice, but with submergence of ice-covered 
 and adjacent lands. 
 
 The Lebanon range was glaciated and the 
 Jordan valley shows its raised beaches. Given 
 that fact and what must have been the conditions 
 at the head waters of the Tigris and Euphrates? 
 With the hills and mountains of Armenia glaci- 
 ated, and subsidences as in other cases of deep 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL Af^D SYNTHETIC 225 
 
 and protracted glaciation, it is incredible that 
 there should not have been floods in Mesopo- 
 tamia. 
 
 I do not know the geology of that region, but 
 I will risk the prediction that it is covered with 
 till (loess) deposits from glacial flood washings. 
 Floods came and went with the changes of 
 climate again and again. Now, if man was 
 contemporary with such events what is there 
 incredible about the Noah story? Evidence of 
 a character not easily brushed away is accumu- 
 lating that man was distributed nearly all over 
 the globe in the later periods of the glacial 
 epoch — the time of its floods. 
 
 It would be marvelous if men could go through 
 such an extraordinary experience and that of it 
 there should not some tradition survive. Flood 
 traditions have survived along a long line. The 
 traditions simply fit the facts. No matter about 
 particulars, any one of them encloses the un- 
 questionable truth that in its early history the 
 race of man encountered extraordinary floods. 
 
 The ark has had its ridicule. But man is a 
 builder according to necessity or dominant idea. 
 With tides creeping inland under subsidences 
 toward a glacier front, man would be likely to 
 
226 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 do something extraordinary. The ark is not as 
 incredible a structure as the pyramids, not more 
 incredible than the Swiss lake dwellings. 
 
 If "forty centuries" had not "looked down" 
 from the pyramids before the very eye of his- 
 tory, we should sa}% if the tale of their construc- 
 tion came to us for the first time now, that it 
 might pass as a story of fairy land but it could 
 not find credence on this solid earth. Mankind 
 is too matter of fact to put so much effort on a 
 chimera. Thoreau is not far from right when 
 he says: "The most wonderful thing about the 
 pyramids is, that so many people could be found 
 who would work for an ambitious booby whom 
 it would have been better to drown in the Nile 
 and then give his body to the dogs." It is in- 
 credible that one man could have, as Herodotus 
 says, "worked up" one hundred thousand men 
 every three months for ten years to build a 
 pyramid, yet the pyramid is there, and there 
 must have been the hundreds of thousands of 
 men "worked up" in order for it to be. Noah's 
 ark for a fairly conceivable exigency was child's 
 play to the pyramid of Cheops. Not only the 
 plains of Shinar but the whole surface of the 
 globe is dotted over with towers and mounds. 
 
HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THE TIC 227 
 
 the story of whose structure has no such sup- 
 port in natural exigency as that of the ark of 
 Noah. You cannot tell what men will do. The 
 wit of man is sometimes surprisingly alert to 
 detect impending calamity, and sometimes pro- 
 vides for it. 
 
 In Bret Harte's story of "The Luck of Roar- 
 ing Camp," though the valley in which the camp 
 was situated abounded in trees, a miner perceived 
 that it had been formerly torn to pieces by floods, 
 and predicted that they might occur again. 
 They did occur, with terrible disaster. Had the 
 miners been impressed with the probability of an 
 immediate calamity and calked the bottom and 
 the sides of their cabin, they would have proba- 
 bly executed Noah's problem under conditions 
 somewhat similar to his. But Roaring Camp 
 was not a very godly place and the floods came 
 and carried them all away. There were doubt- 
 less many Roaring Camps in Noah's vicinity. 
 But his righteousness and consequently his wit 
 never forsook him. To apprehend disaster with 
 him was to provide for it. 
 
 A good many things come together on this 
 story and confirm it. What is this promise of 
 God to the righteous: "No evil shall befall thee. 
 
228 HIS TOR Y, TRIBAL AND S YN THETIC 
 
 neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwell- 
 ing"? It is but one aspect of the law of the sur- 
 vival of the fittest. Noah was righteous and 
 was saved. The rest of the world about him 
 was desperately wicked and went beneath the 
 waters of the flood. You might argue that this 
 would be so from the known operation of the 
 laws of righteousness ,and sin. Righteousness 
 teaches habits of circumspection. The wicked 
 are always, or as a rule, improvident. The 
 Saviour has given a touch of description which 
 reveals the moral carelessness and heedlessness 
 which exposed itself in open recklessness to 
 any fate that might impend: "They were eating 
 and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, 
 until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and 
 thev knew not until the flood came and took 
 them all away." There are moral probabilities 
 of great strength which you maj^ also give in 
 evidence. The probabilities are that under 
 Noah's conditions in nature the man was a fool 
 who did not build an ark, and that his folly 
 arose, just as the Bible says, from the improvi- 
 dence of his wickedness. 
 
 I should be perfectly willing to take even 
 lower ground than this concerning the flood 
 
HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 229 
 
 storj'. Perhaps it is not a reminiscence, but 
 only an inference. Even so, it would carry its 
 body of probability with it. 
 
 We do not do justice to the science of the 
 early days. Men were observers of nature in 
 that day, probably closer observers than they 
 are now, because they lived more in open na- 
 ture. The native Australian is put by us very 
 low in the scale of humanity. Yet civilization 
 employs him as a detective of criminals in the 
 wilds of Australia. Once on a track in the open 
 country, he is Nemesis itself. The sight follows 
 the displacement of a blade of grass, or the dis- 
 turbed position of a grain of gravel, with the in- 
 fallibility of the scent of a hound. 
 
 Sometimes sight and mind corresponded in 
 early days. Observation is not a recent science, 
 nor deduction therefrom a modern art. The 
 Chaldees worked out the essential elements of 
 astronom^^ We speak of the Copernican sys- 
 tem, but Pj'thagoras taught that system in the 
 sixth century B. C. Geology is a science of the 
 nineteenth century surel}^ Its main facts were 
 observed and correct inferences drawn from 
 them in the sixth century B. C. b}^ Zenophanes. 
 Man has always been a digger in the ground. 
 
230 HISTORY, TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 
 
 Suppose that far inland he exhumed the bones 
 of a whale, or a human skull rolled down at his 
 feet, he could infer in the early days as well as 
 now. The flood story in the main as we have 
 it would be an inevitable inference. Do not be 
 so sure about primitive men being "childlike 
 and bland.'' 
 
 Some heads were clear in the earl}' days and 
 wrought to just conclusions from keen observa- 
 tions. In the story of the flood we may have 
 the scientific inferences of an observer of nature 
 as sharp of sight and strong of thought as Ze- 
 nophanes, Pythagoras and the old Chaldees. 
 
 One final word as to attitude of spirit in treat- 
 ing this old record. There is nothing about it 
 that we can afford to drop. There is not a line 
 of it that is not of inestimable value for scholar- 
 ship if not for religion. Tales that look ver}^ 
 incredible to ignorance may become luminous 
 with truth to wisdom. If anything remains un- 
 solved it will become us before it reverently to 
 wait. 
 
 In a cave in Perigord, in Southern France, a 
 bit of ivory was found on which was a sketch of 
 a hairy elephant. Now, suppose the workman 
 who unearthed it, after he had brushed the soil 
 
HISTORY. TRIBAL AND SYNTHETIC 231 
 
 from its surface, had said: "What nonsense! 
 There is no such thing as a hairy elephant. 
 This is simply a fancy sketch, as of a griffin or 
 dragon, an old wives' fable, made to impose 
 upon the imagination of children. I'll smash it 
 here with my pick upon this stone." It takes 
 away one's breath to think how, under the influ- 
 ence of such thought, one of the most precious 
 bits of testimony to the animal life contemporary 
 with early man might have been destroyed. 
 
 And yet we have precisely that state of feel- 
 ing toward these old fossils of human history, 
 and it plumes itself on its wisdom and calls itself 
 criticism. A man who would treat these old 
 records with umbrage or levity would blow up 
 a cabinet of fossils because it contains much that 
 is inexplicable and does not read like a book. 
 
X. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY. 
 
 The impression I desire to produce is, that in 
 the Bible we have a trustworthy history so far 
 as it attempts to portray the lives of individuals 
 or to set forth the origin and movements of races. 
 In the two discussions alread}^ had, I hope some 
 contribution has been made to such impression. 
 But there is a history of man and his surround- 
 ings, which lies back of anything that we have 
 yet touched, for which I can find no better term 
 than philosophic history; Max Mueller says, 
 "constructive." It is a history of which we 
 have no record and little or no tradition. If we 
 find our way into and over it we shall have to 
 execute the feat by the light of philosophy. I 
 wish to carry the conviction that we have as re- 
 liable philosophical history in the Bible as we 
 have pertaining to race or biographical. I think 
 what lies behind that which we have already 
 considered, i e., what in the Scriptures antedates 
 
 232 
 
PHII.OSOPHICAL HISTORY 233 
 
 the record of the division of man into races, is 
 of philosophical cast, was composed as philoso- 
 phy, and is to be interpreted by philosophy. I 
 am far from denying a basis of fact, but the 
 facts are mere guide-posts for the reason as it, 
 from all that is known, constructs a way of ra- 
 tional judgment back over the unknown. 
 
 Of course you will pass by insensible grada- 
 tions from what I have termed synthetic to 
 philosophical history. Suppose a man to be 
 writing human history from a theistic point of 
 view. He will give you an account of God- 
 led men as he traces a line along the open path 
 of history. Back of that he will show you races 
 under divine appointment filing out from some 
 center of common origin to take up their places 
 on the face of the earth. If these speciall}^ de- 
 scribed races do not cover the whole problem of 
 humanity, that fact will be indicated. But if 
 that makes the history of man an affair too wide 
 and too ancient to be traced out in detail, we 
 should expect to find some comprehensive 
 synthesis, some philosophical summary that will 
 give the essential features of a history whose 
 complications bewilder — whose facts are lost. 
 You find just such a system of philosophy in the 
 
234 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 earlier chapters of Genesis. Going back in his- 
 tory as far as one can, there is man, and before 
 him was man of whom there is no history. 
 What were the fortunes of that primitive man? 
 How came he here? That is one of the most 
 entrancingly interesting of questions. This pre- 
 historic man — who was he? Where did he come 
 from? how did he live? what tools did he use? 
 what were his social customs and habits? what 
 was the range of his thought? 
 
 Every cave is searched, every burial mound 
 opened, upon every chipped flint inquisition is 
 made, to find some answer or some partial an- 
 swer to such questions. Our newspapers and 
 periodicals of all sorts are full of facts or specu- 
 lations bearing upon the problems connected with 
 the life of this primitive, prehistoric man. Now, 
 the writer of Genesis knew of this supreme prob- 
 lem as well as the last writer in our scientific 
 periodicals, and the writer in Genesis where 
 fact failed put in philosophy to round out the 
 problem to comprehension as well as could be 
 done or as fully as necessary to suit the purposes 
 of his composition. Let us see what are some 
 of these philosophic conclusions. The work 
 herein cannot be an exhaustive commentary. It 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 235 
 
 can only indicate a mode of treatment which 
 can be applied to the various topics sprung by 
 the record. 
 
 One of these subjects is the unity of the race. 
 Back of the total historic problem of man stands 
 Eden, as back of the Mesopotamian center is the 
 ark of Noah. Out from some common center 
 came man, as out from some catastrophe cutting 
 off others from that center came the progenitors 
 of the tribes and peoples with whom a Chaldean 
 would come in contact. Is not the record evi- 
 dently drawn up on such a basis? Can we to- 
 day do any better with the problems raised? 
 The question of inspiration I leave untouched. 
 That element ma}^ be found in the intent and 
 purpose of a composition intensely human, radi- 
 cally philosophic. 
 
 Let Adam stand for man — for man generic. 
 If you will read the first chapters of Genesis 
 carefully you will conclude that you are dealing 
 with a philosophic problem rather than with the 
 fortunes of an individual. It is philosophy and 
 not biography that is before you. That con- 
 clusion will grow on reflection. Of course the 
 question comes, is the philosophy trustworthy? 
 Well, who disputes the unity of the race? The 
 
2a« PHILOSOPHIC/1L HISTORY 
 
 extremest doctrine of evolution will give man as 
 one species. That doctrine leads back straight 
 to the position of the unity of origin of man. It 
 conceives the various races as differentiated from 
 a common ancestry by the different environment 
 with which they came in contact, just as their 
 tongues were confounded or differentiated by 
 their differing experiences. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution inherently involves 
 the original unity of the race. So that the last 
 theory of science comes to the same ground 
 upon which to rest as the first philosophy of re- 
 ligion. We like to get into a philosophy some- 
 times and see some of the elements which compel 
 it to take the form it wears. I think we can 
 discern one or two such formative principles 
 operative in the case before us. Whoever had 
 worked out the philological problem which we 
 have found solved for us, could not have failed 
 to carry up to the elder problem inferences to 
 which his investigations led him in the later 
 problem. 
 
 There was an earlier unity than the unity 
 which settled on Noah, as that on the face of the 
 record seems not exhaustive. Such philosophical 
 inference I think we may say would be natural. 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 237 
 
 The unity of the race of man would follow from 
 the religious doctrine of the unity of God. Given 
 in thought one God and man his son, and mind 
 will inevitably gravitate to the view of the uni- 
 tary origin of man. 
 
 The moment that monotheism is planted, that 
 moment some Paul will say: "God hath made 
 of one all nations of men, to dwell on all the face 
 of the earth," and that is the philosophy of the 
 first chapters of Genesis. We are not very soon 
 to remove that philosophy from its base. It 
 stands and it will stand. 
 
 But there is another problem on which philo- 
 sophic judgment is passed, and it is the inner 
 one of religion. This is it— the moral history 
 of man, what has it been? The answer to that 
 is the story of Paradise and ''the fall." Our 
 theology has made such havoc with that story 
 that it is almost impossible for one, who tries 
 resolutely to set aside what theology has taught 
 and to read the story anew for himself, to divest 
 himself of the profound misunderstandings which 
 have been bred into the fiber of his mind. Then, 
 on the other hand, destructives with malign in- 
 tent have insisted on treating an allegory or 
 parable as meant for historic fact, and an im. 
 press has been left on us from that quarter. 
 
238 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 Would you deny the truth of the parable of 
 the prodigal son? Neither would I the truth of 
 the Eden story of the fall of man. Indeed, do 
 they not substantially cover the same ground? 
 In fact, what is the story of the fall but the story 
 of a prodigal son? The writer of Genesis found 
 certain moral facts in existence round about him. 
 He found "the tree of the knowledge of good 
 and evil" growing at every man's right hand. 
 Everybody knew that tree. No one has de- 
 scribed it better than the heathen poet Ovid: 
 
 "I know the right, approve it too; 
 
 I know the wrong and still the wrong pursue." 
 
 The question with the writer of Genesis is, 
 how far back can you push knowledge of that 
 sort? and his answer is, just as far as you can 
 push human experience. I have been tempted 
 and I have fallen. Men about me have been 
 tempted and fallen. Where did this experience 
 begin? The answer is, it began with man. 
 Now put your philosophy on the matter. Is not 
 that a correct answer? Who is in position to 
 dispute its correctness? If the first man did not 
 fall, then he was superhuman and was not the 
 first man. " Errare est hiimanum" — " It is hum an 
 to err." The story of the Eden fall is in that 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 239 
 
 Latin proverb; for it is a truth respecting the 
 action of the moral as well as of the intellectual 
 
 nature. 
 
 Man sins as well as makes mistakes. The 
 Eden story is a correct portraiture of the moral 
 experience of all men for all time, true for the 
 first man and true for the last. If you take the 
 theory of the animal origin of man, then the 
 first man was the one who first had the Edenic 
 moral experience. All before that was animal, 
 all after that was man. We hear the doctrine 
 of the fall of man denied. It is denied in quar- 
 ters where we should expect better philosophy. 
 What is a moral fall? A good statement of it is 
 just exactly that which we have quoted from 
 Ovid: 
 
 ''To know the right, approve it too; 
 
 To know the wrong and still the wrong pursue." 
 
 So to know and so to do is to eat forbidden 
 fruit— to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowl- 
 edge of good and evil. Of that fruit the first 
 man ate. Of that fruit we all have eaten. To 
 eat it banished us from Eden; why should it not 
 have had the same effect with primitive man? 
 Every man has the means of verification of that 
 Eden story within himself. That man has been 
 
240 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 continually rising — continually progressing, even 
 morally, furnishes no reason why we should 
 den}^ that man fell and that man is fallen. The 
 two truths may exist together — have existed to- 
 gether — do exist together. 
 
 However rudimentary man might have been 
 at first in his moral capacity, he was not true to 
 that rudimentary moral nature. 
 
 And however clear in moral perception man 
 may have become, he has not been true to the 
 clearness of his perception. That makes a fall 
 along the whole line. Conduct has fallen below 
 moral knowledge. That is undeniable. I should, 
 not expect a man to find a great following who 
 should deny it. Because theology has made a 
 botch in its treatment of this matter, making 
 dark and incomprehensible what is luminous, 
 deducing effects and conditions which never 
 had being, that is no reason why the essential 
 fact of the fall of man should be denied. Cor- 
 rect the theology, but do not blur the fact — a 
 fact standing in universal consciousness. It is 
 utterly untrue that 
 
 "In Adam's fall, 
 We sinned all." 
 
 But it is true that Adam sinned and that 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 241 
 
 we have all sinned "after the similitude of 
 Adam's transgression." It is not true that there 
 is any such thing as original sin in the theologic 
 sense of a sin committed by Adam for which we 
 are guilty, or the guilt of which is imputed to us. 
 But it is true that there is no sin which is not 
 original in the sense pointed out by Coleridge — 
 there is no sin which is not original with the 
 individual sinner — as original as Adam's sin. 
 It is not true that there is any corruption in us 
 derived from Adam's sin for which we are 
 under condemnation. It is true that there are 
 tendencies to sin which we have derived from 
 the whole line of our ancestry back to Adam. 
 
 But the correct moral estimate of these ten- 
 dencies is not that they are guilt, but that they 
 are temptations only, that no guilt attaches till 
 we have chosen to follow the temptation. The 
 sin of all mankind may have wrought depravity 
 in every nature derived from human stock. But 
 there is no guilt till the depravity is assented tOo 
 You may say that the power of this depravity 
 has been accumulating till it has become a terri-* 
 ble force in the course of the ages. Yes, but 
 bear in mind that it has been balanced by a 
 progressive development of the moral nature. 
 
242 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 The latter force offsets the other — perhaps more 
 than offsets the other. It is a question whether 
 bad moral heredity is transmitted with the 
 force which accompanies the good, whether na- 
 ture is not predominantly benign, whether much 
 charged to malign heredity should not go to the 
 account of environment and habit. 
 
 We probably have as fair a trial as Adam or 
 primitive man, and he with his rudimentary 
 moral nature had no better chance than we, and 
 probably no worse. But it is not my purpose 
 to make a theological argument. All I make 
 any detour in that direction for is to take away 
 the clouds and darkness that have been grouped 
 about the Eden story, so that without mental 
 bonds and clamps and prejudice we may read 
 that story in its own original native simplicity, 
 truth and light. 
 
 And now, suppose some one meets you and 
 imparts to you the confidential information that 
 the Eden story is " a fable to be dropped as a tad- 
 pole loses its tail," could you not find philosoph}^ 
 enough to say that what is true of all must be 
 true of any, and so let your brilliant informer 
 go his stupid way? But now, to put a summary 
 briefly, if the experiences in the Eden story 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 243 
 
 are philosophical the man is philosophical — the 
 whole matter is philosophical — was meant for 
 philosophy. Let us read and interpret the old 
 record as it was meant. That the experiences 
 are philosophical, God's walking in the garden 
 in the cool of the day ought to be sufficient 
 proof. That is true taken as ethical psychology, 
 otherwise riot. 
 
 But there is a more ultimate reach to philo- 
 sophical history yet, and some authorjn Genesis 
 has pushed his venturesome wa}^ yet further 
 back. What were the fortunes and experiences 
 of primitive man? That is a great question. 
 But what preceded man? That is a great ques- 
 tion, yet more ultimate. That question is boldly 
 faced and a plain answer given it in the first 
 chapter of Genesis. I have never seen an ex- 
 position of that first chapter satisfactory to my- 
 self. I do not expect io give one that will satisfy 
 others, for I have my unsolved problems. But 
 I have found more satisfaction in treating that 
 chapter as philosophic history than from any 
 other mode of interpretation. Two elements 
 hover over that composition and compel its pres- 
 ent form — God and man — and the relations of 
 religion subsisting between them. 
 
244 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 First and foremost in the thought of the writer 
 is God. Then next comes man made in the im- 
 age of God. The world and all it contains is 
 an abode fitted up for the use and welfare of man. 
 
 I do not think the first chapter of Genesis was 
 ever intended to set forth a scientific order of 
 thought according to modern conceptions. It 
 was intended to set forth a religious order of 
 thought, or a philosophical order of thought as 
 that would be determined by religion. I do not 
 know that I can make this distinction very plain, 
 but I think it will grow plain. It is said that 
 there is a remarkable correspondence between 
 the order of creation or of evolution set forth in 
 Genesis, and the teachings of science. But I 
 think that correspondence was worked out from 
 a religious base rather than from one scientific. 
 For instance, science shows that the evolution of 
 man was a very late affair, and so does Gene- 
 sis. But the author of Genesis drew his infer- 
 ence out of religion, drew it rather from the base 
 of his inner consciousness, while the scientist 
 draws his the rather from objective observations 
 upon nature. 
 
 Let us see how the Genesis inference might 
 come. Man as a moral being capable of com- 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY ^5 
 
 munication with God by his moral nature is the 
 highest creature in the order of being on this 
 earth. It is a conclusion of religion, and I beg 
 leave to say a correct one, that all things are 
 subservient to the interests of this moral being, 
 all things were made preparatory for his com- 
 ing and for his use. Take the attitude of the 
 Psalmist. Question: "What is man that thou 
 art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou 
 visitesthim?" Answer: "Thou hast made him 
 a little lower than the angels and hast crowned 
 him with glory and honor. Thou madest him 
 to have dominion over the works of thy hands; 
 thou hast put all things under his feet; all sheep 
 and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the 
 fowl of the air and the fish of the sea; and 
 whatsoever passeth through the paths of the 
 seas." The philosophy of that Psalm is substan- 
 tially parallel with the philosophy of the first 
 chapter of Genesis. Indeed, much of the phrase- 
 ology is common to the two writings. The re- 
 ligious feeling embodied in that Psalm would 
 compel an account of creation to take the form 
 presented in Genesis. It would compel the ap- 
 pearance of man to be last on the face of an earth 
 fitted up for him and fitted with all things for his 
 
246 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 use. You know that poetry has proved itself 
 one of the best of philosophic interpreters of na- 
 ture. If Darwinism is true, yet Lucretius sung 
 it two thousand years before Darwin was born. 
 Why may not ethics or morals or religion — all 
 radically one — be as good an interpreter of na- 
 ture as aesthetics? It seems to have proved itself 
 so in this case. Let us give speculative thought 
 a little room in this matter. Do not despise that 
 word "speculation;" there may be help in it as 
 in theory or hypothesis. I like to hold to the 
 notion of the Mosaic origin of this first chapter 
 of Genesis — no matter where the other docu- 
 ments of which the book is composed, came 
 from. 
 
 It contains a philosophy which no one was 
 so likely as Moses to put at the head of the re- 
 ligion to which he gave order and law. Moses 
 had a philosophic mind, and he had a wonder- 
 ful opportunity to exercise it. Mr. Darwin was 
 about fifty years of age when he published his 
 book on the origin of species. He had thought 
 about the matter and worked at it all his life till 
 that time. But Moses had a mind as alert as 
 Darwin's. At forty years of age he was driven 
 into the wilderness, and there he remained till he 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTOR Y 247 
 
 was eighty years of age, in the close compan- 
 ionship of God and nature in his capacity of 
 shepherd. It was said of him when forty years 
 more had passed over him that his eye was not 
 dim nor his natural force abated. 
 
 Matthew Arnold held a free lance, hear him: 
 
 ''What bard, 
 At the height of his vision, can deem 
 Of God, of the world, of the soul, 
 With a plainness as near, 
 As flashing as Moses felt, 
 When he lay in the night by his fiock 
 On the star-lit Arabian waste; 
 Can arise and obe}' 
 The beck of the spirit like him?" 
 
 There were forty years, then, of such a man 
 with such powers and with such religious atti- 
 tude of mind in contact with nature. 
 
 Out of such circumstances, or of some man 
 of and in such circumstances, we ought to ex- 
 pect the philosophy of this first chapter of Gen- 
 esis to come. Give credit for some observation. 
 He lives upon his flocks and herds; they live 
 upon plants. There is the order of the intro- 
 duction of vegetable and animal life and of the 
 life of man before him. That is simple, but it 
 is all there. Other conclusions are not very 
 
248 PHILOSOPHICAL HIS TOR Y 
 
 remote, certainly not that the beginning is chaos 
 and that the beginning of effort is toward order 
 in matter. 
 
 There is one stumbling block which I think 
 will cease to be a rock of offense when you ap- 
 proach it from the point of religious philosoph}^ 
 rather than from that of bare science. I refer 
 to the astronomical work of the fourth day. 
 
 The treatment of the whole subject of astron- 
 omy must have been determined by religious 
 considerations. The author was not balancing 
 the niceties of knowledge actual or possible. The 
 religion of Egypt would have begun its philo- 
 sophic history of creation thus: 
 
 "In the beginning Osiris, or the sun, created 
 all things." 
 
 In Egypt the sun was God. It would be 
 necessary to enter some very determined protest 
 against that idea. The tendency among the 
 children of Israel would be to revert to the wor- 
 ship prevalent in Egypt. Indeed, what heathen 
 nation has not had its sun worship? Now see 
 how the author of Genesis I. managed this mat- 
 ter: he has dethroned ^he sun and enthroned 
 God; he has exalted man by making the sun, 
 instead of man's god, man's servant. Probably 
 
PHIL OSOPHICAL HIS TOR Y 249 
 
 the greatest step ever taken in the emancipation 
 of man from superstition was the very degrada- 
 tion of the sun from a Divine position to the sub- 
 ordinate position in which he is placed in this 
 chapter. It will pay us to have before our minds 
 the whole of the record. 
 
 "And God said, Let there be lights in the fir- 
 mament of heaven to divide the day from the 
 night; and let them be for signs, and for sea- 
 sons, and for da3's, and years; and let them be 
 for 'lights in the firmament of heaven to give 
 light upon the earth ; and it was so. And God 
 made two great lights; the greater light to rule 
 the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; 
 and he made the stars also. And God set them 
 in the firmament of heaven to give light upon 
 the earth; and to rule over the day and over 
 the night, and to divide the light from the dark- 
 ness; and God saw that it was good." 
 
 The particularization of the objects in view 
 over and over again would have the effect to 
 beat into the minds of the children of Israel that 
 the heavenly bodies were no gods, but that they 
 were humble servants of themselves — the pro- 
 ducers for them of seasons, the markers of time, 
 lamps to light the day and the night. That is 
 
250 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTOR Y 
 
 a correct assignment of the functions of the heav- 
 enly bodies from a religious point of view, espe- 
 cially when it is directed against a tendency to 
 deifv these bodies. 
 
 Do you say that science laughs at such phi- 
 losophy because the sun is so much greater than 
 the earth and the earth is a mere satellite of the 
 sun? Well, is science so crude of soul as to wor- 
 ship the huge in size instead of the complete in 
 process? Mechanical power instead of spirit? 
 
 To religion moral beings must always be the 
 center of the universe. To ethics and philoso- 
 phy the universe is homocentric. I stood by 
 the open door of a blast furnace with my friend 
 by my side. The furnace was larger than my 
 friend; there was very much more physical 
 power represented in the processes going on in 
 the furnace than there was in the body of my 
 friend. Had my friend been cast .into the fur- 
 nace the heat would have licked him up in a 
 few seconds like a shaving. 
 
 Yet my friend held a very much higher rank 
 in my estimation than did the furnace. In fact, 
 the furnace was the servant of m}^ friend. This 
 earth bears fourteen hundred millions of men 
 highly organized physically, finely tuned men- 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 251 
 
 tally. I shall take off my hat to them and not 
 to the huge furnace that heats them. They are 
 the more finished product. 
 
 God must have the feeling that we have in 
 this matter, only in infinitely greater degree, in 
 tenderness infinitely sublimed. That is the 
 jihilosophy of religion. The author of Genesis 
 caught it and gave it setting in the brief though 
 majestic philosophic outline of the processes of 
 God in matter and nature before the introduc- 
 tion of man on this earth — gave it out of religion 
 and to religion. In the forum of religion it is a 
 just and true account, and will remain so — what- 
 ever science may discover or prove — "till the 
 heavens be no more." 
 
 NOTE I. 
 
 Inasmuch as you cannot describe everything 
 all at once, why is it not just as well to put off 
 to a fourth place in the order of description work 
 done on the sun and stars as to treat that matter 
 in any other place in a cosmical treatise? 
 
 One thing is certain — when you consider the 
 end in view of a sun or planet to be, ultimately, 
 ability to support life upon itselfj and to be the 
 abode of moral beings, if completion is six, the 
 
252 PHILIOSOPHICAL HISTORY 
 
 earth was three parts out of six nearer to com- 
 pletion than the sun, when life appeared. In- 
 deed, are we not at libertj^ to say scientifically 
 the earth was half finished before work on the 
 sun had advanced as far as it had gone at the 
 close of the earth's first day? The sun may 
 have a day in court, but he has hardly had one 
 yet. 
 
 With the fear of Sj^dnej' Smith before my 
 eyes, I would not speak disrespectfully of the 
 sun or the equator. But the fact is that the sun 
 is a huge waste-basket into which everything 
 has been tumbled that was not caught and fin- 
 ished elsewhere. Whether the sun can be utilized 
 in itself for higher purposes is guess-work. But 
 I do not charge this speculation up to the author 
 of Genesis. He probably knew nothing about 
 it and would not have cared for it if he had. It 
 was out of the range of his purpose. Again, I 
 do not mean to play the role of a harmonist. I 
 am impressed with the wisdom of the, following 
 extract from J. Clerk Maxwell: "The rate of 
 change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much 
 more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, 
 so that if an interpretation is founded on such a 
 hypothesis it may help to keep the hypothesis 
 
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY 253 
 
 above ground long after it ought to be buried 
 and forgotten. 
 
 " I think the results which each man arrives at 
 in his attempts to harmonize his science with 
 his Christianity ought not to be regarded as 
 having any significance, except to the man 
 himself, and to him only for a time, and should 
 not receive the stamp of society. For it is the 
 nature of science, especially of those branches of 
 science which are spreading into unknown 
 regions, to be continually changing." 
 
 NOTE II. 
 
 I do not want to be understood as holding 
 that there are two orders of truth for the same 
 facts, one religious and the other scientific, and 
 that what is true in the one may be false in the 
 other. But the vision may subordinate the one 
 department to the other, even sinking important 
 truths of the one out of sight, or neglecting their 
 proper order, for emphasis of a purpose imme- 
 diately in view in the other. It would be strange 
 if this were not done in the first chapter of 
 Genesis. The scientific view was certainly 
 secondary in the mind of the author. Yet no 
 scientist would treat with scorn such scientific 
 
254 PHILOSOPHICAL HISTOR Y 
 
 ideas as chance to come to expression in a docu- 
 ment so synthetic in execution and purpose. 
 Both science and religion probabi}' do violence 
 to the intent of the author in holding him to 
 such sharpness of distinction between event and 
 event, or action and action, definition of means 
 and modes, as is customary in comment. The 
 further light that is to break out of God's word 
 will doubtless come, not from strict dramatic or 
 etymologic treatment of the text, but from divin- 
 ing the philosophic thought lying in it. It will 
 so probably come nearer interpreting the author. 
 Criticism now falls on the text. The author's 
 thought was sweeping over an infinite system, 
 and he ought not to be held to nicety in aeonic 
 punctuation. 
 
XI. 
 
 THE STORY OF EDEN AND THE PAR- 
 ABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON. 
 
 The highest, last, and best form of religious 
 instruction is contained in the New Testament. 
 It is true in one sense that having the New 
 Testament we do not need the Old. Paul said 
 of the Old Testament, that it was "able to make 
 wise unto salvation." That is much more true 
 of the New — even of the writings of Paul him- 
 self. The Gospels are a better guide of salvation 
 than the Psalms. Paul is a better teacher of the 
 way of life than any or all of the old prophets. 
 The New Testament is fruit or flower on the 
 tree of religious knowledge. But fruit or flower 
 is borne on stem and root, and one would .be re- 
 markably wanting in the higher and better ele- 
 ments of intellectual life who should pluck fruit 
 to gratify his taste, or a flower to delight his 
 eye, and take no notice of the branch or stalk 
 on which it grew. One's knowledge is not com- 
 
 255 
 
256 THE STORY OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 plete respecting a flower till he has carried his 
 observations from flower to leaf, from leaf to 
 twig, from twig to branch, from branch to trunk, 
 from trunk to root and from root to all under- 
 ground ramifications. Such inspection gives 
 one knowledge of more than a flower. It dis- 
 closes to one a system — a perfected whole — a 
 plant in its entirety. We should not have the 
 fruit of the New Testament unless we had the 
 stalk and the underground roots of the old. 
 
 One must study the Old Testament in order 
 to have a complete system of knowledge respect- 
 ing the Christian religion. One will find not 
 merely intellectual knowledge out of this study, 
 but he will meet, all along, the germs of those 
 moral truths which take on such high and beau- 
 tiful coloring in the New. One will find as he 
 reads the Old Testament, that he is not only in- 
 creasing his historic knowledge, but that he is 
 coming in contact with those salvatory moral 
 elements which Paul said could be found there. 
 Neither intellectually nor morally, then, can we 
 afford to discard the Old Testament. 
 
 It is very diflficult to execute what ought to be 
 one of the first functions of a Christian minister, 
 to wit, to read and expound the Scriptures to 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 257 
 
 the people. Custom is mightier than any man — 
 mightier than we all combined. Custom has de- 
 creed the reading of one chapter or snatches 
 from several at a service. There are so many 
 chapters in the whole Scriptures that this read- 
 ing can never be anything else than fragmentary. 
 If one has only the knowledge of the Scriptures 
 which he hears read in church he will never get 
 any very definite idea of the Scripture system. 
 Each chapter will be a sort of proverb standing 
 by itself. One cannot make up a connected 
 whole, a sj^stem, out of such isolated reading, 
 I am compelled to fall back, theq, on exhorta- 
 tion to private reading of the Scripture. 
 
 Many of you are far advanced in intellectual 
 culture. You know the rank of the Scriptures 
 on the scale of intellectual possessions. I have 
 no need to speak about the desirableness of per- 
 fecting knowledge on this line. Many of j^ou 
 have read the Scriptures many times. I wish to 
 suggest that it would be well still to make an 
 excursion over the whole field of the Bible. 
 You can read rapidly. Some one says the whole 
 New Testament could be read in a forenoon. 
 
 I especially entreat the young people to take 
 up the Old Testament for private reading and 
 
258 THE STOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 not to lay it down till they have come in order 
 to the last verse of Malachi. The novel and the 
 magazine and modern history have charm and 
 value. But if you will take hold of the Old 
 Testament with resolution and read it through, 
 twenty or thirty years from now you will say 
 you could not have put your time to better serv- 
 ice even for your intellectual development. 
 
 It takes will to do it. But just what you need 
 is culture of the will. You want an athletic will 
 — one that will bear a long, strong strain. You 
 will never get this without an exercise, a gym- 
 nastic, adapted to the result. You will never 
 know whether you have a continuous will or 
 not till you have done something which proves 
 to you that you have such a will — a will you 
 can trust. To take the Old Testament and 
 against all temptations of all sorts to hold your- 
 self through book after book till you have fin- 
 ished the whole, is one of the best exercises for 
 a facult}^ which a great many persons credit 
 themselves with possessing but which very few 
 persons really have. You will tell me, if you 
 read the Old Testament through, if you have 
 not got religion out of the effort, that you have 
 the most satisfactory conviction you ever had of 
 
P ARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 259 
 
 your self-control — self-mastery — and that is a 
 long way on the road to religion. 
 
 I hope the time taken in this exordium and 
 exhortation will not hinder turning thought to 
 the real subject we have in hand. Your opinions 
 respecting many things in the Old Testament 
 will change. I regard it as desirable that they 
 should change. The alternative, I think, is 
 change of view from that which has been held 
 in respect to many things, or repudiation — 
 change of view or the rocks of Ingersollism. 
 You can make many very radical changes and 
 come out with your reverence for the Old Tes- 
 tament not diminished but strengthened. 
 
 I have put at the head of this discourse two 
 titles: "The Story of Eden," and "The Parable 
 of the Prodigal Son." I regard these titles as 
 equivalent. You may put tlie sign of equality 
 between them. The story of Eden is the first 
 version of the parable of the prodigal son. 
 The}^ represent parallel transactions. They both 
 teach the same thing and were meant to teach 
 the same thing, to wit, the experiences and for- 
 tunes of all human souls in their path of aliena- 
 tion from God. 
 
 The parable of the prodigal son is not par- 
 
260 THE STORY OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 ticularly a historic fact — was never meant to 
 set forth a particular historic fact. It does set 
 forth something which transpires in the moral 
 consciousness of every man. The historic form 
 which it takes on is mere stage scenery, intended 
 to give vividness to the moral action to which at- 
 tention is demanded. Would it not be thought 
 somewhat ridiculous if we were to send an ex- 
 ploring expedition to hunt up the home of the 
 man who had the two sons; to resurvey the 
 boundaries of the field where the boys and the 
 servants worked; and to locate the pen in which 
 the fatted calf was kept; to trace the road the 
 younger son took when he went into a far 
 country; to locate that country and to find the 
 tomb of the citizen to whom the young man 
 joined himself; to attempt to work out the his- 
 toric background of this parable as though it 
 were veritable fact? Would not common sense 
 come to the rescue of most people and show 
 them they were off the lines of right interpreta- 
 tion of the parable? We all get hold of the right 
 method of interpretation of that parable in a 
 prayer meeting. We verify that parable not by 
 appeal to it as the history of a definite case, but 
 by an appeal to our own moral consciousness to 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 261 
 
 see if we do not find therein the moral transac- 
 tions in the parable set forth. Who was the 
 prodigal son? Was he a particular man — whose 
 name was Elnathan, and whose father's name 
 was Ben Levi? 
 
 No, the prodigal son is an}' man — is every man 
 that ever came to the surface of moral discrimi- 
 nation. Who called for his goods and went into 
 a far country? You and I. What is it to call 
 for our goods and go into a far country? Alas, 
 3^ou and I know! We know what it is to Uke 
 our lives in our own hands and set up independ- 
 ently of God. In what year did that famine take 
 place? Alas, in every year since man was en- 
 dowed with a moral nature, and in every time 
 of every year when a man has wandered away 
 from God! Where did that famine take place? 
 In everjr soul of man that ever sinned against 
 God. And it will take place to the end of time 
 in every soul of man that doeth evil. In that 
 land a mighty famine will always arise. 
 
 That critical point — he came to himself — in 
 whose bosom was that point located? In the 
 bosom of every man who has repented of sin 
 and turned to righteousness and God. The 
 journey home, the compassion of the father, the 
 
202 THE S TOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 subsequent reinvestment in sonship, the rich 
 clothing and the feast — why, the very children 
 have experienced all this within themselves 
 whenever they have repented of a wrong or a 
 sin. The}^ are not thrown off the track when 
 the parable of the prodigal son is read to them. 
 Every man knows the road and the facts of the 
 departure, if he does not of the return. And 
 there are certain living presumptions within him, 
 of which he can never dispossess himself, that he 
 would find the story of the return to be true if 
 he would only return. 
 
 We have no difficulty in interpreting this par- 
 able when we take it into the field of the moral 
 consciousness. There we find the historic facts 
 in our own being. They are not some one's 
 else facts. They are ours. It is our history 
 that is told in tlie departure and in all its for- 
 tunes. The squalor, the want, the hunger, the 
 degradation of sin, the companionship of swine 
 — where is the theater of this experience? In 
 all human souls that sin against God; and "all 
 have sinned and come short of the glory of 
 God." 
 
 I hope we have clear the method of interpre- 
 tation of this parable of the prodigal son and 
 
PM^BLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 263 
 
 Where it is that we go to verify it. The theater 
 of experience and verification is in the soul of 
 
 every man. _ 
 
 Before I go back to the old version of this 
 parable there are two preliminary questions of 
 which I want to make disposition. Suppose 
 some exceedingly wise man comes along and 
 savs to me, "Don't you know that the parable 
 of the prodigal son is a myth?" What would it 
 be wise for me to do? Fly into a perturbation, 
 if not into a passion, and tell him, "No, it .s 
 not"? Would it not be better to ask him what a 
 myth means. And when he answers, as he 
 must, that a myth is something which men 
 have told, and told because it is usually a bit of 
 universal or typical experience, I can say, 
 "Very «ood; I am much obliged to you for your 
 term; the parable of the prodigal son is some- 
 thing which men tell because they know it, part 
 of it all too well and part all too ill, but it is a 
 bit of universal knowledge." I see the term may 
 cover the ground of truth for the verification of 
 which a man commonly explores the field of 
 consciousness within and not the historic realm 
 without. Do we lose anything by calhng the 
 parable of the prodigal son a "muthos"? What 
 
2G-4 THE STOR Y OF EDEN AhID THE 
 
 Other speech is there that compares with it in 
 the reach and absoluteness of its truth? And 
 now our critic is on his feet once more. Be- 
 hold what childish anthropomorphism I How 
 silly to represent God as a man walking in a 
 garden ! It may be that the critic is the child 
 in the case. It may be that the writer knew 
 what he was about and that the critic does not. 
 "There were giants in the earth in those days." 
 There were men of strong thought — men who 
 knew how to pack a truth so as to make it port- 
 able; so that it could be carried down the ages, 
 so that men would "tell" it, men who knew 
 
 "Truth in closest words shall fail 
 When truth embodied in a tale 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors." 
 
 Men have deified, theosized the term Logos; 
 we need not fear to make Muthos anthropic,i.e., 
 make it co-extensive with man. If Muthos is a 
 tale that men tell because men can recognize it 
 when told them, that is the tale to tell. Thank 
 God for the Muthoi — the tales men have told 
 and always will tell. 
 
 There are those who deny the fall^ of man. 
 Can a man deny the universal applicability of 
 the parable of che prodigal? If the parable of 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 265 
 
 the prodigal son is of universal application, then 
 the fall of man is a truth. Every man knows 
 in his own consciousness that he has called for 
 his portion of goods and departed into a far 
 country; that there his goods have been wasted 
 and the famine has come. Everj^ man has 
 reason to suspect that this has been the experi- 
 ence of his neighbor. That is a fall. That 
 necessitates a universal fall — a fall of the first 
 men as well as the last. If there was a man or 
 men to begin with who had not this experience, 
 then he or they were so far removed from us that 
 we cannot call them our brethren. We belong 
 in a race that would know individually by ex- 
 perience the first part of the parable of the prod- 
 igal son. It is no answer to say that man be- 
 gan low and has been gradually climbing. That 
 is a general truth with regard to man's experi- 
 ence. He did begin low, in that, and he has 
 been climbing up. But that is not the line 
 we are on. However low man began morally, 
 he found a lower depth — and that is a fall. 
 However small the capital with which man be- 
 gan moralljs he called for that little and went 
 by himself into a far country and made it less 
 and the famine came — and that is a fall. The 
 
266 THE STOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 race has its consciousness of fall. And the 
 first man or men had his or their share in the 
 consciousness of the race. 
 
 Adam, were he individual, or a tribe, or 
 primal man generic, had reason from his or 
 their own moral conduct to know the meaning 
 of the parable of the prodigal son. It is idle to 
 say that the first men had not risen — that that 
 was all the matter. There never was a man of 
 them that staid up morally as far as he got. 
 There is not a fact in the universe so easy of 
 proofas that of the fall of man. It is hard to 
 prove the existence of the external world. But 
 it is not hard to prove to a man what has trans- 
 pired in his own soul. You may, if you choose, 
 object to the use of the word proof in reference 
 to a self evidencing fact. Put it in another 
 way — you may say a man cannot deny what his 
 own soul asserts. 
 
 There is one other collateral truth at which 
 we will take a glance. Suppose the prodigal 
 son, when he was in that far country, had met 
 and married a prodigal daughter and they had 
 reared children there in their business of swine 
 tending, and they too had come up and mar- 
 ried similarly and continued in the same busi- 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 267 
 
 ness, do you not suppose that there would have 
 been developed a strong tendency to get out 
 into more remote countries and engage in busi- 
 ness even more debasing than swine tending? 
 But are we not here on the track of two truths, 
 the truth of bad heredity attested by science and 
 of depravity attested by religion? 
 
 The parable of the prodigal son is possibly a 
 key to a great deal more than we have supposed. 
 Now suppose we carry this method of dealing 
 with the parable of the prodigal son back to the 
 story of Eden. Of course the very thing at issue 
 is to settle upon the basis on which we are to 
 treat that story. Are we dealing therewith sim- 
 ple, plain, unvarnished historical fact, or are we 
 dealing with an illustrative statement of moral 
 experience as in the parable of the prodigal son ? 
 Is what is stated in historic form the main thing 
 to be kept in mind, or is the historic form mere 
 setting — mere stage scenery, for which anything 
 else might be substituted — for the exhibition of 
 deeper moral truth? In other words, are we to 
 insist on the actual verity of the historic setting 
 in one case more than in the other? It seems 
 to me that the case is plainer with the Eden 
 story than it is with the parable of the prodigal 
 
268 THE STORY OF EDEN /fND THE 
 
 son. If everything is true to the letter in the 
 Eden story, then it becomes at once a history of 
 an experience so far removed from ours that we 
 have nothing in common with it and cannot be 
 instructed by it. It is a history of fortunes and 
 fates in some other world than this. 
 
 Just think a moment. Did the knowledge of 
 right and wrong grow on a tree, so that a man 
 might pluck off the fruit of that tree and the eat- 
 ing it tell him what was right and what was 
 wrong? 
 
 Did immortality grow on another tree, so that 
 a man might put forth his hands and eat of the 
 fruit thereof and become immortal in spite of 
 the Almighty? Do you not know that you are 
 dealing with metaphors — figures here, just as 
 you are in the parable of the talents or of the 
 sower and the seed? To find out the meaning 
 of all this you are not to go back and speculate 
 on some primitive historic condition, but to go 
 into your own soul and see if you cannot find 
 out some meaning on the side of your own moral 
 consciousness. 
 
 Do women go out nowadays and hold con- 
 versations in good round English with serpents, 
 the serpent meanwhile speaking as good Eng- 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 269 
 
 lish as the woman? Do you suppose a snake 
 and a woman ever carried on a conversation in 
 good round Hebrew or any other tongue of hu- 
 man speech? Is it customary for temptations to 
 sin among us to come from the suggestions of 
 the conversations of serpents? The serpent is 
 figure for the wily, intrusive, seductive power 
 of temptation — for what, try as much as we 
 please, we can do no better than to designate as 
 the serpentine character of temptation. We do 
 not have any trouble when we read in Hamlet: 
 
 "But know, thou noble youth. 
 The serpent that did sting thy father's life 
 Now wears his crown." 
 
 If the serpent in the Eden case is to be a real 
 animal, a real ophidian, then I think it necessary 
 to make all Jesus' parables not supposed cases, 
 but a recital of absolute historic facts. 
 
 The swine in the parable of the prodigal son 
 were not mere symbols of degradation taken up 
 by the Saviour for illustration, but actual swine, 
 as actual as the herd that "ran violently down a 
 steep place into the lake" at Gadara. Did God 
 in literal verity have a habit of walking in a 
 garden in the cool of the day? The Infinite does 
 somewhat different from that in these days. A 
 flaming sword was placed at the east of Eden. 
 
270 THE S TOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 Now Eden ought not only to be found, but that 
 flaming sword ought to be found there still, for 
 the plain implication of the Scripture is that it 
 was never taken away. It would be likely to 
 be an object prominent enough to have been 
 discovered b}^ this time if it were a thing of 
 sense. It was and is a thing of spirit, as we shall 
 see. 
 
 I have done a little destructive work on this 
 Eden story, not for the sake of destruction, but 
 for the sake of defense and construction. It 
 amounts to something with a skillful general on 
 what ground he draws up his lines. I believe 
 there is a line of impregnable defense of the Eden 
 story. But now shall we call this story an old 
 wives' fable? Then the story of the prodigal 
 son is a fable of the old wives' sort. That we 
 are not willing to allow. Is this stor}^ a myth? 
 Men surely have told this story. Call it a 
 myth, you do not by that term put it out of the 
 category of the inspired truth of God, any more 
 than you can so put out the parable of the prodi- 
 gal son. 
 
 There may be something of the historic in the 
 background of the Eden story. I do not know 
 but that there was a first man whose name was 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 271 
 
 Adam and a first woman whose name was Eve. 
 But the Scriptures on their face treat these terms 
 as designations of man and woman generally; 
 certainly they treat them so in this Eden story. 
 Adam is "the man" — man generic, as "the ox" 
 is ox generic. This is not biography, but his- 
 tory writ large — universal history, history of 
 moral experience, what has been true of every 
 man, what must have been true of the very first. 
 A moral nature wakes up to find within itself 
 certain permissions and certain restrictions. The 
 inward voice says: "Thou mayest," and, "Thou 
 shalt not." Coupled with the "Thou mayest" 
 there is life. Coupled with the "Thou shalt not" 
 there is death. These are the most important facts 
 and laws of the universe. They are what God 
 holds to, with more firmness than to anything 
 else. They are the great trees of the garden," the 
 tree of life" and the tree of "the knowledge of 
 good and evil." This latter for brevity's sake we 
 will call the tree of the knowledge of evil. One 
 always had the liberty to know all the good he 
 could. But he had no right to mix his knowl- 
 edge of good with a knowledge of evil. Wrong 
 man should not do. Srn man should not know. 
 There is a prohibition in every man's soul. It 
 was in Eden, in the soul of the first man. 
 
272 THE STOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 That most radical of all the religious experi- 
 ences we have — that protest against wrong and 
 sin — was in the breast of the first moral agent. 
 The first man knew the "absolute imperative" 
 in his being as well as Kant or we. What hap- 
 pens? The man who obeys the prohibition lives. 
 But every man questions what is this prohi- 
 bition-'— why may I not see what is on the other 
 side of wrong as well as what is on the other side 
 of right? I do not like this restriction ; I will do 
 as I please. I will not listen to fatherly counsel; 
 I will call for my portion of goods and go into 
 any country I please and set up by myself. The 
 temptation has been one and the same, and all 
 souls have yielded to it — the first man did and 
 the last man has. Does not temptation to sin 
 always come in this serpentine guise — this pro- 
 hibited thing would be pleasant — I want just 
 the knowledge, just the experience which lies 
 behind that prohibition? 
 
 Now graphic beyond power of an amending 
 touch is the form in which the Eden story puts 
 the cause and consequences of temptation. The 
 fruit forbidden seems, under the suggestion of 
 temptation, to be good for food, to be pleasant 
 to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise. 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 273 
 
 So temptation has painted and gilded for all 
 time. A little touch by the way — vice and sin 
 are not always, not often solitary. They are 
 social in their nature. We influence one another. 
 What seems desirable to one he will make known 
 to another. 
 
 The intimate relationships of life are likely to 
 unify moral experience. What the wife chooses 
 the husband will choose. Our dearest compan- 
 ions may be our tempters. "He that loveth father 
 or mother more than me is not worthy of me." 
 
 The fruit is eaten. The prohibition is disre- 
 garded. The absolute imperative is unheeded. 
 We have known sin — have made it our own. 
 What is behind wrong we have discovered. Ah I 
 what have we discovered? Oh, the poverty of 
 it! The .wretchedness of it! The shame of it! 
 The soul is naked. It would hide and be covered. 
 
 The Hebrew term for atonement is a term 
 which means, to cover. 
 
 The soul must do something. It must cover 
 up its shame. Is not that what comes to pass 
 in every human soul when he mixes his knowl- 
 edge of good with knowledge of evil? Is not 
 that what lies behind the disregard of any Divine 
 prohibition? Is not that what lies behind the 
 
274 THE S TOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 knowledge of wrong? This is the first pertur- 
 bation of sin. But that is not all. Calmer mo- 
 ments come, only to bring us more solemn 
 reckoning. God walks in the garden in the cool 
 of the day with every human soul. He asks for 
 an account of its doings. The hours of reflec- 
 tion come. Things are seen in their true light, 
 and yet the sinning soul will not let the light 
 shine. Men hide themselves from the Divine 
 inspection. They will not let the light shine 
 upon their souls and their deeds. 
 
 What did Adam do in the garden, when he 
 hid from the Lord, but what all souls try to do 
 when they attempt to escape the consequences 
 of their sins? "Men love darkness rather than 
 light,because their deeds are evil." That is true 
 with us. That was true with the first man. 
 No better parable form of putting that sad truth 
 can be imagined than by the representation of 
 Adam trjnng to hide himself when he hears the 
 call of the voice of the Lord. 
 
 Need I stop to comment on the consequences 
 to man and to woman of sin? How has the 
 earth been cursed by man's wrong! Its very 
 fertility has departed from it. Populous places 
 have become waste deserts. Over the fields dev- 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 275 
 
 astated by man's wickedness have come up 
 thorns and thistles instead of the life-supporting 
 grain. Not in trust and rest upon his fellow has 
 man tilled his fields, but in anxiety and fear. 
 
 And when the grain has ripened and he has 
 reaped it, robbers have carried it off, made slaves 
 of his wife and children, and left his corpse to 
 be blackened and burnt in the smoking stubble. 
 
 Out of sin has come to woman — the mother — 
 anguish not only at the beginning but through 
 all her motherhood. Under sin her life has been 
 blasted and she has descended from the position 
 of an endeared help at his side, a rib taken from 
 his side, to the position of a slave beneath his 
 feet. The despotism of man over woman is the 
 despotism of sin. A terrible despotism it has 
 been, and a terrible despotism it still is, where 
 wrong and sin reign. There are one or two 
 more moral elements in this Eden story to which 
 I must call attention. The Lord God prevents 
 the man who has sinned from putting forth his 
 hand and taking of the tree of life. 
 
 Well, what is that but a recognition of the 
 great law that righteousness shall have its re- 
 wards and sin its retributions — that the one shall 
 not have the awards of the other? "Say ye to 
 
270 THE STOR Y OF EDEN AND THE 
 
 the righteous that it shall be well with him; for 
 they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe to 
 the wicked, it shall be ill with him; for the re- 
 ward of his hands shall be given him." The 
 soul that sinneth, it shall die. It shall not grasp 
 the fruit of righteousness, which is life. Sin 
 shall have its own fruit — indignation and wrath, 
 tribulation and anguish. Sin when it is finished 
 bringeth forth death. By no means shall it lay 
 hold on eternal life. Did I say there is no sword 
 flaming over some particular spot of land in the 
 east? But the sword that was put at the east of 
 the Eden of human consciousness, flames there 
 still. We talk about salvation. Salvation can 
 do some things, but some things it cannot do. 
 
 We assert the necessity of atonement. Atone- 
 ment can do some things, but it cannot do all. 
 Whoever goes out of the Eden of innocence, of 
 sinlessness, finds some things barred from him 
 forever. Nothing can restore them. He can get 
 back to them in no way. A flaming sword 
 forever debars him from that Eden. 
 
 There is something about sin which no atone- 
 ment can cure. That is the misery of it, that 
 is the fearfulness of it. A man may disown 
 his sin and become a new man. A man's sins 
 
PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON 277 
 
 may be atoned for and forgiven. But he will 
 remember them forever. The memory of the 
 degradation of committed sin will be one's 
 memory with conscious being. We may find 
 grace to help us bear the memory, but the mem- 
 ory we shall bear. Memory preserves the scars 
 of sin. When the prodigal son had been estab- 
 lished in the honors of his father's home, do you 
 not suppose he thought sometimes of those days 
 in that far country— thought of his wanton prof- 
 ligacy, of the shame of it, of those days of pov- 
 erty and wretche"^ness and degradation, and re- 
 flected that they were his days, that he had lived 
 them, that they had stamped their woeful im- 
 press upon his being? You cannot divide the 
 continuity of human life. You cannot retain 
 consciousness and smother memory. Step out 
 of the Eden of innocence into sin, and there is 
 a flaming sword in your own memory that will 
 prevent your regaining your former estate of 
 consciousness— of sinlessness. There is the 
 Tearfulness of sin— the eternal bar of the flaming 
 sword that springs up behind it. Therefore let 
 us sin not. Let us taste of no fruit which God 
 forbids. Then we shall eat of the tree of life. 
 The gates of pearl "shall in nowise be shut." 
 
278 THE STOR Y OF EDEN 
 
 Away from the flaming sword to the open gates 
 and the streets of gold let us hasten. 
 
 "Paradise, and groves 
 Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 
 Sought in the Atlantic Main — why should they be 
 A history only of departed things, 
 Or a mere fiction of what never was? 
 For the discerning intellect of man, 
 When wedded to this goodly universe 
 In love and holy passion, shall find these 
 A simple produce of the common day." 
 
 WORDSW^ORTH. 
 
 T/ie Recluse, 
 
XII. 
 
 PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY. 
 
 Is it not a little strange that we should cus- 
 tomarily turn to the Psalms for an introductory 
 exercise in worship? We do it not from any ex- 
 ternal compulsion. We do it solely because we 
 are impressed with the unrivaled fitness of the 
 Psalms to express religious feeling. We are not 
 alone in this impression. The Christian church, 
 turning to the Old Testament, opens ten times 
 at the Psalms to once in any other book. 
 
 Though not the author of them all, David has 
 been held to be the author of so large, or so 
 characteristic a portion of them, that the whole 
 collection has passed usually under his name, 
 as The Psalms of David. 
 
 The problem presents itself to the thinking 
 
 mind — whence did this man derive his power to 
 
 lead men in all ages and in all countries in the 
 
 worship of God? How came David so near to 
 
 279 
 
280 PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 
 
 God's heart that the pious and the worshipful of 
 all time should feel that he has best framed what 
 their own hearts would utter? 
 
 If you will read over the life of David, you 
 will find nothing miraculous in it. The whole 
 history is peculiarly of the earth, earthy. I call 
 attention to that fact as showing, contrary to a 
 somewhat common impression, not the lavishness 
 but the economy of miracle on the Biblical arena. 
 God spake to David neither by audible voice 
 nor by vision. His whole life seems to have 
 been spent under the ordinary conditions of 
 men. When you read his life and reign, the 
 miraculous element comes out no more in them 
 than in the case of any other monarch — say 
 Charles V. or Cromwell, or in the case of any 
 other warrior — Csesar or General Grant. Yet 
 David is the great choir leader of men as they 
 swell their anthems of praise to God. 
 
 There is one feature of these Psalms of David 
 that would give us some light upon the question 
 asked if our attention were more closely called 
 to it when we read them. I do not know that 
 I can denominate this characteristic any better 
 than by calling it a struggle for God, or, to put 
 it in another way, a struggle for moral exist- 
 
PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 281 
 
 ence. David can lead us to God because he has 
 fought over so much more of the way to God 
 than we have. We read over the Psalms care- 
 lessly, without discovering how much they re- 
 veal. Nowhere else in all literature is so much 
 of a man's religious experience revealed as in 
 David's Psalms. Nowhere else are the lights 
 and shadows that play over a soul in its reli- 
 gious life so delicately, faithfully, accurately 
 
 touched. 
 
 It is to the shadows that I wish first to call 
 attention. For the shadows we should look 
 when we read the Psalms. God's face was not 
 always visible to David. It was often hid be- 
 hind a cloud, and the Psalms disclose to us the 
 workings of his soul in his darkness. That at- 
 titude of mind is more prominent than any other 
 in the Psalms. Then, in the darkness, came an 
 intensity of struggle that we know nothing of. 
 Nothing can be more pathetic than his plead- 
 ings with God in these seasons of loss of the 
 Divine presence. Just look at: ''Hide not thy 
 face far from me. Put not thy servant away 
 in anger. Thou hast been my help." How 
 natural! A hope flushes in his bosom that God 
 will befriend him because he has befriended him, 
 
282 PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 
 
 and he tells it to God as if to remind him that 
 he had an interest in him by the amount of past 
 blessing conferred. The plummet of religious 
 pathos never went deeper down than here: 
 "Leave me not nor forsake me, O God of my 
 salvation." Whatever else that wrestling of 
 Jacob with the angel might be, it was certainly 
 a struggle of his own soul for a blessing from 
 God. David lets us in to see struggles of his 
 own equally intense. This, bear in mind, is 
 probabl}' actual experience: "I am weary with 
 my groaning. All the night make I m}^ bed to 
 swim. I water my couch with my tears." We 
 shall perhaps never see how much there is in 
 that till we, conscious of the hidings of God's 
 face, have worn away the wearj^ hours of the 
 night, till the stars have paled out in the light 
 of da}^ storming the mercies of the Almighty 
 that we may once more have their sweet pos- 
 session. 
 
 He is not idly dallying with poetry who writes 
 thus: "I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, 
 I go mourning all the day long. I am feeble 
 and sore broken. Lord, my desire is before 
 thee, and my groaning is not hid from the." 
 "Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me; O Lord, 
 
PSALMS NO T I MP RE CA TOR Y 2S3 
 
 make haste to help me." We sometimes strug- 
 gle to stay up our own selves, in our own hours 
 of darkness and conscious separation from God. 
 And we erect a staging for hope, and feel that 
 we have something that we can trust, and then 
 a whirlwind of desolation sweeps over us. All 
 our work to stay ourselves is found as a broken 
 reed, and we are prostrate in the dust, sensible 
 only that we are prostrate and overwhelmed. 
 How graphically, past all amendment, is this 
 experience delineated in Psalm XLII. : "Why 
 art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art 
 thou disquieted in me? Hope thou in God; 
 for I shall yet praise him for the help of his 
 countenance. O my God, my soul is cast down 
 within me." And then the process goes on 
 again of feeling for hope in his hopelessness by 
 way of recalling God's mercies in past days to 
 his children. Though he says, ''As the hart 
 panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my 
 soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for 
 God, for the livingGod,"yet God seems to have 
 sent him away for the time with his longing 
 still unsatisfied, with a sense of vacancy still in 
 his soul, for he leaves the matter with the same 
 sad refrain playing over his unsatisfied heart. 
 
284 PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 
 
 ^' Why art thou cast down, O my soul ? and why 
 art thou disquieted within me? Hope in God; 
 for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of 
 my countenance and my God." The soul is de- 
 nied, yet it clings with a grasp unbroken to its 
 hope. God tries us to see how much tension the 
 cable of our attachment to him will bear, and so 
 he does not alwa3^s satisfy the hungry immedi- 
 ately with good things. We find an expression 
 of that fact and of the proper attitude of the soul 
 in it, in the hymn of George Croly: 
 
 ''Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear. 
 To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh; 
 Teach me the patience of unanswered praj^er." 
 
 He tried David in like manner,and the reason 
 why David is a guide for us is that though 
 baffled in his desire, though his heart was sunk 
 within him, still no force could separate him 
 from God, and his desolation echoes a manly 
 willfulness as in it he still cries: ''Hope thou in 
 God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health 
 of my countenance and my God." I do not 
 want to weary with quotations, but I want to 
 use enough of them to impress the idea that a 
 larger part of the Psalms, than we usually think, 
 is written in the minor key. 
 
PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 285 
 
 "Be merciful unto me. Be merciful unto me, 
 
 God, for my soul trusteth in thee." "My 
 heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed." "Save 
 me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my 
 soul. I sink in deep mire where there is no 
 standing. I am come unto deep waters where 
 the floods overflow me. I am weary of my cry- 
 ing; my throat is dried. Mine eyes fail while 
 
 1 wait for my God. O God, thou knowest my 
 foolishness, and my sins are not hid from thee. 
 Let not the water flood overflow me, neither let 
 the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut 
 her mouth upon me. Hide not thy face from 
 thy servant; for I am in trouble; hear me 
 speedily. Thou hast known m}^ reproach and 
 my shame and dishonor. I am poor and sor- 
 rowful. My heart is smitten and withered like 
 grass, so that I forget to eat my bread. For I 
 have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my 
 drink with weeping. My days are like a shadow 
 that declineth, and I am w^ithered like grass." 
 
 Then there is Psalm XXII. — a very dirge of 
 the soul, forever consecrated to trial and distress 
 by the Saviour's quoting from it, if not reciting 
 it, in the last moments of the cross: "My God, 
 my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Far 
 
286 PSALMS NOT IMPRECATOR Y 
 
 from helping me are the words of my roaring. 
 O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou an- 
 swerest not, and in the night season, but find no 
 rest." 
 
 Jesus was no more son of Da^id in the line of 
 royal descent than in this ver}^ quality of ac- 
 quaintance with sorrow and with struggle in the 
 Divine life. So deep had David gone in this 
 experience that the language which came out 
 of it rose to the Saviour's lips when all his woes 
 were culminating in death on the cross: "My 
 God, ray God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
 
 It is only when we have looked in on these 
 hymns of sorrow and trial and darkness that we 
 can understand David, and see how widely he 
 swept the lyre of human experience. Yea, it is 
 only by studying the poems of this cast that we 
 can appreciate those of a confident or jubilant 
 vein. You can appreciate the light and trust 
 and peace of: "The Lord is my shepherd, I 
 shall not want; he maketh me to lie down in 
 green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still 
 waters," only when you see it coming forth from 
 a soul from whose background of darkness- 
 came: "My God, my God, why hast thou for- 
 saken me?" "Our fathers trusted in thee. They 
 
PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 287 
 
 trusted and thou didst deliver them. Be not far 
 from me, for trouble is near; for there is none to 
 help." Then "The Lord is my shepherd" 
 comes to us like the smiling sunlight streaming 
 in after the passage of a black cloud, painting 
 a bow of promise and hope on its retreating 
 chill and gloom. And those triumphant strains 
 of jubilance and delight: "Bless the Lord, O 
 my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy 
 name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget 
 not all his benefits," are incomputably magnified 
 as expressions of the joy of God found, when 
 you have paused to see that the soul thus jubi- 
 lant has groped for God in the darkness, crying, 
 "Hide not thy face far from me." 
 
 It is easy to see the difference between Isaiah 
 and David. The difference is as marked as be- 
 tween a speech of Burke and a song of Burns. 
 The difference is not merely in the fact that 
 Isaiah is an epic while David is a lyric poet, for 
 Isaiah himself sometimes touched the lyre. But 
 Isaiah is essentially epic even when his style is 
 lyric. It is the heart of a patriot and a states- 
 man that finds utterance in all his song. David's 
 lyrics are a personal utterance. They are de- 
 nationalized. They know no country and no 
 
288 PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 
 
 political problems. They are the cry of a lone 
 soul to the lone God. God is the only God and 
 David is the only man, and his song the breath 
 of desire for friendship, trust, amity between 
 these two beings — seraphim and cherubim and 
 humanity else being dismissed from view. *'As 
 the hart panteth after the water brooks, so 
 panteth my soul after thee, O God" — gives you 
 the mental attitude of David. 
 
 Now take a lyric of Isaiah: "In that day 
 thou shalt say" — "Thou^' — you see a third person 
 beside Isaiah and God on the stage already. 
 Who this third person is, we shall see by and by. 
 "Thou shalt say, O Lord, I will praise thee; 
 though thou wast angry with me, thine anger is 
 turned awa}^ and thou comfortedst me. Behold, 
 God is my salvation, I will trust and not be 
 afraid, for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and 
 my song; he also is become my salvation. 
 Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of 
 the wells of salvation. And in that day shall ye 
 say. Praise the Lord, call upon his name, de- 
 clare his doings among the people, make men- 
 tion that his name is exalted. Sing unto the 
 Lord, for he hath done excellent things, this is 
 known in all the earth. Cry out and shout, thou 
 
* PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 289 
 
 inhabitant of Zion, for great is the Holy One of 
 Israel in the midst of thee." 
 
 You find now who is the third person on the 
 stage. It is "the inhabitant of Zion," and there 
 come before you the throngs of Jerusalem, the 
 people of Israel, and the nations of the earth — 
 "the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah, the 
 flocks of Kedar and the ships of Tarshish." 
 
 Your brief Ij^ric strikes out into thought after 
 all with the long swing of the epos. The his- 
 tory of this lyric of Isaiah is commentary con- 
 firmatory of the view we have before us. That 
 lyric was the patriotic national song of Israel — 
 "The Marseillaise," the "God Save the Queen," 
 the "Hail Columbia," of the Jew. Its inspira- 
 tion is social, not personal; it is a song of the 
 people, not a song of the soul. You read: "In 
 the last da}', that great day of the feast, Jesus 
 stood and cried, If any man thirst, let him come 
 unto me and drink." You will understand the 
 situation of affairs if you think of Jesus as thus 
 crying at the close of a jubilant ceremony in 
 which the priests drew and poured water on the 
 ground as lavishly and as fast as they could, 
 while the people sang this lyric of Isaiah, beat- 
 ing heaven with the strength of their choruses; 
 
290 PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 
 
 "With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells 
 of salvation," and, "Cr}^ out and shout, thou in- 
 habitant of Zion, for great is the Holy One of 
 Israel in the midst of thee." 
 
 It is going out of my way, but I cannot for- 
 bear to take one step aside here. What conflict 
 of thought must there not have been in the mind 
 of Jesus as he heard the people sing this lyric of 
 Isaiah? If the traditions that come to us are 
 trustworthy (good for anything), the fathers of 
 this same people had "sawn" Isaiah "asunder" 
 for uttering this lyric and other thought of kin- 
 dred import. The fathers killed and the children 
 canonized. Is it any wonder that you read: 
 "Woe unto you Pharisees, hypocrites; ye build 
 the sepulchers of the prophets and garnish the 
 tombs of the righteous. Ye are the sons of them 
 that slew the prophets. Fill ye up then the 
 measure of your fathers." And the}^ did fill up 
 the measure of their fathers. Israel put Isaiah 
 to death, and after seven hundred j^ears they 
 sang his songs. So stood that situation. The 
 Jew and the Roman put Christ to death, and 
 after eighteen hundred years Lowell writes: 
 
 "For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day 
 the martyr stands. 
 On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver 
 in his hands; 
 
PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 291 
 
 Far in front the cross stands ready and the 
 
 crackling fagots burn, 
 While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent 
 
 awe return 
 To glean up the scattered ashes into History's 
 
 golden urn." 
 
 So stands the latter situation. 
 
 But my detour is illustrative. I have devel- 
 oped this relating to Isaiah for purposes of com- 
 parison. "I love a prophet of the soul," says 
 Emerson. To all time David will be the poet 
 of the soul in the realm where it "lives in God" 
 or hungers because of his absence. We dwell 
 alone. A few signs pass between us and our 
 friends interpretative of some few things. But 
 there is an abundance of life from which and to 
 which goes no speech or sign save as communi- 
 cation exists with the All-seeing. David is the 
 choir leader of men as in this "undiscovered 
 country" they frame to consciousness the aspira- 
 tions and the songs of the soul. David leads us 
 in worship because he represents the personal 
 element in human experience so broadly and so 
 well; its height, but its depth as well; its sun- 
 shine and its storm; its light and its darkness; 
 its hope and its fears; its peace and its unrest; 
 its joy and its anguish; its possession of God and 
 
1'.;.' PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 
 
 its wild beating against the bars of eternal silence 
 to be let into the Divine bosom. 
 
 There were sins on David's escutcheon? But 
 do not these Psalms show it, confess it? Aye, 
 do they not show what no history can show, 
 what is behind all sins? Do they not show the 
 struggle of a soul with its torments — show its 
 unrest, its upheavals and insurrections against 
 the thralldom of sin and a never dying struggle 
 back for the light, for purity and for God? 
 
 Carlyle, in his "Heroes and Hero Worship," 
 says: "Who is called the man after God's own 
 heart? David, the Hebrew king, had fallen 
 into sins enough — blackest crimes. There was 
 no want of sin, and therefore the unbelievers 
 sneer and ask, 'Is this your man according to 
 God's heart?' The sneer, I must say, seems to 
 me but a shallow one. What are faults, what 
 are the outward details of a life, if the inner se- 
 cret of it — the remorse, temptations, the often 
 baffled, never ended struggle of it — be forgotten ? 
 David's life and history, as it is written for us in 
 those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest 
 emblem ever given. us of a man's moral progress 
 and warfare here below. All earnest souls will 
 ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an 
 
PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 293 
 
 earnest human soul toward what is gooa and 
 best. Struggle often baffled-sore baffled.dnven 
 as into entire wreck ; yet a struggle never ended, 
 ever with tears, repentance, true unconquerable 
 purpose begun anew." 
 
 The law was always the same that it is now in 
 regard to vital knowledge of God: "The king^ 
 dom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent 
 take it by force." The old prophets had to fight 
 their way as do we. With God there is no respect 
 of persons. However God might sometimes give 
 those manifestations of himself that we call mi- 
 raculous, they were not the rule of God's com- 
 munication with the prophets any more than 
 with us. And in David's case there is no indi- 
 cation that God dealt with him in any but the 
 ordinary way. We find David's Psalms our 
 spiritual life because he went through so many 
 of the experiences which we must. Experiences 
 so deeply human, we feel, put us on the right 
 track to the Divine. And because David was 
 human so deeply, God could meet him and bless 
 him as almost no other. The greater we are, 
 the more we can comprehend God. Struggle 
 ■ is the very element of our greatness. It stretches 
 ^ us out and enlarges us in the direction of our 
 
294 PSALMS NOT IMPRECA TOR Y 
 
 strife. If God hid his face from David, by as 
 much as David stretched forth his hands towards 
 him in the darkness, by so much was his soul 
 enlarged. 
 
 "The feeble hands and helpless, 
 Groping blindly in the darkness, 
 Touched God's right hand 
 In that darkness 
 And were lifted up and strengthened." 
 
 Let these old prophets and sacred bards be 
 brought nearer to our sympathies. They were 
 men of like passions with ourselves. They went 
 down into the valley of humiliation as well as 
 up on the heights of illumination. Were the}^ 
 favored of God ? They lived where God's favors 
 come. They had a law of life, and in the long 
 run the law asserted itself over all exceptions. 
 They walked in darkness as well as in the light. 
 What made them the appointed of God to teach 
 mankind was, that they would walk whether it 
 was darkness or light. I know of nothing more 
 pathetic than the spiritual heart histories of these 
 men, as set forth in their lives, descriptive of at- 
 tempted communion with God. 
 
 That was real life when Elijah wandered off 
 alone to Mount Sinai; if haply he might find 
 God there as he thought. he could not in Pales- 
 
PSALMS NO r IMPRECA TOR Y 295 
 
 tine ; if haply some Divine influence might linger 
 round the old blast-swept crags beloved of light- 
 ning and storm, where God had held communi- 
 cation with Moses. It was a last resort for him 
 in his darkness. It was the despairing act of a 
 soul ready to die if he could not get a clearer 
 revelation of God. We should look upon the 
 God of the prophet and the psalmist as their 
 God more as he is our God. Sometimes, perhaps, 
 God appeared wondrously. But even then the 
 true account of the matter seems to be that such 
 appearance was in answer to wondrous effort 
 after him. God might appear to us in some 
 burning bush if we put forty years of our life 
 into almost unbroken reaching out for him. 
 After so many years of effort to lay hold of God, 
 we might be fit for some special mission and 
 might lead our host to a promised land. If we 
 know nothing of God on the heights of his com- 
 munication, it is because we know of no struggle 
 after him in the depths of his silence. God found 
 by persistently pushing through the darkness 
 toward him, is God found forever. Nothing can 
 then hide him from our eyes. If we are in thick 
 darkness we know that it is "his pavilion round 
 about him," and, though our vision be cut off. 
 
21)0 PSALMS NO T IMPRECA TOR Y 
 
 we still trust because we have found him near. 
 The Psalms show us the highest strains of re- 
 joicing in God. But they come from minds that 
 had sounded all possible depths of struggle and 
 doubt. I am not sure but we may say David's 
 light came because of his darkness. He was 
 capable of perceiving what the light and ]oy of 
 God's salvation are because he was capable of 
 such intensity of feeling — capable of such "hor- 
 ror of great darkness" in the privation of light 
 and joy in God. The darkness had some mean- 
 ing to him because he knew whose absence the 
 darkness betokened. Then light and peace came 
 out in clearer colors to him because of the mid- 
 night gloom against which they were projected. 
 The daysprings of peace and consolation take 
 on their most beauteous hues as they break upon 
 souls immersed in sorrow or despair. 
 
 Cowper in some period of depression, thinking 
 God had forever departed from him, wrote: 
 
 "I consent that thou depart, 
 Though thine absence breaks m}^ heart; 
 Go then and forever too, 
 All is right that thou wilt do." 
 
 Against such background what must not have 
 been the comfort and joy when he could write: 
 
PSALMS NOT IMPRECATORY 297 
 
 "Sometimes a light surprises 
 The Christian while he sings; 
 It is the Lord who rises 
 With healing in his wings. 
 When comforts are declining, 
 He grants the soul again 
 A season of clear shining, 
 To cheer it after rain!" 
 '> .... 
 
 If we have no rapture in the Divine life it is 
 
 because the deprivation of it means nothing to 
 
 us, it is because for it we have had no agony. 
 
 THE END. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abaddon, 24. 
 Abraham, 196. 
 Abyssinia, 121. 
 Acts of Apostles, 153. 
 Aesthetics, 25. 
 Adam, 235. 
 Angelo, Michael, 26. 
 Apocalypse, 9-56. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 247. 
 Assyria, 95. 
 Atavism, 63. 
 Attainder, 136. 
 
 Babel. 220. 
 
 Babylon, 53, 120, 128, 131, 
 
 149. 
 Bartol, Doctor, 144. 
 Beast mark of, 44, 51. 
 Bentham, 60. 
 Biographical History, 173- 
 
 197. 
 Bithynia, 35, 46. 
 Blackstone. 137. 
 Bret Harte. 227. 
 Buckle, 133. 
 Bunyan, 189. 
 
 Caesar, 15, 17, 54, 208. 
 Canaan, 141, 207. 
 Catholic church, 48, 77. 
 Clement, 158-161. 
 Comedy, 76. 
 Constantine, 152. 
 Contemporary Review. 140. 
 Cowper, 75. 296. 
 Creation. 248. 
 Cvrus. 117. 127. 
 
 David, 137, 279. 
 Deuteronomy, 80. 
 Drama, 23, 57. 
 
 Eden, 238, 255-278. 
 Egypt, 96. 
 Elihu, 59-72. 
 Elijah, 82. 
 Eliphaz, 67. 
 Eusebius, 160. 
 
 Fall of man, 237. 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 
 
 104. 
 Genesis, 208, 234. 
 Goldsmith, 83. 
 Gospel, 114. 
 Gospel of Peter, 151. 
 Green, historian, 136. 
 
 Hades, 67. 
 Hedonism, 60. 
 Heresies, 162-165. 
 Herodotus, 96. 
 Hezekiah, 94, 118. 
 History, 173-254. 
 Hobbes, 60. 
 Hosea, 207. 
 Human suffering, 61. 
 
 Immortality, 65. 
 Imprecatory Psalms, 130- 
 
 149. 
 India, 179. 
 Irving, 82. 
 Isaiah, 78, 93-129, 287-291. 
 
300 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Jeremiah. 78. 
 Job, 57-75, 189-191. 
 John, 11, 24-27, 48, 182, 196. 
 Jndcjment. final, 53. 
 Juvenal, 48, 82. 
 Jehovah. 59. 
 Jerusalem, 119-129. 
 Jonah, 76-92, 189-191. 
 Kingdom of God, 16, 18. 
 Danciani, 152. 
 Lowell, 81, 82. 
 Maine's "Ancient Law,' 
 
 135. 
 Merodach-Beladan, 118. 
 Messiah, oratorio, 110. 
 Millennium. 52. 
 Milton. 26, 30. 
 Morals, progress in, 133. 
 Moses, 196, 246. 
 Myths, 192, 263. 
 
 Nasby, Petroleum V., 81. 
 Necho, 96. 
 Nero, 154, 167. 
 Nineveh, 84-90, 96, 190. 
 Noah, 216, 225. 
 
 Oriental Christ. 179. 
 Overcome, 17. 
 
 Paris Commune, 145. 
 Patmos. 15. 
 
 Paul, 65. 89, 150-172, 183. 
 Peace Society. 144. 
 Pentateuch. 187, 195. 
 Peter, 93, 151. 
 Pliny. 34-40. 161. 
 Polygamy, 134. 
 Poppea. 154. 
 Potomac, Army of, 145. 
 Prodigal Son, 260. 
 Prophets. 76. 
 Prosperity of Wicked, 69. 
 Protestantism. 48. 49. 
 Psalmist. 68. 245. 
 Psalms. 130-149, 279-297. 
 Pyramids, 226. 
 
 Redeemer, 67, 68. 
 Renan, 181. 
 Resurrection, 53, 184. 
 Revelation, 9-56. 
 Revised Version, 10, 118. 
 Righteousfiess. 59, 77. 
 Roman Church, 48. 
 Roman empire, 33,*43, 48. 
 Roman law\ 142. 
 
 Samson. 193. 
 
 Satan, 59. 73. 
 
 Sayce, 118, 120. 
 
 Schurmann, Professor, 141. 
 
 Sennacherib, 97. 
 
 Shakespeare, 57. 
 
 Sheol, 67. 
 
 Sin, 275. 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, 196. 
 
 Smith. Sydney, 252. 
 
 StrauSiS, 181. 
 
 Suffering, 61. 
 
 Sumner. Charles. 144. 
 
 Sun, 250. 
 
 Sun myths, 192. 
 
 Symbolism, 22. 
 
 Tacitus. 161, 167. 
 Taine. 26. 
 Temptation, 272. 
 Tennyson, 56, 123. 
 Thayer, Professor, 151. 
 Theory, 63. 
 Thoreau, 226. 
 Timothy, 166-169. 
 Tradition. 152. 
 Trajan, 34-40. 
 Troas, 183. 
 Truth of Scripture, 173. 
 
 Utilitarianism, 60. 
 
 Wager of battle, 138. 
 Washington, 80. 
 Wayland, Francis, 144. 
 Whlttier, 102. 
 Wordsworth, 278.