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l\I givtthtf* Books
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From the Library of
Louis R. Ehrich,Y'69.
Gift of his son
Walter L. Ehrich, '99S.
1926

Mr. Savage's Books.

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Mr. Savage's weekly sermons are regularly printed in pamphlet
form in "Unity Pulpit. Subscription price, for the season, $1.50;
single copies, 5 cents. GEO. H. ELLIS, Putizsker,
141 Franklin St.t Boston, Mass.

BELIEFS ABOUT. THE BIBLE

BY
M. J. SAVAGE

The Bible is the great family chronicle oftheJews.— T&BOXE.

BOSTON
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET
18QI

Copyright
Bv Gbosge H. Ellis

883SC

To

HIM WHO WAS MY BOYHOOD'S IDEAL, AND TO WHOSE
LATER CARE I OWE THE BEST OF WHAT I
HAVE DONE OR BECOME,—

MY BROTHER.

PREFACE.

We have just been celebrating the four hundredth
anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. The one
thing with which his name is more prominently asso
ciated than with anything else is — for the Protestant
world — the dethronement of the Pope as God's vice
gerent on earth, and the establishment of the Bible in
his place. It is then a fitting time for us to raise the
question as to whether this work of his can be regarded
as a finality. More important than any discussion as
to what system of doctrine or church polity the Bible
may be interpreted into supporting, is the deeper
inquiry as to how we are to regard the Bible itself.
This book is an attempt to give a plain answer to that
inquiry.Boston, November, 1883.

CONTENTS.

I. The English Bible, .......... 9
II. The Text and the Canon, ........ 23
III. The Pentateuch,  . . , , 40
IV. The Prophets,  . J~y
V. The Writings,  . . 79
VI. The Bridge between the Testaments, ... 96
VII. The Epistles,  m
VIII. The Gospels,  126
IX. The Religion of the Bible,  144
X. The Morality of the Bible  157
XI. The Present Use and Worth of the Bible, . 175
XII. The Eternal Bible, ........... 190

THE ENGLISH BIBLE.

The Bible is the key point of the modern theological con
troversy. Whatever theory of its origin, its nature, its
authority, shall win in this critical contest that is going on,
will influence the thought and the progress of the religious
world for all future time.
What kind of a book is this ? Is it the word of God ? Is
it infallible ? Is it inspired ? Is it ultimate authority con
cerning the nature of God, the nature of man, human duty
and human destiny ? Is it a book unique, to be set apart in
a class by itself ? Is it unlike all other productions that the
world has ever seen ? These are the questions that need to
be asked and that press for an answer. How important they
are I need not waste words in impressing upon your minds.
If this book be indeed in its entirety the word of God, if it
be infallible, if its conceptions of the divine nature and
human nature, of morality, religion, and the future be un
changing truth, then there is nothing so important as that
we should know it, that we should believe it heartily, and
that we should act upon it every day of our lives.
On the other hand, if these claims be not true, then the
claim itself is vicious, mischievous, and injurious to man. It
stands in the way of human progress. For example, sup
pose a ship at sea : the captain has on board a chart which
he believes to be perfectly accurate in every part. He has

10 Beliefs about the Bible.
a compass, the needle of which he believes to be always true
to the north. If they be what he supposes, then they will
of course help him ; and it is of the utmost importance to
him that he should know it and believe it. But, if the chart
be inaccurate, if the compass is not to be depended on, then
to trust in them will certainly lead him astray, and maybe
cause disaster and wreck.
Now, then, if the Bible conception of God, the Bible teach
ing concerning his nature, be true, then it is very important
that we should know it ; but if it be not, and we think it is,
then in our religious conceptions we may be all astray. If
the Bible teaching concerning human nature, the origin of
man, the origin and the nature of sin, be false, and we be
lieve and act upon them as though they were true, then we
are taking just that course which must stand in the way of
an accurate solution of the problem. If the Bible doctrine
as to the final destiny of the race be not true, and neverthe
less we bend all our energies, contribute our money, time,
and effort in order to escape certain supposed dangers when
those dangers do not really exist, we are not merely wasting
time, money, and thought, but we are leading humanity
by an entirely false road, and making it practically im
possible for us to find out the real truth concerning these
all-important problems. He who believes that the Bible is
the infallible word of God must of course hold to this faith
as the highest of all virtues, the most important of all things
in the world. If, then, it be not true, he is substituting a
false standard of right and wrong for the true one. If the
Bible be infallible, the most important thing in the world is
that we should believe it. If it be infallible, then to disbe
lieve it becomes a crime in our thought. The use of reason
is turned into a danger. Doubt becomes a sin ; while, if
the Bible be not infallible, the highest duty of man is to

The English Bible. 1 1
doubt it. The highest duty of man is to use his
reason, is to find out what is the constitution of human
nature, and on what its development and future pros
perity depend. I say then that to believe that the Bible is
infallibly inspired, if it be not so, is not an innocent belief, a
harmless faith. It is something that stands squarely in the
way of human progress, more than anything else of which we
can conceive.
We need then earnestly, simply, without prejudice and
without passion, to ask and answer these grave questions in
the light of all the knowledge and help that we can obtain.
In regard to my own attitude toward it, I wish to say to
you that I have no prejudice against a revelation. My heart
on the contrary would bound and leap with joy to meet
and welcome a revelation, could I believe that it were true.
Could I believe that God did speak in this marvellous way,
with what eagerness would I listen to catch the faintest
utterance ! Did I believe that some supernatural light might
be shed down upon our human pathway which should bring
the solution of our human problems, over which brain be
comes weary and hearts ache, with what gladness would I
look for the faintest glimmer of a ray of that divine light and
guidance ! Whatever, then, I shall say in the course of
these discussions, I beg you not to think that I am influ
enced in the slightest degree by any antagonism toward the
revelation idea itself. But by as much as I desire light, by
precisely so much am I anxious not to be deceived.
Let us then, with these preliminary ideas, take up the book
and look at it, and see what it is.
We find that it is called "the Bible," "the book"; and yet,
as we trace its history a little, we discover that this title is a
very modern one. It is only within recent centuries that
it has gone by this name, " the book," in the singular number.

12 Beliefs about the Bible.
It was called long before that, in the Greek, Ta Biblia, " the
books," indicating by this title what at least is the apparent
truth, — that it is not one book, but a little library brought
together and made one by being put within the same limiting
covers. Before it was called " the books," it was called " the
scriptures," or "writings." But although the Old Testament
went by this title, which indicated that they were set apart by
themselves, it was long before the same descriptive and
sacred title was applied to the New Testament.
Leaving the title and opening the book, what do we find ?
If it be a Catholic copy or many of the older Protestant
copies, we shall find three grand divisions, the Old Testa
ment or covenant, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament
or covenant ; the word " covenant " probably representing
more accurately the idea of the original word than does
the word "testament." We will leave out of consideration
the Apocrypha, because the Protestants have always rejected
it, although the Catholics have accepted it as of equal au
thority with the other two divisions.
We find it not only divided into two divisions, but that
there are many books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament,
and twenty-seven in the New, making a library of sixty-six
little volumes in all. Let us run over the contents for a
moment, that we may get the scope of this work.
At the beginning, we find the Pentateuch, commonly re
garded as the five books of Moses. They tell us about the
creation of the world, the origin and distribution of nations,
the emigrations of the early peoples, until at last God is
represented as selecting one and constituting it his own
peculiar people. We trace this people from its wanderings
from the far East through Palestine, until we find them
slaves in Egypt. Then, we find them escaping from under
the bondage of the Egyptian kings into the wilderness, where

The English Bible. 13
they are supposed to have wandered forty years. During
this time, the statutes of God are given them through the
agency of Moses. Then come Joshua and Judges, books
which tell the story and the conquest of Canaan, stories of
the heroes and the wars of the separate tribes before they
were compacted under one law into one kingdom. Then, at
the end of this, we find a beautiful little poetic idyl, the story
of Ruth, her faithfulness and love. Next follows the history
of the kings, the various dynasties, the wars of the two king
doms of Judah and Israel between themselves and between
them and the surrounding nations. These are related to us
in the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. Then, we
have the story, in Ezra and Nehemiah, of the captivity of
the people in Babylon, their return, and the rebuilding of
their beloved temple. Next comes the story of Esther, and
the founding of one of the great festivals of the Jews ; the
attempt of their persecutors to destroy them, and the re
venge wrought on them by the permission of the king.
Now, we find ourselves face to face with Job and that old
est problem of the world, a problem not yet solved, of
human suffering, and how it may be reconciled with justice
in the government of the world. Passing from that, we find
that we have in our hands the hymn-book of the Jews, that
which they used in their temple service, called the Psalms
of David. Then come the Proverbs, a collection of wise
sayings popularly attributed to Solomon. Next, the little
Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the darkest, most hopeless,
most pessimistic works that the religious or literary world
has produced, setting forth the vanity of human life, the
emptiness of all things under the sun. Then comes a beau
tiful Eastern love-poem, misunderstood, perverted, ridiculed,
and yet containing one of the most beautiful lessons in all
Scripture, the Song of Solomon. Next, we are in the pres-

14 Beliefs about the Bible.
ence of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, followed by what
was supposed to be Jeremiah's lament over the desolation
of his people. Then come Ezekiel, Daniel, and the twelve
minor prophets. When we come to the New Testament, we
find the Four Gospels, — you will see later why there are
four now, originally there were many more, — supposed to be
written by the men whose names they bear ; the first three
very much alike in their general characteristics, the last one
standing apart and constituting a class by itself. The Acts
then tell us about the history of the founding of the early
Christian Church. Then there are fourteen letters supposed
to have been written by Paul to these churches, answering
their questions, solving their problems, telling how to order
and regulate their affairs, advising with reference to matters
of doctrine and practice. Next comes a general Epistle by
James to all the churches ; then two bearing the name of
Peter, three bearing the name of John, and one little one
bearing the name of Jude. Lastly comes the Apocalypse,
the Revelation of St. John, wherein is set forth in gorgeous
strain his lofty vision of the supposed course of human his
tory, until the second coming of Christ and the revelation of
the city of God coming down out of heaven.
This is the book of which we are to treat in its varied
contents. It claims to cover everything from the creation
of the world unto the end of all mundane things, — the fold
ing away of the heavens like a scroll, and the entering in
of that existence, when, in the words of the angel, " time
shall be no more."
Where did this book come from ? So far as we are to
consider the question to-day, it is a translation. I shall not
be able to cover more ground this morning than the treat
ment of the English Bible. We have then a translation
from certain Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. This which

The English Bible. 15
we call the received text to-day was not the first of the
translations. It is the last of the series, beginning with the
work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and their compeers, followed
by the Geneva, the Douay, the Bishops' Bible, and others,
until at last, under the patronage of James I. of England,
in 161 1, two hundred and seventy-one years ago, the book
as we have it was published.
I want to call your attention to two or three peculiarities
of our English version before we go on to the theories
which are held concerning it. You will find, as you open it,
that it is divided not only into books, but these books are
cut up into chapters and verses. Are these chapters and
verses any part of the original ? Not at all. We need to
bear this in mind, because it is a matter of a good deal of
practical importance sometimes. The divisions of chapters
and verses were simply the work of the publisher, made for
mere convenience of reference ; and, sometimes, they are so
badly made that they interfere very seriously with the
apprehension of the meaning of the original writers.
For example, it is quite commonly the case that the
paragraph or section is divided in such a way that, in read
ing one chapter, you may begin in the middle of one subject
and leave off in the middle of another, thus getting no idea
of the matter as it lay in the mind of the writer. The verse
division is also purely arbitrary, hardly any more accurate
than as though they were divided into sections of half an
inch in length without any regard to their meaning. I have
seen many a time on the walls of public halls and churches
isolated texts hung up as mottoes, which not only do not
convey the idea of the original writer, but often quite the
opposite. As one concrete example, — I speak of it without
expressing any convictions I may have in connection with
temperance, — I have seen in halls the motto, "Touch not,

1 6 Beliefs about the Bible.
taste not, handle not," as though God, by the mouth of
Paul, had issued that as a divine injunction. If, however,
you take the trouble to look into Paul's own writings, you
will find that he simply quotes, "Why are ye subject to
ordinances (touch not, taste not, handle not, which all are
to perish with the using) ? " to condemn them. That is, Paul
says precisely the opposite of what he is made to say in
this purely arbitrary use of the text detached from its
surroundings. Not only this, but you find also along the headings of the
pages and at the beginning of chapters certain running titles
and comments, indicating what, according to the author of
these titles, is contained in the pages and chapters so
marked. Was this any part of the original? No. This,
again, was the work of the publishers ; and, many a time, these
headings are not only fanciful and imaginary, but grossly in
correct. That is, they are really a process of interpreting
Scripture, turning headings and indexes into commentaries ;
and, as I have said, they are grossly incorrect.
Let us remember then, as we handle the Bible, that the
original writers are not responsible for these headings, any
more than they are responsible for the divisions into chapters
and verses.
One other idea must be borne in mind in this connection.
Let us grant for a moment that the original Hebrew and
Greek manuscripts are the infallible word of God. Never
theless, as we open our English Bible, we cannot feel that we
have in our hands a verbal transcript of this infallible work,
because no one claims that the translators were inspired.
We have only their judgment as to what the original writers
meant, put into the best English of which they had any prac
tical control. So that, whatever the original may be, the
translation is not infallible, but is the result of the judgment

The English Bible. 17
of fallible men ; and this is emphasized by the fact that no
two translations are alike, and that, even in this revised ver
sion of the New Testament which we have received within a
year or two, there are a vast number of places where the
English and American scholars differed very seriously as to
the meaning of certain words and phrases. These differ
ences are so important that an appendix has been added,
containing them. If you take up an American edition, you
will find the opinions of the English revisers as to these
points given in an appendix by themselves ; and, if you take
up an English copy, you will find the American revisers'
opinions given in an appendix by themselves. We must
therefore bear in mind that there may be an important differ
ence between the Bible as first written and the Bible as
translated, whatever theory of the original may be held.
Now, then, let me place before you, as clearly as I can,
some of the different theories concerning this great book
that have been held by the religious world in our Protestant
age. The first one is that which has gone by the name of verbal
inspiration. Those who held to this theory — and there are
some still who hold to it to-day, I suppose — believed that
every word as it appeared in the original Greek and Hebrew
manuscripts was directly and definitely inspired by God ; so
that it was as literally God's word as though he had himself
held the pen, and had chosen those words and no other.
This theory was carried so far by the early Puritan divines
that some actually believed that not only the words, but the
punctuation points, were inspired. This seems something
trivial to us ; and yet, if you look at it a little, you will see
that it is an essential part of the theory. You know how
possible it is to change the sense of a passage in a letter or
a book by changing the position of a comma, a semicolon,

1 8 Beliefs about the Bible.
or a period. Only a little while ago, I saw a famous letter of
Mr. Darwin's, over which there has been much controversy
as to whether he said a certain thing or whether he said
something else, the whole depending on where you put the
punctuation mark. It is evident, therefore, that the location
of a comma is not a light thing. Indeed, it seems to me as
important that the punctuation should have been inspired as
the words ; and yet I may have occasion, as I go on, to show
you how absurd any such conception as this must be, be
cause the original manuscripts, many of them, from which
our version is taken, contained not only no punctuation, but
no division into chapters or even paragraphs. They simply
present to the reader one solid page, with no division into
words even, and many times with only an abbreviation rep
resenting a word. Whatever, then, may be true of the trans
lation, there were no punctuation marks in the originals as
we have them ; and consequently, if they were definitely and
infallibly inspired, it must have been through the medium
of the human copyist or the printer. This is the first theory.
The next, which has been the one more commonly held
in the Protestant world, and the one generally held by those
who call themselves strictly evangelical, is plenary inspira
tion, from a Latin word meaning full or complete. While
they would not stickle for the very words or punctuation
marks, they held and taught, and still hold and teach, that
the human writers of the original manuscripts of the Bible
were so divinely controlled as to preclude them from the
possibility of any mistake, so that the Bible in every part
is completely true without any mixture of error. This is
the theory of plenary inspiration.
There is another theory which is coming to be quite
popular, especially among the younger men in the ministry,
those who are glad to call themselves by the name of liberal

The English Bible. ig
orthodox. It is the theory which teaches that, though the
Bible may be in error in regard to scientific matters, though
it may make mistakes as to historical facts, though it may
be wrong in its figures and chronology, still it is true
and the infallible word of God, so far as concerns its moral
and religious teaching. That is, it may make mistakes in
geology, in geography and chronology and history, but that,
whenever it comes to teaching anything about human destiny,
then it is infallible. That always seemed to me a strange
conglomerate of a theory. Undoubtedly, it has resulted
from the pressure that has been brought to bear upon the
modern world along these lines of science and history and
chronology, a pressure so severe as to have broken down
at these points the whole theory of plenary inspiration.
That is, these men have been compelled to admit that Biblical
science was wrong, that the writers were mistaken in history,
that they blundered in chronology ; yet, falling back from
this, they have taken refuge in the citadel of the unknown
and unknowable. They insist on claiming that these
writers are infallible here ; and they can keep on doing this,
so far as I can see, as long as they please, because nobody
knows enough about this matter to contradict them. They
can claim that the Bible is infallible, when it teaches us
about the innermost nature of God, the future world, the
need of forgiveness, because we cannot bring these partic
ular questions to any practical test. This theory, then, is
one that holds that the Bible is infallible and inspired only in
those parts where it is practically impossible to bring it to
any decisive test.
But there is still another one which has been popular
among the old Unitarians, and is held by a great many of
them to-day. That is, they would not put their finger upon
each particular thing in the Bible, and say that this is infalli-

20 Beliefs about the Bible.
ble, absolute, and unchanging truth, while this other is error.
They do not say that the Bible is the word of God ; but they
change the phrase, and say that it contains the word of God,
although they give no rule for telling what is the infallible
word of God and what is the human addition or misconcep
tion. I could never find any standard by which they pro
posed to bring this matter to the test, except the standard of
individual intuition and taste. As though a man should say,
"That part which I like, which strikes me as reasonable,
which I am inclined to believe, which is practically helpful
to me, I take as the infallible word of God and reject the
rest." But let them dare to apply this test, and they have
a different Bible for each person, each making his own selec
tion among the different parts.
There is one more theory, still more attenuated than this.
You see how they have gradually diminished and faded
away, until at last the conception of the writers is something
so nearly invisible as to need a microscope to get a good
view of it. This theory is that, although the Bible is not
the word of God in any general sense, though it does not
contain the word of God in any special sense, yet that some
way it is a different book from all others in the world, hav
ing a quality of inspiration about it that is unique, that sets
it apart. They would feel a little shocked and troubled if
you should place the Bible on the same level with Shak
spere or Goethe, if you should propose to criticise it under
precisely the same methods, if you should treat it simply as
a human production.
There is yet another theory ; and that is the one which
treats the Bible as a purely human production, like any
other natural, human work. Heine, the great German poet,
gave an accurate and adequate expression to this idea, when
he said — he being a Jew by parentage — that the Bible was

The English Bible. 21
simply "the great family chronicle of the Jews." This theory
treats the book as a great body of religious and ethical
literature, as the spiritual biography of a nation, the produc-
of a thousand years of hope and fear, and struggle and
aspiration, and yet a perfectly natural human production,
springing out of the human heart and human life just as
naturally as any other part of the world's great literature.
This is what Emerson gave utterance to in the famous
couplet of his famous poem, "The Problem," —
" Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old."
There is one more thought which is the extreme antipode,
so to speak, of the extreme inspirational and infallible theory,
— a theory held and taught with a great deal of vigor by cer
tain rough iconoclasts of the time, and not only by those,
but by some of the leading scholars of the world. This is,
that the Bible is so false in its conceptions of God, so un
founded in its teachings concerning human nature, so one
sided in its ethical ideas and precepts, so barbaric in a
large part of its Old Testament stories, so mystic and
unreal in a large part of the New, that it is a positive evil
to have the book commonly in the hands of the people,
looked on with the reverence and awe with which it is com
monly regarded. James Anthony Froude, the great English
historian, says — I quote only his idea from memory — that,
when he looks over the history of the last thousand years, and
sees the unspeakable amount of evil that has been wrought
in Christendom as the result of believing that the Bible was
the inspired word of God, he could not help feeling that,
having it in all homes, regarded as it was, the book was
working an incalculable amount of injury. He would regard
it, therefore, as a production not to be commonly spread and

22 Beliefs about the Bible.
commonly used in the shape in which it is held at the pres
ent time. A concession to a part of this theory was made
recently by Dr. R. Heber Newton, a brilliant Episcopal min
ister, who is reported in the New York Herald to have said
that the Bible, in its entirety, ought not to be publicly circu
lated, that there should be at least a selected or expurgated
edition published before it is spread broadcast over the world.
These, then, are the different theories concerning this book,
of which I have given you this general account. It is not
my purpose to pursue the subject further to-day. As to what
we are to think of it, how it originated, who wrote it, when,
where, what influence it has had on the world, and what
influences we may expect it to have still, — these questions
will be the subject of future discourses.

THE TEXT AND THE CANON.

A lady present in my audience last Sunday morning
(I hope she was not one of my regular hearers, because I
should be sorry to be so misunderstood and misinterpreted
by one hearing me constantly) was overheard to remark
that she did not see any use in Mr. Savage's attacking the
Bible, a book that had done so much good in the world,
whatever the truth about it might be. This may represent
the attitude of more than one ; and, for this reason, I wish
to make one or two remarks concerning it.
In the first place, I am only telling the simple truth about
the Bible ; and it seems to me a most damaging admission
for any one to make concerning a man, an institution, or a
book, that telling the truth about him or it is attacking it.
In the next place, we need to draw a very clear-cut line, or
distinction, between the Bible and the theories that have
been held or taught concerning it. If you will notice, I
think you will bear me witness that I have never attacked
the Bible ; and it is not my purpose to do so in this course of
sermons. I only attack what I regard as certain false, un
founded, vicious theories involved in the claims put forth on
its behalf, which it has never put forth, and has never at
tempted to sustain. In the third place, we need to remem
ber that theories and beliefs concerning God, concerning
Bibles, concerning institutions of one kind or another, may
have been really helpful to man in some stage of his prog
ress ; and yet these same beliefs and theories may afterward

24 Biliefs about the Bible.
come to be hindrances that stand in the way of his further
advance. So much by way of comment on this type of
criticism. Last Sunday morning, I treated of the English Bible, its
contents, its divisions, natural and artificial, and the theories
that have been held in the past, and are now currently held
concerning it. In so doing, I took note of the well-known
fact that this English Bible of ours is a translation from an
earlier literature ; and I called your attention to this some
what important point, that, even though the originals of the
Old and New Testaments may have been infallible and in
spired, we cannot claim that we have now a book which is thus
infallible and inspired, unless we know that the translators
were divinely assisted in their work ; and this no man that I
have heard of has ever put forth as a sober claim. But,
even though we knew that the Old and New Testament
manuscripts were originally infallible and inspired, we should
not be sure that those copies that the translators used pos
sessed these characteristics, unless we could be certain that
we have in our present copies just those books, and no more,
that were in the first place rendered infallible, and unless
we could be perfectly sure that they had come down to us
through the ages unchanged in every essential feature. But,
again, though we knew that the manuscripts of the Old and
New Testaments had never been changed, though we could
be sure that the translators had a copy that had never
been varied by a phrase or a sentence or a word or a letter,
we should not then be certain that the book was infallible
and inspired. We should need to go back and find out
where this original came from, and what credentials it
brought with it when it came. That is further back than we
shall be able to go this morning, and I shall confine myself
to considering the text and the canon. *

The Text and the Canon. 2$
As we go one step back of our English Bible, what do we
find ? Do we find some one copy containing just the books
of our present Bible, no more, no less ? Do we find that
this Bible has been transmitted from, generation to genera
tion without any changes or any mistakes ? Instead of
that, we find the truth to be almost as far the other way as
you can conceive or imagine. As there are some special
points that I wish to bring before you concerning the manu
scripts of the Old Testament, I shall treat first of those of
the New.
We have in the world a collection, not in any one place,
but in all, of somewhere in the neighborhood of seventeen
hundred New Testament manuscripts. Sometimes a manu
script is complete, containing all the books, sometimes con
taining certain books not at present admitted. In other
cases, the manuscript covers only a fragment or one book or
even a part of a book. Are these all alike ? Does there
seem to have been any supernatural supervision exercised
in making these copies, to keep out any error or mistake ?
Does there seem to have been even ordinary human care
exercised to prevent the intrusion of any errors ? You can
judge for yourself, when I tell you that, within the range of
these seventeen hundred manuscripts, there are somewhere
in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty thousand vari
ous readings. It is only just to say, of course, that the
larger part of these variations are minute, not touching mat
ters of great importance, sometimes only a difference in the
spelling of a word, sometimes a difference in the word itself,
sometimes a difference in a phrase ; but some of them are
important enough to extend to even whole paragraphs and
parts of chapters, so that many of these variations are very
important indeed.
Prof. George P. Fisher, of Yale Theological Seminary,

26 Beliefs about the Bible.
one of the leading orthodox scholars, in an article published
last summer in the North American Review, touching this
matter of the various readings in the manuscripts, has sought
to avoid the force of this very important point by saying that
these manuscripts are probably nearly, if not quite, as
accurate as those we have of Plato, of Aristotle, or of the
Commentaries of Caesar; that we do not feel any special
doubt as to the teachings of Plato or Aristotle or Caesar on
account of the variations in manuscripts, and we ought not
any more to feel anxiety or trouble about the New Testament
variations. But there is a very marked distinction between
the two cases, and one that an acute scholar like Prof.
Fisher certainly ought not to have overlooked. No one
claims that your life and mine for this world, much less our
eternal destiny for heaven or hell in the next world, depends
on the accuracy of a reading in Plato or Aristotle or Caesar's
Commentaries. If some great Church should turn one of
these books into its Bible, and make human destiny hinge
on the accuracy of the phrases of Plato or Aristotle, you
would then see that the world would rouse and wake up
in its interest as to whether we could be certain that these
readings had come down uncorrupted from the past. There
is no justice then in making any such comparison as this.
The point we wish to know is whether we can be so certain
as to the phrases, the wording, the literal teaching of this
book, called the New Testament, that any body of men
has a right to build a world-wide doctrine, and make the
eternal peace or the misery of men depend on the reading
of a text.
It is thus a question of very great importance for us to
find out whether a book, on whose behalf such extraordinary
claims are made, has come down to us accurately as it was
written by its authors. I have said, however, that there

The Text and the Canon. 27
are some one hundred and fifty thousand different readings
in its manuscripts. How can we account for them ? Under
what influences have they come to exist ? Under the most
natural ones in the world. If we consider the New Testa
ment as simply a human production, it is not strange that
we should have these different readings, changes of texts,
misunderstandings, misinterpretations. Every scholar knows
that, concerning Shakspere for example, there are thousands
and thousands of different readings, over which the critics
speculate and study. But it does not arouse any general
interest in the world, because it is of no practical importance
to man whether Shakspere used this particular word in this
particular place or that. No question of human destiny
hinges on it. It is merely a matter of literary curiosity.
These changes then have come about in the most natural
way. In the first place, through the blunders of copyists.
You are aware that printing is quite a modern invention ; and
that these manuscripts were written by hand, by the monks
and students of the Middle Ages, and in the early ages of
Christianity. If you have had a letter copied by the hands
of a clerk, or if you have ever attempted to do any copying
yourself, you know how easy it is to leave out or misspell a
word or to substitute a wrong one or to make any one of a
dozen common errors in copying a piece of work. Here is
the source of a great many of them. Another rises from
the fact that it was quite a common thing for the various
makers of manuscripts to write in the margin of the book, or
at the foot of the page, various little notes and comments ;
to suggest one word for another where they thought some
previous copyist might have made a mistake. When a new
copy was to be made, the man who was engaged in doing it
would wonder a great many times whether these notes in the
margin ought to be a part of the text, something that the

28 Beliefs about the Bible.
previous copyist had left out ; and, thinking they ought, he
would incorporate them into the text itself. A great many
changes, doubtless, came about in this way. If you remem
ber that these Greek manuscripts generally were not divided
into verses and paragraphs, but that they were written solid,
you will see how easy it was for errors of one kind or an
other to spring up in this way. If, for example, I should
send you a manuscript to-day without any division of para
graphs, sentences, or even of words, as some are written, all
the letters about the same distance apart, and the whole
page solid, the chances would be a hundred to one against
your making me an accurate copy, putting in the punctuation
where I intended it to be, dividing the sentences into words
as I had them in my mind, and so giving an accurate tran
script of the whole.
There is another source of error still that has sprung out
of the doctrinal bias of the copyist himself. Deliberate lib
erties were taken a great many times by the copyist, in im
proving the text, as he supposed, leaving out a word that he
did not like, or inserting one that he did. As in that great
warfare that waged in the early Church between the Arians
and Athanasians, between those who believed in the new doc
trine of the Trinity and between those who fought against it,
how natural it would be for a copyist to change a phrase
this way or that, either on one side or the other, softening
it down a little, so that it would not bear so emphatically
against the doctrine which he really believed to be true !
A great many times these men might honestly make these
changes, feeling so sure that they had the right interpretation
that only good could come from their amending the text a
little, so that it should be impossible for the careless reader
to misunderstand it.
Again, we must remember that the standard of literary

The Text and the Canon. 29
ethics then was very different from the modern standard.
To-day, we call a man a plagiarist, we convict him of literary
theft, and he would be publicly disgraced, were he capable
of writing books in such a way as these early workers were
accustomed, as a common thing, to do. For example, it was
a very common thing, during the first four or five hundred
years before Christ and three or four hundred years after, —
yes, seven or eight hundred years after, — it was quite a
common thing for them to take the work of earlier writers
in composing a book of their own, to borrow here and there
such material from those books as they cared to use, and
to incorporate it bodily into their own work, adding and
changing here and there as they pleased, patching and piec
ing in such a way that only a critic could detect the way in
which it had been done. Work of this sort can be traced
in the manufacture of some of the manuscripts both of the
Old Testament and the New.
Not only that, but it was not at all uncommon for writers
at this time to do another thing which our standard of lit
erary honesty would most severely condemn ; and that is to
put into the mouth of the speaker not the words which he
really used, but such words, even extending sometimes to
long speeches, as they supposed he would have used, or
might properly have used, on such and such an occasion.
Let me indicate to you how recently work of this kind has
been done. In some of our modern school-books there are
speeches or orations, supposed to have been delivered in
Parliament by celebrated orators, which everybody knows
were never delivered at all. There were no reporters at
the time the speeches were made. The way in which the
speeches were prepared was for some good writer, who knew
that such a speech had been made at such a time, to write
out what might have been said on that occasion by that

30 Beliefs about the Bible.
speaker; and it passes in the modern world as the real
speech. Sometimes, a thing of that sort is done by a smart
reporter now. I was told not a great while ago by a prom
inent newspaper man at the head of a leading paper that he
had sometimes been obliged to report the speeches of pol
iticians, when he could not get near enough to hear more
than now and then a word. Yet he must produce a speech.
So he caught at this and that, as best he could ; and, know
ing the general sentiment of the speaker, he would write out
as nearly as possible what he might be presumed to say.
And, once, he did his work so well that he received a per
sonal letter with the thanks of the orator. He probably
wrote out as good a speech as the speaker made, even if it
was not just the one that he did make.
To go back to more ancient times, you are accustomed
to find facts like these in the works of Thucydides, Xeno-
phon, and Plato. Thucydides and Xenophon put into the
mouths of military leaders speeches that they made to
the soldiers on the eve of such and such a battle. But
every one knows perfectly well that the writers are only
putting into the mouths of their heroes the speeches which
they might have made, or which would have been fitting
to make, not the actual words that they used. If you take
up the Dialogues of Plato, you find long utterances of
Socrates ; but Plato does not claim to make a verbal report
of Socrates' words. He represents the general position of
Socrates on these subjects; and he puts into his mouth
words which are not the words of Socrates at all, but which
are the words of Plato. This is very well, if it is fully
understood. But, when we know that this may have been
done in the case of Jesus, and that, in all probability, it was
done by the writer of the Gospel of John, when he puts
long prayers and speeches into the mouth of Jesus, which are

The Text and the Canon. 31
entirely unlike that which the other three gospel writers give;
when we are taught to believe that our eternal destiny
hinges on the accuracy of these reports, it becomes impor
tant that we should know the character of the literary ethics
which underlie this work, to know how they are produced,
and how much weight and authority they carry with them.
Not only this, but, to go a step farther, not only did they
incorporate the works of other writers, and put into the
mouths of speakers and hearers that which they did not
say, but that which they might have said ; but they went to
the extent of creating and producing whole books under the
influence of a doctrinal bias, and for the purpose of carrying
this or that belief through the public mind, and making it
dominant in the religious circles of their time, which were
outright forgeries. We should call them forgeries to-day,
although it is a serious question whether We ought to hold
the writers guilty, as we should in the nineteenth century-
Such writing was not looked upon then as it is now. If a
man felt that he was serving a good purpose, that he was
helping on right thought, he considered himself justified in
doing this kind of work. There are books extant to-day
that came very near being incorporated into the Bible ; and
it is quite possible that such books were incorporated, books
which were written two or three hundred years perhaps after
the time of their supposed author, and were published with
the names of some old saint or hero attached to them, that
they might gain currency and authority in the great religious
discussions of the time. We must remember these things,
when we take up the question as to the accuracy and authen
ticity of the manuscripts that have come to be part of our
modern Bible.
Let me pass now to the manuscripts of the Old Testa
ment. I wish to say of them in general that all these things

3 2 Beliefs about the Bible.
which I have said concerning the New Testament will hold
equally with them, so that I need not repeat them. I only
wish to call your attention to one or two peculiar facts
Which bear upon the question of their accuracy. You are
aware, perhaps, that the Hebrew language, as originally
written, was made up entirely of consonants ; that is, the
Hebrew word as written or printed has no vowels at all. It
was quite commonly the case that precisely the same word
as it appeared on the written manuscript or printed page
would have this meaning or that, according to the vowels
which were understood to go along with the consonants
thus written or printed. To give you a very commonplace
example, suppose that English were printed without any
vowels, and you should find the two consonants, b, n, you
would see that it might mean bane, bone, bean, or been,
or half a dozen other things, according to the vowels which
should be combined with these two consonants to complete
the word.
There are cases in the Bible where precisely this kind of
liability to error occurs. As a practical illustration, Prof.
Robertson Smith tells us that, in one passage, Jacob is rep
resented as uttering his dying prophecies and farewell words
to his sons while leaning upon his bed. Another passage,
that refers to the same scene, says that he did it leaning
upon his staff. This is easy of explanation, when we know
that the two words in Hebrew for bed and staff are precisely
alike in their consonants, and may be made to mean one or
the other according to the vowels added. Of course, you
can see what a wide field for misconception and error there
is open here. It is long since the time of Christ, some
where between the sixth and ninth centuries, that the system
of vowel points was generally adopted, so that the reading
of the Hebrew text was settled beyond controversy.

The Text and the Canon. 33
Now, then, without spending more time on the actual or
possible sources of error in the manuscripts, let me say a
few words in regard to the formation of the canon. As I
have often said, if we were sure that we had an accurate
copy of the original text, we should even then need to be
sure that we had just those books which ought to be included
in this collection that we call the Bible ; and we should also
need to know when this collection was settled, and under
what influences. It is a very common opinion that the Old
Testament canon was settled at least by the time of Christ ;
yet this is far from having been the case. About the time
of Ezra and Nehemiah, the time of the return from the Jew
ish captivity, the Pentateuch was about as it stands to-day.
But long after that time, away down to the time of Christ,
and for nearly a hundred years after that, the canon of the
Old Testament remained open ; and it was still a question
which books should be included, and which shut out.
Under what influences was the canon settled at last ?
Was there any criticism, any special scholarship brought to
bear upon it? None whatever. We can have no sort of
intellectual respect for the decisive influences which at last
fixed for all time the canon of the Old Testament scriptures.
There came to be an exaggerated, superstitious reverence
for the Old Testament in the Jewish mind ; and it was carried
so far that they believed there was some wondrous, super
natural, almost magical significance that might be discovered
in every word and phrase and letter. It became a matter of
the utmost importance to them, holding this belief, that they
should be able to know what words and letters really were
to be considered part of the Old Testament scriptures ; and
so there was an arbitrary selection made by the rabbins,
who determined what particular text should be regarded as
the true scripture. After this there was a persistent at-

34 Beliefs about the Bible.
tempt made, and it was very successful, to suppress every
other copy, and all variations from this, which they had de
termined should be the accepted reading. It was even
taught that it was a dangerous, a fatal sin to read or have
to do with any other copies. It therefore became a part of
the Jews' religion to accept a certain text and no other ; and
so slavish was the fear induced in connection with this that
the copyist of the Old Testament books from that time
copied everything, even to the erasures and blots on the
page, not daring to depart by a hair's breadth from anything
which he found in the manuscript.
The Jewish canon, then, was settled under the influence of
the rabbins toward the last part of the first century. The
question whether Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon ;
or Ecclesiasticus, the Maccabees, and others which now con
stitute part of the Apocrypha, should be included or not,
was suddenly stopped by the destruction of the temple,
which put an end to the growth of the Old Testament.
Thus, without any trace of superhuman guidance, was the
canon of the Old Testament finally settled. And, in my
opinion, some of the books which were left out are more
worthy to be there than some admitted ; and I believe that
they would have been admitted, had it not been for the
sudden and violent ending of the Jewish nationality. Every
thing old was looked at through the haze and glamour of
supernaturahsm. Everything was idealized ; and everything
modern, as it is to-day with us, was regarded as common,
and not having about it any of those supernatural qualities.
Now as to the settlement of the New Testament canon. A
large number of books which have not come down to the mod
ern world formerly existed, and stood their chances of becom
ing Christian scriptures in the early centuries of the Church.
There was a very large number of gospels, a great many

The Text ajid the Canon. 35
epistles, and numerous apocalypses, or revelations. Under
what kind of influences and at what time was it settled
what should be received as Scripture, and what not ? For
the first hundred or two years, when the Old Testament
was regarded as sacred scripture and treated and spoken of
as such, there was no such feeling for any written books
of the New Testament, because it was the universal belief
of the whole body of the Church that Jesus, after a few
years at the most, was to return again from the skies, and
establish the visible kingdom of God upon earth. In the
face of an expectation like that, what was the use of writ
ten books ? It was only after this dream had faded away
that the Gospels were composed. The Epistles of Paul were
written before, to meet important cases of necessity and
to answer questions arising at the time ; but Paul had prob
ably no idea that there would ever be any controversy as
to whether his doctrines were the absolute truth or not. A
large number of the books were written after this dream had
faded away, and they felt the necessity of having some
present guidance. And as it seemed a long time since
Jesus had disappeared in the heavens, since the apostles had
become memories and ideals, — as it became a wonder for
some old man to be able to say that he had seen one of the
apostles, or that he had seen somebody who had seen one
of them, — they began to venerate and reverence that old
time ; and, as the links which connected them with it more
closely than anything else, they began to reverence the books
and writings that tradition asserted had come down from
this distant past, and which bore in themselves the imprint
of the personality and authenticity of those men that had
actually seen the Lord and claimed to know just what he
said. Under these influences, then, the old Scriptures — old
at that time — came to take on an air of authority, to be

3^ Beliefs about the Bible.
invested with popular reverence, to be looked on as some
thing closely linked with Him who had come out of the
heavens and had disappeared into them, and to have about
them a touch of the divine.
But who settled what books should come in, and which
should stay out ? You will be a little astonished when I say
to you that the question never has been settled, and is not
settled yet. It was settled by the common consent of the
early Church that the four Gospels should be recognized as
a part of the New Testament Scriptures; but there has
been controversy from that day to this concerning such
books as Revelation, as the second and third Epistles of
John, the second of Peter, the Epistle of James, and con
cerning other parts of the New Testament.
Let me give you a hint as to the kind of influences which
came in to determine and settle the question at last. As an
illustration, suppose I take the Apocalypse or Revelation
of John, which was probably one of the earliest of the New
Testament writings. This teaches the immediate or the
speedy coming of Christ in the heavens. While that belief
was prevalent in the churches, the book was very popular.
It was read and accepted everywhere. But when the people
waited, and Jesus did not come, and the dream faded away,
the book itself very naturally fell into disrepute. They
came to believe that the author had been mistaken, or that
he had not been inspired. Again, there was a fluctuation
and a return of feeling in its favor, as this failure of the
prophecies became forgotten. They took it up again, and
began to read it with a new interpretation, idealizing it,
putting a new meaning in its gorgeous, figurative language,
and so getting out of it spiritual edification. They said it
was not intended to be understood as literal truth con
nected with political upheavals and disturbances of that

The Text and the Canon. 37
age. Upon this new tide of feeling, the book came back
into favor. Take again the influence brought to bear on the
Epistle of James. James was supposed to have repre
sented the old First Church in Jerusalem, and was of great
authority in the early Church. He teaches, however, in
this Epistle, salvation by works ; and you know it has always
been a popular Epistle among Unitarians. Paul teaches
just as vigorously salvation by faith alone, and we can trace
the controversy in the early Church here. Those who
believed in Paul did not like the Epistle of James, and
those who believed in James opposed the Epistles of Paul.
There are traces in the New Testament of Paul's Epistles
being treated with the most keen criticism and almost abuse.
Luther said of James it was an epistle of straw, because it
went against his prime doctrine of salvation by faith.
Luther would not have it in the Bible. He proposed also
to leave out the Revelation, saying it was not worth anything,
and should not be there.
I speak of this to show how freely this New Testament
has been handled. Until the days of the Reformation, no
such universal, superstitious feelings have been held as are
prevalent in orthodox circles to-day. The Council of Trent,
in the sixteenth century, a Catholic council, settled finally
for Catholicism the canon of the Bible ; and this included not
only the Old and the New Testaments as we have them, but
the Apocrypha. There has never been any oecumenical
council of Protestants, and so there has never been any
Protestant settlement of the canon of the New Testament.
What, then, are the results at which we arrive ? Is it not
quite clear that, even if there ever has been an infallible
revelation from God in the form of a book, we have in
our hands no means for adequately determining the limits
of that revelation ? I certainly know of no way of deciding

38 Beliefs about the Bible.
whether Revelation and the Epistle of James should be parts
of any such book. Even if I knew that God had given an
infallible revelation in the form of a book, I should not
know what books they were ; and I have no means of
knowing. If we choose to shut our eyes, and take the
authority of an utterly unfounded and unauthentic tradition,
we can settle the question in that way. We can settle any
question by shutting our eyes. But, if we choose to keep
our eyes open, and search for a reason that is satisfactory to
an unbiassed mind, such a reason is nowhere to be found.
So much for the canon. Come now to the text. Here
again let me say, were I sure that God had given an infalli
ble book revelation to the world, I should have no sort of
reason for supposing that I had an accurate verbal copy in
any English, Greek, or Hebrew manuscript now in existence.
We have not a single manuscript of the New Testament
which takes us as near to Jesus as we are to-day to Shak
spere. The oldest manuscript in existence is the Sinaitic. The
next is the Vatican, and the third is the Alexandrian.
The Sinaitic is at St. Petersburg, the Vatican is at the Vat
ican, and the Alexandrian in the British Museum. The
Sinaitic and the Vatican belong to the fourth century, the
Alexandrian to the fifth. We have no manuscript that takes
us back nearer to Jesus than the fourth century. Consider
then, with all these influences to produce variations, what
might have gone on through those three hundred years con
cerning which we are perfectly in the dark, and then tell me
whether there is any reason which appeals to a rational man,
which is capable of making him believe that we have any
one single text of the New Testament so verbally accurate
as to give us assurance that we have really the word of God
as he first spoke it to man. Have we any such accurate

The Text and the Canon. 39
knowledge of texts or words as justifies any Church in
pointing out such a text, and saying that, on the strength of
it, thousands and millions of people are to be sentenced to
eternal doom? If I am to have the question raised concern
ing my eternal welfare, I would like to have it determined on
the real word of God, if such a thing exists, and not on the
possible blunder of a copyist.
Such, then, are the simple facts concerning the text and
the canon of the Bible. As to more special facts concerning
the authenticity and authorship of particular parts of the
Bible, as to when and where and by whom they were written,
what authority they possess, and the nature of that authority,
these will be subjects for future research.

THE PENTATEUCH.

The Pentateuch means the five books, or, perhaps more
strictly speaking, the fivefold book. The limits of it, as it
stands in our Bible to-day, are not precisely what they al
ways have been ; for Joshua and Judges were to be found, in
the old copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with the first five
books, the whole making substantially one composition
which went under the general designation of " the Law."
I shall this morning, however, pay no attention to this fact,
as it is not essential to my purpose. I shall consider only
those books that go by the general name of the Pentateuch.
The traditional belief is that these books were written by
Moses under immediate, divine inspiration, and of course
written before the Jews had entered the land of Canaan.
This is a significant fact to notice, because you will remem
ber Moses, the reputed author, died on the other side of the
Jordan, in the wilderness, at the close of the traditional
forty years' wandering.
These five books contain, among other things, an account
of the creation of the world, the creation of all things that
live, breathe, and move upon the surface of the earth, in
cluding man. They contain an account of the origin and
distribution of nations, the origin of language, or rather of
languages, and the origin and nature of evil, popularly
called the fall of man. Traditionally, they are infallible;
and their teachings are set up as a standard for human

The Pentateuch. 41
belief, a standard to depart from which is, in the popular
estimation, rebellion against God, outright and wicked infi
delity ; and, of course, if the traditional conceptions concern
ing these books be true, then it is rebellion against God to
doubt and deny, or teach anything else. You see then the
practical importance of the question whether there is suf
ficient ground for believing that they are inspired and infalli
bly true.
Those who have held this theory have said that the world
came into existence in such and such manner, and at such
and such a time : therefore, it is sin for science to dare to spec
ulate or to suggest any other time or method ; and, on that
theory, it is sin. It is daring to look the Almighty in the
face, and question the truth of his word. They contain a
certain account of the origin of man ; and it is no wonder
that those who hold this to be infallibly true should be hor
rified at the suggestions of a scientist like Darwin, because,
if Darwin be true, God, according to their theory, is not true.
So concerning all the other questions of which these
books treat. Because God has said, Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live, therefore hundreds and thousands of poor,
excitable, nervous, weak-minded young women and old
women have been tortured and put to death. Because
God has made it the duty of a man to betray to the author
ities any confession of doubt as to the truth of this book,
therefore persecution has become a sacred duty ; and the
men who with bloody hands and flaming torch kindle the
funeral pile may look up in the face of our Father in
heaven, and expect his smile of approval. Because God
has indorsed slavery, polygamy, massacre, wars of extermi
nation, therefore all these things have had their advocates,
even in the recent past, as eternally right.
It becomes then a matter of great practical importance in

42 Beliefs about the Bible.
religion, as well as in science and morals, for us to know
whether this book, as we hold it in our hands to-day, be the
utterance of God or the traditions of men. And, because of
the importance of this, I shall speak as plainly as I can con
cerning the Pentateuch.
There are three main questions that we need to raise and
to answer : —
i . Who wrote it, and when ?
2 . Without regard to who wrote it, is it true ? Does it
tell us the truth in science, history, and chronology ?
3. Without any regard to whether it is true in its history,
its chronology, its geology, its science, are we to accept
its conceptions of God and man as final ? Are they up to
the standard of our nineteenth century religion and morals?
These are the three points that, as briefly as I can con
sistently with clearness, I want to ask you to consider with
me. You will notice that I coupled together, as though they
were one, the two questions, when the Pentateuch was writ
ten and by whom. I do this because these two questions
are inextricably woven together. If we find sufficient reason
to make us believe that Moses wrote it, that settles the
question when it was written. It was written during his life
time. If, however, we find reason to suppose that it was
composed at some later period, then that negatively settles
the authorship : Moses at least did not write it. For this
reason, the questions are practically one.
I want to treat this subject in such a plain and simple way
that you will not think I am going into technical and crit
ical details that are profound, abstract, and far away. I
want to make it simple, practical, and concrete, so that
every man as he opens the book may be his own critic.
Suppose I should take the complete edition of Shakspere's

The Pentateuch. 43
works, and, as I glanced through it, I should find passages
right in the midst of " Macbeth " or " King Lear " or " King
Richard III.," that referred to the telephone or steamboat ? I
should know most certainly that, whatever might be true
concerning the rest of the plays, Shakspere never wrote
those particular passages. I might, however, grant that it
was nothing more than the interpolation of some other
writer, while Shakspere was really the author of all the rest.
But suppose that these passages are so woven into the text
that we cannot tear them out without making a break, leav
ing a gap, which a master like Shakspere never would have
left. Suppose, moreover, that I find woven into the very
substance of some of the plays passages that, by implica
tion, and unconsciously on the part of the author, refer, let
us say, to the corn laws of England, or the agitation concern
ing free trade, or the debate about the disestablishment of
the Church ? Suppose I find these matters taken for granted
throughout the substance of the plays. What should I be
compelled to believe ? I should know that Shakspere never
wrote them, though his name and autograph were on every
page. Though I had a thousand affidavits certified to by the
notaries of the time, still I never could be made to believe
it, because it would be unspeakably absurd on the face of it.
Now let us look at these five books called the books of
Moses, and see if we can trace anything parallel to what I
have alluded to concerning Shakspere. According to the
popular theory, the Pentateuch must have been written in
the wilderness, before the children of Israel entered the
land of Canaan at all. I shall not go into the subject
deeply, but make general statements. What I give you are
only specimens of what may be very much enlarged and
prolonged. As we look over the Pentateuch, we find statements like

44 Beliefs about tlie Bible.
this : Such a thing occurred before there was any king over
Israel. Do you see the significance of that? When was
there a king over Israel? You have got to leap over the
time of the conquest, come down by Joshua and the Judges,
past the time covered by Samuel and his work, down at
least to Saul, years and years after the time of Moses, be
cause there was no king at all in Israel before that time.
Yet here this writer says this took place before there was any
king. Of course, then, he lived after the time when there
was a king ; and he is calling their attention to something
that existed in the long distant past.
Again, we find one of the towns referred to and called by
the name of Hebron ; while we know from Jewish history
that it was not called by that name until after the conquest
of the land, and until after Caleb, one of the leaders of the
people, had conquered this city and had named it Hebron
after one of his sons. Suppose I should find some document
purporting to be written by General Washington, and in that
document he should refer to the city of Chicago. It would
be precisely parallel to this.
Again, there are several passages which say, when such
and such a thing occurred, the Canaanite was then in the
land. The history teaches us that whole generations after
the time of Moses had passed by before the Canaanites were
all expelled. And of course this passage was written long
after the expulsion. Would Captain Miles Standish be likely
to write, Such a thing took place while the Indians were still
in Massachusetts ?
We find another passage like this, — a command to the
people not to remove the ancient landmarks which have
been set up as divisions between one man and his neighbor.
Before any such command could have issued, the people
must have been long in possession of the country. Individ-

The Pentateuch. 45
ual possession must have been established by common con
sent, so that the dividing lines between their property could
be spoken of as ancient. Sentiment had gathered around
them with this sense of personal possession, and the public
mind began to feel that it was wrong to disturb these marks
that separated between the property of one man and that of
another. These are superficial hints ; but the finger-marks of
a later time than that of Moses are all over the Pentateuch.
Let me now give you an idea of the composition of the
Pentateuch, which makes the matter plainer still, if possible.
These five books, or six, if we include Joshua, bear traces
that they are not one single document written by one single
hand all the way through, but that they are a composite, rep
resenting the work of different writers and different periods
of time. So clear and distinct is the work of those several
writers that you can take the book apart into separate pieces
and have at least three separate books, each one quite com
plete and definite by itself. That is, you can have three sep
arate-stories as though written by three individual persons at
three different periods of time.
Suppose that you should go to England and should find
there, somewhere off in the country, a house, the oldest part
of which was of Norman architecture, with a later part in
the Elizabethan style and still another part indicating the
work of the time of Queen Anne. Suppose there was a
local tradition that the three parts were built by one archi
tect who lived in the time of William the Conqueror, that he
was inspired to foresee what the Elizabethan and Queen
Anne styles would be, and that he therefore built the house
with the three styles at one and the same time : would you
credit this story ? It is just as credible, reasonable, and easy
to believe as it is to believe that the first six books of the
Bible were written at the same time and by the same hand.

46 Beliefs about the Bible.
Let me show you how clearly this may be made out. You
may be surprised to know how very modern this work is.
The oldest part of it takes us down to about 621 B.C. We
know from the history of the people that up to this time
they had never known anything of the second and third
parts of the Pentateuch ; that they had not known anything
about the peculiar legislation of the second and third parts ;
that they had shown no indication of obeying what is be
lieved to be the divine legislation of those parts. About
the year 621 B.C., we trace indications of a part of the Book
of Deuteronomy. The oldest part of the Pentateuch goes
by the name of the Book of the Covenants. About the
time of Josiah, we find indications of what is now a part of
Deuteronomy, quite distinct in its legislation, commanding
the people to do things that, up to that time, they had never,
apparently, heard about or done. Straightway, the people
begin to obey this Book of Deuteronomy. They follow its
directions, make it their highest standard, until, in the neigh
borhood of 450 B.C., when Ezra comes back from Babylon,
at the return of the people from the captivity, he brings in
his hand the book of The Law of the Lord, which makes up
the third part of this composite, — the Pentateuch. This is
very markedly different from either of the two preceding
parts. Until the time of Ezra, there is no proof of the
people knowing anything about this part of the law, or being
under any obligation to obey it. After that time, it is the
standard and guide of the people, in the light of which all
the preceding portions are interpreted. It becomes a master
that they at least always claim to obey. Here, then, you
see that we can take these three documents apart, and have
three different stories and three different eras or epochs of
legislation. This is settled beyond question in the mind of
every intelligent and unbiassed critic. A man would prove

The Pentateuch. 47
a lack of scholarship or a lack of fairness by even claiming
a doubt. By these surface indications, by the structure of
the book, it is placed beyond question that Moses did not
write the substance of the Pentateuch or any one of its
books. The historical portions of the Old Testament run
ning parallel with the Pentateuch make all this clear.
Are we, then, to refer nothing of the Pentateuch to Moses ?
Moses was the great traditional leader and law-giver of the
people ; and it was perfectly natural that, as time went on,
they should refer everything back to him. A precisely anal
ogous thing is going on right before our eyes. If you will
only read the development of the doctrines of the Catholic
Church, you will find it is very simple at the outset, growing
more and more complex and composite with every passing cen
tury, — now announcing the doctrine of the immaculateness of
the virgin, then exalting her to be mother of God, a deity,
and taking her to heaven ; then passing from the infallibility
of the Church to the infallibility of the Pope himself, — all this
grand development of doctrine going on, yet the Church claim
ing all the time that it has not changed its doctrine from the
very beginning until now. The Church does not admit that
it has added an article of belief to its faith in all these cen
turies : it is simply formulating now what the Church has
always believed. That is the claim. So the Jews, as time
went on, age after age, simply claimed that they were putting
into new shape what was implied in the work that Moses
did, and which was the teaching of the law of Moses. It is
not peculiar then to ancient times. The process is going
on around us to-day.
Did Moses then have nothing to do with it ? That is a
very hard question to answer. He may have been the author
of the ten commandments, — not in the form in which they
stand to-day, but in some briefer, simpler form, — because,

48 Beliefs about the Bible.
originally, they were called " the ten words." He may have
been the author, then, of the ten commandments. It is
questionable whether we can attribute anything to him
beyond that ; and even so much is not quite certain.
Now let us pass to our second point. The Pentateuch
we have found to be written not by any one person nor at
any one time. It covers centuries, and comes down to at
least 450 B.C. But no matter who wrote it, no matter when
it was written, the most important thing for us to settle is
whether it is true ; whether it contains divine and infallible
truth concerning God, concerning science, concerning mat
ters of chronology and history. If we can find that it is
true, then we can accept it ; and it will become authority to
us. It will be just as authoritative as the multiplication
table ; and it will make little difference who wrote it or when
it was written. Here, again, I can only give you a few ex
amples ; because, to cover the whole ground, would require
a whole book, and a large book at that.
Take the story of the origin of the world, the creation, as
it is told in Genesis. Can we believe it to-day ? It tells us
that the world was created, and not only the world, but the
sun, moon, and stars, the whole visible universe, six thou
sand years ago ; that it was created in six natural days. I
hope that none of you will be deceived in regard to this mat
ter, or put off with any theory of indefinite epochs, such as
have been used to explain the meaning of the word " day.''
The evening and the morning were the first day ; and the
evening and the morning were the second day. The author
definitely tells us that he was talking about days bounded by
the evening and the morning. Nothing can be clearer than
that ; and it is simply shuffling, it is dishonest, it is disingen
uous, playing with words, for anybody to attempt to recon
cile Genesis and science by considering these days as long

The Pentateuch. 49
periods of time. If you so consider them, then the seventh
day, the Sabbath, is a long rest ; and we should have to rest
for six or ten or twenty thousand years. The writer then tells
us that the world was created in six natural days, six thou
sand years ago, and that a certain definite order was followed
in that creation. It says that light was created on the first
day, and that the sun, moon, and stars were created on the
fourth day. According to this, we had light and evenings and
mornings for three days before we had any sun, moon, or
stars ; and, if you are going to stretch those days to long
periods of time, we must have had millions of years of
mornings and evenings before we had sun, moon, or stars.
One other point. It tells us that the fishes and the birds
were created on the same day, and that on the next day the
animals, creeping things, reptiles, etc., were created. Now,
it is a commonplace in scientific knowledge that the reptiles
preceded the birds on earth. Here, again, is a grand mis
take as to the order of the creative work. So much as to
the indications of the difficulties here.
There is another and distinctive account of the creation,
in Genesis, written by a different hand and at a different
time. These two accounts contradict each other. In one,
Adam and Eve were made on the same day. In the other,
Adam was made a day or two, or several long epochs of
time, if you so consider it, before Eve was made. All the
animals were passed in review before Adam, to see if he
could choose one which he could be reconciled to take as a
companion. He does not find any to suit him ; and the
Lord, having decided that it was not good for Adam to be
alone, makes Eve for a companion for him.
Passing from these, let us come to what the Bible has to
tell us in regard to the origin of languages. You know it has
become a great, distinct, wide-reaching science of itself, so

50 Beliefs about the Bible.
that the discovery of any critical point in the development
of a language is enough to make a man famous all over the
world. But does Prof. Whitney or Max Miiller or any
of the great leading linguists of the world ever think of
going back to the Bible to study the building of the Tower
of Babel as having anything to do with the origin and diver
sity of languages ? There is not an intelligent man in the
world who would not smile at the suggestion ; and yet, ac
cording to the popular ideas of Orthodoxy, these men should
go to the plains of Shinar, and accept the fact that the Lord
in heaven, becoming seriously alarmed lest these gigantic
and presumptuous men might scale the -holy heights to his
throne, to prevent such a catastrophe, came down and looked
over the country to see what they were doing, and decided
to confound their language, so that they could not talk to
each other, and thus puts an end to their enterprise. This is
the account the Bible gives us of the origin of languages.
It would be an insult to your intelligence to tell you that it
is not true.
Take two or three figures concerning the Israelites and
their departure from Egypt. It is said that seventy souls
went down into Egypt. At the end of their sojourn there,
they had increased so that there were three millions, — an
utterly incredible story. There were as many Hebrews then
as there were inhabitants in the thirteen colonies at the time
of the Revolution. Out of these three millions, there were,
it is said, six hundred thousand fighting men ; that is, they
had an army as big as the biggest one in modern Europe.
Yet, when they started out, and Pharaoh gathered together
his horses and chariots to pursue them, they whimpered and
cried and were afraid, and called upon Moses as though
they were going to be eaten up, instead of standing up to
fight for their liberty and freedom with their army of six

The Pentateuch. 51
hundred thousand men. It is a little curious, too, since the
Bible tells us that during the plagues in Egypt all the ani
mals were destroyed, how Pharaoh had no trouble in gather
ing horses enough for a large army.
Look at another thing. There were three millions of
people in the land of Goshen, as many as there were in
the whole of the United States at the time of the Revolu
tionary war. Yet word is got around to all these people so
quickly that, in one night, they departed in such haste that
they took their unleavened bread in their kneading-troughs,
taking also their horses, cattle, fowls, all domestic animals,
the old and the young, the sick and the well. The whole of
the three millions of people were notified to gather up
everything that they possessed, and to leave the country in
one night. If anybody can believe that, he need have no
further trouble with Munchausen or the Arabian Nights. It
is utterly incredible and absurd. And when the three mill
ions of people enter Palestine, though the whole country
was not so large as the State of Massachusetts, they are
warned to drive the inhabitants out slowly, lest the wild
beasts of the land get the upper hands of them !
In the third place, look at a few of the implications as to
the religious and moral character of the God of the Hebrews
at this time, and see whether you can accept the religious
and moral teaching of the Pentateuch as valid for us in the
nineteenth century. I want, however, to bear distinct testi
mony to all that is good, grand, tender, and sublime in the
Pentateuch ; and there is a great deal, a great deal that the
highest and most lovely civilization in any age need not be
ashamed of or apologize for. Take the opening words of
Genesis, for example, — though you must remember that
they were written toward the time of Christ, — the sublim
ity of the picture of God saying, Let there be light, and

52 Beliefs about the Bible.
there was light. This conception of God is grand. Again,
we find grand conceptions of him as the thunderer, as he
who dwells in the heavens, who rules over his people, guides
them, loves them, cares for them. All these things I wish
to admit in a word ; but the question is not whether there is
grand and noble teaching, but, Is all the teaching infallible
and inspired ? That is the question. With the answer to
that question the popular theory must stand or fall.
Let us look at a few indications. Let us take this same
God, in the very first chapter of Genesis, in regard to his
creative work. I refer to the puerility of that idea of having
all the animals pass in review before Adam for him to see
if there was any one suitable to be a companion for him.
Take the creation of Eve as given to us, — the Almighty put
ting Adam to sleep, and performing a surgical operation,
taking a bone out of his side and making a woman out of
it : this picture of the infinite God of this universe coming
down and working in that fashion ; and, again, after the fall,
represented as becoming butcher, tanner, and tailor, killing
animals, and out of the skins making coats for Adam and
Eve to wear ! This is what it tells us. You must take these
facts in their Hteralness and simplicity, and not refine them
away with your spiritualizing methods and interpretations.
Take the God who makes this man and woman and puts
them into the garden without the slightest particle of experi
ence, without knowing they had an enemy in all the universe,
and then making not only their own fate, but the fate of all
the world depend on one ignorant act, he himself knowing
that the serpent was coming, yet not a breath or hint of it
given to them. Conceive the state of mind of a people who
believed that the future of the whole human race could
depend on whether they ate an apple or did not, who could
believe and make Jehovah himself believe that the question

The Pentateuch. S3
of the immortality of these sinful people depended on
whether they could taste another apple or not. For it tells
us that God was afraid they would get hold of the tree of
life and become deathless; and, lest such a thing should
happen, lest they should eat of this tree and become immor
tal, he drove them out of the garden and put flaming swords
and dragons at the gate. You must rid yourselves of the
notion that the cherubim were angels. A cherub in the old
Hebrew was a dragon as much as was the one that guarded
the garden of the Hesperides. It was a dragon that was
placed at the entrance to the garden of Eden to keep Adam
and Eve from returning thither.
I have referred to the story of Babel. I will not speak
about the kind of God implied in the story of the flood.
Let me speak rather of the character, the conception of the
God who comes to Abraham in the form of man, with two
angels for companions. He sits down in the tent-door of
the Arab chieftain, while he hastens to bake cakes, to catch a
calf and dress and roast it ; and then the Almighty God of
the universe is pictured as eating roast veal and cakes with
Abraham. That is what it tells us. And, after he makes a
certain promise concerning Sarah, he notices that Sarah is
laughing at him behind his back, because she does not be
lieve a word of what he is saying; and he rebukes her for
her discourtesy. These are some of the pictures that are
given of God in all their crudeness of barbaric conception.
Look at the exodus, and see what kind of a God deals with
Pharaoh and with the children of Israel. He declares be
forehand to Moses that he is going to harden Pharaoh's
heart, so that, in spite of everything he shall do, he will not
consent to their going. He takes upon himself the blame
for the future conduct of Pharaoh, or at least the responsi
bility for it. He distinctly indorses lying at the very outset.

54 Beliefs about the Bible.
He tells Moses to say that they want to go three days'
journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to God. He does
not say anything about running away. He tells them to
deceive Pharaoh, to get his consent on false pretences. And,
for what Pharaoh does, he punishes the whole land of Egypt,
— men, women, and children. Not only that ; but he pun
ishes with disease and death all the poor, innocent cattle
throughout the whole realm, — punishes them for what he has
made one man do.
Let us go on a little further. We find that this God, on
more than one occasion, distinctly and definitely indorses
lying to carry out a purpose. What else does he do ? He
distinctly indorses human sacrifice. It is implied all the
way through. In accordance with this implication, human
sacrifice lasted in Israel till within a few centuries of the
time of Christ. The God of Moses distinctly commands
human sacrifice. He says, if you have vowed to devote a
¦ man unto the Lord in sacrifice, you shall not in any wise
suffer him to be redeemed, he shall surely be put to death.
Take another thing. When Achan sins, what does the
Lord do? He commands Moses to go and separate not
only this one man from the people, but his wives, his
brothers, his sons-in-law, his daughters-in-law, the whole
clan, — men, women, and children, — all the cattle and house
hold goods and effects that he owned ; and then the earth
opens and swallows them up. He punishes with torture and
death not only the man himself, but everybody related to
him, — as though, if one of you here to-day should commit a
larceny or a murder, your whole family — wife, friends, and
relatives — should be tortured and put to death for it.
That is the method in the Pentateuch.
I wonder if you have ever noticed this : that in this same
Pentateuch there is a command that on a certain occasion

The Pentateuch. 55
a city should be captured, and that all the men and all the
married women and little children should be put to death, as
likewise all the cattle ; but that the young, unmarried women
should be saved alive, and distributed among the soldiers and
the priesthood. What do you think of that kind of a god
for the worship of the nineteenth century ? Slavery, polyg
amy, wars of extermination, everything barbaric that you can
name, — I cannot catalogue any more, — you will find in
dorsed somewhere within the limits of the Pentateuch ; and,
if that is the divine and infallible word of God for all time,
then these crimes, these barbarisms that the world has re
pudiated with horror as belonging to uncivilized times, ought
to be recognized as part of the ethical and religious code of
Boston in the nineteenth century.
Is it necessary for us to assume a theory of inspiration to
account for this book of the Pentateuch ? The highest con
ceptions of God which are entertained there were entertained
in Egypt before Moses was born. Its highest and noblest
morals were also held and practised to some extent in
Egypt long before Moses was born. Is it necessary to as
sume inspiration to account for these mistakes in science and
chronology, to account for this conception of God and this
code of morality which we have seen to be so barbaric and
defective ?
In closing, I wish to call your most sincere and earnest
attention to two or three things : —
In the first place, I wish you to note that I have not been
attacking the Pentateuch. I am simply telling you about it.
I am directly and indirectly attacking a theory held concern
ing it, which the Pentateuch neither asserts, implies, nor
indorses. And I wish to say, further, that, when we take
a rational, natural view of the origin of this book, we find
nothing there which need surprise us, nothing there which

56 Beliefs about the Bible.
calls for apology. The views of the origin of the world,
of the nature of God, of the origin of man and of evil, are
similar to those which were entertained by other peoples in the
same relative grade of civilization. They are simply the views
concerning God, man, and the world, through which every
people in its development naturally passes, but in which no
people ought to stay. That is the point. When, then, we
take this natural theory of the origin and growth of these
books, we find what we should expect; and we are com
forted by the consideration that we are compelled to believe
that religion and morality are a part of the nature of things,
and, as such, based on eternal foundations ; that they grow
as nations grow, that they take on the character of special
grades of civilization, that they are lifted up as civilization
is lifted up, that they are enlightened as men are enlight
ened, made broad and tender and humane as men are
brought up to the ideal of their humanity.
But, on the other hand, consider the difficulties that harass
us at every step, if we take the old and traditional theory
of these books. We are compelled perpetually to disingen
uous twisting and turning of texts, in order to bring it any
where into harmony with the demonstrated facts of the
modern world. We are compelled practically to be dis
honest with ourselves in regard both to science and the
inspiration of the Pentateuch. We are compelled to believe
that certain moral characteristics which arose in the bar
barism of the past world are the eternal right and wrong of
God. We are compelled perpetually to apologize for God ;
to explain to men how it could be possible that he who is the
loving, tender Father of men to-day was once the cruel,
bloody, heartless, false persecutor and deceiver of men.
Is it not then something, not to mourn over, but to be
grateful for, to get such a belief in the growth of religion and

The Pentateuch. 57
morality, such a conception of the origin and development
of sacred books, as shall permit us to use our brains, to keep
the tenderness of our hearts, and at the same time to be loyal
to our highest thought of the living God ?

THE PROPHETS.

Lest I should be misunderstood on what is quite an
important point for a general comprehension of the develop
ment of the Hebrew religion, I take this occasion to say that,
if I had pursued the strict chronological order of develop
ment, I should have taken this subject first, and the Penta
teuch afterward. That is, the work of the prophets pre
ceded the law in the shape in which it appears in our Bible
to-day. The period of prophecy, I may say, in a general
way, stretches from the eleventh or twelfth century B.C. to ¦
the fifth century B.C. Parts of the Pentateuch appeared at
various times during this period ; but it was not brought into
its present shape, as we have it now, until the greater part
of the work of the prophets had been accomplished, some
where within the fifth century ; so that, chronologically speak
ing, instead of saying the Law, the Prophets, and the Writ
ings, we should say the Prophets, the Law, and the
Writings. Please bear this in mind, so as not to misunder
stand the real order of development, as I give you some
indications of the crude and barbaric origin of prophecy
among the Jews.
The traditional idea of prophecy, the one in which I
myself grew up as a boy, and which I held even in the
beginning of my own ministry, and that which, I believe, is
widely prevalent in the public mind, is that the prophets

The Prophets. 59
were a distinct order of men, appearing only among the
Hebrews, and leaving traces of themselves only in the
religion of Israel and in the Old Testament; that they
were in a certain sense a homogeneous body of men ;
that though they might be like the different instruments in
an orchestra, each playing his own special part, yet, to
gether, they made one music ; that they had substantially the
same ideas of right and wrong, and those the very highest,
the divine and unchanging ideas of ethics ; that they had
substantially the same ideas concerning God, all agreeing
in the highest, most refined, sublimated, and spiritual
thoughts of God, such as are fitted to lead on and lift the
thought of the world forever. Beyond this, it is a part of
the popular idea that one of the main duties of the prophets
was to foretell future events, things that were to occur fifty,
a hundred, or a thousand years in the future, which, by no
possibility, could be foreseen except by some one directly
and supernaturally illuminated by the divine spirit itself;
that, thus illuminated, they became a direct proof of the
supernatural nature of religion, one of the foremost pillars
to uphold the popular conception of the supernatural char
acter of the Bible, and the religion it represents.
I remember when I used, as a theological student, to be
considering the great matter of Christian evidence, that the
miracles and the prophets were placed side by side, like
the two great pillars, Jachin and Boaz, that stood in the
porch of Solomon's temple. Miracles and the prophets were
the two unimpeachable supernatural evidences of divine
inspiration and the infallibility of the Bible.
The special thing that the prophets were able to see and
foretell, as was supposed, was the coming Messianic kingdom.
They were commissioned to outline in unmistakable terms
the figure of Jesus as the coming Messianic King, and thus

60 Beliefs about the Bible.
to foreshadow all the glory of his divine and eternal reign.
This seems to me to be a fair representation of the tra
ditional idea of the prophets and their work. I shall only
treat it indirectly, as I go on with my subject.
Let me call your attention to three quite distinct and
definite phases of the development of prophecy among the
Jews. I do not mean to say that these three are clearly
outlined, following one after another, without any very
marked connection between them. I only say that, in the
continuous line of development, from the seer or soothsayer
up to Isaiah, there are marked phases that it is worth while
to notice.
In the first place, as I open the Bible, I find sixteen books,
four called the major prophets and twelve the minor, repre
senting the work of those whose writings or sayings have
been traditionally preserved for us. A part of these sixteen
books were not spoken, not preached, not delivered at all,
but were simply written. Some of them were undoubtedly
spoken, and then written out afterward either by the
prophet himself or by some one who heard him, who sup
posed himself to be correctly reporting what the prophet
said. As you look over any one of them, — Isaiah, for example,
— you will find that a very small part of it even pretends to
be given in the form of prediction, to foretelling anything
that is about to take place in the immediate or in the far-
distant future. Neither are we to understand that all of
these books were written by the persons whose names stand
at their heads in all cases, nor that any one of them was
written through, just as it stands, by any one author. At
least, it is safe to say that, in a large number of cases, they
represent a variety of authorship. They are made up as one
might make up the speeches of Burke or Sheridan, if he had

The Prophets. 61
only fragments of them, parts written here and there, col
lected without much regard to their quality, and without
much regard to their chronology or place or time of
delivery, the whole collected perhaps many years after they
were spoken, and edited by some one who should put them
in final shape for posterity. This is the general conception
that you are to have of these written prophecies.
Now for the contents of some of them. Suppose we open
Isaiah, and indicate briefly some specimens of the topics
treated. In one chapter, he goes on to encourage the people
when they are in distress and are downcast by giving them
general promises of the divine favor, and by assuring them
of deliverance after they shall have received the requisite
amount of punishment which they have deserved, and which
he declares to be for their good. Then, he rebukes the
tyranny, the impurity, the idolatry, or some other sin, of the
king or some of the great ones at court. Then, he will turn
to animadvert very severely on the fashionable frivolities of
the ladies of Jerusalem at that time, describing the tinkling
ornaments, the wristlets and anklets and bells, and telling
them they would certainly meet with divine judgment and
retribution for this lightness and frivolity of life. Then, the
prophet takes up some burden concerning the present condi
tion of Egypt or Assyria, threatening divine judgment on
them for their encroachment on the people of God, or some
judgment on the king for entertaining the idea of alliance
with these foreign powers. Then, idol worship in the high
places, the mingling of the people in the lascivious worship
of Ashera, the Syrian Venus, are reproved. In this way, the
prophet is more a preacher of righteousness than one who
foretells events that are to take place at some future time.
In some few places there may be what may be called proph
ecies ; but what they mean I shall consider later.

62 Beliefs about the Bible.
Now take a step back, and see another type of prophet.
Take the prophet Elijah. He wrote nothing. None of his
speeches, if he ever made any, have been recorded. There
are only isolated words or sayings. He is not the man of
writing, the man with a pen, the man of words. He is a
man of deeds, the actor, the one who appears at some crisis
of the nation's history, and casts into the scale of what he
believes to be right and truth the tremendous weight of his
supposed supernatural, divine influence. He stands up for
what he believes to be the rights of the people, and attacks
the tyranny and idolatry of the king. He appears like a
meteor flashing across the startled sky of one of those old
superstitious kings, and then disappears again into the night.
Like John the Baptist, he dresses himself in sackcloth, eats
whatever he can find in the wilderness, spends years at a
time living in the desert places or concealed among the few
people who believed in him, and at some crisis epoch of the
people appears, suddenly startling the king and nobility out
of their semi-secure state. He appears to Ahab, and an
nounces that for three and one half years it shall not rain,
and then disappears. At the end of that time, he suddenly
reappears to Ahab, as he is far away from the capital, and
tells him to hasten to the palace ; for he hears the sound of
rain. He then goes up into a mountain, and sees a little
cloud no larger than a man's hand, which spreads over the
sky. Then, in that wild, rapid, frenzied way of the times, he
cries out, runs down to Ahab, and in front of his chariot till
he reaches the royal city of Samaria. This is a different
type of prophet from Ezekiel or Isaiah.
Go back, and note a third phase, earlier still than these.
Here is Samuel, not worshipping in the temple, for there is
no temple ; having no fear about the high places ; worship
ping God under the image of a bull or golden calf, as it is

The Prophets. 63
called in some parts of the Bible ; and engaged in the prac
tice of what we should call to-day clairvoyance, soothsaying,
or, except for the evil significance of it, witchcraft. He is
the man to whom Saul goes to find out where something is
that has been lost. We find, in connection with this sort
cf_g2j£rjtjgcy, there were what were called schools of the
prophets,-— gatherings of young men who lived in the same
place, and who were susceptible to this same curious kind of
influence which came upon them, and who, when they were
under this influence, acted like madmen, stripped off their
clothes, lay for a day and a night naked upon the ground,
uttering meaningless cries and sounds, and were supposed,
while in this condition, to be controlled, guided, by the
indwelling spirit of the God who had taken possession of
them. I want now to show you what kind of influence this was,
and how it was interpreted by the people.
If we go back to ancient Greece, we shall find they had
one method of divination which was by the casting of dice.
They had painted dice, and, after going through some relig
ious ceremony, or praying to some particular god, they threw
these dice, and then interpreted the will of the god accord
ing to the indications of the throw. As we read about that
in the heathen writers, it strikes us as utterly irreligious, as
promotive of anything but piety or spiritual worship. Yet
do not be startled when I tell you that the eleven apostles,
after the suicide of Judas, took precisely this method for
getting at the divine will as to the appointment of the
twelfth man to take the place of the betrayer. If you
remember the story in the Book of Acts, it says that the
apostles gathered together and picked out two men, either of
whom they thought would be a fitting one to fill this impor
tant office. Then, they prayed to God and cast lots, or threw

64 Beliefs about the Bible.
dice, as we should say. In this way, as they supposed, was
indicated the will of God as to which one of the two should
be the chosen.
There is another thing worth our notice in this connection
in the New Testament. In the Book of Acts, it says that, at
the time of the Pentecost, when the divine spirit came lifer 'a
rushing mighty wind, and when the Holy Ghost like cloven
tongues of fire appeared on the heads of the members of the
infant church there gathered, the disciples spoke with tongues.
Remember that the Book of Acts was written a great many
years after Paul wrote his Epistles. Tradition had enlarged
the original story until the writer really supposed, and tells us,
that these persons spoke so that the different nationalities that
were gathered there all understood them, each speaking in
his own language.
Now go back a step, and see what Paul says about this
same phenomenon. Paul tells us that there were a great
many different gifts of the spirit among the young churches.
Some understood the gift of prophecy, some had gifts of
healing, some could lay their hands on others and they
would receive the spirit. Among these gifts was one called
the gift of tongues. Those who read the New Testament
superficially suppose this was the gift of speaking in other
languages ; and this is what the author of Acts had in mind.
If you study the language of Paul carefully, you will find
nothing of the kind. The man who has the gift of tongues
thrills, quivers, sighs, rolls up his eyes, is in a rapt, " pos
sessed " condition, and in this condition he pours out a stream
of meaningless sounds ; he babbles. This is what Paul
means when he tells us about speaking with tongues. But
he and the early Church supposed this was a divine utterance
of the spirit of God who had taken possession of the per
sons, and that the sounds, meaningless to ordinary hearers,

The Prophets. 65
contained some divine message which required an inspired
interpreter to tell the people what it was. Do not seek this
gift of tongues, he says, because it does not edify, unless
there is some one who can interpret. Do not bring discredit
on the young Church by seeking to practise these gifts,
unless there is some one present with the divine power of
interpreting these meaningless cries, and of telling the
people the message that ought to be conveyed. He dis
tinguishes this from what he calls prophecy by saying he
would rather prophesy, or speak five words that people could
understand, than any number of words in a tongue. It is
not an unknown tongue. The translators, supposing that
was what he meant, put in the word " unknown." It is not in
the original.
This same phenomenon reappeared in modern London
under the preaching of the famous but eccentric Edward
Irving. But that which was divine inspiration in the first
century was repressed as an impropriety in the nineteenth.
Now come back to the Old Testament, and find some
traces of the method by which the people believed they
could come into possession of divine knowledge. It was
very common for the people, when they wanted to find out
any hidden thing, to go to the high priest and ask him to
divine by Urim and Thummim. What were these ? They were,
it is thought, bright precious stones which were set in the
high priest's breastplate. We do not know how they used
them ; but, in some way, these precious stones were supposed
to have the magical power of divination. The high priest,
as the result of some special ceremony or sacrifice, by the
use of these stones, precisely as a modern fortune-teller by
cards, was able to tell secrets, and answer the questions of
those who came to him.
We do not know, as I said, the special method of using

66 Beliefs about the Bible.
these stones ; but, as a possible hint, I may say there are a
great many stories of magical stones that were supposed,
after a religious ceremony, to have the power of disclosing
what was going on in distant places by a series of shadows
passing across the face of the stone itself, so that the person
who held the stone to his eye could see these moving pict
ures. Whether this was the way in which they divined the
future by Urim and Thummim, I do not know.
There was another method of divination that was by the
use of the ephod. This was a curious girdle of the priest,
which again in some way, the actual report of which has not
come down to us, was used in processes of divination.
They also used the teraphim, small idols, in the same way.
You will recollect that Rachel, when fleeing from her father,
laid so much stress on these portable deities that she stole
them from her father and hid them in the furniture of her
camel and sat upon them, thinking thus she should be able
to keep with herself the divine favor and magical protection
that went along with the little images of the gods.
I speak of these things as common throughout the Old
Testament. Let me give you one or two as illustrations, for
it seems as though people read the Bible with their eyes
shut, or else as though they considered these things as some
thing entirely distinct from the practices of other nations and
other religions.
Let us stand for a moment with Moses in the presence of
Pharaoh, and see him holding his magical rod in his hand.
[Moses, of course, was looked on by Pharaoh as a sooth
sayer, a magician, a prophet like those he already knew, and
jany number of whom he had about him. When Moses
flings down his rod, and it turns to a serpent, all the others
throw theirs down, and they turn into serpents also. Moses
possesses no power which is not common to the other magi-

The Prophets. 67
cians, except — and here is the indication of the interpreta
tion given by a later belief to these old traditions — the God
of Moses was a greater God than the God of Pharaoh.
Moses did not doubt the existence of the gods of Egypt.
There is no trace of that whatever. Until after the time of
David, there was no doubt as to the reality of the existence
of the gods of other peoples. Moloch and Dagon and As
tarte were real gods. The only point was that Yahveh, the
god of the people of Israel, was above all the others, a
greater god than any of the rest. That was proved satisfac
torily to Moses, when his serpent ate up all the other ser
pents. These magicians could turn their rods to serpents,
but only his serpent could eat the others. This showed the
supremacy of the God of Moses.
When a king went to war, it was not simply a war be
tween two peoples and their kings, but it was a war between
their gods also ; for Dagon on one side and Yahveh on the
other were supposed to fight just as much as the Philistine
king and the king of Israel and their followers. Precisely
the same is true in the Iliad. There the Greeks and Tro
jans were fighting on the plains, but the air was thick with
the gods of Olympus urging on and inspiring the champions,
guiding the dart of one, the spear of another, overthrowing
the horses and chariots, so that, when the day was done, it
was a question whether the conquest was achieved by the
people or by the invisible gods and goddesses of the air.
We find these ideas throughout ancient times, and they are
as apparent all over the surface of the Old Testament as in
the tales of the Greek and Roman mythologies.
Let me give you an illustration of the way the Greeks
used to divine, and see how all this belongs to one stage of
development. Had you gone to Dodona, in Greece, you
would have found there one of the most famous of all the

68 Beliefs about the Bible.
ancient oracles. Any one who came to Dodona could ask a
question as to the future, or about any hidden thing, and get
an answer from the priest in charge. How did the priest
get his information ? He listened to the rustling of the wind
in the supposed sacred Dodona oaks and beeches ; and he
claimed to have the divine power of interpreting the sounds
made by this rustling, and thus getting the divine message.
Suppose you were to go to another famous oracle of the
Greeks, perhaps the one best known, the oracle of Delphi.
What would you have found there ? A temple built over a
chasm, or cave, from which issued a vapor ; and this vapor
either actually had, or was supposed to have, the power of
setting nervous organizations, such as were adapted to be
priests at Delphi, into a mesmeric or convulsive condition.
Whatever was true under its influence, it was only such an
influence as you could produce by giving certain gases now.
The person becomes unconscious ; and before he is entirely
gone, as we say, he gives utterance to certain words or inco
herent sounds and cries. These words were supposed to be
the utterance of the gods who had taken possession of them,
and these were the answers that were given to those who
came to inquire at their shrine.
This excited condition was sometimes induced by the aid
of instruments of music, as in the case of Samuel. The
school of prophets was preceded by the harp, the tabret, and
pipe. We find this the case all over the world among bar
baric people. Certain persons who are very susceptible are
wrought on by these sounds until they are supposed to be
in a religious frenzy and able to give divine messages to the
people. It is also produced by drugs of certain kinds. In
India, the Soma, a drink capable of producing intoxication,
was formerly worshipped as a god, and the person under its
influence was supposed to be delivering a divine message.

The Prophets. 69
Many of these things, though haloed by the glamour of
distance and the superstitious reverence that gathers about
the past, were precisely analogous to the results of religious
frenzy as exhibited in the excitement of modern revivals.
He who — as I have — has attended a negro revival meeting,
or who has attended a Methodist church on the frontier, and
has seen a man or woman rolling on the floor, possessed by
"the power," knows what ignorance is ready to call divine.
Again, one of the prevailing beliefs common all through
the Bible, in the New Testament as well as the Old, was in
the divine meaning of dreams. Either the person himself,
or some other person for him, could interpret these dreams.
Joseph had the power of dreaming and of interpreting his
own dreams. Pharaoh had wonderful dreams, but he had to
call Joseph in to give him the meaning. The people had
no doubt that these dreams brought a meaning from the
other world, and that thus they came into the possession of
divine secrets.
Let me now give you the underlying idea, the common
belief of barbaric men out of which all these beliefs have
sprung. You are aware, perhaps, that the soul and body
have been regarded in almost all ages, from earliest times
certainly, as quite separable and distinct from each other,
not only as capable of being separated at death, but
temporarily, so that the spirit could go out of a man, and
he could lie like a vacant house with no occupant, till it
came back ; or, during his absence, another spirit could come
in, and take possession. To take possession of a man, then,
merely meant that some other spirit had come into his
body, and made him do what it would, in spite of the man's
individuality. We have a reminiscence of this in our com
mon language. We say of a person that has fainted, " He
has gone." That used to mean the soul had gone, had left

70 Beliefs about the Bible.
the body. Even now, when a person is getting over a
fainting fit, we say he is "coming to," — his soul is coming
back to the body. We carry this survival of the once
universal idea into our language to this day. It was
believed in all sincerity in the Old Testament and New;
it was believed in Homer ; it was believed all over the
world, in a certain stage of human culture, that the soul could
go away and come back, or that another soul could take
possession. It was believed — Cicero teaches it, Philo
teaches it, all of them teach it — that, when the soul goes off
in a dream, the scenes which pass through the person's mind,
the conversations it engages in, are just as real as any event
of waking life. They had no idea of the philosophy of
dreaming ; and, if a man fell asleep, and during that sleep
had a talk with a neighbor, and told when he waked up that
he had seen such an one, and had had such a conversation
with him, they believed that it had really happened. It is
perfectly natural then that out of this should spring the
idea of possession by another spirit. For example, a person
is seized with a fit of epilepsy and falls into a swoon and
goes through certain motions, or, as in delirium, carries on
conversation with others. When he comes out of it, he is
told that he said so and so, or did such things ; and he very
frankly replies, " No, I did not say it, I did not do it." He
has no memory, no consciousness of it. It was the most
natural thing that they should have thought that such a
person had been taken possession of by another will, by a
disembodied spirit, and, while in this condition, the spirit
had made him do these things, and had thus talked through
him. It takes only one more step to say that in this way we can
get divine revelations ; and people who were susceptible to
these influences, people who were easily wrought upon,

The Prophets. J\
nervous persons, who had a tendency toward any of these
peculiar psychological phases of development, who were
inclined to hysterics and epilepsy, — these, as we know, were
the ones who were sought out to serve as priests and medi
ums between this world and the next.
You are aware perhaps that among barbaric peoples,
among the North American Indians, among the Arabs still,
among all people in that stage of culture, that an insane man
is looked on as inspired, and he is treated with the utmost
tenderness and care. His words are watched as though
instinct with divine meaning, or, if not inspired by a good
being, they think possessed by a bad being. All through
the New Testament, down through almost the entire history
of the Catholic Church, this belief in demoniacal possession
is very apparent ; and the business of the exorcist, or one
capable of driving the spirit out, was one of the most im
portant functions exercised by the priesthood.
Here, then, we have the root of all the traditional beliefs
concerning divine possession, prophecy, revelation through
another. These prophets of the Old Testament back in the time of
Baalam, Samuel, past Elijah till we come to Isaiah, and the
grandest development of prophetic life among the Jews, all
believed that they were taken possession of by the spirit, and
that they were speaking not their own words, but the words
of this indwelling power, which for the time being had sub
dued their own aptitudes and faculties, and simply used them
for this purpose.
I do not wish you to understand that, because I have
given you thus the root of prophecy, I have not the
highest and ' noblest feeling of respect toward the grandest
fruits and noblest outcome of it in Hebrew history. It is
nothing against astronomy that it had its beginning in astrol-

72 Beliefs about the Bible.
ogy. It is nothing against chemistry that it had its*begin-
ning in alchemy. It is nothing against any of the grand
scientific developments of the world that all human culture,
if traced down, finds its roots in crudeness, in ignorance, in
senseless speculations. The function of prophecy among
the Hebrews was one of the grandest, in its higher develop
ments, that has ever been seen in the history of any religion
on the face of the earth. The prophet was the tribune of
the people, standing between the tyrant and the wronged,
lifting up his voice for the noblest ethics and the grandest
religious ideas of his time. It is indeed true that the
earlier prophets did not teach the morality which we should
expect of the leading teachers of to-day, but they taught the
highest of their age. It is true that many of the earlier
prophets were not monotheists. They believed in a great
many gods. They worshipped images of Yahveh in the
high places. Elisha and Elijah were not monotheists. They
lived in the northern kingdom, after it was separated from
Judah. The first thing the leader of the northern kingdom
did was to set up two golden oxen, images of Yahveh, — for
God was worshipped at this time under the images of these
golden calves, — as other people worshipped their gods under
some other form. These great laws against idolatry were
developed a long time after David and Elijah and Elisha.
It was a later outcome of the religious development ot the
people. They worshipped Yahveh under these images.
They were not scandalized at idol worship, and that the
symbols of the worship of some other god stood right along
side their own : only they felt that Yahveh was their special
God, and they recognized him as supreme.
We look back at these prophets, and, thrown into shadow
by their sides or leading up to them, we see the indis
tinct outline of other prophets who have been forgotten

The Prophets. 73
They, in their time, were believed in as much as Elijah or
Elisha. As time goes by, it sifts and gleans the gold from
the sand ; and as we look back, down the ages, we fix our
minds on Elisha, Elijah, Samuel, Isaiah, Micah, Amos, those
great men. Why ? Not because they were believed in
chiefly by the people of their time, but because they really
were the men who stood for the highest and grandest things
of their age ; and the others were pronounced, after the age
had gone by, to be false prophets, because it had been
proved by experience that the things they stood for and
taught were not the highest truth of the time. The process
of selection was as natural as that by which we take out
Abraham Lincoln and Gov. Andrew as the ones that best
represented the ideas that experience shows were the highest
and truest of their time, those to which victory was given,
and which have been made the dominant ones of the age.
These people, then, did a grand service for Israel. It is
these prophets that we have to thank for the highest and
finest outflowering of the religious life of the people ; and
the idea which they represented was higher than any relig
ious development that the world had then seen. When Jesus
said God is to be worshipped, not in this particular place or
that, but in spirit and in truth, because he is spirit, he was
only echoing the grandest sayings of Micah and Isaiah and
Ezekiel. They taught this grand spiritual religion. They
stand as representatives and prophets of monotheism to all
coming time. We shall not be able to get any higher,
sweeter notions of religion than some which they taught.
All we can do is to take the germ, develop and apply it
broadly over human society. When Mica:h says, " What
doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " he has given us
as fine a definition as the world has yet attained. We can-

74 Beliefs about the Bible.
not improve the definition : all we can do is to live it out.
There is one other point as important as any of which
I have treated, and that is the question whether the prophets
did ever foretell things that were to come to pass in the far dis
tant future in such a way as to indicate that they had anything
in the way of supernatural knowledge. I answer in one
word, No. There is no proof whatever that the prophets
had any supernatural knowledge of the future in any degree
beyond that of any shrewd observer of the forces at work
in his time, who has learned to understand that every
condition is a cause that must be followed by its natural
effect. Let me take up two or three typical examples, that
I may show you how true this is. It is commonly said that
Jeremiah prophesied that the Jews would go into captivity
for seventy years, and then return. He does make that
prophecy, but it was not fulfilled. It is common to say that
it was ; but they reach the fulfilment by doctoring the facts,
by fixing an arbitrary time for the beginning and an arbitrary
time for the ending of the period. In that way, they can
reach to about sixty-six years. They say that that is near
enough, and call it seventy years ; but it is a purely arbitrary
process, and is beneath the notice of any intelligent and
respectable critic.
Again, Ezekiel in the twenty-sixth chapter makes a definite
prophecy that Tyre, on the eastern shore of the Mediter
ranean, was to be conquered by Nebuchadnezzar and his
army. It was to be utterly destroyed, so that the bare
rock on which it was built was to be a place for the spread
ing of nets by the fishermen. The city of Tyre has been
destroyed, and there is not much left but the bare rocks ; and
the fishermen have probably spread their nets a great many
times on them since that day. But the critical point is that
it was not done by Nebuchadnezzar, nor for a great many

The Prophets. 75
years after his time. It was really destroyed by Alexander
the Great, when going East for the conquest of Persia.
So this prophecy was not fulfilled.
Take that prophecy supposed to be connected with the
New Testament and the development of Christianity. Isaiah
says, A virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son, and
his name shall be called Immanuel. Then, it goes on to
say that, before this child grows to be old enough to distin
guish good from evil, a definite event, which is close at
hand, shall happen. This prophecy has been always applied
to Jesus, and it has been supposed to be a confirmation of
the most stupendous miracle of history. In the first place,
Isaiah does not say anything about a virgin : he simply says
a young woman. For all that the word means in the
original, she might have been married half a dozen times.
Then, it is definitely stated that the event which is to take
place is not in any far distant future. It is to occur before
the child shall be old enough to know good from evil.
It is only a faith so blind that it will not see, that dares, in
the face of modern scholarship, to bring up a case like this
as an example of a prophecy relating to a far distant event,
and to claim that it has been fulfilled.
I say then, in general terms, that there is not a single case
in the Old Testament of a distinct and definite prophecy of
a distant event, where there is satisfactory proof that it was
ever fulfilled. The prophets themselves did not claim to
exercise any such power of foretelling events.
What did they do ? They did just what any of us can do
in a measure. If, for example, I should examine a railroad
bridge, and find one of the abutments or piers was crum
bling, and that with every train that went over it it grew
weaker and weaker, it would not take any supernatural
knowledge to say that some day the bridge would fall, and

j6 Beliefs about the Bible.
involve ruin and disaster. If I were to see that there was
a growing hatred of France on the part of Germany, and a
growing power in Germany to accumulate money, to equip
and train magnificent armies, and if, by and by, something
should happen to give Germany the opportunity it desired
to declare a war with France, it would not require supernat
ural knowledge to prophesy desolation as the result. If I
see any one of you breaking the laws of health, it does not
need divine inspiration to foretell the sequel.
These prophets then foretold that, unless people repented
and forsook their evil ways, such and such calamities would
naturally and necessarily follow ; and this grew out of their
belief that God was a sovereign who loved righteousness,
and would not suffer his laws to be permanently disobeyed.
This is the sum of what is genuine and worthy your notice
among the prophecies of the Old Testament.
I want to give you one or two illustrations outside of the
Bible, to show you that there is no need of supernatural aid
to foretell some things which are very startling. Look at
the prophecies of Lord Chesterfield, of Arthur Young,
of William Cobbett, of Heine, of David G. Crowley. If
they had been in the Old Testament, they would have been
picked out as those of the most astonishing nature. They
are more definite in their terms, and more completely ful
filled, than anything that the Bible anywhere contains.
Lord Chesterfield was that famous dandy, a writer and
thinker of a certain sort, a person of whom some one once
said that he would have been a philosopher, if the universe
had been a drawing-room ; a man of no character, one far
from the ideal of a prophet. He prophesied, long before
the time, the coming of the French Revolution. Arthur
Young, a traveller and shrewd thinker and observer, prophe
sied the same thing, when no one in Europe dreamed of its

The Prophets. TJ
possibility. William Cobbett did a more wonderful thing.
He was a farmer of marked ability, a good thinker, a writer
of good English. At the very beginning of this century, he
prophesied the secession of the Southern States. David G.
Crowley, in a magazine which was published in New York in
1872, — which is no longer published, — prophesied the great
panic which swept over this country and ruined so many
business men. He went so far as to say that this would
probably be precipitated by the failure of the Northern
Pacific Railroad and the bankers connected with it. But
the most remarkable prophecies of the modern world are
those of Heine, the German poet, a man of whom it has been
said that he read all the sanctities of morals and religion
backward, a man who was bitter, cynical, malevolent toward
his enemies, ungrateful to his friends, thoughtless, sarcastic ;
not a man that would be supposed to be selected by the
Supreme Being as a medium of prophecy. He prophesied,
long before Europe and America dreamed of such a thing,
the war between Germany and France, and that France would
be utterly overthrown ; he spoke of the line of forts which
Thiers was building around Paris, saying that the enclosing
army would crush the city like a contracting iron shroud ;
that the communists would arise in their fury; that they
would strike at the fine public buildings, and the higher
developments of science and art ; and that, in the midst of
great popular disturbances, they would hurl the Vendome
column to the ground. These are specimens of some sec
ular prophets and their work. I venture to say that nothing
in the sacred literature of the world is so definitely outlined
and so exactly fulfilled. They were based upon a skilful
reading of the forces of the world and upon a knowledge of
the laws of cause and effect.
Prophecy in Israel at last died out, and was superseded by

78 Beliefs about the Bible.
the Law and its interpretations in the synagogues ; and the
synagogues were the direct predecessors of the Christian
Church. We need not regard it as a loss that there is no power of
foreseeing the future. It would undoubtedly be to us a
calamity; and yet we do have the power to read just as much
of it as we need to know. As Patrick Henry once said,
No one can read the future, except in the light of the past.
In the light of that past, tracing the causes and the forces
that work in human history, we are able to tell the natural
and necessary results of any forces we choose. Instead of
this delusive light that comes in the absence of reason, that
takes possession of the brain, and sweeps away a man's will
and a man's intelligence, and utters meaningless intimations
concerning the future, — instead of that, we find to-day God
and his eternal truth by the development of reason, by its
broadest use in every department of human life, by humbly
studying the facts of the universe, and deducing their laws,
and thus tracing the causes at work that have made the
present and that are making the future.

THE WRITINGS.

Not long after the return of the Jews from captivity, that
section of the • Old Testament which went by the name of
the Law, the principal part of which was the Pentateuch,
came into its present condition. It is said that Ezra returned
from Babylon with the law of the Lord in his hand. Some
time after this, — perhaps during the fourth century before
Christ, — the second collection of the Old Testament was
made, and generally accepted among the people. This sec
ond collection went by the name of the Prophets, and it is
this of which I treated in my last discourse.
After the Law and the Prophets had been collected, and
had been received universally by the people, and had acquired
that character of peculiar sacredness which made them re
garded as the very word of God, there still remained a large
body of miscellaneous writings which had not yet acquired
this character of sacredness. They were coming, however,
to be looked upon as having a peculiar, precious character
or quality, which set them apart from any and all other
books excepting those which were already accepted in the
canon. These miscellaneous writings were twelve in number.
They were the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon,
Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra,
Nehemiah, and Chronicles. These were the twelve books
which made up the collection which was called the Writings.
In the New Testament, when you find the Old Testament

80 Beliefs about the Bible.
referred to, it is generally under the name of the Law and
the Prophets, or the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms.
Jesus is sometimes represented as using this last phrase.
Those three terms cover the whole of the Old Testament
literature, the word " Psalms " being used first as the most
important part of the collection, and thus giving name to the
whole. I remember James Freeman Clarke published a vol
ume of sermons, in which the name of the first sermon is
used as the title of the whole book. In just this way, the
third collection went by the name of the Psalms, because
it was the first and most important part.
I shall not be able to go into any minute and critical
examination of each of these twelve books, for I neither
have time nor is it necessary for the purpose I have in view.
My object is to consider the origin, authority, and authen
ticity of the books that make up our Bible, so that we maj
understand how we ought to treat them, how much obedi
ence we ought to yield to them, and what relation they bear
to the other great books of the world, what relation they
bear to the conduct of our daily life.
It will not be necessary for me to touch at length on many
of these books. I will only characterize them in a word, and
concentrate the attention of the morning on three or four of
chief importance.
The Chronicles in the Hebrew copy of the Scriptures
stood as the very last book, although it has been placed
before the Prophets in our modern collection. It is a some
what loosely written history, derived from the Temple archives
and historical records, which either were not accessible to
the writer of Samuel and Kings, or which for one reason or
another he failed to use. It is of no special importance,
and need not detain us.
Daniel has played a very important part in the history of

The Writings. 81
Christian speculation. It stands, as you know, as the fourth
of the major prophets, and goes by the name of prophecy.
During the larger part of the Christian centuries, it has been
understood that it was written by Daniel himself during his
captivity in Babylon, and that it is a distinct prophecy con
cerning great future events which, in majestic figure and
vision, are outlined and foreshadowed. Yet the Book of
Daniel, as a matter of fact, was the very last one which the
Jews received into their canon. Instead of having been writ
ten in the sixth century, it was written probably in the second
century, during the time of some of the Jewish wars, per
haps under the tyranny of Antiochus, with the purpose of
encouraging the people in times of very great oppression.
Yet this book has been characterized in all earnestness as
a " pious fraud," meaning by that not what we should mean,
were that term used to characterize any modern composition.
The writer of Daniel had no idea of doing anything wrong.
He believed he was justified in the work in which he was
engaged. He was an earnest lover and friend of his people,
and desired to comfort them, and strengthen their hearts
and hands in the great conflict in which they were engaged,
to keep them patient until they should be victorious and
reorganized. He writes this book, and attributes its author
ship to Daniel, a person who lived some hundreds of years
before. He thought, by sending it out under the authority
of this great name, it might speedily take hold of the popu
lar mind and heart, and produce the desired effect. Yet
this book has been the one to which the Second Adventists
have appealed. A book from whose mystical figures people
have dared to read the future, year after year and age after
age, dealing with "a time, times, and a half," with the big
horn and the little horn, and with the beasts, in their en
deavor to picture the future course and destiny of nations.

82 Beliefs about the Bible.
You will judge from the time when the book was written
how very little profit there has been in this kind of specula
tion. Esther is a very peculiar book, one that the Jews long
looked at askance before receiving it into their canon. It is
marked by the fact that it does not contain the name of
God, and has no religious character about it whatever. The
Jews, while they were in captivity, adopted a feast called the
Purim, which became one of their most famous feasts, and
to which they were greatly attached. After the return from
the captivity, it was difficult to make this feast popular in
Palestine. Undoubtedly for the purpose of giving a plausi
ble Jewish origin to this festival, and to make it acceptable
to the Palestine Jews, this book was written. At least, such
is its probable scope and purpose.
Ruth is a beautiful pastoral idyl, one of the most beauti
ful things in the whole Bible. Its whole purpose, so far as
we can see, and that which made it so dear to the popular
heart, is the fact that it traces the supposed genealogy and
origin of David, their favorite king and their ideal national
hero. Lamentations is simply an anonymous book, written in a
strain of elegy, and mourning over the desolations of the
people. Ezra and Nehemiah, two books, though substantially one,
give us an account of the history of the revival of the Jewish
¦ people and the reorganization of their national religion after
their return from the captivity.
The Book of Proverbs, supposed to have been written by
Solomon just as it stands, indicates on its surface that it has
a divided authorship. The last chapter, it is said, was
written by the mother of King Lemuel, another by Agur.
Whole chapters throughout the book are not proverbs at

The Writings. 83
all, but ethical treatises, containing advice from one who
has been through life and learned its temptations and mean
ing. They could not have been written by Solomon or by
any one man. Many of the proverbs are not even of Jewish
origin. But the tendency to attribute such a book to a
particular author is perfectly natural. As if to-day I should
make a collection of prudential maxims such as Poor
Richard made himself famous for, and entitle it Maxims
by Benjamin Franklin and others, and the book should
grow and additions be made to it, it would be easy for the
popular mind to think that he was the author of them all.
People would cease to make any distinction between his
maxims and the others. They would quote these maxims
as though all belonged to Poor Richard's sayings. In this
way, the Book of Proverbs has probably grown. Solomon
had a great reputation among his people for shrewd observa
tion, for wise and witty sayings. He was skilled and
experienced in interpreting riddles and solving problems
of nature and of life; and he came to stand in their minds
as a representative proverb-maker, and tradition associates
his name with this collection. This tendency is perfectly
natural. You constantly hear people quoting sayings from
Sydney Smith which may possibly have been familiar to
ancient Rome or Greece, or perhaps may have originated
last year in a Western newspaper, but attributed to him,
because he is the representative wit of the English people ;
and it is safe to suppose that anything witty of which the
origin is not known was originated by him.
Let us now concentrate our attention on the four most
important books in this collection called The Writings.
First, the collection of Psalms, the Psalms of David, as
they are popularly called. I used to suppose, and probably
most of you were taught to believe, that, in spite of the fact

84 Beliefs about the Bibte.
that the sons of Korah and the name of Moses and other
names are given as the composers of some of these psalms,
yet David was the writer of them all. This, I say, is the
popular idea that has been in the minds of the people for
centuries. What is this Book of Psalms ? It is nothing more nor
less than the Jewish hymn-book. It is the hymn-book of
the second temple ; that is, the temple built under the aus
pices of Ezra and Nehemiah on the return of the Jews from
their captivity in Babylon. As we examine the book, we
find it divided into five different sections or separate classes
of hymns or psalms. The first reaches from the second to
the forty-first psalm ; the second, from the forty-second
to the seventy-second; the third, from the seventy-third to
the eighty-ninth ; the fourth, from the ninetieth to the one
hundred and sixth ; the fifth, from the one hundred and
seventh to the one hundred and forty-ninth. You will
notice that I say nothing about the first or last psalms.
The first was added after the general collection was made
as a sort of general introduction, and in the old Jewish
psalm-book the second psalm counted as the first. The
one hundred and fiftieth psalm was added as an epilogue to
the general collection. So there were originally only one
hundred and forty-eight psalms. You will find the second
psalm quoted in the New Testament ; and, although our
translators have made Jesus quote from the second, in the
original Greek he quotes from the first, because that was
originally the first.
These five books were collected at five different times. I
need not go critically into this. The first book, either par
tially or entirely, was brought together and was in use dur
ing the service of the first temple, the temple of Solomon.
In this first book, if anywhere, we must look for some of the

The Writings. 85
poetic work of King David; for, after that first book, you
will probably find none of his work at all. As you look at
these psalms, you will see that they have various headings,
— such as "A Psalm of David," or "David's confidence in
God's grace," or " David praiseth God for his deliverance,"
— but you are to remember as you read them that these are
no part of the original work at all. All these headings and
notes are the work of editors, and not of the poetical authors
themselves. If you look back to your childhood, you can
remember how you used to hear the minister in the pulpit,
or your father at morning worship, reading, as though they
were a part of the inspired Psalm, certain detached words
which we now know to be a sort of musical notation. It is
as though, when reading the hymn, I should read the words
andante, fortissimo, — Italian words for the guidance of the
musicians. So certain words, such as Selah and Higgaion,
are simply indications to the singers as to how the music
should be performed, whether with accompaniment of instru
ments or by voices alone, whether high or low, etc.
Now, a word in regard to temple music, that you may
understand something as to how these hymns were used.
Some were used only for special occasions, as on festivals, —
as we have our Easter and Christmas hymns, suitable only to
those occasions. Others formed part of the general service.
It is stated in one place in the Bible that they had some
four thousand singers. That is probably a larger number
than was permanently attached to the temple. They had,
however, between two and three hundred men and women
engaged in the temple singing. The idea that the women
must be shut off in a gallery by themselves apart from the
men was not a part of the Old Testament idea of service.
It is a more modern notion. There were then between
two and three hundred voices. These were accompanied

86 Beliefs about the Bible.
generally by stringed instruments simply to aid the singers,
as we are accompanied by the organ to sustain and guide
and direct the multitude of our voices. If you think of the
three hundred men and women's voices, with lyres and harps,
and now and then cymbals to mark the time, as we use them
to-day, you will have a very good idea of the temple choir, as
they performed their daily and Sabbath services. Only you
must not think of them as singing as we do ; for harmony, or
the blending of the different parts of the song in one gen
eral effect, is a modern thing in music, and was unknown to
the ancient Hebrews. They had no poetry in the sense in
which we use that word, perfect in rhythm, time, and rhyme.
Theirs was perfect only in alliteration and rhythm, or meas
ure. There was no rhyme. Their singing was more like a
chant than anything we call harmonic music : they sang only
melody. These five books, then, that make up the Psalms, were col
lected at different times by different editors. They came at
last to be looked on as chiefly the work of David. How did
this idea arise ? In several ways.
Suppose I should make a collection of hymns. I might
take, as a basis, " Watts and Select." If by and by that
book passes out of use, and somebody else makes a collec
tion, and carelessly marks all taken from "Watts and
Select" as simply "Watts," meaning the collection and not
that he was the author, when by and by " Watts and Select "
should be entirely lost, many would suppose that Watts was
the author of all the hymns bearing his name in the last
collection. And remember that in those old times there
was no printing, and no chance for people to correct errors
by comparison. In this way, therefore, many of the old
psalms that formed part of the Davidic collection, which
was formed for the first temple, were transferred to the later

The Writings. 87
books, and were therefore thought to have been written by
David. It is absurd to suppose that he wrote many. Let me indi
cate a few reasons why he could not have done so. I take
one of the Psalms, for example, with reference to the temple
worship. Of course, David did not refer to that. There was
no temple in existence until after he was dead. If joy and
love in temple worship were expressed, it was written by
some one who lived after there was a temple.
Take the one hundred and nineteenth psalm, devoted to a
passionate love and admiration for the law. The law came
into its present shape after the captivity. Before a person
could write the one hundred and nineteenth psalm, the law
.nust have been familiar to his mind for years and years,
u-til there could grow up this passionate admiration and love
for it. It must have been made dear by association. It
could not have been written until within a few centuries
before Christ, hundreds of years after David was dead.
The one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm, beginning, " By
the riveis of Babylon there we sat down ; yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion," must have been written by some one
who had been in Babylon during the captivity, hundreds of
years after David was dead.
How has the popular idea of David arisen ? The people
have assumed that David wrote the Psalms ; and then they
have gone to work and created an ideal sort of man, made
up of the materi. Is of which the Psalms are composed, and
they call that D»vid. That is, they have assumed that he
wrote the Psalms, and have created an ideal image of such a
man as would be likely to write such things as these. They
have made him spiritual, noble, a monotheist, giving the high
est worship to God. But look at the outlines of the early part
of his life. He went into the wilderness at the head of a

88 Beliefs about the Bible.
band of cut-throats, murderers, and convicts of every kind,
and there remained for a certain number of years, until strong
enough to seize the throne. Then, he is a barbaric leader, a
man of immense power and force of personality, a man of
great genius, a man who first welded those conflicting tribes
into one nation, but no more of a saint than Richard Coeur
de Lion or Henry VIII. He was cruel and vindictive. He
worshipped Yahveh; but he also worshipped Baal, and
named one of his sons for him. He sacrificed the seven
sons of Saul to Yahveh ; and, when he conquers the Ammon
ites and captures one of their rebellious cities, he puts the
inhabitants to the severest torture, and burns them alive.
And he did this to all the captured cities of the Ammonites.
This is not the kind of man you would think of as writing
the poetic and beautiful and spiritual lines of many of the
Psalms, that have been the comfort of souls for hundreds of
years. You might as well think of Henry VIII. writing a
treatise against Divorces as to suppose that King David was
the author of most of the Psalms. The contradiction on
the face of it is as clear in the one case as in the other.
How many did he write then ? Instead of giving you my
own opinion, I will give you the opinion of Prof. Robertson
Smith, the author of the article on the Bible in the Encyclo-
pmdia Britannica, one of the most eminent Biblical scholars
in the world. He thinks it would be very critical to say that
David did not write any. According to his opinion, he may
have written the eighteenth and the seventh. He thinks it
is probable he wrote them.
The Psalms, however, whoever wrote them, do not depend
upon their authorship for their power and beauty. They
range from the highest lyrical poetry in the world to mechan
ical verse without any trace of inspiration. Some are
acrostics : the writer begins every line with a certain letter

The Writings. 89
of the Jewish alphabet. But there are others that bubble
up like springs that have their source at the very heart of
the world, full of life and sun and joy forever. Some of the
Psalms, however, derive a great part of their wealth from
association. A Cremona violin is not so valuable when first
constructed. After it has been used for years and years,
after it has expressed the joy and sorrow of the world, until
these have been wrought into it, so that it seems as though
it had a soul of its own, then it becomes a valuable instru
ment, — valuable because of these stored-up vibrations, and
worthy of the touch ot the grandest master. Precisely so
these Psalms have been played upon by human sympathies
and hopes and fears and imaginations for centuries, until
they are permeated and colored all the way through by the
passionate joy and the passionate sorrow of the human
heart. As an illustration how association changes the very inter
pretation of the passage itself, take that familiar one, " Oh,
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." How sweet
and fine this thought ! — the beauty of holiness, representing
a state of culture that is looked on as ideal beauty. Does
the author mean that ? If I should give you the original
meaning, all the spiritual aspiration goes out of it. The
writer simply says, I will worship the Lord in the bea,uty of
consecrated garments, with beautiful robes and ritual. But
you will never get that idea back into it again ; for the heart
of the world has written over that line, and filled it with
spiritual meaning. So a large part of the wealth of the
Psalms is not what the writer put into them, but what the
experience of the world has written between the lines.
The Song of Solomon is generally spoken of apologet
ically. It was a long time after it was written before it was
introduced into the canon. As it stands, it is the oldest

90 Beliefs about the Bible.
book probably in Hebrew literature. It was after the time
of Christ before it was admitted as a sacred book. It was
cherished in the heart of the people, but they could not get
over the fact that it did not appear to be at all religious.
They could not find any reason for admitting it to the canon,
until at last Rabbi Akiba, a man of overmastering influence,
said that the whole world was not worth the day on which
that song was given to Israel ; and. that fact, together with
the idea that it was attributed to Solomon, settled the ques
tion, and it was admitted. The probability is that Solomon
had nothing to do with it. It is sometimes charged with
being an obscene and impure book. There is not a more
beautiful or pure poem on the face of the earth. What
does it teach ? What is its moral ? It is a dramatic poem,
or as near that as the Jewish genius ever attained, and rep
resents a beautiful country maiden, who is betrothed to a
shepherd lad, enduring the blandishments of the courtiers
who are endeavoring to lure her from her country lover, and
make her the chief figure in the royal harem. In spite of
all these blandishments of the gay court and city, she resists,
and remains true to her rustic lover, and at last is permitted
to go back to her friends, her home, and her love. That
is the moral. If any one can find anything impure in that,
they could question the purity of a rose in a glass vase on
the parlor table. There is nothing particularly religious in
this book except this undying faithfulness. Yet the heart
of it is true from beginning to end. But do you suppose
Solomon would sit down deliberately and write a song in
which he would delineate his discomfiture, and set forth
how he tried to woo and win a country maiden, and could
not succeed, but had to let her go back to her country lover
again ? People who go through with that experience do not
usually set it forth in songs of that fashion. With this

The Writings. 9 1
conception, the song is beautiful from beginning to end.
Let Us pass to Ecclesiastes. This is also one of the last
books admitted to the canon. It came in with a great deal
of difficulty, and probably would never have been admitted,
had it not been that Solomon was supposed to be the author.
His name floated it, so that it kept on the surface of Jewish
thought; and we may be thankful for the kind of half-
fraud which gave his name to the book, because it is an
intensely interesting specimen of ancient literature. The
writer says, " I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jeru
salem." Take that last phrase. When Solomon was king,
there was no king anywhere else except in Jerusalem. Why
should he say that he was king in Jerusalem ? If a Presi
dent of the United States should speak of himself, he would
not say, when I was President in Washington. There is no
president elsewhere : why specify it in that fashion ? But, in
later times, there was another king at Samaria ; and it would
be natural for a person in a subsequent period to use such
an expression. Again, Solomon would be likely to use the
present tense. He was king all the time until he died. He
would not write of himself in the past. Again, the writer
refers to Judea as a province. It was not a province for
hundreds of years after the time of Solomon. If you know
the character of the book, you will see with what difficulty it
must have been admitted. There is little religious in it.
It is pessimistic to the last degree, hopeless of this world,
despairing of human society, hopeless of the future. The
writer is a fatalist. He says that the world is all vanity and
vexation of spirit ; that there is nothing in human life ; that
a person who is dead is better than one living, and one not
born better than either of them ; that the whole world is
empty, one endless round of vanity and vexation. If a
person is rich, has many gardens and much increase, he

92 Beliefs about the Bible.
becomes satiated and tired of it all, and disgusted with life
in any form. Animals and man are about on the same
level : the same things happen to both ; there is no future
for either. It is very curious, as Mr. Chadwick has observed
in a lecture on this subject, that a passage from this book
intimating that there is no future life is placed over the
entrance to Mt. Auburn: — "Then shall the dust return to
the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who
gave it." To any one familiar with Oriental thought, this
simply means that the body goes back to the dust, and the
spirit, that spark that we call life, goes back and loses its
personality, is absorbed in the infinite God from whom it
came. That is what that passage means. Thus, the Book
of Ecclesiastes was put into the Jewish canon, and became
a part of the Bible of Christendom, although it explicitly
denies every tenet of Christianity. The name of Solomon
floated it in. But, dreary as it is, it represents a phase of
human life that finds its echo in the world to-day. It is
only fair, however, to say that the last two verses contain
a sentiment so noble as to redeem much that is vastly
inferior. Let us now consider perhaps the greatest book in the Old
Testament, Job. When was this written ? It is supposed
that it was written somewhere in the neighborhood of the
seventh century. It is an attempt on the part of the writer
to consider the oldest and the newest problem of humanity,
perennial in its interest, mighty in its hold on the thoughts
and hopes and fears of man. He considers the question
why it is that good men suffer, why they are in sorrow and
trouble, why they are overthrown and cast down, why it is,
if there is a righteous government of the universe, that there
is no certain prosperity for virtue and truth ; that, in spite of
the good man's endeavors to do right, he may be cast down

The Writings. 93
to earth, and trampled under the feet of tyranny, selfishness,
and wrong. You will see the nature of the problem to the
Jew, when you remember that it was the fundamental idea
of his religion that Yahveh was a God of righteousness who
would reward the virtuous. As they expressed it, " I have
never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging
bread " ; though I could never help feeling that the writer of
that verse had had a narrow experience of life.
The Jews at this time had no real faith in any future life.
There are no intimations of it until toward the very last,
and then they are dim and indefinite. They teach that God
will reward the righteous with long life, with health, with
friends, with many children, all the elements of prosperity.
That is the reward for serving Yahveh. Yet, in the face of
this, they saw the righteous suffering. It was the solution of
this problem that was in the mind of the great thinker who
wrote this book. It was probably written not long after
the death of Josiah, somewhere about 641. He was the
king above all others who was their ideal for righteousness
and truth, devotion and service to Yahveh. The prophets
had long been saying that, when they should have a king
true to the law, who should put down idolatry, who should
serve Yahveh, they would have prosperity and victory over
their enemies. Here, then, was a king faithful and true,
from first to last, putting down idolatry, lifting up the law,
bringing only good to Israel, yet killed in mid career, and
his people overthrown. No wonder that this great loving
heart and grand poetic brain, the author of Job, should be
stunned and amazed at seeing all his old ideas put to rout.
What does it mean ? Does Yahveh really rule and care for
the world ? If he does, why does he permit such contradic
tion in human affairs ? This is the problem. You remem
ber the introduction, where Satan is represented as appearing

94 Beliefs about the Bible.
before God. The Persian influence had not at that time
affected the Jewish belief, and Satan had not developed into
a hater of God. He has access to the very court of God
himself, and even talks with the Lord on his throne. This
introductory scene may very likely have been written by
other hands : it does not settle the wonderful problem any
way. It sets forth how Job is suddenly overthrown. It lets
us in behind the scenes, and lets us hear the partial solu
tion, though it is not what we should regard as a solution
to-day. The book is dialogue in form, and is made up of conversa
tions between Job and the three friends whom he calls mis
erable comforters, and an interpolated speech of Elihu.
Then, Jehovah himself speaks. The speech of Elihu inter
rupts the dialogue, but it does not give the solution of the
problem. Does the whole book settle the question ? Does
it give us any answer to this great problem ? Not at all.
We face the mystery overhanging the world from the begin
ning until now. When Yahveh appears himself, and speaks
out of the whirlwind, what does he say ? He does not give
any explanation. You have no right to question God. You
must bow and submit : that is the only solution which the
writer could discover. As one of the Psalmists says, " I was
dumb : I opened not my mouth because thou didst it." The
Book of Job does not carry us any further.
Have we discovered anything to throw light on that prob
lem since? Only this: it seems to me that the theory of
evolution hints an answer such as the world has never dis
covered before, and which, to my mind, is more rational than
any attempted solutions that have been offered. Why do
we suffer ? I do not believe we suffer in order to test us,
because the Almighty and Satan have entered into a contro
versy whether we will cling to him, if he puts us to trial. I

The Writings. 95
do not believe we suffer because God appoints this or that
amount of pain to us on account of something we have done ;
as I heard a tender-hearted mother saying, " Oh, what have
I done that God has taken my child away ? " I reject that
whole conception of the government of the world. I do not
believe that God, because a mother does not go to church,
or because she loves her child too much, out of jealousy
sends diphtheria or scarlet fever to put the little child to
death as a punishment to her. It seems to me infernal, this
conception of God. I could not love a Being like that.
What does modern science tell us ? Simply this : that we
are surrounded on every hand by a great natural order ; that
we are a part of it ; that life and health and happiness
come as the result of our conformity to this law and order.
If I keep the laws of my physical life I am well, if I break
them I am sick ; and neither praying nor cursing has any
thing to do with the question whether poison is wholesome
or bread is injurious. Pain is a signal marked "Danger," set
up along our pathway on every hand. If we step from this
pathway, consciously or unconsciously ; if we break a law vol
untarily or by the force of inheritance, — pain, disease, death,
come as necessity. Pain means broken law. Welfare and
happiness mean law kept ; and the result of this is to teach
us progressively through the ages to know and keep the laws
of the universe, in which are life and peace forevermore.

The Bridge between the Testaments.

As you open any one of our common Bibles, you will find
that there is a break between the Old Testament and the
New which has been filled by the binder with only the blank
leaves for a family record. This break has been, in the
popular mind, a blank for hundreds of years, as much so as
the unwritten leaves. Yet something of vast moment must
have happened between the closing of the Old Testament
and the beginning of the New, which we must understand
in order to appreciate the movements which are so alive on
the scene of the New Testament record. This break is no
slight one, as you will see when your attention is called to
the dates. The date of the prophecy of Malachi is placed
in the Bible, in the margin, as 397 B.C. That is, our Bible
gives us the impression that the Old Testament closed
nearly four hundred years before the New Testament began.
If you ascertain the date of the first writings of the New
Testament, you will find it was somewhere between fifty and
sixty years after the birth of Christ. Here is a gulf appar
ently of four hundred and fifty years between the Old Testa
ment and the New. It was years, in my own case, before I
had looked up this matter enough to have any comprehen
sion of what had been taking place during those centuries
which must have united these two periods of time. In
order that you may see how important must have been the

The Bridge between tlie Testaments. 97
activities going on, I shall ask you to note two or three par
ticularly marked things.
When the Old Testament closed, there was no trace any
where of any belief, on the part of the Jews, in any doctrine
of immortality, in any heaven or hell. The New Testament
is full of both. There was no trace anywhere, at the end of
Malachi, of any developed doctrine of angels, good or bad.
The New Testament is full of the hierarchies of good angels,
under their leader, and, over against them, the hierarchies of
bad angels, under the fully developed Satan, or Devil. When
we have finished the Old Testament, we have learned nothing
about any kingdom of heaven, or kingdom of God, as to be
expected very soon on the earth. The very first cry that
meets us as we open the New Testament is, " The kingdom of
God is at hand." When the Old Testament closes, there are
almost no traces anywhere of an immediate expectation of
the Messiah. The New Testament seems to begin with the
Messianic cry in the hearts and on the lips of all the people.
So the words "grace" and "sin " and the idea of the atone
ment, and all these things with which the New Testament is
filled, had found no clear and definite expression at the close,
or what was supposed to be the close, of the Old Testament
record. But there is danger of our having an entire misconception
of the facts, if we suppose that there is really a very long
break between the records of the Old and New Testaments.
A large part of this misconception comes from the mistakes
that have been made in regard to the dates of the records.
For example, the Old Testament canon was not closed 397
B.C., although this is the popularly regarded date of the
prophecy of Malachi. As a matter of fact, the Old Testa
ment canon was not closed until after the destruction of the
temple, nearly a hundred years after the birth of Christ; and

98 Beliefs about the Bible.
it was closed at this time, not because all those books which
were regarded as worthy to be reckoned in its number had
been included, but because the destruction of the temple
and the dispersion of the Jews among the peoples, as the
result of their conquest by the Romans, made it impossible
for them any longer to carry on this religious and literary
activity. Only those books, then, which had become sacred
in the minds of the people at the time of the destruction of
their nationality, were looked upon as belonging to the old
and sacred period of their history, and about them gathered
this halo of antiquity and respect which always belongs to
those things which are revered as part of a nation's past.
The Book of Malachi was not the last of the Old Testa
ment. Several of those books which are included in the
canon date long after the prophecy of Malachi. The Book
of Daniel, of Ecclesiastes, and several others, were of more
recent date than that prophecy.
There is a large body of literature, the name of which you
may be familiar with, that has not been included in either
the Old Testament or the New by Protestant Christianity,
although a part has been accepted by the Catholic Church,
which fills up this apparent gulf between the two Testaments.
This literature shows a development of religious and politi
cal life among the Jews, and explains what must otherwise
be a great mystery. A part of this literature goes under the
name of apocalyptic writings, and a part under the name of
apocryphal writings. Apocryphal means hidden, and apoca
lyptic means just the opposite, unfolded or revealed. The
apocalyptic literature was so named, because it was supposed
in some way to lift the veil which hides the future, and in a
series of shadowy outlines to picture the great events that
were to come. The writers of these visions did not expose
themselves to detection by being over-definite in drawing the

The Bridge between the Testaments. 99
outlines of coming events. They have written them in so
cloudy and indefinite a fashion that it has been a question
with interpreters in all ages as to whether this precise picture
or that was supposed to refer to one historic event or another.
The apocryphal literature would be well worthy an hour's
study in your presence, had we time. A large part of it is
so very noble, so splendidly written, so full of fine ideas, that
it can only be the result of an accident that it is not a part
of the Old Testament itself.
I intimated that the canon was closed suddenly by the
destruction of the Jewish nationality, and that, but for this,
the Book of Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon, the
histories of the Maccabees, and others of these powerful
works, would undoubtedly have appeared in the Old Tes
tament canon. As we study these books, there is no reason
that we can see why they should not have been included, so
far as we can judge of their intrinsic worth. They are cer
tainly much superior to some parts of the Old Testament.
Some parts of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon
are quite equal to anything that goes by the name of sacred
Scripture in any of the religious writings of the world.
We cannot admit, of course, that this apparent break be
tween the Testaments is a real cessation of Jewish life, activ
ity, and development. We are now accustomed to the
modern word "evolution," to a belief in the continuity of
growth, — that nothing happens suddenly, or without a cause,
or springs full-grown out of nothing.
If, for example, we had no history of this country from
the time when the Pilgrims landed until the Boston harbor
"tea-party" or the battle of Lexington, — if it was all un
written, so that we left off with their landing at Plymouth,
and began again at the beginning of the Revolution, — we
should have no sort of doubt or question as to whether there

100 Beliefs about the Bible.
had been most intense political and intellectual activity on
the part of the people during this time. We should have to
assume a line of continuous development from one point
to the other. Precisely the same is true concerning the his
tory and development of the Jews. We cannot understand
the beginning of the New Testament life and literature,
unless we assume an intense activity on the part of the Jews
during this period, which is not covered by that which we are
accustomed to call sacred literature.
There are two possible courses open to me this morning.
I could take up this apocalyptic and apocryphal literature,
and outline it, giving you specimens of its contents, analyze
them, show what these writers were thinking about, and point
out their effect on the popular life ; but this would lead me
too far and into too minute details, and would make the sub
ject wearisome. On the other hand, I can simply give you
results. I can tell you what we have learned by studying
this old history and literature. I can tell you what the Jews
were doing politically, intellectually, socially, and religiously,
and in this way enable your thoughts to cross this great
gulf from the Old Testament to the New.
Leaving on one side, then, except as I may refer to it inci
dentally, this whole mass of literature, I will give you, in as
brief and clear outline as I can, the history of what the Jews
were doing during this most important period of their his
tory and development.
In the first place, let me tell you the political vicissitudes
through which they passed, because these led the way to the
other changes ; and it is necessary to know them, in order to
comprehend their later movements.
When the Jews first returned from the Babylonish captiv
ity, they were under a Persian protectorate. That is, these
exiles returned home by permission of the Persian king, and

The Bridge between the Testaments. 101
under the escort and guidance of Persians, protected by Per
sian power. They were permitted by Persian authority to
rebuild their temple, and to renew, as far as possible, their
old-time life. They were under this power continuously, and
at peace for a long number of years. They enjoyed practi
cal independence during that time. The Persians were so
far away that the kings did not care to interfere with them,
and they were allowed to develop according to their own
ideas. Their chief priest, or high priest, was practically the
supreme power. Of course, if any conflict arose, the people
would have the right to appeal to Persia, so that the Persian
king was the ultimate authority in all political questions ; but,
practically, the Jews were independent. They remained in
this way until that young Grecian king, Alexander, started
in his great career of conquest. On his way to the East, he
took Jerusalem as one of the great cities in his course, and
conquered the Judaean power, bringing it to his feet and
leaving it as one of his subjects, while he went farther east
to break down the entire Persian rule in all its range.
After Alexander's death, this great world-wide kingdom
broke up into four pieces. Judaea fell to the share of Ptol
emy, the ruler of Egypt ; and, for a long time, we find Judaea
a dependency of Egypt. About this time, the great city
of Alexandria was built as the capital of the Ptolemies. It
soon became one of the most famous cities of the world,
the seat of commerce and of literature. It was one of the
great centres of learning, and exerted an influence throughout
the world. It was a great cosmopolitan city. Greeks,
Romans, Jews, Egyptians, Orientals of every name, centred
here, and formed this great seething, political, intellectual,
and religious life. It was during the reign of the Ptolemies
that the Old Testament was translated into the Greek ver
sion called the Septuagint. This Greek translation of the

102 Beliefs about the Bible.
Old Testament is the one that is always referred to in the
New Testament, when quotations are made there. So that,
if you find that these quotations are different from the Old
Testament, you may understand this difference, by remember
ing that they quoted from the Septuagint, which sometimes
differs in words and phrases from the ordinary reading of the
Hebrew. After the Jews had been under the reign of the Ptolemies
in Egypt, they passed under a new conqueror, the Syrian
kings, or dynasty of the Seleucidae, of whom the representa
tive at that time was Antiochus Epiphanes, or Antiochus the
brilliant, who was nicknamed, on account of his strange and
unaccountable ways, Epimanes, or the madman. He did
everything he could to denationalize the Jews. He abolished
their temple worship. He made it obligatory upon every
Jew to worship the gods of Greece and the gods of Greece
alone. He did everything he could to pour contempt on
the temple, even going so far as to sacrifice swine upon the
altar, the last and extremest indignity, in the eye of a Jew,
which could be committed against his national worship.
He not only sacrificed this animal upon the altar of the
temple, but, making a broth of the remains, he sprinkled it
over their sacred books and utensils, doing whatever he
could to defile everything that they called sacred. He
carried this so far, however, that he defeated the very pur
pose he had in view ; for one day, as a renegade Jew was
about to offer a pagan sacrifice, Mattathias rushed on him
and slew him. This started a revolution, which ran like
wild-fire all over the country. It resulted in the Jews attain
ing their freedom, and becoming a nation again by them
selves. The son of Mattathias, Judas, the Hammer, as he
was called, became king. He beat his enemies to pieces,
established a new dynasty, and for many years the Jews

The Bridge between the Testaments. 103
ruled themselves, and were independent. But, by and by, they
formed an alliance with that new power in the West, which
was so soon destined to rule the whole world. When two
rival claimants for the Jewish throne were quarrelling as to
the succession, Rome stepped in, and assumed a protector
ate, which meant their subjection; and, from that time on to
the destruction of the Jewish city, Judaea was only a province
of the Roman Empire, ruled a part of the time by kings
appointed in Rome, a part of the time by Roman procurators
and other officers of the Empire.
So much for an outline of the political history. You see
how active were those times concerning which we have known
so very little, and how and what were the influences at work
which mingled not only the nationalities, but the philosophies
and religions of the world in such a way as to prepare for
the development of a new religion.
Mark for a moment how these influences were at work.
Here were brought together, in these great cities of Rome
and Alexandria, peoples from all over the world, each with
its own religion, each worshipping its own separate gods.
And as they grew wiser, and thought more deeply about this
subject, do you not see how scepticism must have resulted ?
Whose god was the true one ? Here were a hundred gods ;
here were many religions represented in these great cities.
A man could take his choice, and worship this or that ; but
it was impossible for him to believe in them all. When the
question was raised, Which one shall I believe in? the
answer was likely to be, In none. The system each religion
represented was so vulnerable, the gods were so clearly only
the idealizations of national hopes and aspirations, that the
people of no one nation could receive the gods of another;
and so they finally ceased to be respected, even by their own
followers.

104 Beliefs about the Bible.
The systems of philosophy and all the ideas of the world
were also brought together and compared one with another,
so that they might be comprehended, that they might be
tested, to see which were capable of standing.
Among the great movements going on in the intellectual
development of the Jews was the attempt to reconcile the
doctrines of Judaism with the great philosophies of Greece.
Philo, who lived in Alexandria, a Jewish scholar of the
century preceding the birth of Christ, is the most distin
guished name of this epoch of Jewish life. He spent his
life in endeavoring to reconcile the philosophy of Plato with
the Old Testament ideas, attempting to find traces in these
higher pagan philosophies of some primitive revelation that
should bring their thought into connection with that of his
old-time fathers. Out of this fusion of ideas sprang many
of those conceptions which became living forces in the
New Testament thought and in the development of the
young Christianity. Not only was there a fusion of Jewish
and Grecian ideas, but also of Oriental and Gnostic specula
tions. These philosophies were compared, and possible
relations sought out ; and thus there was formed in the popu
lar mind a preparation for a new development, something to
come that had not yet been understood or known.
I wish now to point out one or two other lines of growth
which were going on in the Jewish mind and life.
As we open the New Testament, we find everywhere men
tion of the synagogues. Jesus, whenever he visits any little
town, goes into the synagogue ; and, when the roll of Old
Scripture is unfolded and read, he rises and speaks to the
people. There is no trace of a synagogue in the Old Testa
ment. This, then, is an entirely new development in re
ligion. Between the time when the Old Testament closed
and the New began, the synagogue had arisen. It occupied

The Bridge between the Testaments. 105
a large part of the national life, — larger than even the tem
ple worship. Every little village had its synagogue ; and,
in Jerusalem, they could be counted by the hundred. There
were as many synagogues as there are churches in the most
populous of our Christian countries to-day. What were
they ? Simply little meeting-houses ; places where the peo
ple came together on the Sabbath day, and listened to the
reading of the Old Testament scriptures. And then, after
the reading, just as in a modern Quaker meeting, any one
was at liberty to stand up and comment on the passage that
had been read, and give utterance to whatever religious
opinions or thoughts he might have in his mind. This devel
opment bears in a most important way upon the growth of
the Christian Church. The synagogue is the direct parent
and predecessor of the Christian Church. It is undoubtedly
true that, if there had never been a synagogue, there never
would have been a church ; if there never had been a scribe,
there never would have been a minister ; for the scribe was
attached to the synagogue, and was the man who copied or
made the rolls of the Law, the man whose business it was
to understand the Law and interpret it to the people. The
Law, as you know, is in the old Hebrew ; and at this time the
Hebrew language had ceased to be spoken or written by the
people. The common language was the Aramaic. It was
spoken by Jesus and his apostles. It was neither -Hebrew
nor Greek, but a new dialect. The Scripture passages were
read and translated, and comments made upon them by the
scribe ; and you therefore see how naturally his work pre
cedes that which the Christian minister has done for the last
eighteen hundred years.
Along with this development of the synagogue, this sort
of communal religious life of the people, there was a devel
opment of sects and parties among the Jews that we need

106 Beliefs about the Bible.
to understand. There are, in the later time, references to
the Sadducees, the Pharisees, scribes, lawyers, Hellenists, or
Grecians, the Herodians, and the Essenes. In the Old
Testament, you find no traces of any of them. They had
all grown up during this time between the Old Testament
and the New.
What were these parties ? We are accustomed to speak of
the Sadducees as sceptics. I think this is the popular idea
of them, — that they were the New Testament sceptics.
We are accustomed to say that they did not believe in any
thing, — that they did not believe in angels, in a resurrection,
nor in any future life. Yet we shall make a capital mistake,
if we think of them as sceptics at all. The Sadducees were
simply the old, respectable, titled, wealthy conservatives
among the Jews. They were typical conservatives. They
did not believe in angels, or the resurrection, or spirits, or
the future life. Why ? Because the Old Scriptures, which
they stood by, and were ready to fight for through thick and
thin, did not teach any of these ideas. They stood by the
Law, by Moses, by all that which was oldest and most
respectable in national life. They rejected all these new
fangled ideas, as they regarded them.
Who were the Pharisees ? I used to think of them as the
conservatives, but they were the precise opposites. They
were the popular party that was ready to accept new ideas.
They represented best the national life of the time. They
were the ones who not only believed in Moses, but in the
traditions ; and the traditions gave them an opportunity to
incorporate into their belief, and to accept as a part of their
religious convictions, a thousand things that the Old Script
ures never had said. They were the popular party among
the people.
I have told you who the scribes were. The lawyers were

The Bridge between the Testaments. 107
substantially the same as the scribes, — not lawyers like ours
of to-day, but interpreters of the Old Testament law.
The Hellenists formed a party which would naturally
spring up as they came into contact with Grecian ideas and
learning. They believed that they ought to break down
their Jewish exclusiveness, that they ought to study Hel
lenistic literature. They were of course very unpopular
with those who believed in keeping exclusively the old ideas
and old-time national life.
Then there was the great party of the Essenes, only re
ferred to incidentally in the New Testament. They lived a
life of seclusion. They were something like the modern
Shakers, very simple and pure in manners, hospitable and
gentle. They have been suspected of being connected in
some way with Oriental ideas, perhaps with Buddhism ; and
it is a serious question whether they have not had more to
do with the Christian Church than they have had credit for.
It is at least a curious fact that, as soon as churches sprang
up all through the Roman Empire, the little sect of the
Essenes disappeared, and were never seen again.
Passing from a consideration of these sects among the
Jews, let me give you a little more definite idea as to where
a great many of the popular ideas in the New Testament
came from, and how they came into being during this period
of which we have so little record in our hands. I refer to
the theories of the kingdom of heaven, of angels, of the
resurrection, of the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds
of heaven, of the judgment, of heaven and hell, and all
these things which are so common now in Christian thought.
There is no trace of them, as I have told you, in the Old
Testament. Where did they come from ? They were not,
the larger part of them, native developments of Jewish
thought alone. Nearly all of them were borrowed from the

108 Beliefs about the Bible.
Persian. They were the results of the life which the Jews
led during their captivity. Among the Persians, and the
Oriental nations from whom the Persians themselves derived
many of their ideas, these conceptions were full-grown per
haps before the time of Moses himself.
Very soon after the coming home of the Jews from Babylon
there crept into their thought this belief of a great hierarchy
of angels good and bad in perpetual conflict. From this
comes the idea of the New Testament devil in perpetual
conflict with God. We find, growing up in the apocalyptic
books, especially in Enoch, which is full of these ideas, the
full development of a belief in a judgment to come, of
Messiah coming in the clouds of heaven, in a separation of
the good and the bad after that judgment, of an eternity
of blessedness ..and an eternity of punishment, expressed in
almost the same language which we find afterward on the
lips of Jesus himself. Almost all these ideas were appar
ently developed from seeds which were planted in Jewish
thought during the time the Jews came in contact with the
great Persian power.
I want to lay the emphasis of this part of my theme on the
question of the Messiah and the part it played in Jewish
thought and life. If there had been no dream of a Messiah,
there would have been no Christianity. It is very impor
tant, then, to inquire where this idea came from, and how
much it had to do with the development of their later thought
and life.
If we confine ourselves to the Old Testament, we find no
clear doctrine of a Messiah at all. We do find this, how
ever, which was a preparation of the soil for the reception
of the seed, which developed into the thought of the Mes
siah. The Jews believed — and it was necessary, holding
the idea of God and his government that they did — that

The Bridge between the Testaments. 109
they were to be prospered, that a kingdom was to be estab
lished which should be permanently blessed, whenever the
time should Come that the people were faithful to the law of
their God. They did not believe in any future life : they
believed in prosperity in this life as a reward of goodness.
Here is the germ which developed into the doctrine of the
Messiah ; but there is no trace of their believing in the
coming of any personal king, only that the kingdom after
the idea of David's rule should be restored. But this idea
of a pre-existent Angel-Messiah, who should come as the
angel of God to rule the world, was a common Persian
thought ; and I believe that this idea among the Jews can
be traced to their connection with this Oriental religion.
Here, then, we find the next great step in the doctrine of the
Messianic idea.
The next step is simply to identify this supposed super
natural being with some one actually come. You will see
then why it was that, when Jesus was born, the people were
expecting the coming of the Messiah. They were being true,
as never before, to the law of Jehovah. They believed, ac
cording to the fundamental idea of their religion, that this
must bring them prosperity. They had accepted the idea
that a kingdom was to come, and that some one sent of God,
either a divine or an ideal man, was to rule over the chosen
people ; that he was to come and sit in judgment on all the
earth; that the dead were to be raised, and that the end of
the world was to come ; and that he was to usher in a new and
grand heavenly kingdom that should be without end. They
were looking then on every hand for the Messiah. It was Lo
here ! and Lo there ! And the first thing asked of Jesus,
when he preached that the kingdom of heaven was at hand,
was, Art thou the Messiah, the one we have expected? or
shall we look for another ? So, if Jesus was to play any part

no Beliefs about the Bible.
in bringing in the kingdom of heaven, he must be considered
as this expected Messiah. The role of Messiah was thrust
upon him. He was to be the agent of God to bring in the
kingdom of heaven. The people would accept no other.
I believe, then, that the time had come, in the history of
the world, when a new religion had to be born. The people
had lost faith in the old ones. They had lost faith in their
old philosophy, in all their old conceptions of God and man.
There was an earnest expectation on the part of the people
all over the world of some new development of another type,
and a higher type, of life. So I believe that, if Jesus had
never been born, we should have had Christianity still, or
something substantially like it. For the ideas and anticipa
tions of Christianity were in the popular heart and mind,
filling all the air. It only needed that they should centre in
or crystallize about some person who should be accepted as
the Messiah ; and, had this person not been Jesus, some other
person must be found. I think this is clear, when we study
the writings of Paul. Paul is the actual father of historic
Christianity; but Paul never saw Jesus, except in a vision.
He says very little about what Jesus said or did. His writ
ings are full of the ideal Messiah, but he takes almost no
note of Jesus of Nazareth. It is this new revelation from
God, this new head of a new Christianity, with which Paul
deals. Thus, we find all these influences, which had been at
work during the time of which we have no record in oui
Scriptures, culminating at last, naturally and necessarily, in
the birth of a new religion, and that new religion the one that
we call Christian.

THE EPISTLES.

As we come from the Old Testament to the New, we notice
that there are four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles
that lead the list of those books that have come to be
regarded as canonical. It is worthy your note, in passing,
that the Acts of the Apostles does not treat in any general
way of the doings of the twelve apostles, but only concerns
itself with certain passages in the life chiefly of Peter and
Paul. The significance of that I shall refer to later.
As I wish to treat of the New Testament, in a general
way in the order of time, rather than the order in which the
publishers have happened to place the books, I pass by the
Gospels and the Acts and come to the Epistles ; for you are
probably aware of the fact that nearly all the Epistles, the
principal ones most certainly, were written some time before
any of the Gospels were brought into their present condition.
When the First Epistle was written, which was probably
the first Epistle of Paul to the Church in Thessalonica,
Jesus had been dead but about twenty years. That is, the
people were then about as far away from his time as we are
from the time of Abraham Lincoln, and, of course, there
would be a great many persons alive who had either seen
Jesus, or who had seen somebody that had seen him, —
enough to keep alive and fresh the traditions of the princi
pal events in his life, the principal phases of his doctrine,

U2 Beliefs about the Bible.
and the generally believed account of his death. We must
bear in mind, however, all the way through, that these early
churches did not believe that Jesus was really dead, but
only that he had been withdrawn into the heavens for a
little time, whence he was to return again in the clouds,
accompanied by an innumerable retinue of angels, to raise
the dead, to judge the world, and to usher in the new king
dom of God which he was to establish here upon earth. I
refer to this only to show you the general intellectual and
religious atmosphere of the time when these Epistles were
written. There is another point to be noted. You will find that
these letters are written to the Church in Philippi, to the
Church in Ephesus, to the Church in Galatia, to the Church
in Rome, etc. That is, and this is the point, the first
churches, as we should naturally expect, were organized in
the great cities scattered over the Roman Empire, the princi
pal centres of intellectual life and thought. I refer to this,
so as to bring you into sympathy with the natural growth
of these churches, that you may see how, under ordinary
human laws, they happened to be what they were.
In process of time, those who rejected the claims of Chris
tianity came to be called pagans and heathen. Did you ever
think why ? The word " pagan " is from a Latin word paga-
nus, which means a villager. The word " heathen " is simply
heath-men, men who lived out on the heath, peasants. This
suggestion is mainly interesting, as I think, because it lets us
into the secret, which is true to-day just as it was then, that
any new movement always finds its first footing in the town,
where thought is most active, where opinions are most fluent,
where it is easier to get a hearing for a new idea, and where
a new thought first finds lodgement in the minds and activi
ties of men. However sturdy and noble and grand the coun-

The Epistles. 1 1 3
try may be in the make-up of its moral fibre, yet it is always
a little behind the town. Just as last year's fashions are this
year's fashions in the country, so the intellectual and relig
ious fashions follow this same law : they start in the centre
of intellectual activity, and then spread slowly toward the
country. These churches, then, these new organizations, were dotted
here and there over the Roman Empire in the great centres
of commercial and intellectual activity. They were not, as
yet, — between 50 and 60 A.D., when the first Epistles were
written, — very numerous, very large, or very powerful.
These little churches were simply made up of the few men
who had accepted the claims of the new Messiah, and who,
while they were waiting for his immediate return, — for both
Jesus and Paul taught explicitly that he was to come back
before that generation had entirely passed away, — would
naturally place little emphasis on the affairs of this world.
It is not strange, therefore, that they established practical
communism, selling their houses and lands, just as in modern
times Millerites have done, believing that the world was com
ing to an end in three, five, or ten years. What was the use
of laying out schemes of business, plans for the regeneration
of this world, social or political improvements ? What was the
use of being troubled, if Caesar was a tyrant and was ruling the
world ? What was the use of mourning about these things ?
So Paul tells them not to be troubled, for the time is short,
and the end is at hand. Therefore, they sold their property,
and tried to make one another as comfortable as possible,
establishing these little brotherhoods in the great centres
of activity, and then, laboring and doing their daily duty as
best they could, awaited the coming of the kingdom of God
with its heavenly magnificence and glory. In the face of a
belief like that, of course it would not occur to any one to

114 Beliefs about the Bible.
write any Gospels. What did they want of Gospels ? The
people who were living already knew about Jesus, and some
of them were to live until he came again. So they did not
take the trouble to make any record of his life and teachings
at that time.
But you will see how naturally the Epistles arose. Here
were these churches, perplexed on every hand by practical
questions. They had just come out of heathenism. In those
days, if you were to dine with a heathen, the chances were
that he would go through some religious ceremony preceding
the feast, to consecrate the animal that he was to have for
his dinner. It was a very vital question, then, whether the
new Christians were to be permitted to attend such feasts, and
eat the meat that had been offered to idols ; whether in so
doing they became accomplices in idolatry. You remember
how often Paul refers to this. They questioned, also,
whether it was necessary to keep the Mosaic law, and they
looked to their leaders for answers. Those who had seen
Jesus, or who had received traditions of him from others'
lips, could have him for guidance in this matter ; but others
did not know just what they were required to believe, and
all sorts of practical questions would naturally spring up
while they were waiting for his second coming. It was to
answer these difficulties and to solve these practical problems
that the Epistles came to be written.
We must remember another thing. It is absurd for any
body to suppose that Paul or Peter or James, or any of the
writers of the Epistles, ever had the slightest idea that these
letters would become a part of a book, to be referred to as
a standard of belief and doctrine eighteen hundred years
after that time. And this absurdity appears in what I have
already stated, that they expected the world to come to
an end before the people who wrote the letters were dead.

77^*? Epistles. 115
They expected Jesus to come again to earth, and reign again
as their king, for at least a thousand years. This idea is
still thrilling and throbbing through parts of the New Testa
ment, especially the Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation.
It is all on tiptoe with this upward and onward looking
for the coming of the Lord. When Jesus should come,
there would be no reason, and almost no need, of any
book to announce his will ; for he himself would be the
living king, dispensing his own law and executing his own
judgments. These letters, then, were simply temporary and local expe
dients to meet the exigencies of that time. If you read
them carefully in the light of that idea, you will find nearly
all your perplexities solved. It is not my purpose to go into
minute criticism of one Epistle after another. Instead of
any textual criticism, I wish to give some general ideas for
which they stand ; but it is worth my while to point otu
first one or two significant facts concerning a few of them.
Take the little Epistle of Jude. Jude says that he was the
brother of James. He was not himself an apostle, but, per
haps, the brother of an apostle. There is one thing in that
little letter which of itself is sufficient to forever render
absurd any claim for the entire infallibility of the Bible. I
have spoken to a great many orthodox ministers concerning
it, who had never had their attention called to it. I spoke
to you last Sunday concerning the Book of Enoch, — a wild,
crude, unreliable, apocalyptic book, written within a hundred
years of the time of Christ. Jude quotes it as being the
work of the old patriarch, " the seventh from Adam." Here
is a palpable blunder.
The Epistle of James was written apparently to offset
Paul's doctrine of "justification by faith." James evidently
thought Paul was pushing that too far. He said it was well

1 1 6 Beliefs about the Bible.
enough to have faith, but you must supplement faith and
manifest the reality of that faith by works, or it becomes
dead and fruitless. This was the first general contribution
to the seething discussion of the age.
There is no occasion for me to say anything concerning
the three Epistles of John, except that there is little reason
to suppose John the Apostle wrote them. Neither need I
detain you with a special reference to the writings known as
the Epistles of Peter. The second certainly was not written
by him, and it is doubtful about the first ; but it makes little
difference to us.
Concerning the Epistle to the Hebrews, ordinarily called
the work of Paul, there is hardly a scholar in the world who
thinks that Paul wrote it. It devotes itself to an endeavor
to justify Christianity to those who had come out from the
Jewish Church. It shows how the old dispensation was
preparatory to Christianity; that every thing prefigured it;
that it represented the symbol and shadow of which Chris
tianity is the substance and reality. This, you will see, must
have met a very pressing need or want at that time, when
one of the most important and practical questions of the
Jew was whether, when he became a Christian, he was false
to the old and divine dispensation which had been given to.
his fathers.
I wish now to confine myself entirely to the attitude and
work of Paul. Paul is the great name in historic Christian
ity, second only in rank and dignity to that of Jesus, and
not even second to him in the power which he has exerted
over thought. Instead, however, of going into a general
examination of the Epistles, I want, in some general, graphic
way, to give you Paul's attitude toward the universe, to set
forth the scheme which he held, and which he made a vital
power in the development of civilization. There is no man

The Epistles. 117
in all the past ages more alive to-day than Paul, or who is
having more to do with men that have never thought very
much about it, and who have least appreciated the signifi
cance of the work which he wrought.
It is not necessary for my purpose that I should discuss
all the questions that have been mooted by the critics as to
whether he wrote all the Epistles that have passed under his
name. It does not make any special difference to our
consideration, for the doctrines we care to note are taught
in the Epistles which are undoubtedly his.
In the first place, then, in order to understand this Pauline
doctrine, you must remember that he was a grand, sturdy,
unfaltering believer in predestination of the most cast-iron
sort. No man who ever lived has taught it more explicitly
and clearly than he. God is the absolute sovereign, and he
has a right through all the eternities to do whatever he will ;
and puny, short-sighted man has no right to question it.
This is the attitude of Paul. God has a perfect right, to
use his figure, to take one lump of clay, and make a vase to
hold flowers in the parlor: he has a right to take another
lump, and make a coarse, crude pot for use in the kitchen ;
and neither lump has a right to say anything about it one
way or the other. He has a right to make one man for one
use, and another for another, — to predestinate one to suc
cess and glory, to predestinate another to failure and dis
aster ; and these have no right to question either the wisdom
or justice of the dispensation. But, in justice to Paul, I wish
you to note that the outcome of his doctrine is quite differ
ent from that of Calvin and modern Orthodoxy.
The next great doctrine of Paul is his uncompromising,
unhesitating acceptance of the legend that teaches the fall of
man. Adam, the first man, stood as the earthly head of
humanity up to his time. The doctrine of the " federal head-

118 Beliefs about the Bible.
ship," as it has come to be called in theology, is undoubtedly
a Pauline doctrine. Man, with Adam at the head up to the
time of the birth of Christ, had been simply a disastrous
failure. In Adam, all died ; through Adam came sin ; through
Adam came sorrow ; through Adam came all the disasters
that have ever afflicted poor, suffering humanity. Paul, of
course, had none of the means of knowledge at the disposal
of any intelligent man in the modern world. He did not
know, therefore, that death had reigned not only since Adam
and over all his descendants, but for some thousands and
millions of years before Adam was ever thought of. He did
not know that suffering and pain had been in existence, not
only among men, but in the animal world for millions of
years. If he had, he would have had no more faith in the
doctrine of the fall than I have. But Paul believed in the
federal headship of Adam ; that he was the representative
and leader of the world up to that time, and that, under his
headship, the world had been a failure. Naturally, then, he
turned to some scheme of recovery. He desired to find
some way in which this long failure could be turned into
success. He desired to find some method, a part of the
secret council and fore-knowledge of God, — for not only the
fall, but the redemption was part of the predestination of
Paul, — by which a new order of things could be instituted,
and the world be ultimately crowned with success.
Here, then, we are led to consider Paul's view of Christ.
There is another thing also, at the outset, to which I wish to
call your careful attention ; for people seem to read the Bible
in a blindfold and sleepy way, if they read it at all, — never
thinking of comparing part with part, or treating it as they
would treat any other book, or as they should, if they wish to
learn anything from it. I was taught in this way myself.
I was taught to read so many verses as so much religious

The Epistles. 119
duty accomplished ; so many square inches of Bible, so much
goodness. Thus, people read the Bible, never using their
brains and common sense about it.
We need now to consider Paul's attitude toward Christ, —
toward Christ, not toward Jesus ; for it is hardly too much
to say that Paul made no account of the personal Jesus
whatever. I want to make that distinction clear. Paul does
not have anything to say about Jesus. The only time he
quotes his words is when he gives- the story of the Last
Supper, and, in another place, where he quotes a saying
from Jesus that does not appear in the Gospels. He does
not anywhere say anything about what Jesus did. He has
not a hint anywhere of any miraculous conception. He
speaks of no miracles in the modern sense of that
word. He only refers in a general way to signs and won
ders. But he believed that " speaking with tongues," that
incoherent gibberish and babbling, was a miracle; so you can
understand what he meant when he spoke of signs and won
ders. He says nothing about his raising people from the dead
or feeding the multitude. Yet you must remember that he
stood nearest to Jesus of all who wrote of him in the New
Testament. It is strange that he should not allude to these
things in all of his Epistles. There is not a trace of his
having any personal love for Jesus, the man. He says,
frankly and distinctly, that he never saw him, except in a
vision ; and he makes so little account of these things that,
when he comes up to Jerusalem and talks over the condition
of the early Church with the apostles, he says they had
nothing to tell him that he cared anything about, — to use his
own phrase, they " added nothing " to him. He refers to the
apostles very slightingly, " those who seemed to be some
what," to be pillars. He speaks of them with hardly dis
guised antagonism and irony; and he was in antagonism with

120 Beliefs about the Bible.
them the most of his life. You see how little account he
makes of the historic Jesus. What does he make account
of ? Of the theologic Christ as standing for a part of the
scheme of the divine economy in the salvation of the
world. There are three distinct stages of progress very perceptible
in Paul's writings, as illustrating three stages of growth in
his mind concerning the doctrine of Christ. In the first
place, he is converted to the belief that Jesus is the Messiah.
But he does not stop there. We find at the last that he had
risen to the belief that Jesus was a pre-existent being ; that
he was the Angel-Messiah ; that he was the first-born of
every creature; that he was the beginning of the creation of
God, and only less than God himself. But the great thing
that he believed, whether he called him Messiah or pre-
existent angel or head of the Church, was that Jesus was
the head of a new and renovated humanity.
I have told you what Paul believed about Adam, that he
was the head of the race that was a failure. Over against
Adam, the old man, he sets Christ, the new man, revealed
from heaven as the new head of the new humanity. This
is the most significant thing in the whole belief of Paul, so
far as his doctrine of Christ is concerned. He was the head
of the new order of humanity. Those who became engrafted
into the Church, those who became followers and disciples
of Christ, put off the old idea of Adam, sloughed off their
whole association with the old and false order of humanity,
and became members of this new race, — the redeemed and
renovated Church of God. This is the doctrine of Paul
concerning Christ.
I said, a little while ago, that the predestination taught by
Paul had a far different outcome for the history of this world
from that taught by Calvin and the orthodox churches of the

The Epistles. 121
day. He teaches that the fall of man and the redemption
are parts of the one divine plan of him who, as a sovereign,
works his eternal will. But he held so grand a conception
of God that he believed it is a part of this sovereign will
that the world ultimately, this whole groaning, travailing,
weeping, and crying creation, shall be redeemed. So he
teaches that the Jews were rejected and outcast only as a
temporary thing, only as the occasion of the bringing in of
the Gentiles. He teaches that, when by and by the Gentiles
are all brought in, then the Jews also are to be reclaimed ;
and then, under Christ, there is no longer to be any Jew or
Greek, any civilized or barbarian. They are all to be one
as parts of this new humanity. Christ is to be the head of
it, and all the world is to be brought into one under his head
ship. Then, at the last, Christ is to deliver up the kingdom
to the Father, and God is to be all and in all.
Ultimately, then, Paul was both a Universalist and a Uni
tarian ; for, although he teaches the pre-existence of this
Christ, he teaches plainly his subordination to God, and, as
the final outcome of everything, that he is to give up the
kingdom to the one God, and all men are to be part of this
kingdom. This is the outcome of Paul's doctrine of predes
tination. I have left to the last that which is the grandest work that
Paul wrought, — a work as grand as that which almost any
man has ever wrought in the history of humanity.
I said in the beginning that there were two factions in
the early churches. It was inevitable that there should be.
Here were these Jews who had been taught and trained for
ages into the belief that the Mosaic dispensation was not
only divine, but eternal ; that, on the basis of this, a new
kingdom, after the type of the kingdom of David, was to be
established, and the Jews were to rule over the world for-

122 Beliefs about the Bible.
ever. But here comes in a new claimant, a new Messiah, as
those who accepted the Messianic doctrine believed. And
here comes Paul, organizing churches all over the Roman
Empire, and saying that this divine dispensation of Judaism
is obsolete and outgrown. It is very natural that it should
require some time to accept so strange a doctrine as that.
James said, the old first church at Jerusalem said, all the
apostles said, You must also keep the law of Moses, or you
cannot be saved. They sent their emissaries after Paul all
over the Roman Empire, because they regarded him as the
most dangerous heretic of the age. They felt that he was
trying to do good, but that he was teaching false doctrine in
saying that it was not necessary to keep the law of Moses.
After a while, they found that they had to compromise, and
they said, You do not have to keep all, but there are certain
things you must keep ; and, for a long time, they still clung
to the idea of the shadow after they had given up the sub
stance. It was ages before they gave up the notion that a
Jewish Christian was not better than a Gentile one. They
believed that there was an advantage in having been born in
the Jewish religion. This was the origin of the great divi
sion in the Church, with Peter at the head on the one hand,
and Paul at the head on the other. For a great many years,
this discussion rent the Church in twain and almost threat
ened its existence. You find traces of it throughout the
New Testament, one party hitting at the other, and that in
turn striking back; Paul striking hard blows on one side,
and his opponents returning them on the other.
The Acts of the Apostles is a very late book. It was
written after this warfare between the two churches had
practically died out. It was a sort of compromise, written
by somebody who wanted to unite these two factions. You
will notice a strange parallelism between the sayings and

The Epistles. 123
doings of Paul and Peter in this book. If, in one chapter,
Paul is represented as doing something wonderful, you will
find Peter doing as strange a thing in the next. This book is
evidently written for the express purpose of healing over this
division in the Church and doing justice to both sides.
But, now, what is the point of the grand work that Paul
did ? If it had not been for Paul, we might not have had an
historic Christianity. We should certainly have had a very
different one, and not so good a one as that which we have
had. It would have been impossible for the early apostles
to have forced upon the Roman Empire not only a belief in
Jesus, but also the practice of all the ritual of the Jews.
If they had attempted that, the whole effort would have
broken down, and Christianity would have been merely a
new sect of Judaism confined to a few followers. But Paul,
with his views, felt that the hour of the Mosaic ritual had
struck. The past had been a failure, or at most only a
type, a shadow leading on to Christ, the head of the new
humanity. And so he said : The works of the law, that
neither you nor your fathers could keep, are dead rubbish,
to be swept away. So he dispensed with sacrifices and
the Jewish Sabbath, and it may be noted he did not say
anything about any other. You need not pay any atten
tion to the laws of Moses, he said. They are all gone by.
They are only a shadow leading to Christ ; and, now that
Christ has come, everything is summed up in faith in him.
And so arose Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. He
became the liberator of the world, and we are to rank him as
hardly second among the great men who have snapped the
shackles that have bound the freedom of the human race.
Paul broke off this enclosing shell of Moses, and set civiliza
tion free. This doctrine of justification by faith was the
weapon with which he did it ; for he said : Whether you are

124 Beliefs about the Bible.
Jew or Gentile, it does not make any difference. Only appro
priate and incorporate into your own life the life of this new
Christ. Do it by faith. If you believe and accept, you are a
part of this new dispensation of God. And so Jew and
Gentile, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, no matter who, any man
who accepted Christ, became a part of this new kingdom of
heaven ; and thus all the petty, worrying, wearing, exacting,
ritualistic ceremonies of the Jews were abolished at one
stroke. Paul's belief in salvation by faith was not a mere
petty intellectual assent to an idea. It was with him a be-
lievingin something all over, in such dead earnest that you
are ready to give your life for it ; just as you business men
believe in a thing so that you are ready to risk a fortune on
it. Faith is not merely saying, yes, when somebody an
nounces a proposition. It is a belief that drags a whole
train of character and consequences after it. That is Paul's
belief in justification by faith.
How broad that was, and what power of freedom it had in
it, was proved again in the sixteenth century. The Christian
Church, under the Catholic power, had become nothing more
nor less than a worse Judaism, with ritual and ceremo
nial, — eveiything except character, manliness, and force, —
when Luther rose; and the weapon with which he broke
the chains of modern Europe was Paul's old grand doctrine.
I am not sure that we are done with that weapon yet. It
does not belong by any patent right to Orthodoxy. Paul
forged the weapon. Paul tried its temper and proved its
power. Then, it lay rusting and waiting for a thousand
years, until Luther proved strong enough to wield it, and
once more to fight again the battle for human freedom.
And, though it be put away in its armory, it will be called
for again and again. For this doctrine means simply going
right deep down to the heart of humanity, and saying that

The Epistles. 125
what you believe with your whole heart, and are willing to
put your life into, is that which makes you what you are.
This, then, is the service which Paul rendered to the world ;
and it is hints of this service which are scattered all through
these Epistles, and which will make them in all coming
time, whatever theory of the Bible may go up or down, of
inestimable value to those who care to know the history of
humanity.

THE GOSPELS.

As we open the New Testament, we find the four Gospels,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, leading the list of its
books. Yet, as I had occasion to tell you in my sermon on
the Epistles, if we follow, as I have tried to do in a rough
fashion, the chronological order, we shall place the Gospels
at the end of the New Testament rather than at the begin
ning. It was perfectly natural and indeed inevitable, as I
have already showed you, that the Gospels should have been
written after the Epistles were. It could hardly have been
otherwise in the state of Christian belief that existed then ;
for it was a part of that early belief taught, as they sup
posed, not only by apostle and teacher, but by the Master
himself, that Jesus was very soon to return from sitting at
the right hand of God in the heavens, that he was to raise
the dead, that there was to be a general judgment and a
miraculous ushering in of the world-wide Messianic kingdom.
Of course, then, expecting him, perhaps to night, possibly to
morrow, next week, — at the utmost, very soon, — they would
feel no necessity of writing down long stories of his life or
connected statements of what he had said. It was only
after they had waited and were disappointed ; after they had
expected, and he had not come ; after they had begun to
look over the promises of his coming, and see if, in any way,
they could explain the delay, — it was only after all this that
there arose on the part of those little scattered Christian

The Gospels. 127
communities in the Roman Empire a feeling of the necessity
for some connected and authoritative record of what the
waited-for Jesus had said and done. Then, of course, it was
very natural that those who had opportunity to know these
things should write more or less full and connected accounts
of them, and that thus the Gospels should spring up.
These four Gospels, four little thin pamphlets, — for they
could all be comprehended within the limits of less than a
hundred pages, — are really the most significant part perhaps
of all the world's literature. They tell, or claim to tell, the
story of the life of that Galilean peasant who, after spend
ing his youth in utter obscurity, flashes into the sight
of his countrymen for a year, or two, or three, according
as we take one account or another, then disappears by
an ignominious death, and, after two or three hundred years,
is exalted, in the reverence of the civilized world, to the
position of Almighty God. No rational man, then, can be
indifferent to the nature and authority of these little books,
when they tell us a story which has played a part in the
history of the civilized world so stupendous, so unique, that
it stands alone, and has no second.
What, then, is it that we desire to know concerning them ?
We want to know of course, first, by what authority these
little pamphlets speak. Are they the word of God, infal
libly, eternally true? Or are they the traditions of men,
stories naturally springing up and growing through the
imaginative and creative consciousness of the early Church ?
Who wrote them ? Did Matthew and Mark and Luke and
John write them, just as we have them to-day ? If they did,
who were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and how much
are their opinions worth ?
Whichever way we look at these Gospels, you see we
come back to the question of the authority of these books,

128 Beliefs about the Bible.
the power by which they speak. It is in pursuit of this that
I ask you to come with me this morning, while I examine
this subject. I trust you will appreciate the difficulty and
magnitude of my task. It is nothing more nor less than
to condense into some comprehensible shape whole libraries,
and, if I may, pack them, so that my story shall have
some significance and meaning, within the abbreviated limits
of an hour.
Let us then start from the stand-point of our modern
world, and go up the ages, and see what we can find out
about these books.
The oldest manuscript that we have of them takes us
back only to the fourth century, — that is, some three
hundred years after the death of him concerning whom they
were written. The first question we naturally ask is,
whether there is reason to suppose that we have these four
little books in substantially the same shape in which they
were originally written. Three hundred years had passed
since the death of him of whom they are a biography ; and
we do not know just when they came into the precise shape
in which they are to-day. The names now attached to
them we do not find until nearly the last quarter of the
second century, — that is, perhaps one hundred and fifty
years after the death of Jesus, although the earliest forms
of the Gospels may have existed long before that.
The first question, then, as I have said, is whether we
have an accurate transcript of these four little books in
substantially the same shape in which they were when they
first took form. We are obliged to answer this question in
the negative; for the different manuscripts of the Gospels
which are in existence give us some hundreds, if not
thousands, of various renderings. There are differences in
words or in phrases, a difference of half a sentence, some-

The Gospels. 129
times differences of whole paragraphs, or sometimes half a
chapter, or even more than that. Then, we know that there
were changes through the carelessness of transcribers.
There were changes from dogmatic reasons, in order that
the person copying or using them might make them teach
what they held to be true. In this way, changes of greater
or less magnitude were made. Sometimes, they were the
result of intentional fraud. Let me give you the authority
of Origen, one of the most famous and learned of all the
church Fathers. It was some time after the New Testament
books were written before they took on the character of
sacred writings, when a man would not have been regarded
as sacrilegious for taking from or adding to them. They
were considered as the work of ordinary men, and not too
sacred to be touched or changed as yet. But, whatever may
have been thought of the books of the New Testament in
the early Church, the entire Church at the time professed to
regard with almost superstitious sacredness the books of
the Old Testament. That was the Scripture before the New
Testament became Scripture. Yet we have the authority of
Origen, writing in the fourth century, for the statement that,
in the heated and angry controversies of that period, people
did not scruple to change even the text of the Old Testa
ment for their own purposes. Concerning the Septuagint,
he says: "There are evidently great discrepancies in the
copies of the Septuagint, whether attributable to the careless
ness of scribes, or to the rash and pernicious alteration
of the text by some, and the unauthorized interpolations
and omissions of others." Origen writes in that way about
the manner in which the early Church dared to treat even
the Old Testament Scriptures ; so you can imagine with
what freedom they would handle the less sacred and newer
books that afterwards came to be the New Testament.

130 Beliefs about the Bible.
We know, then, that there were great changes made.
These books floated around in the churches, and passed
through some of the most biting, bitter, and burning con
troversies that the religious world has ever seen. They
hurled texts on both sides with as much vigor as has been
done in the modern world. When you remember that there
were only manuscripts, that there were no printed books, no
standards of authority or appeal, you can see how easy it
might be for a man to make a change in his own copy, and
then claim that that was the original. Another man having
a copy that did not agree with it would claim that his was
the original, and the one who claimed the loudest would be
likely to carry the day.
Another point. Were there more than four Gospels, and,
if so, how does it happen that we have only four to-day ?
There were a great many Gospels written in the early
Church. 1 have here in my hand, for example, a copy of
the apocryphal New Testament. It is almost as large as
the genuine one. This book is made up of Gospels, visions,
and allegories, which were rejected by the orthodox of the
Church as time went on. It contains at the beginning four
Gospels, the Gospel of Mary, the Protevangelion, the Gospel
of the Infancy, the Gospel of Nicodemus. I also hold in
my hand the book of an eminent High Churchman of
England, entitled Lost and Hostile Gospels, which gives an
account of ten which were known to the early Church, a
part on one side of the great controversy, and a part on
the other. I had occasion, in a previous sermon, as you
will remember, to refer to the great controversy in the
early Church between Paul, who was in favor of admitting
the Gentiles, and the other section, headed by Peter and
James, who believed that no Gentiles should come in, or
only by practically becoming Jews. This controversy raged

The Gospels. 1 3 1
for a long period of years ; and we find, as a record of it,
certain Gospels called the Petrine Gospels, representing the
Hebraic side, and another set called the Pauline Gospels,
which take Paul's side of the controversy. They went to
the extent of changing the records of the Gospels them
selves, coloring them to suit one faction or another of this
great party controversy. These Gospels, many of them,
were written or changed, as it was supposed, in the interest
of heretical sects, though it is quite a question whether those
that came to be called heretical were not originally the
orthodox ones who changed to heretics by being left be
hind ; for Orthodoxy changed, as it has been changing
ever since, and that which represented the older ideas
became the heresies left behind.
Along toward the latter part of the second century, we find
that the sifting process has gone on, and the Church has come
to a general consensus of opinion as to which Gospels should
be accepted as genuine ; and those were the four that we have
in our hands to-day.
We can reconstruct some of those lost and hostile Gospels ;
that is, we can tell almost the whole story of the life of
Jesus as told there, through picking up the quotations made
here and there in the controversial writings of the day.
Take, for example, the Gospel of Marcion, one of the leading
heretics of the time. He had a Gospel which he claimed to
be older than any we possess, and which I am inclined to
think was so. This represented Jesus as human, and took
the Hebraic side of the controversy. Marcion, being one
of the great leaders of heresy, was quoted by all the princi
pal writers of the time. They quoted his Gospel here and
there and everywhere to such an extent that we can, in the
literature of the early Church, pick out nearly the whole of
it, and put it together like a piece of mosaic work. As

132 Beliefs about the Bible.
letting you into the secret of the state of mind of one of
those early Fathers that we are accustomed to look upon
with such exaggerated reverence, let me give a specimen of
his opinions. After the Gospel of John had been written
and become popular, and the four Gospels had been decided
on, Irenaeus, writing about 185 A.D., gives his reason why, in
his opinion, there are these four Gospels and no more ; and
it is a most astonishing reason. He does not say there are
four Gospels because there were only four writers who told
the truth, because there were only four who wrote with au
thority, that there were only four who were inspired to do
this kind of work. He does not say anything about that.
What does he say ? " It is impossible that the Gospels can be
more or less than they are. For, as there are four zones in
the world which we inhabit, and four principal winds, while
the Church is spread abroad throughout the earth, and the
pillar and basis of the Church is the gospel and the spirit
of life, it is right that she should have four pillars, exhaling
immortality on every side, and bestowing renewed vitality
on men. From which fact, it follows that the Word has
given us four versions of the gospel united by one spirit."
I want you now to consider with me a little the traces of
growth which have taken place in these four Gospels. If
you look at them carefully, you will have to divide them into
two parts ; the first part containing the first three Gospels,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the second part John, by itself.
The first three have been called the Synoptic Gospels, from
two Greek words meaning taking a common view, or seeing
together. They give in general the same view of Jesus, dif
ferent from that of John.
Look at the first three, and you will see some of the evi
dences lying on the surface which prove to us that we do not
have the record as it could have been written in the time or

The Gospels. 133
near the time of Jesus. Of course, I shall not be able to go
into very minute points of criticism. I shall only give you
specimens of what might be multiplied indefinitely.
Take the genealogies first. Matthew has a genealogy, and
Luke has one ; yet they both tell the story of the miraculous
conception. They both tell us that Jesus was the son of
Mary without any human father. Yet they take the pains to
give us at length the genealogy of Joseph, as though that had
anything to do with it. Unless Jesus was the son of Joseph,
giving his genealogy does not prove that he was the son of
David or of Abraham, any more than it proves that I am. Of
course, it has nothing whatever to do with it. Take one or two
other little hints akin to this. Jesus is represented when a
mere boy as betraying remarkable precocity in the journey
made to Jerusalem. Yet we find his mother, who ought to
have known whether he was the son of the Holy Spirit,
utterly astonished at this evidence of precocity. We find his
brothers charging him with being possessed with the devil, and
having no sort of faith in him. We find his townsmen laugh
ing at him, ridiculing his pretensions. Could it be possible
that they had had the slightest hint that this was the son of
the Most High God, — not only that, but very God himself ?
If so, ought they to have been very much astonished at any
proof of wisdom he might display in his early childhood or
in any part of his career ? Ought his mother to have been
astonished that he should feel that he had a career before
him, and that he did not ask parental guidance or permis
sion concerning it ?
Another point. We find in the Gospels as we have them
now a phrase in which Jesus is represented as giving his
disciples the following command : " Go ye therefore and
teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." Turn to Paul's

134 Beliefs about the Bible.
Epistles. We find him talked about, charged with baptizing
disciples into his own name. Would it have been possible
for him or for any of the disciples to have baptized in the
name of Paul, when they had been commanded to baptize in
the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ? We
know perfectly well from the development of doctrine that,
until the second or third centuries, the doctrine of the Trinity
was not held at all. So that the fact that this phrase is lying
there on the surface of the gospel proves beyond question
that it belongs to a later age, and must have been placed
there after the doctrine that it represents had grown into
the consciousness and belief of the early Church.
Take another point. Jesus is represented, the very last
thing before he left the earth, as commanding his disciples
to "go into all the world and preach the gospel to every
creature " ; yet he has not been dead ten years before the
Church is rent into factions wrangling over the question
whether they shall allow any Gentile to hear preaching or
not, whether they shall admit a Gentile, even if he wants
to come. Is it possible that Jesus could have uttered those
words, and all the apostles have forgotten them so quickly?
Think what a weapon they would have been to Paul ! What
if he could have said to Peter and James, Do you not
remember that the very last thing the Master said before
leaving the earth was that we were to preach the gospel to
every creature ! But neither Paul refers to it in controversy,
nor does James or Peter. The inference is irresistible
that the words were placed there in a later age, after the
Pauline faction had won the day ; and, then, Jesus is
represented as indorsing that which was an accomplished
fact. In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is represented
as telling how to deal with those who should become hereti-

The Gospels. 135
cal or offenders in the Church. There was not any church
in existence until long after he died. It was absurd to
suppose he was talking about church regulations before the
Church existed. Then, the spirit of the directions is utterly
foreign to the Master. He was always exceedingly tender
to publicans and sinners and outcasts. But, here, Jesus is
made to say of such an offending disciple : " If he neglect
to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man
and a publican." Can you conceive those words in the
mouth of the tender, forgiving, human Son of Man ?
Take one more point. In the twenty-fifth chapter of
Matthew, Jesus is represented as sitting on the throne
of judgment, and before him are gathered all the nations
of the earth; and he is giving, as Almighty God, the con
ditions of eternal salvation. What are they? Simply,
moral goodness, — healing the sick, visiting those in prison,
feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, looking after
the lowest outcast. These are the conditions. If there
were any other conditions, can you conceive him who
had come on purpose to save men as forgetting all
about them ? What is to become then of all that shall die
between the time he utters those words and the time that
Almighty God shall correct his statement, and give a true
version of the conditions of eternal life ? Yet, in the last
chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we find the same Jesus
represented as sending his disciples into all the world to
preach the gospel to every creature. And what are the
conditions of salvation that are here given ? " He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that
believeth not shall be damned." Not a word about good
ness or morality. Instead of its being the Son of Man
who utters these last words, I am compelled to imagine in
his place a robed and self-sufficient bishop of the Church,

136 Beliefs about the Bible.
domineering and dictatorial toward those who dared to
question his words.
These three Gospels represent three traditions in part;
and, in part, they represent one common tradition concern
ing the life and teaching of Jesus. I want to hint a word
about that which would take me a long time to develop with
fulness and clearness, so that you may see by what process
we get back through the maze of the improbable and the
miraculous, until we find ourselves in the presence of the
simple Son of Man.
Each writer gives the story of his life. You will find it
not only a common story, but the same words, the same
phrases are perpetually recurring in each of these three
different Gospels. It is settled beyond question, I think, as
a principle of criticism that these three writers used some
common materials; that is, Mark did not borrow from
Matthew, nor Luke from either, but all three used a common
fund of tradition. We find traces in the traditions of the
times of logia, little fragmentary writings. Some one had
gathered the sayings of Jesus, another had written a partial
account of what he did, and so there grew up this common
fund of tradition concerning him. And, when these Gospels
were written, they used this common story, making such
additions as they thought best. If we take out that which
is common to them all, if we take out the story in which
they all agree, and leave out that which is added, we come
to that to which scholars have given the name of the triple
tradition. Suppose we take three Lives of Lincoln or
Washington, distinct in many points, and yet agreeing in
many, we should feel more certain of those things which
were told by all three than of what was told by any one
alone. Precisely the same is true here. If we extract the
story from these three Gospels, we can make out a complete

The Gospels. 137
history of Jesus of Nazareth, and use only the very words
which are common to all three of these different writers.
If we make such a story as that, what kind of a man do
we find ? The supernatural birth is lost at once, so also the
story of the supernatural resurrection and ascension into
heaven. Nearly all the more stupendous and incredible
miracles are gone ; and we stand in the presence of a simple,
loving, tender, heroic, devoted man, — a man about whom
wonder stories are beginning to gather, and they seem so
simple and so natural that we can almost see the materials '
out of which they have sprung. This is the process that
criticism is going through with to-day, just as it seeks to find
the origin of any wonderful story that it believes to have
had an historic basis.
I have said John stands apart. The other three Gospels
were growths. Neither Matthew nor Mark nor Luke wrote
them. Those names as attached to them were purely tradi
tional, but without one particle of authority. We do not find
those names until nearly two hundred years have gone by.
It is a fact recognized by all the best orthodox criticism
of to-day, as represented by Prof. Robertson Smith in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, and by Dr. Abbott of the English
Church in the same, that these Gospels are unapostolic digests
of early traditions. That is, some one has edited and gath
ered into the shape in which we have them materials a good
deal older than they. The Gospel of John, however, stands
alone. Here, Jesus is not a simple man. It is announced
in the very outset that it is not a simple man of whom he
writes. John's Gospel is a theological treatise. He starts
out with a thesis which he is going to prove, and he selects
from the materials here and there that which shall serve his
purpose ; and, when he is done, we recognize hardly a single
lineament of the simple son of Joseph and Mary of the first

138 Beliefs about the Bible.
three Gospels, and we find in his place a grand, pre-existent,
spiritual, metaphysical abstraction ; for the Jesus of John is
not a man. He could by no possibility have been the same
person about whom Matthew, Mark, and Luke are writing.
By the time John wrote, the doctrine had developed of his
being the pre-existent Christ, partaking of the nature of God.
He says nothing about any human origin or birth, but begins
with him in the heavens, before he descends to earth. Then,
after a brief phenomenal appearance here, he disappears
into the clouds again.
Let us note two or three points of difference between this
conception and the others. According to the first three
Gospels, the public life of Jesus is given as about a year and
a half ; and he makes one journey to Jerusalem, spending
most of his life in Galilee.
John, on the other hand, appears to give his public life as
continuing three years. He makes three journeys to Jerusa
lem, and spends the greater part of his life in Judea. Both
cannot be true. See how different are the whole circum
stances, the whole atmosphere, and the kind of man. The
writer of John evidently lived out of Judea. He lived after
the destruction of Jerusalem. He makes all kinds of mis
takes in geography. He does not locate the towns correctly,
nor under the right names. John was intensely Jewish in
belief and sympathy, and yet the writer of this Gospel speaks
of the Jews as though they were a foreign people. He even
speaks to the Jews of things in their law as what is written
" in your law." Suppose I, a citizen of Massachusetts, should
stand here and talk about one of the common statutes under
which we all live as of "your law." If I came from Ohio, it
would be appropriate enough ; but, if I lived in Massachu
setts, it would be absurd. Or, as if I were writing a book,
and should speak about Americans as though I were an Eng-

The Gospels. 139
lishman or a Frenchman. John is speaking all the time of
what the Jews did and said, reflecting the time when the
Christians began to look on the Jews as natural enemies,
and the persons who had crucified their Lord. Let me read
a sentence here from Dr. Martineau, one of the leading
Unitarians of the world : —
That a constant companion of the ministry of Jesus should shift it
almost wholly to a new theatre, should never come across a demo
niac, and never tell a parable; should remember nothing about the
Kingdom of Heaven and the Coming of the Son of Man ; should have
forgotten the last Passover of the little flock, with its institution of the
Communion, and have occupied those festival hours with the Crucifixion
instead ; should have lost the Master's terse maxims and sweet images of
life, thrown out in homely dialogue, and have fancied in their place
elaborate monologues, darkened with harsh and mystic paradox, — is so
utterly against nature as to forfeit the rank of an admissible hypothesis.
That is, Dr. Martineau thinks it absurd that John could
have been the author of this Gospel. Jesus does not utter
any parables in this Gospel. He tells them not to make long
prayers, and yet he prays through a whole chapter. He who
was tender and loving toward the past, and who counted
himself as a prophet like those of old, and who accepted his
mission as prophesied and foretold, is made to say that all
who came before him were thieves and robbers. The Jesus
of John's Gospel is metaphysical, unlovable, hardly human,
utterly unlike the simple man of Nazareth of the first three.
Now, I must tell you how it came that such a Gospel as
this should have been written, and under what bias it was
composed. I have referred before to the philosophy and the sect of
the Gnostics. They grew up in this way. When the Septua
gint translation of the Bible was made, there started up in
Alexandria a great school of philosophy, the avowed pur
pose of which, in part, was to reconcile the religion of the

140 Beliefs about the Bible.
Jews and the philosophy of Greece ; and, from that day on,
this mixture of Old Testament religion and Grecian philoso
phy went on, fermenting and changing according to the
popular taste and speculations of the time, until, along in the
second and third centuries, we find ourselves face to face
with this great system of Gnosticism. What was the cen
tral point of their belief? They believed that matter was
essentially evil and the source of evil ; that God was the
ineffable, the infinite, the unseen, who dwelt remote from all
possible contact with the visible world. Yet, in some way, he
was the source of all life and all things. They had, there
fore, to bridge over this almost infinite gulf between God
and the world by conceiving or speculating on what they
called ceons, or emanations.
That is, in some inexplicable, mysterious way, a god a little
lower than the Infinite One emanates from him, constituting
a god of the second class, and then from this god of the
second class emanates a third, and so on till, to make up
the complete chain, there are about thirty different ceons or
emanations. The last and lowest of the whole range was the
one who created the world. They identified him with the
Jehovah of the Old Testament. When they began to specu
late about the nature of Jesus, they conceived that, in some
marvellous, mysterious way, he summed up all this chain of
ceons, or emanations, so that it is said that in him dwelt
all the fulness of the godhead bodily. You find in him the
whole pleroma, the technical term by which they designated
this whole range of mons that linked the Infinite God to the
world. It was a wild region of speculation. They did not
have one single fact to go on, and it did not seem to occur
to any one of them that they needed a fact. It was one wild
chaos of speculation, in which the simplest and mildest
virtues became endowed with personality.

The Gospels. 141
The opening of John's Gospel seems very simple in Eng
lish, — all this about life and light and truth. But, when we
look at it carefully, we find that these were sub-gods, deities,
spelled with a capital letter, personified ; and Jesus sums them
all up in himself, and becomes the link to bind God and the
world together. Under the influences of this philosophy,
John's Gospel was written. It was a reconciling book be
tween the divisions in the Church, between the Gnostics
and the other believers. When one who understands Gnosti
cism looks at it, he sees it all covered with the finger-marks
of that system, as modern literature is covered over with the
finger-marks of evolution or Darwinism. It could not have
been written till Gnosticism was in the air, any more than
Darwinism could exist till Darwin had lived.
In what position do we stand concerning the life and
words of Jesus ? Have we a record of them that is perfect,
complete, authoritative ?
No, we must confess that we have not, so far, as we can
be certain, the testimony of a single eye-witness of anything
he ever did. Paul is our oldest witness, and he never saw
Jesus. We have not the authoritative record of a word he
ever uttered. Yet do not misunderstand me, or think I go too
far. I do not doubt in the least that we have substantially a
true account of the sayings of Jesus. There are a good many
things recorded that I believe he did not say, and of course
he said a thousand things which are not there. But the
words of Jesus were of such a nature that they were not
easily to be forgotten. We may safely trust them to tradition,
and expect them to be reported with a great deal of ac
curacy ; and we may believe that we have them substantially
as he uttered them.
As we slough off the accretions and later growths of
miracle and marvel, what kind of a man do we see Jesus

142 Beliefs about the Bible.
must have been ? Simply, a tendeF, gentle, true, God-con
scious man, sympathetic toward all men, a hero, a martyr,
a man who shared the doubts and errors of his age, — which
is only saying that he was human, — and yet rising above it
like the Andes above a plain. He was grand in his heroism,
simple and true when standing for his convictions in the
face of the Roman governor and the howling mob ; thought
ful and tender to the last, yet going unflinchingly to feel the
nails driven through the quivering flesh that fastened him to
the cross ; a man, combining manhood's strongest strength
and womanhood's tenderest grace ; a man to be loved, to
be honored, to be everything except worshipped. A man
whose name we may be proud to wear, if we do not change
it until it has a meaning that he would not have recognized.
When we come to speak of the miracles, there is no intel
ligent jury in Boston could ever be induced to commit a man
to prison for thirty days for the crime of larceny, unless they
had stronger evidence for it than we have of any New Tes
tament miracle. We have stronger evidence for miracles
performed in the time of Saint Augustine, in the time of
Thomas a Becket, for those in Lourdes last year, than we
have of the New Testament miracles. Yet we let them
pass by us as the idle winds which we make no account
of. Shall we then believe these because they are old, be
cause they are anonymous, because we cannot put the wit
nesses on the stand and cross-question them, because we do
not know who they were or when or where they lived. But,
even if we had proof of such things, what then ? It seems
strange to me that people should make so much of the ques
tion whether John wrote the Gospel bearing his name or not.
If he did, it is purely a literary question. If I knew that
John, who leaned on the bosom of Jesus, wrote the Gospel,
and therein declared that he was a supernatural being, why

The Gospels. 143
should I believe it ? Suppose that Mr. Herndon, after an
intimate association of years with Lincoln, should tell me
that it was his private conviction that Abraham Lincoln was
a supernatural being : should I believe it ? It would be only
his opinion, and we must have something more than a simple
opinion of any man before we can accept the stupendous
statement that three in heaven are different from three on
earth, and that a fallible, weak, suffering, dying man is at
the same moment the eternal and infinite God of all the
worlds. But, after these are all gone by, we have in this New
Testament the record of a life whose influences cannot die, —
one which, so far as it has had opportunity to make its own
simple way and tell its own simple story, has been largely
sweetening, brightening, helpful, uplifting, — and divine.

THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE.

It is generally assumed that there is such a thing as " The
Religion of the Bible." And, further, it is also 'generally
assumed that this religion is one, simple, and easily discov
ered. Men speak of "the Word," as though indeed the
Bible were only one word, and had but one utterance. One
man says, " I am a Bible Christian," as though that were a
perfectly definite thing that any one could easily deduce from
a plain reading of the book. " The Bible is the religion of
Protestants," said Chillingworth, thinking that thus he was
plainly setting forth the grounds of the Reformation as
against the pretensions of Rome. " Go and read your Bible
prayerfully, and youwill find it a sure and safe guide," — so
from our childhood have we heard our ministers telling us.
All this takes for granted that the Bible contains and
clearly sets forth some one, definite system of religious
truth, to the exclusion of all other systems. But what are
the facts, as practically set forth in the real condition of the
" Christian " world ? The Romanist prayerfully reads his
Bible, and he finds in it the primacy of Peter, the supremacy
of the Church, and the direction to " do penance " for the
forgiveness of sins. The Protestant prayerfully reads it,
and he discovers that Rome is the "mystic Babylon," the
"mother of harlots," the " abomination of desolation." The
Churchman reads it prayerfully, and he sees priestly suprem
acy and sacramental salvation. The Congregationalist reads

The Religion of the Bible. 145
it prayerfully, and comes away convinced that sacramental-
ism is the deadly " works of the law " that are forbidden,
and that every believer is his own all-sufficient priest. The
Baptist looks into it, and sees all true believers going clean
under the water ; while most other sects see them only going
down to the edge of the water and standing there to be sprin
kled. Cromwell and his Roundheads read it, and saw every
where " the Lord of Hosts " leading on his followers to battle ;
and they went out shouting, " The sword of the Lord and of
Gideon ! " The Quaker reads it, and finds everywhere " the
Prince of Peace," hears only the command, " Resist not
evil," and repeats after his Master, " He that takes the sword
shall perish by the sword." The Unitarian reads it, and
comes away flourishing the text, " My Father is greater than
I " ; and he remembers that Jesus was sometimes ignorant,
was weary and hungry, and seemed in all points a man.
The Trinitarian goes into the same armory, and comes out
wielding the phrase, "I and my Father are one." The Ortho
dox sees overshadowing all the pages the dreadful image of
justice and wrath, says, " Our God is a consuming fire," and
sees this fiery wrath flaming against his enemies even to
the lowest hell. The Universalist sees only the loving
"heavenly Father," and turns the most awful forebodings
into Oriental tropes and pictorial rhetoric. The Mormon
picks out phrases to bolster up his polygamy ; the monoga
mist falls back on Adam and Eve, and cries out even against
divorce ; while the Shaker, on the basis of the personal ex
ample and specific words of Jesus, forbids all sexual relations
whatever. The Northerner loaded his gun with texts, and
went out to fight for freedom ; while the Southerner quoted
Noah's curse against Ham, and the patriarchal example,
and so met Bible with Bible in defence of slavery.
What, then, is this strange book? The gypsy fortune-

146 Beliefs about the Bible.
teller sometimes invites her maiden inquirer to look into her
magic mirror, and assures her that she shall see the face of
her future husband. She looks and sees her own ; and, for
explanation, she gets the intelligence that, when married,
her face will be her husband's. Is the Bible a magic mirror,
in which every comer sees his own face reflected ? All
these sects — mutually exclusive, contradictory, antagonistic
— appeal with equal confidence to the same book as the
charter of their rights and the ground of their authority.
Each one is sure that it is right, and equally sure that all
the others are wrong. And, until recent times, there has
been a short and easy way of accounting for all dissentient
opinion. Each sect has said, " All good and honest people
see it as I do. A different opinion means wilful blindness
and a bad heart." And, since they have all held it the plain
duty of "the Lord's people" to destroy his enemies, and
since each one has held it self-evident that its enemies and
the Lord's enemies were the same, the dominant sect has
generally thought best to give its opponents a foretaste in
this world of the Lord's " uncovenanted mercies " stored up
in the nether regions of the next.
But thoughtful people are beginning to wonder if it can
be possible that a book that is read in so many different
ways can teach one and only one system of truth. They are
beginning to wonder if it can be a plain revelation that
reveals so many different things. Of course, if one is at
liberty to pick and choose, to wink hard when you come to
the hard places, to twist texts by private interpretation until
you get a meaning out of them that their writer never
thought of, to adopt Swedenborg's method, and make pas
sages mean almost anything except what they say, — why,
then, of course, one can get any teaching he pleases out of
anything- The spelling-book or the dictionary might serve

The Religion of the Bible. 147
for a Bible, if it can be treated in that way. In one of his
humorous letters during the war, Nasby said that the text,
" Cursed be Canaan," and Paul's directions about returning
the fugitive slave, Onesimus, were to be taken literally : " all
the rest of the Bible is figurative." If one may treat as
" figurative " whatever he does not happen to like or want to
believe, why then, all of us can believe the Bible, and get out
of it anything we please. But, I take it, we will all agree
that, intellectually, this is hardly respectable, and that, mor
ally, it is not quite honest.
Turning then and looking at the Bible with wide-open,
reasonable eyes, what do we find it to be ? It contains
snatches of rude song and fragments of custom-made law
that are perhaps two thousand years older than Christ ; and
it is not completed for two hundred years after his time.
Tradition, history, law, theology, ethics, proverb, idyl, poetry,
letters, authentic, anonymous, pseudonymous, all mingled
together! It is not a book: it is a national literature.
Suppose I should make a compilation. Let me gather the
fragments of far-off Saxon sagas and legal maxims ; put
in a little of the Venerable Bede, of Beowulf, of Chaucer;
include some of Froissart's Chronicles and a play of
Shakspere ; make a collection of English and American law,
history, and poetry ; let me bind them all together in one
volume ; then let me try to gather out of it all one simple
system of belief, in which all the variety and contradiction
should harmonize, — what would you think of such, an
attempt ? I can imagine you admiring my ingenuity, but
it would certainly be at the expense of my judgment. Very
like this is the effort of those who try to get out of the
Bible one consistent system of religious teaching. The
Bible, as I have said, is not a book, but a national literature.
It is the biography of a race. It is predominantly a relig-

148 Beliefs about the Bible.
ious literature, for the simple reason that the national genius
was predominantly religious. Their God was also king ; and
so law and custom, politics and poetry, were all looked at
from the theocratic stand-point.
But this peculiar feature of the Biblical literature brings
out in strong relief two very important facts, that we need
carefully to note before we go on in our search.
1. It shows us that religion is natural, a part of the nature
of things, — something not put on like a garment, and that
thus can be as easily thrown off. It is a part of human
nature, and so as permanent as human nature itself. Those
who seek for it a supernatural origin and ground render it
a very doubtful homage and service. For if it is not an
inherent part of human nature, but something thrust into
the system from without, then human nature may some day
decide to thrust it off, and get on without it. But, in reality,
it is man's eternal search for the secret of life, his endeavor
to get into right relation with the nature of things.
2. The other fact is this : since it is a part of human
nature, we should expect to find its form growing and chang
ing, just as the external manifestations of all the other
elements of human nature grow and change. So, instead
of being troubled by the early crudenesses and the kaleido
scopic changes in theology, these things are just what we
ought to expect.
There is, then, in the ordinary sense of the words, no such
thing as " the Religion of the Bible." Instead of that,
there are the religions of the Bible. Or, if you prefer
another way of putting it, there is the eternal search for
God, taking on ever new and higher forms and phases, to
keep step with the growing intelligence and civilization
of man.
Not as exhausting, but only indicating the facts, let us now

The Religion of the Bible. 149
trace some of the more important features of some of the
different religions of the Bible.
1. As, then, we turn to the oldest traditions of the religion
of Israel, not only do we find no Christianity, which so many
claim to be the religion of the Bible, but we find no Judaism ;
neither do we find even the tribal worship of Yahveh. We
are face to face with pure and simple nature worship in its
crudest forms. We find the traces of fetichism all around
us, such a fetichism as to-day goes along with and indicates
the lower barbarism of tribes like the Fijis or those of
Central Africa.
For example, we find the worship of sacred trees, sacred
stones, sacred serpents, sacred animals, a sacred box or
ark, divination like that of the old augurs, sex-worship, the
worship of the planets, and an attempt to appease the
ferocious god by human sacrifices. It is quite true that
the later writers attempted to interpret all these things in
the light of their later monotheism, just as the Catholic
Church incorporated the older paganism, and tried to make
it a part of Christianity. But that does not change the
facts. The common people worshipped the sacred oaks
at Mamre, though later times tried to explain this popular
reverence by associating them with a supposed camping
station of Abraham. Jacob pays reverence to a stone
where he has a wondrous dream. Moses lifts up a brazen
serpent, supposed to possess magical curative virtues. At
the exodus, and even as late as after the death of Solomon,
Yahveh is worshipped under the image of a bull. And the
Temple itself perpetuated the remnants of the old bull-
worship by the horns attached to the altar, and the twelve
brazen oxen which stood under and held up the laver used
for the sacred lustrations. The Israelite armies supposed
they carried their god around in a box or ark. The

150 Beliefs about the Bible.
Philistines could capture him, and leave them defenceless
without his aid. Rachel steals the gods of her father
Laban, hides them ' under the camel furnishings in her tent,
and sits upon them. Divination, like that of all the pagan
nations, was practised by patriarchs, by Samuel, by David,
by the High Priests, and even by New Testament apostles.
Sex-worship — the Ashera, translated "grove" in the Old
Testament, was a symbol of it — was practised with all
kinds of abominable rites. The festival of the new moon,
and the Sabbath itself, show the general hold of planet-
worship on the life of the people. And Abraham, Jephthah,
Samuel, David, and many of the later kings, illustrate the
early practice and the very late hold on the public mind
of human sacrifice.
These things are not strange. Since all races have passed
through these crude and brutal stages of religious develop
ment, we ought not to wonder that Israel does the same.
Only these facts are not quite consistent with a special
revelation, or with the notion that the Bible contains but
one religion.
2. After nature worship there comes- a general popular
recognition of allegiance to one god.
This does not mean that they always worshipped only
him, nor that that they disbelieved the existence of any
others. It only means that they had adopted him as their
tribal god. That they continued to worship others is
apparent all the way through the Old Testament. The
prophets are always rebuking them for it, and their calami
ties are always being attributed to it. Though, on this
theory, it is a little strange that an idolatrous king like
Manasseh has a long and prosperous reign, while the faithful
servant of Yahveh, like Josiah, is cut off in disastrous
defeat.

The Religion of the Bible. 151
As long as they believed in the real existence and power
of other gods, it is hardly strange that they should try to
win their favor. Mr. Conway tells us of a Christian woman
in England who always bows when the devil's name is
mentioned ; prudently arguing that, if he really exists and is
as powerful as he is represented, it may be just as well to
keep on the right side of him.
Some of the very texts that are frequently quoted to
prove a monotheistic belief on the part of the Jews, in
reality prove just the opposite. Yahveh is "King of kings
and Lord of lords," a "great King above all gods." The
lords and gods over whom he is supreme must exist, or such
words mean nothing.
And it is absurd, also, to try to think that the god of Sam
uel and David is the same being as the god of the second
Isaiah and of Jesus. The older conception is of a being
who comes down on earth, as Jupiter and Mercury used to
do, and walks about, talks, and eats like a man. He is
jealous ; he is ignorant, having to go down to Babel and
Sodom to see what is going on ; he makes mistakes and
repents ; he likes the smell of a burning ox offered in
sacrifice; he rejoices over the destruction of an enemy like
a red-handed tribal war-chief.
3. But, as ages go by, and the people rise to a higher
type of civilization, the popular god is transformed, and
reflects this higher type of civilization. We are face to face
with a spiritual monotheism. To the higher prophets, only
one god really exists : " All the gods of the nations
are idols." They have ears, eyes, hands, and feet; but
they neither hear, see, handle, nor walk. And this
higher god cares nothing for their sacrifices nor the smell
of their burnt offerings. He only wants truth in the inward
parts and righteousness of life. How different he from

152 Beliefs about the Bible.
the old god who himself inspired prophets to lie, glorified
treachery, sanctioned rape, and took delight in the blood
of his enemies ! The highest peak of the Old Testament
is reached when Micah proclaims, "What doth the Lord
require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God ? "
Here is a religion of simple moral monotheism, — one god
only, and he to be worshipped only by lofty-souled reverence
and human goodness.
4. But Israel does not remain on this lofty table-land of
noble thought and pure devotion. From this time on to
the birth of Jesus there is a declension toward the lower
level of legalism, ritual, and ceremony. The free inspiration
of the prophets has died out, and they begin to look back
and live on the past. Instead of being themselves inspired,
they worship the records of a past inspiration. Sacrifices
and tithes and petty observances take the place of character
and noble deeds. They quarrel over such questions as to
how often and in what ways they shall wash their hands.
They measure off the precise distance which it is permitted
one to walk on the Sabbath. They wear charms about their
persons, made up of magical texts of Scripture. They
buy supposed merit at the expense of long and tedious
prayers. They hamper every hour of the day with some
petty observance, to break over which they think will incur
the anger of their god.
But what a god he must be to care for such humdrum
boy's play as all this ! This is the second childhood of a
religion, the decrepitude of an age that can only sit by the
fireside, and tell over what it has done.
And, in all these forms of the older religions, one impor
tant fact is to be specially remarked. Those who talk about
" the religion of the Bible " are accustomed to tell us that

The Religion of the Bible. 153
the one object of it all is to save our souls in the next world.
But, throughout these four forms of religion to be so clearly
traced in the Old Testament, soul-saving in the next world
has played no part at all. Until the very last there was no
popular belief in or teaching about any next world at all.
Until within two thousand years, then, this same God (as
the popular faith teaches), who is now so anxious to have us
save our souls, never told the world, never told his chosen
people, that they had any souls, or that there was any next
world ! When these old Jews come up to judgment and
ask God why he did not let them know about it, what will
he answer ? Is it not even absurd for men who claim to be
intelligent to tell us that two religions, the sole object of
one of which is to save people in the other world, and the
other of which does not teach any other world at all, are still
one and the same ? Jewish rewards and punishments, down
almost to the time of Christ, were all confined to this world.
5. But now we have come to still another and a new relig
ion. Jewish hopes and Persian dreams have wrought
together. Pagan speculations and Israelite apocalypses, like
the Book of Enoch, have filled the air with vague expecta
tions. The people are looking, either through revolution on
earth or an avatar from heaven, for the coming of an ideal
kingdom. John appears in the desert, proclaiming that "the
kingdom of heaven is at hand." The young Jesus appears
at his baptism, and is designated as the expected Messianic
king. He accepts the supposed prophetic appointment.
But he carries it out in such a way that even John begins to
doubt if he is really the one, and sends messengers from his
prison at Machaerus to ask him.
What, now, really was the religion of Jesus ? In a word, it
was this. Through his instrumentality, God was soon to usher
in, suddenly and by miracle, a kingdom of heaven. It was

154 Beliefs about the Bible.
to be established on earth. The terms of admission to its
divine citizenship were very simple. Not a word about
Trinity or atonement, — only acceptance of him as the Mes
siah; repentance, or a practical change of life so far as it
had been evil ; and the practical living out of moral good
ness as he understood and taught it. The dark side of it
was — if it be really true that Jesus taught it — the going
away of those who refused his conditions " into everlasting
punishment, prepared for the devil and his angels." To
Jesus, the devil was as real a being as God ; and he undoubt
edly accepted the superstition of his time as to the demoniacal
origin of disease.
Here, then, is a religion entirely distinct from anything the
Old Testament contains, and also almost altogether unlike
anything that later ages have called by the name of
Christian. I am aware that large numbers of people attempt to alle
gorize these facts all away. But it seems to me neither
scholarship nor plain dealing to torture the language of
Jesus into conformity with modern thought, as long as it is
perfectly well known that this same modern thought was
unheard of in that age. The language of Jesus is to be
interpreted in the light of the beliefs and ideas prevalent at
the time he lived and spoke. I am then compelled to be
lieve that, in the historic sense of the word, Jesus himself
was not a Christian. He was a theist, pure and simple ; or,
in the sense that he believed in only one God, a Unitarian.
6. But the New Testament contains the fruitful germs and
outlines of another religion still. There is, first, the religion
of Jesus ; and then, after that, there is a religion about Jesus.
Jesus himself did not teach what has come to be called Chris
tianity ; but Christianity, formed of many composite elements,
grew up around the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, and so

The Religion of the Bible. 155
made his Messiahship, the Christos, its central doctrine.
Hence the name. It was the crystallized result of the
flowing together of many speculative ingredients, pagan,
Jewish, philosophic. It started with the idea of " the king
dom of God," just as Jesus did. At first, it was to be here
on earth ; then, after long waiting and many disappointments,
it was transferred to the other world. But it radically di
verged from the teaching of Jesus in regard to the condi
tions of entrance into that kingdom. The man Jesus was
changed into a god ; and about this central article of faith
there clustered an aggregation of mystic, philosophic, and
speculative beliefs, the acceptance of all of which became
the condition of salvation. Around these beliefs grew a
thorny hedge of ceremonial, as tangled and luxuriant in
its development as the world had ever seen. The guard
ians of these became dominant, and made it so hard to be
saved that hell grew populous and heaven exceedingly lone
some. Then, as ages went by, came revolt, and the multiplication
of sects, each one claiming it had the whole gospel. And, as
each one emphasized this doctrine or that, the conditions of
salvation became multiplied and bewildering. It was faith,
it was works, it was ritual and sacrament, it was the blood,
it was one thing or another according to the church you at
tended or the preacher you heard. All pointed to the Bible ;
and, since all these things are in the Bible, it is not very
strange that those who look should find almost anything
that they desire.
Dr. George E. Ellis has recently raised the question — and
a storm at the same time — as to whether the Bible is ortho
dox. You might as well ask as to whether English Litera
ture is orthodox. It is, and it is not. It all depends upon
what part of it you read. If you fix your attention on one

156 Beliefs about the Bible.
phase of teaching, and if you then consider everything that
contradicts that as figurative, why, then, it becomes compara
tively easy to harmonize the whole around a few ideas. But,
if you take the Bible for what it is, — a national religious
literature, — you will cease talking about "the religion of the
Bible." You will trace the upward steps and stages of
growth in religion, as well as in all other things ; and, look
ing forward instead of behind, you will learn to believe that
God is really alive to-day, and that his last word is not yet
spoken.

THE MORALITY OF THE BIBLE.

I wish to give expression to just one word of preface
before beginning the treatment of my theme, lest the purpose
that I have in view, and the method of carrying out that
purpose, shall be misunderstood. If we could only take
this grand old book for what it really is, for what it really
claims to be, how gladly would I spend my time not in
criticism, but in eulogy; for it occupies a unique position
in the history of our race. On the basis of what it claims
to be, there is no grander book in the world. You will
understand then that, in what I am about to do this morn
ing, I am not criticising the Bible, I am not finding fault
with its ethical teaching ; I am only criticising a theory, a
conception of the Bible, a teaching about it, which has
dominated the world for centuries, and which, as I believe,
stands in the way of the world's further and nobler progress.

There are two questions that must be asked and answered,
in order that we may understand the position which this
book holds in regard to the ethical teachings of the world.
In the first place, does the Bible contain one, and only
one, system of ethical teaching? Is the teaching in the
early part of the book the same as that of the middle and
latter part? Are there no signs of progress and growth

158 Beliefs about the Bible.
such as we find connected with the other religions of the
world ?
The next question is : Is the highest ethical teaching of
the Bible perfect and complete, meeting the wants of the
nineteenth century, and capable of satisfying the needs of
any possible development of human life and thought in the
future? If the Bible contains one system, and only one,
and if that one system is perfect and divine, then we should
be able to believe, when we take this book in our hands,
that we actually held a divine and infallible revelation. But,
if there is more than one system, and if one system is higher
than another ; if there are traces and evidences of growth,
and if the highest teaching is not complete and perfect for
all time, — why then, of course, we shall not be able to believe
that we have an infallible and divine revelation of moral
truth. They who deal in apology or defence of the Bible
talk to us of a progressive revelation. But a " progressive
revelation " is an absurdity, on the theory of a divine and
infallible one. If, for example, God gave light and guidance
to the Hebrews only so fast and so far as they were intellect
ually developed enough to appreciate it, so that they received
comparatively the same kind of light that other nations
received at the same stage or degree of development, then
we are reduced to the absurdity of supposing that God
reveals truth only as fast as people are capable of finding it
out for themselves ; which of course is a contradiction in
terms. These, then, are the two questions.
Leaving one side, now, for the moment, all thought of a
divine revelation of moral truth, looking abroad over the
world and tracing the origin and development of ethical
principles, we find this one thing everywhere plainly to be
observed : In all parts of the world, among nations that have
reached substantially the same level of intelligence, the same

The Morality of the Bible. 159
grade of civilization, and are in substantially similar circum
stances of life, we find substantially the same ethical princi
ples and precepts. That is, people in China, when they
had risen to a certain level of intellectual and moral devel
opment, held substantially the same ideas of character and
conduct that people in Egypt held, when they had reached
the same level or a similar one. We find the same natural
process of growth at work as in the vegetable world. If
you climb up the sides of the Alps, so many feet above the
level of the sea, and then climb up the same height above
the level of the sea on the sides of the Andes, if you do not
find the same vegetable growths, you find corresponding ones,
in similar circumstances. This is the method of nature.
If, then, we should find no revelation touching the matter
of right and wrong, we should expect to find this principle
at work everywhere. Outside of the Bible, we do find this
principle at work. We find in similar circumstances, in
similar grades of development, and in similar grades of intel
ligence, similar precepts and principles. If we shall find
substantially the same thing true concerning the Bible, then,
of course, we must surrender the idea that here is anything
supernatural or exceptional. We must place Bible ethics in
the same natural category and classification with all the rest
that we can discover.
Before discussing Bible ethics, simply as a suggestion, a
hint of what may be found in other places, as a sort of back
ground to my thought, I wish to give you two or three speci
mens of the ethics of ancient Egypt, that you may see what
kind of ideas, what sort of conception of God and duty, men
were capable of attaining and really did attain three thousand
years at least before Christ was born. In the first quotation
that I shall make, you will perceive their conception of God.
This, of course, while a part of religion, is also a part of

160 Beliefs about the Bible.
ethics. If you can find out what sort of character men
attribute to God, you will find a reflection on the sky of their
own moral conceptions of that which is highest and best.
Within recent years, a large part of the sacred literature of
ancient Egypt has been recovered. On monuments, in
papyrus rolls, on tombs, and preserved in many different
ways, have been found sayings which date back beyond the
popularly supposed period of the occurence of the flood, —
perhaps some of them older than the creation itself, as dated
by the popular chronology.
Here are a few of these sayings, — the first addressed to
God: —
" Every one glorifies thy goodness. Mild is thy love toward us : thy
tenderness surrounds our hearts. Great is thy love in all the souls of
men." "Let not thy face be turned away from us : the joy of our hearts is to
contemplate thee. Chase all anguish from our hearts. He wipes tears
from off all faces."
" Hail to thee, Ra, Lord of all truth ; who listeneth to the poor in his
distress ; gentle of heart, when we cry to thee ; deliverer of the timid
man from the violent; judging the poor, the poor and the oppressed;
sovereign of life, health, and strength."
" The heart of man is no secret to him that made it. He is present
with thee, though thou be alone."
Then here is a fragment from an inscription on a tomb,
giving the idea of the writer as to what kind of life he should
have lived : —
" I honored my father and my mother. I loved my brothers. I taught
little children. I took care of orphans as though they had been my own
children." There has been recently brought to light, from the ruins
of that old civilization, almost a complete work, called the
Maxims of Ptahhotep, which dates from the age of the

The Morality of the Bible. i6t
Pyramids, and which even then refers to the authority of
ancient times. It is the most ancient book in the world,
as far as is known.' R^nouf, the great French Egyptian
scholar, says that " they inculcate the study of wisdom, the
duty to parents and superiors, respect for property, the
advantages of charitableness, peaceableness and content,
of liberality, humility, chastity, and sobriety, of truthfulness
and justice." M. Chabas, who first gave the book to the
world, says : " None of the Christian virtues is forgotten in
it : piety, charity, gentleness, self-command in word and
action, chastity, the protection of the weak, benevolence
toward the humble, deference to superiors, respect for
property in its minutest details, — all is expressed there,
and in extremely clear language."
We cannot resist drawing the inference from this that, if
ancient Egypt three thousand years before Christ was capa
ble, without a revelation, of attaining to a knowledge and,
in some degree, to a practice of all the finest so-called Chris
tian virtues, it is hardly possible to make out any necessity
for a revelation, in order to teach these a thousand or two
years later to another people.
Had I time, I would like to place beside these one speci
men from the Mahdbhdrata, the great Indian or Hindu epic.
There is one selection which I am obliged to think is finer,
higher, more humane than anything which the whole Bible
contains. It represents one of seven brothers, the last of
the seven, standing at the entrance to the Indian heaven.
His six brothers, his wife, and his faithful dog, the constant
companions of his life, have fallen by the way; and he
stands alone at the gates. The gods come down to welcome
"him ; and there is a throne waiting him, vacant till he shall
occupy it. They bid him come in, but he stands there, and
asks the gods what is to become of his brothers, his wife,

162 Beliefs about the Bible.
and his dog; and, until he is assured that they also shall
share his bliss and his glory, he turns his back on the
heavens, and refuses to enter. I know of nothing in all
religious literature higher, finer, grander than that. Cer
tainly, it compares most favorably with the old Puritan
picture of the saints leaning over the battlements of heaven,
and enjoying the spectacle and listening to the groans of
their brethren in eternal torments below.
I now turn, to treat, as briefly as I can, some suggestions
concerning the moral teachings of the Old Testament and
the New.
i. First, let us look at the Old Testament, and attempt to
answer my first question, whether there is one system of
teaching in the Bible, whether the Old Testament teaches
the same as the New. Of course, in so brief a review, I
must omit many points. I only intend to take up specimens
here and there.
One of the first things we come across is the doctrine of
revenge, or retaliation. We find in the Old Testament that
practice which, in Southern Europe, in tales of love and pas
sion, we are familiar with as the vendetta, or the duty of the
living relatives of a man who has been murdered, or killed
by accident, to pursue and relentlessly revenge the death of
the murdered man. We find this taught and indorsed by
Yahveh himself, who goes so far as to establish certain
cities of refuge where a man might flee, provided he had
killed a man by accident, or, as we should say, in case of
justifiable homicide. If he were caught before he reached
that city, it was justifiable to put him to death, even if
he had not intended to commit murder. That is a part of
the social morality of the Old Testament. Would we con
sider that up to the level of the best life of the nineteenth
century? The New York Nation has been calling very

The Morality of the Bible. 163
vigorous and earnest attention to practices similar to this
in the South, treating them as evidence of savagery, and
calling upon the South to cleanse its skirts from these relics
of barbarism before they can expect that civilized people will
go there to live, or invest their capital among them. This,
then, is instinctively pronouncing judgment on this kind of
ethics by the conscience of the modern world.
Turn to another institution which is taught and indorsed
and regulated by God himself in the Old Testament, the
system of polygamy. If the Bible were to be treated like
any other book, I should not have a word to say against
polygamy in the Old Testament. There was a time when
it was moral. If you trace the upward growth of social life,
you will find that man began several grades lower down
than polygamy ; and polygamy is a step in advance of that
which preceded it. It is part way up the ladder from where
the human race began toward the position we now occupy.
I should have nothing against polygamy as part of the proc
ess of the social development of the world. We criticise
it to-day only because the world has outgrown it. It was
well enough in its time and place ; but the world has now
higher moral conceptions of social order, and so looks down
on that as something belonging to a barbaric past. You
know how we look upon the Mormons to-day, what a blot
we consider it on the national escutcheon, how we apologize
for it and hope to outgrow it and leave it behind, how we are
ashamed of it in the face of Europe ; and yet it is recognized
by God himself, taught, arranged for, ordered by him. We
find ourselves, on the orthodox theory, in the curious position
of apologizing for God, if that is a part of an infallible and
eternal revelation.
Leaving that, we come to slavery. Slavery is recognized
in the Old Testament as right. The people are permitted

164 Beliefs about the Bible.
not only to buy strangers, but their own race, other Jews.
There is one slight mitigation, when they are dealing with
their own brethren. Although they were permitted to buy
and hold a Jew as a slave, after six years he was set free by
the limitation of the law concerning him. But, if he were
married and had become the father of children, if he chose
to go out and take his liberty, he had to leave his wife and
family still in slavery, — a diabolically ingenious device for
keeping him in slavery himself ; for no true man would leave
his wife and children, and take his freedom on those terms.
In regard to slavery, I should say precisely as concerning
polygamy. If I might treat it from the stand-point of the
natural development of the world, it would need no apology
in the Old Testament. Slavery itself was once relatively
right. It was relatively better than that type of social life
which preceded it. It took the place of the indiscriminate
slaughter of one's enemies in time of war. It was a definite,
distinct step upward in social evolution ; and I should not
be called to apologize for it, if people did not tell me that
it was a part of the divine revelation. If it were, it must
be not only good for that age, but for any and every age.
Let us next consider the Old Testament code of morals
concerning other nations in time of war. God permits — nay,
he commands — wars of absolute extermination. He com
mands them to put to death men, women, and children,
infants in arms, gray-headed age, even to destroy the very
cattle and everything which had belonged to the tribe with
which they were at war. Merciless massacre is part of the
ethics of the Old Testament. Would we consider anything
like that as justified for a moment in regard to the relations
which nations maintain with each other in the nineteenth
century ? If there were a respectable people on the face of
the earth capable of carrying on war as it is carried on there,

The Morality of the Bible. 165
under divine guidance and orders, the civilized world would
rush to arms to compel that nation to be humane.
One other point. I have said that the conception which
any people hold concerning God is a part of its morality,
because the character of the deity is a reflection of the char
acter of the people themselves. What kind of character,
then, must we attribute to these old Jews, when we look at
the kind of god who reveals himself through a large part of
the Old Testament, — a god who is jealous, a god who likes
flattery, a god who is cruel, a god who takes delight in the
cries of slaughtered victims and in the smell of their blood
and the smoke of their burnings, a god who permits and
accepts human sacrifices, a god who teaches his own proph
ets to lie, a god who commands rape, a god guilty of almost
every crime. Of course, this does not exhaust the Old
Testament teaching concerning God. You will not mis
understand me so crudely as that. There is no finer teach
ing concerning God than some parts of the Old Testament
furnish, — none loftier, none nobler, none more beautiful:
only these things are also there. They are a part of the
book. And, if the book is divine and infallible revelation,
then these are divine and infallible revelations of moral
truth, because they are a part of the record. I need not
enlarge upon this point, in order to enforce upon your thought
and feeling the conviction that the Jews made progress just
like all other people : only we find them here in their period
of barbaric semi-development, and so we find barbaric morals,
just as we find them in Asia, Africa, or in Europe, among
our own brutalized and barbaric forefathers. There is the
finger-marks of a natural growth in moral ideals, precepts,
and principles all through the Old Testament, from the
lowest beginning up to the sublime spiritual conceptions
of the second Isaiah, as high and lofty a flight as the world
contains.

1 66 Beliefs about the Bible.
2. Let us now come to the consideration of the second
question. If there is any perfect morality anywhere in the
Bible, we shall expect to find it in the New Testament. It
is a very common opinion — the liberal orthodox are begin
ning to share it and stand by it — that, while the Old Testa
ment contains much that is barbaric and outgrown, the New
Testament, at any rate, is perfect. I think it is the opinion
of large numbers, perhaps the majority, of liberals, even if
they reject the dogmatic teachings of the New Testament,
that the highest part of it is supreme, perfect, final, and
cannot be outgrown. I think it is a very common feeling,
on the part of liberal Christians generally, that Jesus was an
absolutely sinless, perfect being, and that he gave a perfect
system of ethics to the world. I shall not argue the question
of his own character, as it is not a part of my theme. I will
frankly express to you my opinion that I know no reason
why I should suppose that Jesus of Nazareth was absolutely
free from error and human frailty. I know no reason why I
should suppose that he was perfect in every particular.
Sublime, God-conscious, noble, sweet, pure, true, — yes ; yet
I think there are evident traces in the New Testament of
his sharing the limitations, the prejudices, the mistakes, and
the common frailties of man.
But, say a great many, the Sermon on the Mount, at least,
is faultless. I think it is a common opinion, among those of
the liberal faith, that the Sermon on the Mount is a perfect
standard of moral truth. They hold it up before the world,
and demand the intellectual and moral homage of mankind
for everything which it contains. But, as I study it, I
cannot so regard it. The New Testament contains in es
sence, in germ, some of the highest and finest principles
that the world has ever seen. If the saying of Jesus con
cerning loving God and man with all the heart could be

The Morality of the Bible. 167
expanded and carried out practically, with all the light of
the growing intelligence of the world ; if it could enter into
all the details of human character, — it would make a perfect
world ; but a system of ethics is not to be judged by some
germ principle, but by the interpretation of that principle as
it falls from the lips of the teacher himself.
Let us, then, test this Sermon on the Mount in two or
three directions, by looking at some of the specific applica
tions of ethical principles which fall from the lips of Jesus.
Before I pass to specify those parts, I wish to make one
or two remarks concerning the attitude which the world
holds toward this wondrous discourse. I do not believe
there is a single orthodox person or church in the world,
which even tries, strictly and literally, to obey the Sermon on
the Mount. If any body of people, any city, any town, any
tribe, any nation, should attempt to carry out these teachings
literally, it would bring the world, as far as they were con
cerned, to a stand-still. In other words, many of those prin
ciples are simply impracticable. They never have been
carried out and never can be in this kind of a world. Those
who laud them the most never think of trying to obey them.
Let us now specify a few particulars.
Jesus teaches us, as plain as language can express it,
improvidence, lack of forethought, lack of careful provision
for the future. Again, the doctrine of charity which is here
inculcated has perhaps wrought more evil in the past history
of the world than much of the hard-heartedness and cruelty
of the rich. I am perfectly well aware that men attempt
to reinterpret all these sayings and make them mean what
they think they ought to mean ; but it seems to me that the
true and just and common-sense canon of criticism would
lead us to judge these sayings of Jesus in the light of the
thought of his time, not in the light of the thought of ours.

1 68 Beliefs about the Bible.
So judging them, we are to take them literally. We are to
take him as meaning what he says. He says, "Take no
thought for the morrow." I know that they translate that,
" Be not anxious about the morrow " ; but, even if I grant
so much, still the world could not get on by literally obeying
it. The world must be anxious about the morrow. The
world must take thought. The world must provide for the
future. The very distinction between barbarism and civil
ization is that the barbarian obeys this principle, and the
civilized man never did, does not, and never can. One of
the highest marks of civilization is that men have planned,
forecast, traced the present working causes to their possible
consequences, and provided against the future. We cannot
live in this world like lilies and birds, unless we are trans
formed into lilies and birds. We are men, factors in a com
plex civilization, and the principles which apply to these
things do not apply to us.
Jesus teaches us that, if we trust in the Father, if we ask,
we shall receive ; that we are to care only for the kingdom
of heaven ; that we are to make no provision for the morrow.
That is the simple, ingenuous teaching of Jesus. In his
doctrine of giving, he says : " Give to him that asketh thee,
and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou
away." Lend, asking for nothing again, expecting nothing.
That is, if anybody comes and asks you for anything, let
him Lave it without any regard to ever receiving it again.
That is the simple teaching ; and we know that is most likely
to have been the meaning of Jesus, because these ideas were
all in the air at the time. The young man comes to him, and
asks, " What shall I do to inherit eternal life ? " And his
reply is, " Go, sell everything thou hast, and give to the
poor." If a man should obey literally that direction to-day,
he would be considered a public enemy. This doctrine of

The Morality of the Bible. 169
charity, as far as carried out, has always tended to create
permanent pauperism. If it were carried out in all its hter
alness, it would fill the world with irresponsible lazzaroni.
It is sometimes said that these teachings were intended to
be only local and temporary in their application. If so, it is
at least a serious defect that a statement of that fact is not
plainly made.
Take the next step, the teaching of Jesus concerning
poverty and riches in general, which is very near akin to this.
The doctrine of the New Testament all the way through is
that riches are evil. "Blessed are the poor." "Woe unto
you that are rich, for you have received your consolation."
"Blessed are they that weep now, for they shall laugh."
"Woe unto those that laugh, for they shall weep." Take the
parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It is ordinarily
assumed that Lazarus was somehow a very virtuous man,
and that Dives was a bad man. Jesus does not say one
single word about Dives being a bad man. There is not a
charge brought against him, except that he was rich. He
does not say anything about Lazarus being a good man.
There is no praise for him, except that he was poor. When
they get into the next world, Dives is not told that he is
to suffer in consequence of his having been a sinner;
but Abraham says to him, " Remember, in your lifetime, you
had your good things, and Lazarus evil things : now, he is
comforted, and you are tormented." Not a word about good
or bad. Dives is simply punished to make things even, and
Lazarus rewarded to make things even. All the way through
the New Testament, there is a very apparent antipathy to
wealth ; and the Catholic Church has rightly interpreted it,
in making voluntary poverty one of the Christian virtues.
Yet modern civilization has developed the fact, beyond pos
sibility of question, that wealth, the accumulated resources

170 Beliefs about the Bible.
of the world, lies at the very base and is the prime and
essential condition of all civilization. There is no possi
bility of man being civilized until there is a little saved
beyond what is needed to eat up or wear out for the day.
There is no chance for schools, for music, for art, for educa
tion, no chance for anything beyond taking care of man as
an animal, until there is some wealth saved in the world.
Lay not up for yourselves riches on earth, only care about
riches in the next world, says the New Testament. I think
it is a very good idea to look out for both ; but the world
would come to a stand-still, and civilization would be under
mined and a failure, if those precepts were literally carried out.
Let me turn to another ethical principle, touching marriage
and divorce. I think it is generally taken for granted that
the New Testament is impervious to criticism here, if no
where else ; and yet it seems to me that this is far from true.
Jesus' doctrine of divorce is one that no Protestant nation
has ever dared to incorporate into law or carry out in prac
tice. Yet they claim to be Christian in their methods of
legislation. Jesus says you shall put away your wife for one cause and
one only ; but, mark you, he does not make any provision
for the wife putting away her husband at all ! The New
Testament doctrine of divorce is entirely one-sided. The
wife is not permitted to put away her husband for any cause.
Another point. Not simply in the teaching of the Book
of Revelation and of Paul, but in the teaching of Jesus him
self, marriage does not occupy the highest social rank. It
is a little under a cloud. There is something else that is
better. Jesus himself says that, if a man is able to receive
it, the, celibate life is superior to the married one. Paul's
direction about marriage is that it is better to marry than to
do worse. In the Book of Revelation, the one hundred and

The Morality of the Bible. 171
forty-four thousand peculiar saints set apart from all the rest,
even in heaven, who have the highest seats and to whom
special honor is given, are those who have lived perfectly
virginal lives. The doctrine is that the celibate has superior
sanctity. It puts us in the position of thinking that God
has made us what we are, and then is ready to teach us that,
if we go against the laws of the natures he has given us,
and do something else, we shall gain his favor more certainly
than as though we carried out the laws that he himself has
made. The New Testament thus, it seems to me, contains
the germs of all European monasticism and asceticism and
justifies them, and therefore is no guide for the practical
morality of the world to-day in these respects.
There is another point. Let us take the teaching of the
New Testament concerning resistance to evil ; the doctrine
concerning the citizen's relation to government. What is
it? "Resist not evil." The Quaker is the only man that
attempts to carry out the doctrine of the New Testament in
this direction ; and, if all the world were Quakers, we might
possibly get along with it, though I question whether, even
then, it would not be a pretty tame, poor kind of a world.
Through resistance to injury, resistance to tyrants, fighting
for liberty, fighting for right, has the civilization of the world
grown. Paul says : " He that resisteth the power resisteth the
ordinance of God." " The powers that be are ordained of
God." That is substantially the New Testament doctrine.
The powers that be are manifestations of the will of God,
and resistance to tyranny and injury of any kind is un
christian. Yet look back down the pathway of the ages up
which our ancestors have trod, leading to the grand ideas
of freedom and civilization which we hold to-day. See the
barons at Runnymede demanding from King John the con
cessions of the Magna Charta. The influence of the New

172 Beliefs about the Bible.
Testament would have been on the side of the weak-minded,
vacillating, unscrupulous, tyrannous John. Come down to
the period of the Commonwealth, and see Cromwell with his
Roundheads fighting against King Charles. The old Eng
lish Church was only logical when, after the death of the
king and the restoration, at the end of Cromwell's rule, it
inserted a special passage in the Book of Common Prayer
in memory of the blessed saint and martyr King Charles.
The Puritans, according to the New Testament ethics, were
wrong in resisting the divine right and authority of the king.
We were wrong at the time of the Revolution. The French
were wrong when they threw off the mountainous tyranny
of ages, and stood up at last free men. Do you know the
world has come to the vantage-ground of civilization by not
being literally obedient to the Sermon on the Mount? Men
have reasoned, out of their own experience, laws of right
and truth which have been spoken of God through the
mouthpiece of the events of the time ; and these have super
seded any teachings that preceded them.
I must touch one other point. The dominant teaching of
the New Testament was other-worldly. It cast slight and
contempt on this life, the flesh, and everything concerning
it. Of course, then, there was no place in it for anything
like that spirit of truth, that spirit of investigation into
natural phenomena and forces, such as have come to grand
embodiment in the modern science of the world. The
teaching of the New Testament is that faith is one of the
highest virtues. When Jesus reappeared to his disciples,
Thomas did what any one would do to-day : he asked proof
of a stupendous miracle. And — though Jesus forgives him,
forgives him for a virtue — he is represented as saying to
him, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have
believed." Blessed are those who shut their eyes, and

The Morality of the Bible. 173
accept that which is given them as truth. We want no such
blessing in the modern world. The experience of the civ
ilized world is crowning doubt among the virtues, placing it
as high as faith. It is just as much a duty to doubt a thing
that is not true or proved as to believe a thing that is
proved. This spirit, then, of modern investigation, of de
manding credentials of that which claims to be truth, of
investigating nature, her laws and forces, recognizing the
fact that it is by knowing what these are and getting into
right relations with them that the noblest civilization of the
world is built up, — this whole scale of virtues, so to speak,
on which so large a part of the best things in the world
depend, are not New Testament virtues at all. This is some
thing that the modern world has developed since that day,
something that could not have been known then because
the world had not then attained its majority, and was not
free to look over the universe for itself.
The New Testament, then, does not contain, it seems to
me, a final, perfectly developed system of ethical teaching.
I wish not to criticise it or to find fault with it. I have not
a word of fault to find with it, judged by the standard of the
age and time. Do not understand me as attempting to pick
flaws in the character and teachings of Jesus. I only say
that the first century is not the nineteenth ; that God is alive,
and has been alive for nineteen hundred years ; and, if the
world has made any progress, it is perfectly natural that we
should be in advance of the people who lived nearly two
thousand years ago. That is infidelity, that is lack of faith
in God, that takes the ground that the world is not making
any progress ; that in two thousand years we have done
nothing and come to nothing, but have been simply running
around in a little circle, ending where we began. I believe
in the theory of the divine Life and its relation to this

174 Beliefs about the Bible.
world that teaches us that God is perpetually before us as
Leader ; that the new experiences which he gives us in each
generation of time give new conceptions of right and wrong,
higher views of God and man and duty, something nobler
and better than the world has ever seen until to-day.
Were it in the line of my theme, and had I time, I should
love to dwell upon the other side, to point out what I regard
as original, grand, and permanent in the ethics of Jesus.
But I have had another object this morning, — that of test
ing the perfection of the New Testament teachings. And I
ask that what I have said may be judged in the light of
that purpose.

The Present Use and Worth of the Bible.

No one who is familiar with the results of modern criti
cism, scientific investigation, and historic research, can pos
sibly hereafter hold the same theory concerning the Bible
which has so long dominated the brain and the conscience
of the world. The Bible has come down, in one sense, from
that lofty pedestal of power and unique supremacy on which
it has stood ; and it must henceforth take its place, to be
judged by the same rules of criticism, along with all the
other sacred literatures of the world. That is not by any
means saying that the other sacred literatures of the world
are as good as the Bible. When I say that one of the Cali
fornia big trees is to be studied in precisely the same way
as an ordinary pine-tree or wayside shrub, that it is just as
natural as they, that it has developed according to precisely
the same methods, and is to be studied after the same prin
ciples of botany and of vegetable growth, I do not say that
the California tree is no higher, no grander, no more won
drous than the wayside shrub. The Bible takes its place
alongside all the other literatures of the world ; and it will
demonstrate its fitness to stand above them, overlooking
them, grander, higher than they, provided it is fitted to
occupy this position. And this certainly is all that any be
liever in it can rationally desire. The Bible can no longer
be regarded as an infallible inspiration concerning religious

l7& Beliefs about the Bible.
truth. It can no longer be regarded as an ultimate standard
of judgment concerning ethics. It is no longer scientific au
thority. It is no longer unimpeachable as an historic record
of a people whose life it details through the course of so
many changing centuries.
What then ? Are we reduced to the alternative that has
been so many times held up for us, — the whole Bible ac
cording to the old ideas of it, or nothing ? Are we to wor
ship the Bible, or else fling it to the rubbish-heap ? Must we
read it as infallible all the way through, from cover to cover,
or else never read it at all ? Is it treating it as God's word in
every sentence, phrase, and letter, or else as no longer worth
the attention of rational men ? I am perfectly well aware,
as are you, that this alternative is very commonly pointed
out to us, and we are expected to choose the one or the
other. For my part, I decline to be thrust through by either
horn of such an unreasonable dilemma.
There are two main questions that I want to ask you to
consider with me this morning. Has this change which has
come over the position and estimate of the Bible been pro
ductive of loss or gain to the modern world ? This is the
first question. That is, are we richer or poorer than we
were as the result of criticism concerning the Bible ?
The next question is, Of what use and value is this Bible
to the man who looks upon it simply as human literature,
developed according to the laws of the other literatures of
the world ?
I. Take these two questions in their order. We are per
petually told that, if we give up the Bible,— and by giving
up the Bible is meant giving up a particular theory about it
and a particular use of it, — we have lost all hope, all ground
work for religion, all basis for ethics, all reason for belief
and trust in God, all ground for hope in a future life. The

Present Use and Worth. 177
warning cry is constantly "rung in our ears that it must be the
old theory of the Bible in its entirety, or else blank religious
and moral darkness, "without God and without hope in the
world." So far from accepting this, I am one of those who
believe that the modern conception of the Bible is a distinct
and definite gain to the world ; and I propose to show you
why I think so in two or three simple particulars.
In the first place, he who holds this modern conception
of the book is relieved from the burden that the intellect
and the conscience of the enlightened modern world is find
ing too heavy to bear. We are no longer under obligations
to defend that which is intellectually indefensible. We are
no longer under obligation to apologize for that which
certainly needs apology, if the rational intellect of the world
is to be trusted.
Let me point out just what I mean in one or two directions.
He who holds to the infallibility of the Bible and holds his
conception of religion in that kind of framework is perpetu
ally challenged in this direction or that. If he goes to a
man and says, " I want you to accept my religion, to become
religious according to my ideas," the man to whom he speaks
will be certain to say, if he be one who has doubted the
infallibility of the Bible, " Must I believe the Biblical account
of the creation of the world, which has been demonstrated
to be false ? " What answer can the old type of Bible apolo
gist make to a challenge of this sort ? No answer, except to
say: "You must forego the use of your intellect; you must
give up the result of modern knowledge ; you must shut your
eyes, and accept that which the best knowledge of the world
declares to be untrue. You must do this, or you cannot be a
lover and follower of God. You cannot be, in the highest
and truest sense of the word, 'religious.'" In other words,
the man occupying the old traditional stand-point must forego

178 Beliefs about the Bible.
intellect, knowledge, and brain ; distrust them ; leave them
one side, wondering why God ever gave them to man. That
is only one illustration.
Again, the doubter who would be religious, and who would
also like to keep his brains, if he may, beginning with the
first chapter of Genesis, will run all the way through, and
will say : " What about the incredible story of the exodus of
the Israelites from Egypt, intellectually incredible, morally
indefensible? What about the conquest of Canaan; the
shaking down of city walls at the sound of a ram's horn
blown by the people ; the staying of the sun in the heavens
until the end of a battle can be reached? What about
human sacrifice ? What about the cruelty and immorality
of a man like David, still said to be a man after God's own
heart ? What about the genealogies of the New Testament ?
What about its stupendous miracles that no one can explain ?
What about the prophecies of the immediate coming of the
kingdom from the Master's own lips, and as yet unfulfilled ? "
I speak of these things to indicate the kind of intellectual
and moral burden, the load, that rests upon a man who
attaches his religion to the old conception of the Bible, who
must defend all these things ; for they cannot be defended
in the court of reason. He must either do this, or he must
forego the use of his intellect, shut his eyes, and accept
whatever is given. He must torture and twist texts out of
their natural meaning, until there is wrought into the very
fibre of his intellectual and moral nature the warp and woof
of uncertainty, of deception, of unreality, and he questions
whether words in their connections anywhere mean really
what they say, getting into a state of mind like that of the
clergyman who said to me the other day, " If my people
understood what I say as I understand it, they would not
listen to me for a week." I think it is a grand gain to be

Present Use and Worth. 179
able to throw off this burden, which neither the past nor the
present has been able to bear, and to accept that which is
true because it is true, feeling under no obligation to shut
one's eyes or to stop one's thinking.
Akin to this is another point, in some respects sufficiently
important to make it worthy of separate mention. The
world is set intellectually free by this modern conception
of the Bible. He who holds the old ideas may claim to be
intellectually free; but it is only the claim of a man who,
shut within certain definite but very narrow limits, proclaims
that he is perfectly free, because he does not choose to step
outside of those limits. But, if the time ever comes when
he wishes to step outside, then the bondage becomes irksome
and unbearable. I remember my own experience, when I
was studying theology in the seminary. I was told to study
with perfect freedom, to make excursions through the uni
verse wherever I would, through science, philosophy, criti
cism, history ; but I knew all the while that there was a law,
unuttered, which made it perfectly certain that if, after my
excursions, I did not come back and settle down within these
definite narrow limits, I was banned, excluded from the
fellowship of those with whom I had been friends, whom I
had learned to love, and who, as I believed, and as I was
taught to believe, possessed the final and ultimate truth of
God. I say it is a grand gain to set the human intellect free
in this regard.
According to the old ideas, when Copernicus began to
study the nature of this universe, he was trespassing on
dangerous ground ; for the minute that he found out that it
did not accord with the Biblical story, that moment he was
infidel and outcast. His system of demonstrated truth was
opposed by all those who claimed officially to represent God
on earth. When Magellan, starting on his voyage of dis-

180 Beliefs about the Bible.
covery around the world, declared that he believed the earth
was round, because he noticed that its shadow cast on the
face of the moOn during an eclipse had a circular outline, he
was taking his stand on the reality of the universe that God
had made ; but he was a rebel against God's church, God's
book, God's infallible, revealed truth, according to all the
standards of the time. He was not free, except by making
himself outcast and infidel. And so, when Darwin, tracing
through long years the problem as to the origin and nature
of man, comes to the conclusion that the Eden story is not
true, what must he do ? He must either assert the liberty of
thought, and dare to look God's universe in the face, and
ask it questions, and listen to receive its answer, or he must
shut his eyes to what he knew was the truth, and bend his
intellectual hands and feet to the wearing of spiritual chains.
There is no freedom, there can be no freedom, of intellect in
the face of a system that claims to be absolutely infallible,
unquestionably true.
It is, then, a grand gain to set the mind of the world free.
For note you this : if the teaching of this claimed infallible
system be true, then God's universe must be in accord with
it ; and ultimate search, deepest investigation, can only con
firm it. Why, then, any need of the claimed infallibility?
Here, then, is another distinct and definite and grand gain.
There is one more that I must mention, which is even
more magnificent, if possible, than either of these, because it
touches the heart, the life, the hope, of man.
Let us look for a moment at the outlook over this world,
this changing scene of human history. One who occupies
the old stand-point, what must he believe? He must believe
that the silent God sat in the heavens uttering never a word
or a warning for thousands of years; that at the last he
selects one family, leaving all the rest of the world to wander

Present Use and Worth.

ISI

and perish. He selects one little family, and reveals to the
founder of this family a hint of something to come in a far-
off time. Then, ages go by. This little family grows ; but
its light extends nowhere beyond its own limits. Age after
age goes by, and the great outlying thousands and millions of
the world are still perishing, and no word of warning is
uttered, no hand reached out to lift them up or help. By
and by there comes another who claims, or on whose behalf
the claim is made, that he is the very God of the universe,
himself come down to earth in the form of a man who lives
and dies. His church is founded, and Christian history
begins. Eighteen hundred years, and almost another cen
tury, have gone by, and not a third of the wide world yet has
heard the message that God has spoken, or has felt the
touch of his hand thrilling with love and help. On this
theory, it seems to me that God's dealing with this world, if
he was in earnest, and if he meant to save it, is the most
stupendous failure that human history has to record. But,
on this other theory, what ?
We are able to believe that this book is one among other
books ; our religion one among other religions, — all of them
equally natural, equally divine except in degree ; that, in
every case, all these people were God's children, and that, in
what little light they had, they were following after God, if
haply they might find him ; that, with stammering lip or not
fully uttered expression, they were giving vent to their
thoughts, their hopes, their feelings, their fears, reaching out
and up after the divine ; that God's light has flooded the
earth from the beginning, shining into the brains and the
hearts of men, just as fast and as far as those hearts and
those brains were capable of receiving it ; that all men
thus are God's children, and that all of them have been
guided and led, — never for a moment forsaken, never for a

x82 Beliefs about the Bible.
moment forgotten; each one in his own dialect uttering his
hopes and aspirations, and reaching out and finding God.
We are able to believe, on this theory, that Pope was right
when he wrote his grand universal prayer : —
" Father of all ! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord I . . .
" To Thee, whose temple is all space,
Whose altar, earth, sea, skies,
One chorus let all beings raise,
All nature's incense rise I "
We are able to believe, for the first time in human history,
that, when we utter the words, "Our Father, who art in
heaven," they have a world-wide, universal, all-humanity-
embracing meaning. They are a mockery on the other
theory. For, if that be true, God has chosen, as his children,
a few, no better than the rest, judged by human stand
ards, and has left the others, like sheep without a shepherd,
to wander in the wilderness and be devoured by wild beasts
at their will. These seem to me some grand reasons why we
may count the modern change of theory concerning the
Bible a great gain instead of a loss.
II. But it is time for me to turn to my second question,
and indicate to you three or four of the uses which the Bible
may well have for us who have given up the old theories
concerning it. In the first place, curiously enough, it seems
to be imagined by those who have held to the old ideas that
a religious truth ceases to be truth at all, unless it is backed
up by an infallible inspiration. How do we find out what
is truth ? We find it out by experience, do we not ? If it
were infallibly revealed to men that corn is wholesome to

Present Use and Worth. 183
eat, would it add anything to the fact discovered by human
experience? Suppose it were recorded in a claimed infal
lible inspiration that corn was poison, experience would
demonstrate that it was not. In either case, the revelation
would be worth nothing concerning such a thing. Any
revelation concerning the practical welfare of men would
mean nothing to us, until we had lived it out by practical
experience. We find out what is wholesome by testing
it: we find out poison by testing that. We find out all
the facts of human life in the same way. The methods by
which conduct ought to be ordered in the relations of man
with man, — social, political, commercial truths, — these are
discovered by experience. Those who reject these truths
ultimately go to the wall, crushed by them, because they are
a part of the eternal ongoing of the resistless universe that
has God's omnipotence at its heart. The truth, then, that
the Bible contains remains true on any theory, and it will
always be valuable as a part of the food and as part of the
mental and moral stimulus and inspiration of man. For
" Not all the critics can crush with their ban
One word that is true to the nature of man.''
In the next place, for many centuries yet, I know not how
long, the Bible is going to have a grand advantage over all
the other books of the world by reason of the sacred memo
ries, the splendid associations that have clustered about it
in the past, and will cluster about it for ages yet to come.
What do I mean by this ? Do you not know, as you look
over the past of your own lives, that many and many a time
a truth has been uttered in your ears that on some other
occasion, in the midst of other circumstances, would seem to
you commonplace enough, a simple truth, abstract as a
statement of a principle in algebra, perhaps, so far as it is

184 Beliefs about the Bible.
concerned, one that you may have heard before and may
have heard many times since ; and yet, in your experience,
it is set quite apart, surrounded by a halo of sacred light,
having a meaning that it could not have had but for the fact
that it is linked in your memory with some of the sacred
associations of the past, with some epoch hour of your life?
It was the word, perhaps, that mother spoke to you when
you were a little boy at her knee ; the word that father
uttered when you left home for the last time ; the word that
some brother or sister may have spoken on their sick-bed,
just before they faded away into the silence, — some word that
comes to you with a power beyond itself, linked with mem
ory, with experience, and that has for you all the added
weight of this sacred association. Now, the Bible, as no
other book, has this hold in our sympathies and on our
hearts. The Bible to most of us, whatever our creed may
be, is bound up with the memories of childhood and mother
and home. Some words from the Bible are connected with
them, or with that hour which we do not remember, but of
which we have been told, when we were consecrated by the
noble and well-intended aspirations of our parents. Some
words from the Bible are linked with the marriage service,
that has changed for better or worse the whole after years
of our life. Some words from the Bible are linked with
those last sad funeral hours in which we have laid away
those that we learned for so many years to love. The Bible
is bound up as is no other book with the sacred and tender
associations of our past.
Then, again, on a larger than a merely personal scale, what
other book is there that is so woven into that province of the
world's civilization to which we belong? We cannot read
of any of the great epochs of English achievement, of Amer
ican advancement, without seeing that some words from the

Present Use and Worth. 185
Bible played their part in the victory or the defeat. No one
can read of Cromwell, of the Puritans, of the development
of liberty in England, without seeing that the Bible was
there, some of its grand words being the mainspring and
inspiration of some of the noblest of all those movements.
Then, the Bible is associated with much of the grandest
art of the world, with its music, with all that is noblest and
finest in our civilization. Whatever theory we hold of it,
that makes no difference. These are the facts. It is pos
sible, in a sense in which it is true and can be true of no
other book, that this is the book of Christendom ; and it
will always occupy a unique position and have a unique
and grand influence, — all the grander influence because we
will be able to sift out the gold, weaving it into beautiful
ornaments and implements of noble use, leaving the ddbris
and the worthless material to find its own place.
There is another point that seems to me of a good deal
of importance. You will notice, as I conduct these services
from Sunday to Sunday, that there are large parts of the
Bible that I do not read. I select chapters or parts of
chapters from both the Old Testament and the New, but I
cannot read it indiscriminately. Large parts of it I pass by.
For what reason? Simply because I wish to be perfectly
frank and open as to what I believe, and because I do not
choose to spend half my morning, after I have read a
passage, in telling you that I do not believe it literally, and
in explaining to you in what sense I do take it. The time
will come, when we have passed through this transition hour,
when the results of the criticism of the Bible have been
.settled, when the thoughts of men have found their placel —
the time will come, I say, when I shall be able to read any
part of this Bible from the pulpit, and not be misunderstood.
I shall not be understood to believe a miracle, because I read

1 86 Beliefs about the Bible.
the account of it. I shall not be understood to accept as
history an Old Testament legend, because I read it as a
lesson. I can read from any other part of the literature of
the world, and people understand me. I can draw out the
lessons, beautiful and rich with human associations, from
any legendary lore of the world, outside of the Bible, and
never be misunderstood. The time will come when I can
use the Bible in the same way ; and, when I can, I shall find,
and you will find, that there is no book in the world so rich
in human instruction as is this book. Legend, allegory,
miracle, parable, — all wrought and woven through and through
with the texture and color of human experience, — I shall be
able to use them with a force that pertains to no abstract
truth. It requires a high order of intellect to deal with
abstract truth, pure and colorless. To illustrate in a concrete
way what I mean : I remember that Mr. Collyer was one
day telling me that he repeated a certain sermon to his
people ; and, as he was coming out, one of them said, " I
remember perfectly well that you have preached that sermon
before." Mr. Collyer replied, " I have no doubt of it ; but,
if I had only happened to think to leave out the story of the
little dog, you never would have remembered it in the world."
This carries the principle that illustration or a story, some
thing concrete, something that touches human life, something
that has the flavor of human experience about it, fixes itself
in the memory. It is carried where abstract truth is lost and
forgotten. By and by, the time will come when I shall be able to read
you the story of the cruse of oil that was an inexhaustible
fountain from which the widow could pour and pour without
refilling it, and I shall be able out of that to deduce grand
lessons that are ideally true, whatever may be said concern
ing the outer shell that encloses them. The miracle of turn-

Present Use and Worth. 187
ing the water into wine at Cana of Galilee, — do you not see
how at the heart of it there is a great universal human truth?
Are there not experiences in the lives of us all, when the
presence of some superior man or woman, the word of some
superior wisdom, touches the commonplace of our lives, and
transmutes them into gold? The story of the transfigura
tion, — do we not all climb up on heights of mountain out
look where our faces are transfigured, where they shine with
a light they never knew before, and where we enter into
communion, as did the disciples with Moses and Elias, with
the great, the heroic of all the past, and where we enter into
a new range of experience, something higher than we should
be able to maintain as the ordinary level of life ? These just
as hints of what a storehouse of wealth for human lessons
this old Bible will be, when we are able to read it with
untrammelled intellect, and without stopping to think of
critical questions of truth and untruth.
One thing more. The Bible must forever have one use
and meaning that is true concerning it in a sense that is true
of no other book. As far as my acquaintance with sacred
literature extends, the Bible contains the most complete and
finished religious biography in the world. That is, it traces,
from the very earliest forms of the religious life, the origin,
the birth, the growth, the development, the mistakes, the
faults, the failures, the decline and fall of a great race relig
ion. What is the use of that ?
Let me illustrate a moment, to make it clear to you. A
physician, if he wishes to know how to treat a well man to
keep him well, or a sick man in order to cure his disease,
must know, as far as possible, all that pertains to the birth,
the growth, the disease, the health, the decay, and the death
of a man ; and so he starts with the little primal germ, and
traces the physical life of man all the way through, and

1 88 Beliefs about the Bible.
this becomes to him a perpetual lesson, a storehouse of
knowledge, a guide in the practical experience of his every
day life. We read the biography of a man ; and, if we are
wise, we extract from it lessons as to how to live. If the
man has been faulty, if he has made mistakes, if he has
wandered this way or that, all the better for us, as far
as the instructiveness of that biography is concerned. If
we are dealing with a chart that shows us the navigation
of a dangerous coast, we do not want simply to know that
here is an open channel : we want signals to indicate the
places where wrecks have gone down. And so again, in
regard to the religious books and biographies of the world,
we need to know the mistakes, the faults, the wanderings,
all that pertains to the religious experience of the race. We
want to know it as a part of our text-book. As one more
illustration, more commensurate with the theme, let me
ask, What is the use to-day of reading Gibbon, the decline
and fall of a great empire ? Of supplementing that with all
that can be known of the early times of Rome, of the time
when it w'as a dominant force on the earth? Why, the
history of that race is a perpetual storehouse of instruction
for statesmen, for politicians, for all those who are interested
for the social and political welfare of man. So, if you can
give us a complete text-book that shall teach us concerning
the origin of a great scheme of religious thought concern
ing God and man, you have given us a book that at all times
shall act as warning, as instruction, as inspiration, as light,
as guidance. And so the Bible, being the completest biogra
phy of the religious life of a race, must always, in the thought
of any intelligent and serious man, occupy a unique and
wonderful position, and maintain its influence as light and
guidance for centuries.
Is there to be a loss of reverence and real religiousness in

Present Use and Worth. 189
the world springing out of and flowing from this change ? I
cannot believe it. It used to be supposed, and it was taught
for ages, that it was impossible to train and maintain a spirit
of loyalty on the part of a people, unless there was a visible
symbol of that loyalty in king and sceptre and throne. And
thousands of well-meaning men have fought for monarchy,
because they believed that these outward and visible symbols
were necessary to keep alive the spirit of loyalty and devo
tion. But have we not proved that that fear was vain ? Has
there ever been in the history of the world a grander devel
opment of loyalty, a more wide-spread devotion to it, a more
unselfish outpouring of life than we have shown without
either sceptre or throne or king ? Have we not learned, as
the result of human experience, that all the happiness of
man, his welfare, his prosperity, are bound up with law-keep
ing and with order ? We recognize all the great principles
that underlie these things. And, though it be only an ideal,
having no outward embodiment unless it be in a flag, still we
are ready to pay to it our utmost devotion of heart and life.
And so I believe concerning this Bible. Whatever theory
goes up or down, taken as a fact, religion is a part of the
experience of the world, it is the tidal wave which lifts the
aspiring heart of man toward the stars.
It is the result of human experience. And this demon
strates its utility, its power, its grasp on the heart and the
brain of the world ; and, on the basis of this, we may expect
it will forever abide.
The Bible, then, may be left to hold its own place. The ¦
religiousness, the reverence, the loyalty, the love, the aspira
tion of man will not only remain, but will go on, and grow
and broaden till they become not only parts, but the very
heart and soul, of all that is noble in human civilization.

THE ETERNAL BIBLE.

Whatever theory we may hold concerning the universe
of which we are a part and in which we live, it is still true
that, when we analyze the word to learn its most abstract and
general definition, we find that human life consists of a series
of actions and reactions between the individual and his
environment. You will find, if you will take tbe trouble to
think it out more particularly than I have time to illustrate
it this morning, that, in whatever direction you start, whether
you deal with man in his social relations, as a business man,
as an artist, or what not, that this abstract statement which
I have made covers the entire truth. Life consists in a
series of actions and reactions between man and the uni
verse. And a successful life, as distinguished from any
other kind, depends entirely upon the question whether man
perceives the right relations in which he ought to stand to
these forces and powers all around him and with which he
deals. The commercial man, for example, if he rightly
apprehends the problem given him to solve, and is capable
of dealing with it, will be a successful merchant. The law
yer, if he rightly apprehends the points of the case given him
to manage, and has intelligence and force to mould and
shape his case in accordance with what he perceives, will
succeed. And so in any other department of human life.
And this right relation, or the perception of this right rela
tion, in which man stands, or ought to stand, to the forms

The Eternal Bible. 191
and forces of the universe about him, is what we mean by
the word "truth." If you will analyze it carefully, you will
find that truth has just this meaning and no other. A truth
of thought is simply my way of stating the fact that the
external reality with which I am dealing corresponds to the
thought that I have already in my brain. If, for example,
I take a flower in my hand, it impresses me as possessing
a certain shape, a certain color, a certain fragrance. If my
perception is correct, — that is, if I see the real relation
between that flower and my brain, — I see the truth concern
ing it. The truth, then, in any direction, so far as man's
thought is concerned, is only the establishment of perfect
correspondence between the thought and the thing. A prac
tical truth, as apart from this abstract truth, is simply a per
ception and establishment of right relations between man's
active faculties and the external world with which he deals.
Now, how does man discover this truth ? Is there more
than one way ? I believe that truth always, everywhere, in
all cases, has been discovered, is being discovered to-day,
and must be discovered forever, through the process of
human experience ; for truth pertains to the nature of
things. It is a part of our life, of the relationship in which
we stand to the forms and forces of the universe about us.
To talk of truth away off somewhere in the depths of the
universe, that does not touch us, that does not come into
relation with us in any way, that has nothing to do practi
cally with our life or thinking, is to talk of nothing. There
is no truth for man apart from this truth of perception and
practical relationship in which he stands to the life of things
around him. Men talk of truth as if it were a sort of entity
stored up somewhere outside of the world, that could be
injected into it from without, as if it were something outside
of the nature of things that could be given to men, as

I92 Beliefs about the Bible.
though it were a commodity place 1 in their hands, as though
it were a light that could be shed abroad over the earth from
outside, as though it were a series of propositions that
could be put into men's brains and hearts from some exter
nal source.
If I have made you apprehend clearly the very abstract
thought with which I began, that truth is simply a part of
the nature of things, that 't consists essentially in the
relation in which we stand to the forms and forces that
are around us, you will see the absurdity of supposing that
either God or man could bring truth from the outside, and
put it into the universe or into human life. The only way by
which men ever did apprehend or ever can apprehend truth
is as the result of their own experience in dealing with these
forms and forces with which we come into relation day by
day, year after year, and age after age.
Truth, then, always and everywhere, is the result of
human experience. There is no other method by which we
can possibly come into possession of it. The amount of
truth which any race, any people, will possess at any given
stage of their experience or progress, will depend, of course,
upon the character of that people, upon their intelligence,
and upon the range of their experience. It is also true, in
every race and in every period of the world's history, that
there is some one man or a group of men or a few men
scattered here and there, who possess a clearer insight, a
keener perception, a broader power of generalization, than is
possessed by the common mass of busy people engaged in
the practical concerns of life. And these keener, more
thoughtful men, those that have the clearer insight, what will
they do ? They will not be able to discover or formulate
any truth that has not been experienced by the race to
which they belong, but they will be able to see more clearly

The Eternal Bible.

193

that which others dimly fe They will be able to interpret
in language that which the ... ss of the people have partially
apprehended, but to which they have never been able to
give expression. Just as you say, when you are listening
to a man, "He is giving expression to what I have been
feeling after, and half-perceived, for years, but have never
been able to put into words " ; so precisely these seers, these
prophets, these leading men of the world, are able to
condense, to crystallize, so to speak, to give outline and
form and expression to that which the mass of their fellow-
men have experienced and dimly felt. And because this
truth that the seers of the world have perceived and
expressed seems to the mass of the people so wonderful,
so much above what they themselves feel capable of saying
or clearly apprehending or expressing, we find — and this is
true all over the world, in every clime, among every people
— that, when these truths of human experience have thus
been formulated and expressed, the mass of the people have
looked upon them with so much wonder and reverence that
they have come to believe that they are a divine revelation,
something let down from above, something coming out of
the sky. They have not been able to understand that such
marvellous truths concerning the universe and human life,
such wonderful speculations concerning God and the future,
could possibly have sprung out of the common experience of
common men. So they have told themselves stories and
invented fairy tales of how these seers and prophets have
had special ways of access to and intercourse with teachers
higher than human. In this way have grown up stories of
divine and supernatural revelations of systems of truth.
In each case, this supposed divine and supernatural system
has only been the fragment of truth which this particular
people, up to this particular point in the line of its develop-

194 Beliefs about the Bible.
ment, has experienced or been able to put into formal
expression. Two or three results which have been repeated over and
over again in the history of the world now come into view.
When any particular people has made up its mind that if has
received from the gods, or their god, a special, supernatural
revelation of truth, then what ? Two results in almost every
case have followed, — results perfectly natural and springing
out of the circumstances in which they found themselves
placed. They have received, they think, a divine, super
natural revelation of truth. The next step is that they per
suade themselves that they have all the truth there is, — all
the truth, at any rate, that men need or ever will need ; and
so they close their book, their Bible, or revelation, and say,
Here, we have a sure and complete compendium of divine
truth concerning the origin of this universe, of nature, of
God, his purposes toward man, and all that pertains to the
future of human destiny. The Mohammedan caliph is re
ported to have said concerning the Alexandrian Library : " If
these books agree with the Koran, we do not need them ; if
not, they are false. So, in any case, let them be destroyed."
Along with this there always comes a certain spiritual
pride, a certain religious self-conceit ; and the people fancy
that they must be special favorites of heaven, — and why
not ? If God has singled me out from all the thousands
and millions of the world, if he has come in person to me,
or sent a special messenger to me to tell me his secret, why
should I not feel lifted up above the level of the ordinary
run of my fellow-men ? If, instead of its being one person,
it is a race, precisely the same effect will follow ; and so we
do find, as a matter of history, that one race after another,
in the past, has fancied that it has received this divine reve
lation, that it possesses a complete system of eternal truth ;

The Eternal Bible. 195
and, as the next step, it fancies that it is the favorite of God,
a chosen people, set apart, selected out of all the nations,
and made the depositary of the divine truth.
And then what ? Another natural step follows upon the
heels of this. One of two things this people will do in such
circumstances. They will either build a Chinese wall of
exclusiveness around themselves, and look over the rest
of the world and down upon it with scorn and contempt,
neglect it, fold their arms in a sort of conceited content, and
leave it to go its own way to destruction, regarding everybody
but their own people as outside barbarians, while they live in
the centre of the world and under the very dome of heaven ;
or else they will regard themselves as a missionary people,
to whom this truth has been committed and upon whom has
been imposed the duty of bringing all the rest of the world,
either by persuasion or force, into subjugation to their ideas.
We find that different religions have illustrated both types.
Take the Chinese, for example. They occupy the Central
Flowery Kingdom, and all the rest of the world are outside
barbarians. They never think of sending out missionaries.
It seems to them a matter of slight importance whether the
rest possess the truth or not, or what their destiny in the
future may be.
On the other hand, take the Buddhists, the Christians,
the Mohammedans. They have considered themselves as
divinely commissioned to proselyte all the rest of the world.
They have sent out missionaries to compel them to come in.
If they would not come in as the result of persuasion, they
felt they must force them ; as the Mohammedans wrote their
short creed — Allah is Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet
— on the point of the sword ; thus, if in no other way, thrust
ing it down the throat or into the hearts of their enemies.
Thus, each people has taken its fragment of truth, and

196 Beliefs about the Bible.
supposed it to be the divine and complete system of religion.
It has written its Bible, and supposed that here was the
closed canon of the revelation of God, that they and they
alone were the depositaries of eternal truth. This belief
could very easily be held by any nation, as long as it was
isolated, as long as the nations knew very little of each
other, as long as there was no possibility of frequent com
munication all over the world. It is only within fifty years,
perhaps, that some of these great systems of religion have
been opened up to the thought and life of the modern world.
As long as each people stayed at home and knew very little
about its neighbors, it could very comfortably maintain its
self-conceit, and suppose that it was the only civilized people,
the only one that had any respectable religious ideas, the
only one that had any noble principles of ethics, the only
one that had ever received any light from heaven or under
stood the mysteries of God. But a change must come to
any state like this. How does it come? As I have indi
cated. The one source of truth is experience, and the new
movement comes as the result of deepened, broadened,
enlarged human experience. These nations living quietly
by themselves, so exclusive in their selfish content, have been
compelled to become acquainted with each other.
War has done something toward this larger civilization.
For, when nations fight with each other and come into the
rough shock of conflict, they learn the stuff of which this
other people is made; and there comes to them a larger
sympathy of humanity, a larger feeling of the common ele
ments of greatness, a larger appreciation of the fact that
they are not the only people in the world, but that there are
others, wise and mighty and strong as they.
Commerce has done more even than war ; for it has cov
ered all the seas with ships, and men have gone to and fro,

The Eternal Bible. 197
discovering the common brotherhood of humanity, finding
similar religious and intellectual ideas, similar ethical prin
ciples. They have brought home the story ; and so these
ideas have been scattered from one nation to another, thus
becoming the common property of civilization.
Discovery and scientific investigation have done something,
for they have sent their explorers all over the world to study
the history of these alien civilizations, their literature, their
religious and moral ideas ; and, thus, they have given us a
grander and broader conception of men, nature, and life.
So these various influences have been at work, and men
have taken a higher position as the result of the growing
experience of the world and of human life ; and this growing
experience has written a new chapter in the perception of
truth, that the wise and thoughtful of all the world may read.
What has been the result ? This old belief, on the part of
these separated nationalities and religions, that they had all
the truth, and that they were the only ones that had, is
passing away. It has become impossible for an intelligent
man any longer to believe it. Two grand objections face us,
— and either one of them is strong enough to overthrow com
pletely this theory, — an intellectual objection and a moral
objection. The intellectual objection I have already hinted and partly
outlined. What have men learned, what have we Chris
tians learned concerning some of the other religions of the
world ? We have learned that our experience has not been
unique, but that it has been the universal experience of the
world. We have learned also that our system of truth is
only a fragment of the universal truth. We have learned
that other people, other nations, have passed through similar
experiences, and consequently have arrived at similar con
clusions ; that they have discovered similar truths, similar

198 Beliefs about the Bible.
ideas concerning the universe, God, and man, similar prin
ciples of morals, or ideas of right and wrong. We have
learned that they have Bibles of their own, and that they
think they came by divine revelation, as we have thought
ours did; that they have set themselves up as the exclusive
possessors of divine truth, just as we have ; that they have
had the same kind of conceit that we have had ; that they
have supposed they were favorites of God, as we have sup
posed we were ; and that they have started out to convert the
world, just as we have, and for precisely the same reasons.
Furthermore, we have found that they have just as much
reason for holding these opinions as we have had, no more
and no less.
What is the next step ? We are forced to the conclusion
that one of two things is true. Either there were half a
dozen divine revelations and half a dozen infallible Bibles, —
in which case, we wonder why it would not have been just as
well to give one universal, complete one in the first place ;
or to the conviction that there is not any universal religion in
existence or any universal and infallible truth or any infalli
ble Bible, but that we all have passed through similar stages,
and by similar steps of human experience have arrived at
similar conclusions. The result is irresistible that the truth
we have reached has come to us — no less from God than on
the other theory — through the process and by the method of
our human experience in living out our life and dealing with
these great principles and forces of the universe that touch
us on every hand.
The moral objection is quite as strong as the intellectual
one. As men grow wiser, as they grow better, as they have
a larger conception of human brotherhood, broader ideas of
justice, a deeper thought of truth, a wider sympathy and
more care for human welfare, it ceases to be possible for

The Eternal Bible. 199
them to believe that the infinite God of this universe cares
any more about one part of his children than he does about
the rest. It ceases to be possible for man with a grandly
developed and sympathetic moral nature to feel that the God
of the whole earth is capable of being partial, of having his
pets, of selecting either individuals or nations and giving
them his special care, and leaving all the rest to wander in
darkness, or fall into pits of destruction. The highest and
noblest moral natures of the world would find it impossible
to worship, or even to respect, a God who was capable of
a partiality like that. It ceases then to be morally possible
for men to hold this old exclusive, partial, selfish conception
of God, of religion, of the Bible, of divine and infallible
truth. What then ? What is the next step to which we are
forced ? This, plain and inevitable : a recognition of the
fact that these separate and distinct religions are only parts
of the universal religion yet to come ; that these separate
and closed Biblical canons are only chapters in the universal
and eternal Bible, as yet only partially written.
I want now to note two main characteristics of this eternal
Bible. In the first place, it must cover and include all truth that
touches the concerns of life and the welfare of man. In the
second place, it must be forever being written and never
done. These are the two tests by which you may judge the
universal and eternal Bible of God.
Religion in its conception as it has hitherto prevailed in
the world has been narrow. It has concerned itself only
with a little fragment of human life. We talk about religion
and business, religion and politics, religion and science, relig
ion and art, religion and morality. The coming grander and
truer conception of religion will, of necessity, sweep all

200 Beliefs about the Bible.
these particulars under its one grand generalization. A
man must be religious in business, religious in politics, relig
ious in science, religious in art, religious in everything. It
must be the quality that permeates all life, the atmosphere
that men breathe everywhere. Religion is the secret of the
highest, truest life of man. Religion is the expression we
give to the relation in which we stand to the universe, — that
is, to God. It is our dealing with him. It is our dealing
with the totality of life. No man can be in the broadest and
truest and deepest sense of the word religious, except as
he is a complete man, in right relations to all the forms and
forces of the universe about him. And, if he is a complete
and true man, he gives utterance to the truest and deepest
conception of the religious life ; for that is what religion
means. Religion, then, must deal with the physical nature of man.
And here is one particular in which the Old Testament is
far ahead of the New. Moses places sanitary laws side by
side with the command to worship one God and no more,
making one of equal importance with the other. The New
Testament throws contempt upon this world, and speaks
slightingly of the body, "this vile body," "Bodily exercise
profiteth little," etc. It is sprinkled all over with passages
expressing contempt for this world, the material side of
things ; and yet there never was a sane or true religion except
as it based itself on a sound and healthy physical life. We
must begin with our religion right here. Cleanliness is not
next to godliness merely. It is a part of godliness ; and so
is every other sanitary regulation that touches the welfare
and health of the physical man.
This eternal Bible must go over the whole realm of truth.
It must include all man's social relations, all political
relations, all international relations, all science, all art. It

The Eternal Bible. 20 1
must include everything that touches the life and happiness
of man. The eternal Bible, then, will cover and include all
truth, so far as it is developed and wrought out as the result
of the experience of the world.
I said that its second characteristic was that it was always
being written and never finished. This, you will see, springs
naturally out of the principles thus far developed. Truth,
as far as it appertains to the welfare of man, being the
result of human experience, developed by it, presented as
the result of it, must of course keep step with human
experience, and can never transcend it, so that humanity
writes a new sentence in its Bible with every new step of
human experience, with every new and larger contact with
the universe in which it lives. The boy has the truth which
pertains to the boyish nature; but, as he grows up and
becomes a young man, he comes into new experiences, which
enlarge and broaden his ideas. He has new and wider
conceptions of life, that enable him to live the true life of a
young man. The middle-aged man and the old man come
into new experiences as they advance ; and, thus, truth keeps
step with human life.
This Bible, then, is not done. It never will be done, until
the last thinking being is weary of thought, and fallen asleep.
There is one other phase of my subject, carrying it on and
rounding it out, that I wish to bring to your thought, and
which may seem somewhat new to you, put in just the way
in which I propose to state it. Is there any reason in the
nature of things why we should forever look at God, the
universe, the great truths of religion, through Hebrew eyes
and none other ? Let us be glad and thankful for all the
Hebrews saw. Let us rejoice for the depth and breadth
of their religious experience, and take it as our light and
guidance, as far as it extends ; but is there any reason why

202 Beliefs about the Bible.
Americans should not come into contact, first hand, with the
divine, as well as Hebrews, Egyptians, Buddhists, and Mo
hammedans ? Is it not the same God above us ? Are not
the same heavens over us as bright with stars as were those
that shone over the Judean hills? Are there not now
as fair flowers, as fresh grasses, as those from which Jesus
drew his lessons of religion and life? Are not as noble
hearts, as unselfish devotion manifested to-day, as high quali
ties of manhood and womanhood in society as in olden
times ? Reversing and changing the purpose of those ques
tions of Shylock, may we not say instead : Hath not an
American eyes ? Hath not an American a heart, brain, soul,
religious faculties, moral perceptions, as well as a Jew or a
Buddhist or a Mohammedan ? Do we not stand in as inti
mate and close relations with the father-heart of God in the
nineteenth century as men stood five hundred, a thousand,
two, three thousand years ago ? Has God moved farther
off ? Are the heavens more distant ? Are we less wise, less
capable of thinking, less capable of feeling than they were
in the olden time ?
I appeal to your consciousness, to your clearer thought, as
to what are the ideals, the forces, and the methods that
govern your own life to-day ? Are you not guided by the
Bible of the ages instead of the Bible of the Hebrews and
the Christians ? What are the doctrines, the ideas, the beliefs
that are moulding and shaping your life to-day ? They are a
part of the life of to-day and not those of two thousand or
five thousand years ago.
Where is our book of Genesis ? It is not in the Bible.
The book of Genesis that we believe in and that we are
guided by was written by Copernicus, by Galileo, by Newton,
by Laplace, by Lyell, by Spencer, by Darwin. And, if we
profess to believe in the old Genesis, we are perpetually re-

The Eternal Bible. 203
interpreting and retranslating its ideas, so that they shall
echo Copernicus and these other men. Where is our book
of the Law ? Do we really go to the Pentateuch to find out
the principles by which we shall guide and govern our daily
lives ? No. We go to those men and to a hundred others
who have studied for us and laid down the laws of this actual
universe of which we are a part. We go to men like Dr.
Carpenter, of London, to find out how this marvellous body
of ours is made. Servetus and Harvey wrote some sentences
in this wondrous book of the Law. Ferrier in his studies
of the brain, Bain and his co-workers and compeers in out
lining the marvellous nature and functions of our nervous
system, — these men who have studied the real laws of the
universe and human life, and have written them for us, they,
not the Pentateuch, are the real book of the Law by which
the modern world is being guided, whatever men may say or
profess about it. Where are our divine histories, those that
really move and control the world ? They are not the Kings,
Samuel, Judges, and the Chronicles of the Old Testament.
They are the histories of Greece, of Rome, of the Middle
Ages, of Germany, of the rise and progress of modern civ
ilization, Green's history of the English people, Bancroft's
history of America, all those that have given us the sources
of that stream of national life of which we are a part.
These are the histories that are moving the modern world.
Who are our heroes ? Are they any longer Samuel, Jeph-
thah, Gideon, and David, and the grand names of the old
book that are a part of our childhood thought ? No : they
are the men that have fought for truth and for freedom and
for human advancement. Our heroes are Winkelried, the
barons that met King John at Runnymede, Cromwell of the
Commonwealth, that grand group allied to Washington that
figured in our Revolution, other men like Lincoln and Gar-

204 Beliefs about the Bible.
rison, men that have stood for truth and human right.
These are the heroes that shine like stars in our moral and
intellectual firmament, that give us the light by which we are
guided and the inspiration for our every-day life.
Where are our ideal women ? Are they Miriam and
Deborah and Ruth and Esther and Mary and Dorcas, those
that are simply names to us in the olden book ? Are they
not rather Mary Carpenter and Florence Nightingale and
Frances Power Cobbe and Marian Evans of England,
Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Thompson, Mary A. Livermore,
and a hundred others I might name, that are making and
shaping the life of these modern times ? If women like these
had lived in the ancient days, they would have towered so
much above the noblest of them all that either they would
have been persecuted and put to death as ahead of their time,
or idealized and worshipped as divine.
Who are the prophets and seers that lead and inspire
us now ? They will still continue to be in part those who
have written the noble, burning words that have led on the
world for so many centuries ; but added to these are all the
great religious leaders, — Zoroaster, Gautama, Confucius,
Socrates, — the great men of more recent times, — Savon
arola, Wickliff, Luther, Wesley, Swedenborg, Channing,
Theodore Parker, these great seers, utterers of divine
truth, those that have lifted up and led on the life of the
world. And what are really the Gospels that fire us, that come to
us whispering their good news ? They are in part those that
have been written in the days of old. They include the
Gospels of our New Testament, the light and life that came
through Jesus of Nazareth ; but they include also those
other flashes of light that have come out of the inner heav
ens of human thought and life, and are streaming out of

The Eternal Bible. 205
them still. They are to be found very largely in the ranks
of those men that have been thought to be opposed to
gospel and to God, in the ranks of men doing the work of
science. These are bringing to us the good news that
man is mighty, that there are secret forces and powers in
this universe that man can discover, that he can harness as
his servants and compel to do his work. They are discov
ering that man may control and mould all the forces of
the universe around him, and lift himself up from drudgery
and slavery to that nature that has dominated him so long.
Where are the apocalypses, those that unfold the future and
teach us what it is that is coming ? They are not like that
wonderful phantasmagorical dream of John that closes the
New Testament. They are again these same men of science ;
for, as Patrick Henry said, there is no way of foretelling the
future except by the past. And it is the study of this past,
the study of the principles that underlie and control the
development of civilization up to this hour, that are indicating
the possibilities of future growth and progress. And, look
ing along the line of these up the ages, by a faith that is not
credulity, a faith forever springing out of human experience,
a faith based in the nature of things, we see man sceptred
and crowned controlling the world, with its forces at his feet,
its mightiest powers his ministers, himself master henceforth
of the world and of his destiny.
These, then, I say, are the real chapters of the eternal
Bible that are being written age after age as the result of
human discovery and experience, — a Bible not yet complete,
a Bible in which each new truth is a sentence, and each new
grand discovery a chapter or a book, and that shall go on
being written by the finger of God in human life forever.
And, as it progresses, it shall cease to be a book whose every
page is blood-spattered, as were the Old Testament books of

206 Beliefs about the Bible.
the past. No longer shall its pages be defaced with so
copious a rain of human tears. It shall not be so largely
made up of groans at the world's injustice or with human
cries for help. For the time shall come, it is coming pro
gressively, when this truth of God shall be more and more
written in the hearts and lives of men, and when it shall be
no longer necessary to say to one another, know thou the
Lord, know thou the truth, know thou the perfect relig
ious life ; for all shall know and live in the harmony of this
truth and life the wide world over forevermore.