"¦I ^ice iheff Books for the f atanding ef a. College itl^tMr Co/o/ty" 0 ILHIBI^^IET DIVINITY SCHOOL TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY GIFT OF WILLISTON WALKER "'W/'T^i'v, (•-^^ e s.cBjt.>i)i b '1't/h -i) <^ *'^ THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON CIVILISATION THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON CIVILISATION BT ERNST VON DOBSCHUTZ HALLE-'WITTENBERG -^^tary of tl^ Urn DIWTY SCHOOL] Haven, NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1914 Cj)SO J)L3(oL Copyrighl, 1914 Bi Charles Scribner's Sons Published April, 1914 I t PREFACE ? One of the greatest questions of our day is how ^ modern civilisation and Christianity can go on in .s- harmony. One can approach this question by sev- 5 eral ways, but historical investigation has always ^ proved to be the surest. The author has in mind ^ to write in German a full "History of the Bible," when time will allow. Meanwhile this brief sketch >J may prove useful. Readers who look for references s will find most of them in an article contributed by u the present writer to Dr. J. Hastings's Encyclo- psedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. II, on "The Bible in the Christian Church. " ^ T The author wishes to express his thanks to his 1^. friend, Professor J. H. Ropes, for kindly reading the proofs for him, to Mr. W. J. Wilson and Mr. J- H. A. Sherman, who helped him in improving the J diction, and to Professor Williston Walker for vi PEEFACE valuable information regarding early American doc uments. If any reader should find fault with the English style of this book, he must not blame any translator— the author himself is responsible. Ernst von Dobschtjtz. Cambbidge, Mass. Jmiuwy, 1914. CONTENTS CHAFTEH PAQE I. The Bible Makes Itself Indispensable for THE Church (to 325 a. d.) 3 II. The Bible Begins to Rule the Christian Empire (325-600 a. d.) 28 III. The Bible Teaches the German Nations (500-800 A. D.) 47 IV. The Bible Becomes One Basis of Medieval Civilisation (800-1150 a. d.) 67 V. The Bible Stirs Non-Conformist Move ments (1150-1450) ... .... 94 VI. The Bible Trains Printers and Translators (1450-1611) 117 VII. The Bible Rules Daily Life (1550-1850) . 138 VIII. The Bible Becomes Once More the Book of Devotion 164 ILLUSTRATIONS TO FACE PLATB PAGE I. Harvard Papyrus. Romans 1:1-7.... 14 II. Origen's Hexapla 16 III. Codex Sinaiticus 28 IV. Roll and Book 30 V. Vienna Genesis 32 ¦VI. Joshua Roll 38 VII. The Lord's Prayer on a Potsherd ... 46 VIII. Gothic Bible 50 IX. Alcuin's Bible 52 X. Theodulf's Bible 54 XI. LrNDISFABNE GoSPELS 66 XII. Byzantine Miniature 70 XIII. English Miniature 82 XIV. 'Wycuffe's Bible 116 XV. Gutenberg's First Printed Bible .... 122 XVI. First Printed German Bible 126 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON CIVILISATION THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON CIVILISATION THE BIBLE MAKES ITSELF INDISPENSABLE FOR THE CHURCH (UNTIL 325 A. D.) There is a small book; one can put it in one's pocket, and yet all the libraries of America, numer ous as they are, would hardly be large enough to hold all the books which have been inspired by this one little volume. The reader will know what I am speaking of; it is the Bible, as we are used to call it — ^the Book, the book of mankind, as it has prop erly been called. It has been commented upon, treated in every way, but, curious to say, hardly any one has attempted to trace its history through the centuries and mark the influence which it ex erted upon our civilisation. In order to do this we follow the traces of the Bible through the different periods of human or, to speak more accurately, of Christian civilisation. In the first period of Christian history, the time of 4 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION persecutions during the first three centuries of our era, there is not much to say about the Bible as influencing civilisation. Christianity was but start ing on its way and fighting for its place in the world. The Bible could not exert a civilising influence upon a hostile world. But by impressing its value upon the Christian mind it made itself indispensable for the church and thereby laid the foundation for the future development. Christianity was a living religion. The first con gregations were dwelling in an atmosphere of enthu siasm. There was a general outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The prophet's words seemed to be fulfilled: "They shall teach no more every man his neigh bour and every man his brother, saying: know the Lord; for they shall all know me." Christianity was not a religion of a sacred book, whose dead let ter was to be artificially kept alive by learned men. It was a religion of living experiences. Neverthe less, Christianity from the beginning had a sacred book. Jesus and his disciples used the Bible of their people, the Old Testament, and Saint Paul carried it to the Christian communities of gentile origin, which had not known of it before. Christianity could not do without it. If it was necessary to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah, how could this be done without arguing THE OLD TESTAMENT 5 from the Scriptures as proof? If the gospel was to be announced to the heathen they would give less heed to the new tidings than to the statement that it was really the most ancient form of religion as attested by this sacred book, which was superior to all the books of poets and philosophers and legisla tors by reason of its venerable age. Christianity without any hesitation claimed the Old Testament as its own book, its own Bible. Not only was Jesus the content of this book, he was even believed to be its author. It was the spirit of Jesus which dwelt in the prophets and made them seek and search concerning the salvation offered by Christ (I Peter 1 : 10-11). "The prophets having their grace from him, did prophesy unto him," we are told in the so-called letter of Barnabas. So the Old Testament seemed to be a Christian book both in content and in origin, and it was easy enough to add some properly Christian pamphlets, as Saint Paul's letters and some gospels, the Acts and other letters, and some books of revelation. It was as necessary as it was easy, if Christianity was not to lose con tact with its proper origin. The New Testament, as we have it now, was not complete at the start. It was a collection of primi tive Christian writings, larger in some ways than it is now; on the other hand lacking some of its 6 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION present elements. Its precise content did not be come finally established until a very late period, not earlier than the end of the fourth century. So also the size of the Old Testament was not quite fixed. There were more books in the Greek Bible of the Alexandrian Jews than in the Hebrew Bible of the Palestinian rabbis. The Christian church at first adopted the Greek Bible, but from time to time some scholar pointed out the difference, and many people thought they had better keep to the Hebrew canon. This view, championed by Saint Jerome, led to a partial rejection of the books which nowadays we usually call the Old Testa ment Apocrypha, until in the sixteenth century the churches accentuated their difference by a different attitude toward these books, the Calvinists rejecting them altogether, the Roman church including them as an integral part of the Bible, and the Lutherans giving them an intermediate position as books to be read with safety but without canonical authority. When, in 1902, King Edward VII was to be crowned, the British and Foreign Bible Society intended to pre sent to his Majesty the copy of the Bible on which he was to take his oath. Then it was discovered that according to the old regulations the king of England had to take his oath on a complete Bible, that is a Bible containing the Apocrypha. The THE ALEXANDRIAN CANON 7 British and Foreign Bible Society on its part, by its statutes, was prevented from printing Bibles includ ing the Apocrypha; so they presented to the king a most beautiful copy, but the king did not use it for the coronation service. It is the difference be tween the Alexandrian and the Palestinian canon which reappears in this little struggle and thereby is seen surviving to our own time. Unsettled as the size of the Old and of the New Testament may have been, nevertheless the prin ciple was established at a very early date that Christianity was to have a holy Scripture in two parts, one taken over from Judaism, the other added from its own stores. Let us stop here for a moment and try to realise what this meant. Mohammed, when founding his new religion, acknowledged, it is true, the books of the former religions, but for his own behevers the unique authority is the Koran, a book which origi nated within a single generation and therefore is pervaded by one uniform spirit. Christianity ad hered to a Bible whose larger part originated in a period much anterior to its own and in a religion inferior to Christianity. The Bible covers a period of over a thousand years. What a difference in civilisation between the nomadic Hfe of the patri archs and the time of Jesus! What a difference in 8 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION spirit between the sons of Jacob killing the whole population of Sichem in order to avenge their sister and Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan! or be tween the prophet Elijah killing four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and Jesus preaching the love of one's enemies! In fact, it was possible to over come this difference only in an age which did not read the Bible with historical notions. Even so, the juxtaposition caused much difficulty. We shall see the problem of the Law troubling the church through all the centuries. We shall find the notions of sacrifice and priesthood adapted to Christian in stitutions. Looking at Charlemagne or Calvin, we realise that the Old Testament is ever introducing its views into Christian minds, as authoritative as any word of the gospel. Now, at the beginning the influence was rather the other way; the Old Testament was to be inter preted in the light of the New. And, in truth, much light came from the life of Jesus to the history of the ancient people and to the prophecies. We do not wonder that Christian minds were excited by all this fresh illumination, and we must not wonder that sometimes they remodelled the tradition of the life of Christ to accord with the Old Testament. The harmony between the two Testaments soon became a leading idea in Christian doctrine. Some THE TWO TESTAMENTS 9 heretics, indeed, would not accept the Old Testa ment. Marcion maintained that it came from an inferior god, while the supreme God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, had revealed himself only through his Son. He found a great many contrasts between the Old and the New Testament, and this criticism was supported by pagan philosophers, as, for example. Porphyry. The church, therefore, was most anxious to establish the harmony of the Testa ments by any means at its command. Taste varies from century to century; the minute parallelism constructed by some early Christian writers, and evidently much admired by their contemporaries, seems to us rather ridiculous and fanciful. On the other hand, the church was right in maintaining the harmony. The New Testament needs to be ex plained from the Old Testament; it is open to much misunderstanding when taken apart. There was almost no sense for historical development at that time; the criticism of Ptolemseus, in his famous let ter to Flora, where he speaks of several strata of revelation running through the Old and the New Testament, is an exceptional one. For most of the faithful the Christian doctrine was directly looked for and found in the Old Testament; the gospel was contained in every one of its books, from Gene sis to Malachi. Unity was conceived as uniformity. 10 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION This was the system which appealed most to the average Christian mind. And the Bible was open to all Christians, as Harnack has brilliantly demon strated in a recent publication. The ancient church laid stress upon this publicity and never tried to withdraw the Bible from the people. There was no hidden mystery regarding the Bible. On the contrary, all members of the church were anxiously urged to make themselves as familiar with the Bible as possible. They were supposed to have copies of their own and to read them privately as well as in the congregation. Even when the struggles about the right doctrine began and the heretics sometimes held to the Bible as their champion against the doctrine of the church, the church did not remove the Bible from public discussion. The ecclesiasti cal party maintained that the Bible was always in favour of the true doctrine; one needs but to know how to read it. Tertullian, it is true, once in the heat of controversy declared that it was no use arguing against heretics from the Bible, but he did it, nevertheless, and so did the other fathers. The Bible proved its spiritual value to the expe rience of every reader. A man familiar with the Psalms has a treasure which cannot be lost; in any situation he will find what is suitable for his needs. If one looks for examples of faith, the author of the NO PAGAN BOOKS 11 epistle to the Hebrews in his eleventh chapter gives a splendid model for finding heroes of faith all through the Bible. The book of Genesis, especially its first chapters, was of particular interest for most of the readers on account of the sublime description there given of the beginnings of man kind. The creation story in Genesis implies much more than even the finest of all Greek myths, namely, the myth in Plato's Timseus, with which it was compared by the emperor Julian. The mighty words, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth/' proved to be the one true answer to all the cosmological questions of Greek philosophy, and be sides there was ample room for introducing what ever was wanted — such as the creation and the fall of the angels — ^if only one knew how to read between the lines. In an old Christian book dealing with church regulations and the rules for individual Christian life we find the following admonition to use no other book at all except the Bible, because, as the author says, the Bible contains Hterature of every kind. The passage runs :^ Stay at home and read in the Law and in the Book of the Kings and in the Prophets and in the Gospel (which is) the fulness of these things. Keep far away ¦ Didascalia, ch. ii, p. 5 in Mrs. M. D. Gibson's translation. 12 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION from all the books of the heathen; for what hast thou to do with foreign words or with false laws or prophe cies which also easily cause young people to wander from the faith? What then is wanting to thee in the Word of God, that thou throwest thyself upon these myths of the heathen? If thou wishest to read the tales of the fathers, thou hast the Book of the Kings; or of wise men and philosophers, thou hast the Proph ets amongst whom thou wilt find more wisdom and science than among the wise men and the philosophers, because they are the words of God, of the one only wise God. If thou desirest song, thou hast the Psalms of David or if the beginning of the world, thou hast the Genesis of great Moses; if law and commandments, thou hast the book of Exodus of the Lord our God. Therefore keep entirely away from all these foreign things, which are contrary to them. The Bible, in fact, pervaded the whole life of a Christian. It was the Bible, its history, its com mandments, that he was taught as a child in his parents' home. When the girls gathered in the women's hall to spin, they would sing and talk about God's revelations more eagerly than even Sappho had praised her luxurious love — according to an expression used by Tatian in his Apology. The prayers, private as well as ecclesiastical, all echoed BibHcal phrases, and even at burials the Christians sang joyful psalms. So the Bible became famihar to the Christians of that time. We are astonished to find how well BIBLE READING 13 they knew it. The sermons of this period are fuU of Biblical allusions, and evidently the preacher could expect them to be understood. This is the more remarkable as the circulating of the Bible in this time met with the greatest difficul ties. There was, of course, a large amount of Bible reading in the congregations. According to Justin's description of early Christian worship about 150 a. D., the service began with continuous reading of the Bible through many chapters, as far as time would aUow. Then an officer, bishop or elder, would begin to preach. The office of reading was esteemed so highly that it was regarded as based on a special spiritual gift; the anagnostes, i. e., the reader, in the earliest time had his place among the prophets and spirit-gifted teachers. And, in fact, if we look at the earliest manuscripts of the Bible which have come down to us, we shall almost think that super natural assistance was necessary for reading them: no punctuation, no accent, no space between the words, no breaking off at the end of a sentence. The reader had to know his text almost entirely by heart to do it well. From the "Shepherd of Her- mas," a very interesting book written by a Roman layman about 140 a. d., we learn that some peo ple gathered often, probably daily, for the spe cial purpose of common reading and learning. But 14 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION even granted that the memory of these men was not spoiled by too much reading, as is ours, so that by hearing they were able to learn by heart — it is said of some rabbis that they did not lose one word of all their master had told them, and, in fact, the Tal mudic literature was transmitted orally for centuries — nevertheless, we must assume that these Christians had their private copies of the Bible at home. The evidence from the allusions of preachers to private reading is strong. Cyprian addresses a Christian: "Your life should be one of assiduous prayer or reading (of the Bible): now you speaking to God, now God to you." Here begins our difficulty: how did they get so many copies? There was an organised book-trade in the ancient world; publishers had their offices, using (instead of printing-presses) slaves who were trained in copying; they had shorthand writers, as well as calligraphers to do the fine writing. But as long as Christianity was still an oppressed religion it is doubtful if the Bible was among the books which pubHshers would care to take. The Chris tians were, most of them, poor people who could not spend much money for procuring Bibles. Be sides, it was no easy thing to get a complete Bible. At that time the books were stiH written on papy rus rolls, not in book form. Only one side of the Plate I— HARVARD PAPYRUS An attempt to copy tbe letters of St. Paul (Romans counts as A = first letter) giving the text only unto Romans 1 : 7; late third or early fourth century. From Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Vol. II, PI. II, Egypt Exploration Fund — London. BIBLE COPYING 15 papyrus could be used; the roll would become un wieldy if too long. So, in order to get aU the books of the Old and the New Testament, at least two dozen roUs had to be written. Maybe a simple Chris tian copied for himself one gospel or some letters or even one or more books from the Old Testament. There are preserved on papyrus some unfinished at tempts which show what hard work it was (Plate I). We can scarcely imagine a man going with this heavy hand through all the books of the Bible. We are told that wealthy Christians helped their brethren by procuring copies for them. Origen, the greatest Bible scholar of the ancient church, is said to have been supported by a rich admirer, who put at his disposal a number of slave copyists. With their help he succeeded in creating one of the great est works which Bible criticism ever undertook, his so-called Hexapla, which is a comparison of more than six various Greek translations of the Old Testa ment. Scholars in the nineteenth century held that scarcely more than one copy of this enormous work had ever been written, but by recent discoveries we know that it was copied several times (Plate II). A later admirer of Origen, Pamphilus, is said always to have carried with him several rolls in order to provide poor brethren. Now that was the third century. Christianity had already begun to spread 16 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION among the higher classes and to become a feature in the world's life. Devotional reading of the Bible was accompanied by scholarly interpretation. We mentioned Origen as the greatest Bible scholar of his time, if not of all times. It may be worth while to insert here a few words on his life. A native of Alexandria, he saw as a boy his father dying as a martyr for his Christian faith; he longed to become a martyr him self, and was only prevented from giving himself up by a trick of his mother's, who concealed all his clothes. He got a good training at the catechetical school of Alexandria, not restricting himself to mere Christian and Biblical studies, but reading the pagan philosophers of his time as well as the Greek classics. A youth of only eighteen years, he became the head of the school, and his fame spread all over the em pire. He travelled to Rome, to Greece; he was even asked by the Roman governor to come to Arabia to settle certain questions. So zealous was he to fulfil the commandments of the gospel that, misunderstanding one of the Lord's sayings, he made himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heav en's sake, which brought him into trouble in his later life. When once on a journey through Pales tine he, being still a layman, had preached before the bishop of Csesarea, he was summoned by his f '¦M-^.-u:. Plate II— ORIGEN'S HEXAPLA Fragment found in the Cairo-Genizah and published by E. Taylor in 1900: parch ment, fifth century, with part ot second, third, and fourth columns: Ps 22: 25-28; used later for copying Hebrew texts. From "Hexapla of Origen," by E. Taylor, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. ORIGEN, THE BIBLE SCHOLAR 17 own bishop and ordered not to preach. Some years afterward the bishop of Csesarea, who was among his strongest admirers, ordained him a priest, which caused his bishop to banish him from Alexandria. He settled at Csesarea and lived there for twenty years without ever aiming at any ecclesiastical posi tion, pursuing his study of the Bible and gather ing around his chair the best men from every part of Christianity. So great was his fame that the empress JuUa Mammsea, being still a pagan, asked him to see her when she was traveUing in the East. He was the one man to refute the vigorous attack made against the truth of Christian doctrine by the philosopher Celsus. Wben persecution began again he wrote a tractate of comfort, "On Martyrdom," and another, "On Prayer." He himself suffered imprisonment and torture, and died after his release, as a result of these sufferings, at the age of sixty- nine. We can scarcely do honour enough to this man, who three centuries after his death was proclaimed to be one of the most dangerous heretics, the church, however, using his learning in the form of extracts. The vast amount of reading, the sagacity, and the perspicuity of the man are alike admirable. He is said to have commented upon nearly aU the books of the Bible, and this three times. He wrote short 18 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION annotations, he compiled large and learned commen taries, and he preached before the congregation. Only a small part of his works has come down to us, but this fills volumes. Origen's great merit is that he brought Christian interpretation to a system which enabled the church to retain the plain historical sense alongside the so-called higher meaning. For a long time gentile philosophers as well as Jewish preachers had adopted the method of treat ing their sacred books allegorically. Homer, it was assumed, in teUing his stories of battles of gods and heroes, meant quite another thing; otherwise he would be gmlty of irrehgion. He meant that the powers of nature and the energies of the human soul came into struggle, and therefore virtues and vices were fighting one with another. The same thing was done by PhUo for the Old Testament. There was no real history; all was symbolical, aUegory. Christi anity tried to foUow in this path. The gnostics in dulged in the wildest form of allegory. But it was not safe to give up the idea of historicity altogether. Jesus and his gospel were historical facts, not mere ideas; they were emptied of all meaning if turned into allegory. And likewise the history of the Old Testament could not simply be reduced to allegorical metaphors. Origen saved the situation by assert ing that each of these two views had its proper place. THEORY OF INTERPRETATION 19 His theory is that as man consists of body, soul, and spirit, so the holy Scripture has a threefold nature, to which corresponds a threefold interpretation. The body stands for the plain historical meaning: Jesus did cast out of the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves and the changers of money. There are some historical difficulties, Origen admits, if we compare the different gospel narratives and if we take account of the fact that a single man did this; Origen explains that it was a miracle showing the divine power in Jesus. But there are other as pects too. The soul represents the higher moral view: Christ is always casting out of his church, which belongs to the heavenly Jerusalem, the men who are profaning it by their money-making. And, lastly, there is the spirit, that is, the su preme mystical understanding. The spirit of Christ, entering its temple, the man's soul, casts out of it all earthly desires and makes it a house of prayer. Now that is very ingenious. These three strata of interpretation allow for a great variety in explanation and adaptation. Origen succeeds by this method in keeping the essential historical basis and adding what in those days was thought to be most significant. The Bible, being a divine book, seemed to require a higher form of inter pretation; the Holy Ghost of God was supposed 20 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION to be a spirit of mysteries; it was assumed that to interpret the Bible in a plain way was to think of God meanly. Of course, the Bible contained some aUegories which might seem to support this theory of aUegor ical interpretation; for instance, the beautiful vision of Ezekiel, told in the thirty-seventh chapter of his book: he sees the valley full of dry bones, and at the command of God he prophesies over them and they begin to come together, and flesh came up and skin covered them above and at last breath came into them and they lived. It is a magnificent aUegory of the people of Israel, scattered in the exile and brought to life again by the power of God. It is irritating to see the fathers just at this point de clining to follow the path of allegorical interpreta tion. They insist upon the reality of the occurrence; it is to be taken literally as resurrection of the dead — so it has influenced aU mediaeval pictures of the last judgment ! I need only add that the rabbis took Ezekiel's description in the same way, as a real oc currence, arguing for the historicity by showing the phylacteries which the risen persons had worn — and one feels what a pity it is to treat aUegory as his tory. But the opposite fault is still worse: the spiritualising and aUegorising of real history is the greatest damage ever done to religion. AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 21 Theologians tried to estabhsh the authority of the Bible. This had already been done in some mea sure by the rabbis of the synagogue. In taking over the Bible the Christians had only to accept their estimate of it, but they were not quite satis fied with it. The rabbinical doctrine was a rather mechanical one: God had used men, just as a man uses a pencil to write with. The pencU does not act consciously: so the Old Testament writers, ac cording to this theory, did not take any part in what they were writing; it was to them as another man's script. Commenting upon the last chapter of Deuteronomy, where the death of Moses is de scribed, a rabbinical authority remarks: "Until this passage God dictated and Moses wrote; henceforth God dictated and Moses wrote weeping" — namely, the account of his own death. There was so little interest in the human author that he could be elimi nated altogether. We are told by an early Jewish legend that all books of the Old Testament had been destroyed at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, when the temple was burned; so God dictated them all to Ezra. According to this theory Ezra would be the real author of the whole Old Testament. This is the most mechanical way of representing the equal in spiration of all parts of the Old Testament. The Jews of the dispersion had a somewhat similar theory 22 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION about the inspiration of their Greek Bible; when Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, gathered at Alexandria seventy elders of the Jews to make the Greek translation of their law, he put each one of them in a separate cell in order to avoid any com munication between them, so the legend runs. Then, after working for seventy days, all at once they shouted "Amen" from their cells, having accom plished their task, and when the seventy copies had been compared they were found to agree even in the smallest detaU. Here we have again an attempt to assert inspiration not only for the book itself but also for its translation. It is as mechanical as the former, all human co-operation being excluded. Christians did not want this. In Jesus they had experienced living revelation; they had prophets among themselves. So, at least at the beginning, they had a much higher view of inspiration. God enters a man's soul and fills it with his spirit; now the man acts and speaks in the power of this spirit, and yet he is not unconscious of his own doing and speak ing. There are two ways of inspiration, we are told by Clement of Alexandria: either God snatches up the man's soul and conducts it to the unseen world and shows to it whatever he wishes it to know — this is ecstasy— or God enters the man and fills him and makes him his organ. The latter, less striking THEORIES OF INSPIRATION 23 though it appears, is nevertheless the higher and more valuable concept. Therefore the fathers do not so much use the metaphor of the pencil as the simUitude of a musical instrument, whether a flute through which the Holy Spirit is playing, or a harp which he touches with a plectrum. Much as they appreciate the holy Scripture, the early fathers usuaUy talk about it in a very unpre tentious manner. They have not yet developed those gorgeous formulas of quotation which are used in later times. They quote simply: "Scripture says," or "Paul says," not "the holy and glorious apostle in his most excellent epistle to the Romans says exceedingly weU." They talk in simple words, but they are prepared even to die for this Bible. Eusebius, the first historian of the Christian church, to whom we are indebted for so much in valuable information, teUs us a moving story about Marinus, a young Christian officer in the Roman army, at Csesarea, in Palestine. He had the con fidence of his superiors and was to be promoted to the higher rank of captain. Then out of jealousy one of his comrades denounced him as a Christian. Summoned before his colonel, he was asked if this was true, and when he confessed he was urged to abjure his faith. The colonel gave him three hours' time. So he went to the small Christian church. 24 THE BIBLE AND CI-VILISATION where he found the venerable old bishop. The bishop, hearing his story, took the Bible in one hand and the soldier's sword in the other. "This is your choice," he said. And the soldier, without hesitating, grasped the Bible, went back, and de clared himself to be and to remain a Christian. And instead of receiving military promotion he became a martyr. It is a significant little story. Indeed, after a hard struggle, lasting through nearly three centuries, when the Roman empire found it necessary to attempt the final destruction of Christianity the attack was mostly directed against the Bible. Diocletian, in 303 A. D., on the 24th of February, issued an edict ordering all Christian churches to be destroyed and all Bibles to be burned. He relied on the Roman law, which forbids not only the exercise of magical arts, but the science of magic, too, and therefore condemns all books of magic to be burned. The Christians were accused of employing magic, and their Bible was treated as a magical book. We have thrilling accounts of Christians try ing to conceal their treasured Bible rolls from the eyes of the inquiring officials. They took them from the church into their private homes, securing the Bible in safety but many a time bringing per secution upon themselves. To the officials they BIBLE PERSECUTION 25 surrendered books of various kinds in order to escape from surrendering the Scriptures. Asked if they had sacred books in their houses, many of them would answer: "Yes, in our hearts." The en thusiasm was so great that they beheved the story of any miracle in support of the Bible. They main tained that copies of the Bible which had been thrown into the fire by the heathen were not burned or even touched by the flame. NaturaUy there were others who were not strong enough in their faith to resist, but these " surrender- ers," as they were called, were cast out of the church and never admitted again. During the fourth cen tury to bring against a clergyman the charge of having surrendered sacred books at that period of persecution was felt to be the most serious accusa tion possible. Even to be ordained by a bishop who was under suspicion of having surrendered his church's holy Scriptures was held a disgrace by a large party of zealous Christians who demanded that orders of this kind be invalidated. The records of a trial held at Carthage in 329 A. D. dealing with this question have come down to us. Here docu ments from 303 a. d. were introduced as evidence against the clergy, and the whole forms one of the most Uluminating pages of church history. Even to be found reading the Bible made a man 26 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION guilty of obstinate resistance to the emperor's law and involved him in penalty. There was a deacon at Catania in SicUy named Euplus. He was read ing the holy Scripture when the sheriff laid hold of him. Brought before the judge he takes his copy of the Gospel and reads from it (Matt. 5: 10) : "Blessed are they that have been persecuted for right eousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," and (Matt. 10 : 38): "And he that doth not take his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me." The judge asks him: "Why did you not surrender those volumes which the emperors forbade?" "Be cause," he replies, "I am a Christian and it was not loyal to surrender. It is better to die than to surrender." We do not need the addition made by a late Byzantine hagiographer that the copy of the Gospels was hung on his neck when he was con ducted to execution. It is clear enough that he was suffering for his devotion toward the Bible and that it was the gospel which inspired his boldness. Euplus does not stand alone. I could mention a dozen martyrs whose acts all give the same impres sion. Sometimes a gathering of men and women is apprehended while reading the Bible, and the whole company is forthwith carried away to the most painful tortures. These Christians knew what the Bible was to BIBLE MARTYRS 27 them. All declamations of later theologians about the inspiration and the authority of the Bible count for nothing compared with this testimony. After aU, we do not wonder that the Bible became a civUising power as soon as Christianity had won its victory. II THE BIBLE BEGINS TO RULE THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE (325-600 A. D.) After the persecution by Diocletian a new era began. Constantine proclaimed tolerance, and by and by Christianity became the rehgion of the em pire. The victory of Christianity was a victory of the Bible as well. This finds its expression in the remarkable fact that the first Christian emperor, the immediate successor of those who persecuted the Bible and tried to destroy it, ordered fifty splendid copies of the Bible to be prepared at his expense for the churches of the newly founded capital, Con stantinople. Some scholars have thought that one or two of these copies still survive in the famous manuscript discovered by Tischendorf in the Con vent of Mount Sinai (Plate III), or in the Codex Vaticanus at Rome. I venture rather to think that both copies belong to the period of Constantine's sons. But the fact that the Bible, after a period of destruction when most of the earlier copies were burned, got a surprising circulation under official direction accounts, I think, for a puzzling feature in 28 Plate III— CODEX SINAITICUS End cif St. Mark (15 : 16-16 : 8) and beginning of St. Luke (1 : 1-18); Mark 16 : 9-20 is missing; 15 : 47 is added at the lower margin by a later hand; remark the numbers of Eusebius's sections and canons. The eight columns of tbe open book recall the roll-system. Reduced one-fifth from thf fac-simile edited by Prof. Lake and published by the Clarendon Press (Oxford and London). BIBLE MANUSCRIPTS 29 the transmission of the text. From the Old Latin and the Old Syriac, as weU as from the testimony of the fathers, we can infer that various forms of the Greek text must once have been widely circulated, which have now almost disappeared, whereas most of our present Greek manuscripts give a text evi dently based on a late official recension. Look ing at Diocletian's attempt to destroy the Bible altogether and at Constantine's official order to pro- ¦vide a large number of manuscripts, we easUy un derstand the situation. The older forms of text had been swept away; now there was room to sup ply their place ¦with the learned attempts of later scholars from the schools of Origen or Lucian who endeavoured to bring in more critical texts. Another change is to be mentioned at the same time. The old form of papyrus rolls became obso lete and the parchment book took its place. The use of this latter form seems to originate in the law schools; the codex, or parchment book, is at first the designation of a Roman law-book. But at an early date the Christian church adopted this form as the more convenient one and gave it its circulation. We hardly say too much when we call the Bible the means by which our present form of book came into general use. Even if the Bible had done nothing else for civUisation than to give man- 30 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION kind the shape of its books that would be a great deal (Plate IV). The form of a parchment book, or codex, would admit of the copying of several books in one volume. The great Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries of which we know contained all the books; they formed one volume. So the internal unity running through the Bible as a whole came to be represented even in the outward form. The copying of the Bible went on rapidly, monks and noble Christian ladies undertaking it as a form of ascetic work, providing a heavenly merit and sometimes earning bread and butter, too. Instead of the plain copies in an unskilled hand we now find sumptuous books of the finest parchment with purple colouring, in the most luxurious manuscripts the sacred text being written in gold and sUver, and the margin sometimes being covered with beautiful paintings. A copy of Genesis in Greek at the Vienna library has forty-eight water-colours, one at the bottom of each page, teUing the same story as the text. The manuscript when complete must have had sixty folios : this gives one hundred and twenty of such decorated pages for Genesis, and if it con tained the whole Pentateuch we may aUow for five hundred and ten illustrations (Plate V). And this manuscript does not stand alone; it is but one of Plate IV — ROLL AND BOOK St Luke the Evangelist copying trom a roll into a book (codex form): miniature from a Greek manuscript at the Vatican library (gr. 1158), eleventh century. From "Vatikanischc Miniaturen." Copyright by B. Herder, Freiburg. BOOK AND ROLL 31 a large group of illuminated manuscripts. This sumptuous appearance may be taken as a sign of the value attached to the Bible. Persecuted hitherto, it became the ruler of the Christian empire, invested ¦with aU the glory of royalty. The place given to the Bible is best shown by the fact that it presided over the great councils, a copy of the Bible lying upon the presidential chair. It was meant as a symbol for Christ himself taking the place of honour and deciding the great questions of faith. The same holds true for non-ecclesiastical assemblies. In an ordinance of the emperor Theo- dosius it is required that a copy of the Bible be present in every court-room. The Bible, or rather the Gospels, or to speak even more precisely the most prominent page in them, the beginning of the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, was used for tak ing an oath. The worn condition of this page in many a manuscript still attests this use. Presiding over the courts, the Bible began at once to exercise its influence upon the Law. We can al ready trace this influence in the legislation of Con stantine himself: when he forbids to brand a crimi nal on his face, giving as reason that the image of God ought not to be marred, it is the Biblical no tion of the man's face being the likeness of God which underlies this law. When, in a law pubHshed in 334, 32 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION he insists that no man, whoever he is and whatever rank he has, shall be admitted as a solitary witness unless supported by another witness, it is the well- known Biblical rule that at the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established. When he makes divorce more difficult, denying the right of remarriage to the man who repudiates his wife without sufficient reason on her part, we feel that it is the injunction of Jesus which is behind this law. I would not say the same of all parts of this legislation which various scholars have adduced as proving Christian influence. Roman law from the second century was influenced to a large extent by the Stoa, all the famous lawyers such as Gaius and Paulus belonging to this school and introducing its ideas into the practice of the courts and into the legislation of the magistrates, especially of the em peror. There is an evident development in the Roman law toward a more humane conception of slavery; this is due to the Stoa. The -vdews on mar riage and divorce, the position of "natural chil dren," as the Roman law caUs illegitimates, aU this is largely due to non-Christian influences. Never theless, there are unmistakable traces of a particu lar influence of the Bible upon the legislation of the Christian emperors, and this influence increases from decade to decade. Constantine gives a rather vague Plate V— VIENNA GENESIS The paradise: Adam and Eve appear three times: Cl) under the tree of knowledge. Gen. S : 6; (2) when discovering their nakedness, 3 : 7; (3) when hiding them selves from the Lord among tne trees, 3 : 8. The divine voice, represented by the hand from heaven, belongs to this third scene; it is put in the centre merely for artistic reasons. From "Die Wiener Genesis." F. Tempsky, Vienna. ROMAN LAW 33 ordinance for keeping Sunday as a day on which courts are not to be held. Theodosius is much stricter; and the climax is reached with Justinian, when Sunday has become a legal hoHday. Justinian, of course, codifies the Roman law, but his Novelise, the laws issued by himself, show the new spirit of a legislation ruled by the Bible. He sometimes refers directly to the Bible as authority. StiU more is this spirit prevalent in some provincial codes. One of these says that everything has to be judged according to the ancient and to the mod ern law, i. e., the law of Moses, which antedates the laws of aU other nations, and the law of Christ, as it is contained in the laws of the emperors Con stantine, Theodosius, and Leo. Lawyers of this pe riod indulge in comparisons between the Roman law and the law of Moses. The Roman empire was Latin in some respects, Greek in others. Latin was the official language of the court, of the law, of the army. But the popula tion spoke mostly Greek, though from the third century on large parts used their native language, Syriac and Coptic, as well. The Bible had been translated into these languages during the former period. Now the general political situation brings the empire into contact with the Goths in the North, with Armenians and Georgians in^Jh* i Vinni^ijith YAH WVlNin SCHOOI 34 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION Libyans and Ethiopians in the South. As soon as the empire gains any influence among these neighbour ing peoples, the Christian mission tries to get hold of them and we see the Bible translated into these languages, which hitherto have had no writing. The Bible marks for these peoples the beginning of a national literature. Their alphabets were made up from the Greek, thus showing that the read ing of the Bible with these nations began in con nection with their intercourse with the Roman empire. The Bible ruled even the Greek language of this empire. There are many changes in the later Greek which are surely due to famUiarity with the Bible. Words previously unknown in Greek or used in a different sense became quite familiar; everybody knows what is the meaning of Beelzebub, Messiah, Paradise, Satan, and that an angel is not a mere messenger, but is a messenger from God, a spiritual being, and that the word demon always means an unclean spirit. Moreover, the Bible influenced the style of the writers, especially of the great preachers. One may distinguish three forms of influence in this depart ment: artificial imitation; naive use of Biblical names and phrases (what is usually called in Ger many the language of Canaan) ; and, lastly, the un- LANGUAGES AND STYLE 35 conscious influence which the style of any book ex erts upon a careful reader. I do not think that there are many instances of artificial imitation in this pe riod. Sometimes a preacher skilfully composed his whole sermon by adding BibHcal quotation to quo tation; asked to preach a sermon on a saint's day, he did nothing else than comment upon the saint's life in BibHcal phrases. The second type of influ ence is very common; the'present emperor is usually spoken of as the new David; the story of a war is always told as if David were fighting the PhUistines; each heretic is entitled to be called the new Judas Iscariot who betrays his Lord. The most famous example of this kind is the sermon attributed to Chrysostom after his first return to Constantinople, when he had fled from the wrath of the empress: "Again Herodias is furious, again she flurries, again she dances, again she desires the Baptist's head to be cut off by Herod." The preacher's own Christian name, of course, was John, and the empress was trying to get rid of him for political reasons. The most important influence, however, is the unconscious influence simply from the use of the Bible. The great power of Chrysostom's sermons was partly due to his eminent rhetorical talent and training. He knew how to gain his hearers' at tention; yet for the greater part his thorough ac- 36 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION quaintance with the Bible seems to be responsible. Reading the sermons of those great Greek Christian orators of the fourth century, we are often struck by the embedded quotations from the Bible. In the midst of this fluent Greek there is something quite different, something stern, something austere, something dignified and solemn, which immediately appeals to the hearer. As a matter of fact, the preachers themselves, proud as they were of their classical training, had rather the opposite impres sion; they apologise for introducing barbarous lan guage. Chrysostom insists, in many a sermon, on the idea that the apostles were fishermen, unskUled in literary style, and that it is one of the proofs of inspiration that those men could write at all. He evidently is not aware of the fact, clear to us, that it is just the vigour and strength of BibHcal lan guage wbich gave to his own sermons their mag nificent effect. He was fiUed with BibHcal phrase ology as was no other preacher of his time. He himself did not reahse it, nor did, I presume, the greater part of his congregation, yet it was this which so impressed them. If only the modern edi tors would note all the Biblical allusions in his works! Yet they are hardly able even to recognise them. We find preachers noted for their briUiancy in ex temporaneous speaking, and usually the remark is CRAFTS AND ARTS 37 added, it was because the speaker knew the Scrip tures by heart. In this way the people became accustomed to BibHcal phraseology, and we do not wonder that at last the colloquial Greek also was influenced by the Bible. We can trace its influence even in the romances. The Bible ruled the home and the daily life; people had their furniture decorated with BibHcal symbols; lamps showed Noah's ark or Jonah's whale, Jesus with his disciples in a ship or Jesus treading upon the Hon and adder, the serpent and dragon (according to Psalm 91). At the Strassburg Museum there is a beautiful engraved glass cup made probably in a Roman manufactory in Cologne. On one side is engraved Abraham sacrificing Isaac, on the other side Moses striking water from the rock. Rich people wore sumptuous garments embroidered with representations of Biblical scenes. The preach ers complain that these people wear the miracles of Christ on their coats instead of taking them to their heart and conscience. The great officials of the empire used to give to their friends ivory tablets commemorating their honours. In former times they had represented on them the emperor, the empress, or their own por traits, and scenes from the circus; now they chose 38 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION Biblical subjects. People liked to have long roUs exhibiting the wars and triumphs of an emperor in a continuous series of drawings. Two gigantic roUs of this kind may still be seen at Rome; I mean the columns of Trajan and of Marcus AureHus. Chris tian art produced rolls of the same kind, exhibiting the story of Joshua's battles (Plate Vl). Senators and noble ladies vied with each other in arranging the history of the Bible and especiaUy the life of Jesus in the form of poems, each word of which was taken either from Homer or from Vergil. It is a wonderful mixture of Bible and classical culture. The Bible rules not only the public and the pri vate life, but also the church and its organisations. At the beginning the Christians were afraid of comparing the Old Testament rites with the ec clesiastical institutions. The Law of the Old Testa ment belonged to an earlier form of religion; it was abolished by the New Testament. Christ, accord ing to Saint Paul, was the end of the Law. But by and by the Old and the New Testament were brought nearer together. An author of the first century remarks that God by his commandments in the Old Testament has shown himself to be a lover of order, therefore in the Christian congregation, too, order ought to rule. He does not call the Christian com munion a sacrifice, the Christian minister a priest; Plati VI-JOSHUA roll (At the Vatican) Joshua is sending from Jericho (at the left, walls tumbling down) to Ai two men to spy out the land, Joshua 7 : 2. The towns are represented by edifices as well as by allegorical figures (Tyche of the City). From "Vatikanischc Miniaturen," by St* Beisael. Copyright by B. Herder, Freiburg. CHURCH SERVICE 39 but his paraUelism comes very near to this, and a century later the step is taken. It becomes usual to speak of bishop, elders, and deacons as high- priest, priests, and Levites. Later on, even the minor degrees were taken back to Biblical models: the subdeacon, lector, exorcist, acolyte, janitor were found represented in the Old Testament. The clergy formed a separate class as distinct from other people as the tribe of Levi was among the tribes of Israel. It was upon the authority of the Old Testa ment that they claimed rights and prerogatives to be given and guaranteed by the empire. The monks found their models in Elijah and Elisha; common life was represented by the apostles; peni tents were Job, David, and the people of Nineveh; widows (as ecclesiastical functionaries) had their models in Naomi, Hannah, Tabitha, etc. The church was the tabemacle of Moses and the temple of Sol omon, and each detail in the description of these Biblical buildings was made to agree with a feature in the Christian church by means of allegorical in terpretation. The feasts of the church correspond to the feasts of the Old Testament; Easter is usu aUy called Passover, and Whitsuntide Pentecost. At a rather early date a festival of the dedication of the individual church was introduced to correspond with the festival of the dedication of the temple. 40 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION As the Jews kept two days in the week for fasting, so did the Christians, choosing Wednesday and Friday instead of Monday and Thursday; and in doing so they remembered that it was on a Wednes day that Jesus was betrayed by Judas and on a Friday that he died on the cross. Even the usual hours for prayers were based on Old Testament au thority; David, saying in Psalm 141 : 2 "The lift ing up of my hands as the evening sacrifice," means vespers, while in the 131st Psalm he is speaking of compline, in the 63d of matins. The vigil was observed as well as commanded by Christ himself (Luke 6 : 12 and 12 : 37). The whole liturgy was explained as being in every detail a representation of the life of Christ. The sacraments, too, were prefigured in the Old Testament. This symbohsm is very old and very commonly used; it has in fluenced Christian art. We see Noah's ark as a symbol of baptism {(^. I Peter 3 : 20) ; Abel's sacri fice, and Melchisedek offering bread and wine to Abraham, as symbols of the holy eucharist. Abra ham entertaining at his home the three angels re veals the holy Trinity. All this is represented in splendid mosaics on the waUs of the churches, as for instance in San Vitale at Ravenna. To us this system of Biblical references for every thing in the Christian service seems strange. We THE MONASTERY 41 feel that the worship of the Christian congregation rests on other principles than the ritual of the Old Testament and does not gain anything by such hazardous comparisons. It looks like comparing the stars in heaven with beasts on earth. But the fathers thought that this was the highest achievement at which they could arrive: to allego rise and spirituaHse the Old Testament law in order to deduce from it the Christian Hturgy. That was what they caUed worship in spirit and truth. It is exactly opposite to the great idea which Jesus con veyed in those words; it is one of the greatest confusions to which the juxtaposition of the Old and the New Testament in one Bible was leading. Nevertheless, it was of great influence upon civUisa tion for centuries. The church and the laity were ruled by the Bible; but the real Bible folk of this time were the monks. There had been a tendency toward asceticism from the very beginning of Christianity. At the moment when the church came into power this tendency in creased rapidly. In Egypt as weU as in Syria, wher ever there was a desert place hermits gathered and monasteries were built. Now, in these monasteries the life was really filled with the reading of the Bible. Even the poorest monk would have a copy of the Gospels to read. Some of the monks, of 42 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION course, were very simple, unlearned people. They could not read, so they learned it all by heart. And sometimes — we are told in the legendary tales of the monks — ^it happened that a monk who never before had learned to read was miraculously given the art of reading, God granting it to him as a rec ompense for his zeal. The monks had their hours for common worship and reading, but they were supposed to read each by himself as much as pos sible. "The rising sun shall find the Bible in thy hands," is one of the monastic rules, and legend iUustrates how the divine grace recompensed as siduous reading: filled with heavenly light all through the night was the cell of a hermit as long as he was reading the Bible. When visitors came the talk was over questions raised by the Bible. It was with quotations from the Bible that the cele brated anchorite entertained the people who caUed upon him to ask for spiritual help. Among all Biblical books the Psalter was the one most favoured by the monks. They knew it by heart, almost aU of them, and they used to recite it during their manual labour. The Psalter was their spiritual weapon against the temptations of the demons; the demon liked nothing so much as to turn a monk from reciting his Psalter. But be sides the Psalter it was the Gospel which prevaUed PSALTER AND GOSPEL 43 over all other books in these ascetic circles. Many of the hermits were induced to leave the world by attending a Gospel lesson in their church at home. "If thou wouldest be perfect, go, seU that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me," or "And every one that hath left houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or chUdren or lands for my name's sake shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal life." These are the words which occur again and again in the lives of saints as the decisive ones for their "conversion," that is for leaving the world and going to the desert or entering a monastery. The first saying quoted above is referred to in the life of Saint Anthony, the greatest of all hermits, and Saint Augustine had this in his mind when the time came for him to change his life. The second say ing makes Saint Hypatius go away from home; his biographer, however, is honest enough to add that the saint, a youth of eighteen, had just received punishment from his father. An actor living luxu riously with two concubines chances to enter a church, and hears read from the Gospel, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand"; so he repents and becomes a monk. I do not mean to say that these tales of the monks are historical and trustworthy in every point, but I venture to think 44 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION that this statement about the motives for conver sion is, after aU, a correct one. The gospel is what appeals to the human heart, in all centuries and in all nations. And then the man wiU try to make the gospel the rule of his Hfe. I think it is remark able that whereas the church and the empire both were ruled mainly by the Old Testament, these as cetic circles took the gospel as their main rule, that is to say, the gospel as understood by the men of that time. It was to them a new law, a law of asceticism, of self-denial, and they kept to it as strictly as possible. Even if for other Christians it meant an almost inaccessible ideal, the monastery ought to be the place to fulfil it literally. Our picture would be inadequate, however, if we should neglect the abuse of the Bible, the Bible show ing its importance and ruling force even by its influ ence upon the dark domain of human superstition. The ancient world was full of magic. We remember the story in Acts 19 of how Saint Paul overcame some Jewish exorcists, with the result that "not a few of them that practised curious arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all, and they counted the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver." I suspect many a scholar or librarian of to-day would like very much to have those books among his treasures, but they SUPERSTITION 45 were burned; and Christianity scored its first tri umph over superstition. Superstition, however, did not give way at this first defeat; on the contrary, it made a strenuous effort to draw over aU the forces of Christendom to its own side. There was the name of Jesus, frightening the demons; black magic took this name and converted it to its detestable uses. There was the Gospel, representative of Jesus himself in his heavenly power; superstition made it a vehicle of its own magical rites. There was the Bible, the book of divine oracles; human inquisi- tiveness turned it into a book from which to read the dark future. The heathen had done this with the poems of Homer and Vergil. Turning over the pages they suddenly stopped at a verse and then tried to find in this verse the answer to their ques tion. The fathers of the early church detested this method as something quite alien to a Christian mind, but as early as the end of the fourth century people came to feel that it was all right if only they used the Bible for the same purpose. In the sixth century even church officials kept to this practice. When a bishop had to be elected they almost always con sulted the Psalter first on behalf of the man to be elected. Bible verses written on parchment were attached to easy chairs in order to keep away the evU spirits. Gospels in the smallest form were hung 46 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION on the necks of the babies. It is astonishing to see how great was the esteem in which the Bible was held and how terribly contrary to the spirit of the Bible this practice was, especiaUy when the Bible was used to do harm. Lead, by its dull lustre, always has reminded mankind of the realm of death; so it was used in black magic for bringing upon an enemy a curse from the gods of the underworld. A roUed sheet of lead, inscribed with a psalm and a dreadful curse against any robber, has been found on one of the ^gean Islands hidden in the ground of a vine yard. Evidently the psalm was supposed to be one of the most effective spells. Even the Lord's Prayer and other parts of the Gospels have been abused in the same way (Plate VII). Nothing is so holy that it cannot be turned into a crime by human sin. It is a dark page of human civilisation. I am afraid it is a large page, too. I could accumulate instance upon instance. But however interesting this might be, it would give a wrong impression. The Bible was not primarily used as a magical means in those centuries. It was acknowledged as some thing superhuman, bearing supernatural powers, and therefore ruling everything. It ruled the empire as weU as the church. It influenced law, language, art, habits, and even magic. Plate VII— THE LORD'S PRAYER On a potsherd found at Megara, sixth century; used probably as a spell. From "Mitteilungen des K. Deutschen Archaeologischeo Instituts," Athen. Published by G. Reimer, Berlin. Ill THE BIBLE TEACHES THE GERMAN NATIONS (500-800 A. D.) Fkom the fourth century on the Germans, tribe by tribe, crossed the Danube and the Rhine and en tered the boundaries of the Roman empire. Here part of them settled near the frontier, part took service in the Roman army. But the more numer ous they became, the more hostUe they were. At last the Roman empire in the West broke down, German kingdoms taking its place. It is a long and cruel history, this period of "Volkerwanderungen" as it is usuaUy called in German, the period of the great migrations. And only after some centuries did the new Roman empire of German nationality come to be estabhshed by Charlemagne. At first the Germans made a brilliant start in taking over Roman civilisation. The Goths had been Christianised and civilised at an early period. While it is true that the Visigoths under Alaric cap tured Rome and did not refrain from plundering it, the behaviour of the Vandals under Gaiseric was even worse, so that for all time to come their name 47 48 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION is connected with the most brutal piUage. But the noble tribe of the Ostrogoths under their celebrated king Theodoric— called Dietrich von Bern in the German songs — tried another plan; they adopted Roman civiHsation as far as possible and endeav oured to combine both nations under one dominion. Theodoric had as his minister or secretary of state a member of the Roman nobUity, the most cul tivated man of letters of the time, Cassiodorus. We have his collection of reports and letters, and we may infer from them how much, aside from his training in the Roman law school, he was influenced by his Christian belief and Biblical reading. Later on, when he retired into the monastery which he had founded on his estates at Vivarium, all his devotion was given to the study of the Bible. He is the man who inculcated on Western monasticism that love for scholarship which has been ever since a characteris tic of the Order of Saint Benedict. Cassiodorus was a Roman, of course, but we have ample evidence that even among the Goths the Bible was read and studied. There was a Gothic translation of the Bible, which is supposed to have been made in the fourth century by Ulfilas. In order not to encourage the warlike spirit in his people he is said to have omitted the books of the Kings, wherein so many wars and battles are described. The educational THE OSTROGOTHS 49 aspect of the Bible as teaching the German nations comes out here distinctly. We are able to trace the history of the Goths by their Bible, which, hav ing been translated in the East from Greek manu scripts, shows traces of a Latin influence, evidently introduced when the Goths settled in Italy. There stiU exist some copies, among them the famous Codex Argenteus, now at Upsala, which in its silver writing on purple ground, is a wonderful specimen of lux urious calligraphy, giving testimony to the degree of civUisation which these Ostrogoths had taken over from Rome (Plate VIII). There was, however, one great difference between the Germans and the Romans; the latter were Cath olics, the former Arians. This religious difference is responsible for many troubles and persecutions brought by the Germans upon the population of the conquered land. The Germans had a church organ isation of their own; they had their own clergy, and this clergy was well trained in Bible reading. We find the remarkable fact that the German Arian bishops show an even larger knowledge of the Bible than their Roman Catholic colleagues. The com plaint was often heard that the watchwords of Ca tholicism, as, for example, homousios, had no Biblical foundation, while, on the other hand, the Arians were always ready to fill their creeds with Biblical 50 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION phrases. These Germans had a profound reverence for the holy Scripture and bowed down to it. It was only by Scriptural proofs that the CathoHc clergy of Spain succeeded in converting the Arian king to their faith. Theodoric built at Ravenna some churches which stUl exist. Here we see mosaics exhibiting the life of Jesus in a very simple way, but with that un mistakable touch of awe which is so characteristic of German piety. How different are the pictures which were added after Ravenna had become By zantine! They are highly ceremonial, representing, among others, the emperor Justinian and the em press Theodora with all their suite. These were the first centuries of German invasion. The ancient civilisation, championed by the Roman church, was stUl strong enough to impose itself upon these invaders. Time went on and civilisation more and more lost its energy. Especially in Gaul, in the kingdom of the Merovingians, intellectual dark ness spread all over the country. There was no layman who could read, hardly any member of the clergy. We hear of great monasteries, which were rich royal foundations, where no complete Bible was to be found. We see the troubles of a missionary like Boniface. In order to procure the necessary books, he has to apply to his English lady friends. ^N\t:iAnq;iiesrNl|MTuKi6- a^ ^'^^•m^m^^mmm^ TxizB^tXi ^^^h^iK^^*s^»i«| W. Plate VIII— GOTHIC BIBLE Codex Argenteus, now at Upsala. Sixth century, written on purple parchment in silver and (some words) in gold. The figures at the bottom give Eusebius s harmony of the Gospels: this particular scheme is found in Syrian manu scripts and in the Old Latin Codex Rehdigerianus at Breslau. From "Deutsche Kulturgeschichte," by O. Henne am Rhyn. Grote, Berlin, Germany. THE MEROVINGIAN PERIOD 51 who send him copies of the books he wants, finely written by their own delicate hands. It was a time when a book, a Bible, was a treasure, and to own one was a fact to be recorded by a biographer. This enables us to trace the history of more than one famous manuscript. We are surprised to find what journeys they made. One was sent from Naples to England, and then a century later again removed to the German shore and finaUy treasured among the rarities of the Fulda library. Another manuscript, now at Florence, came originally from the monastery of Cassiodorus in the extreme south of Italy and found its way to the monastery of Mount Amiata, near Florence, only by a round about route through the famous English monaster ies, where it was copied. The few scholars of that period had to go a long way before they could get a copy of the Bible worth their attention, and they had to go a long way to find a monastery with hands able to copy manuscripts. A new epoch begins with Charlemagne, who has a real right to the name of the Great. If one wants to know a great man, one has only to see what atten tion he pays to minor things. It is simply wonder ful how this German king, who restored the old notion of the Roman empire, whose dominion con tained France, Germany, Spain, Italy, was taking 52 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION care of the schoolboys and fixing his eyes on the way in which the Bible was being copied in the monasteries of his vast realm. In one of his ordi nances he complains that they use unskUled boys for copying the most sacred book. It needs, he says, grammar — nay, good grammar — to understand what you are copying. It is no religion to pray to God in ungrammatical language and to have his holy Scriptures in a grammatically incorrect text. From the fact that the monasteries in their letters of application used a bad style he infers that Bible reading here was being neglected. Therefore, Char lemagne tried, in the first place, to bring the schools of his kingdom to a higher standard. Each mon astery had to have a weU-conducted school for the monks and for the young people who were sent there for education (as they are now sent to pubhc schools). At his own court he had the Schola -palatina and the great emperor himself went there often and took lessons together with the boys. But he did not stop here. His intention was to secure a really good, trustworthy text of the Bible. He therefore invited scholars from everywhere; even some Orientals are said to have shared in the work. The leading man, the chairman of the Committee for the revision of the Bible, as we should say at present, was Alcuin, a monk from England, who by his great learning INCIPITLIBER. ISAIAETR^O PHETAE ISIOISX t>.CpiI-l) O IT Sup IJ C't UlK RU TCrt" Ukeyrmp^cxrr-ictpi.p.iloji'iiji.fr,) '^^cr-r^l^"rr\ltK^nTn bLu-fpht-Ttjm fi ' v r if lE.^ n(--Ti OmrigCTMJ'JgtXnTmaHm etajTum-cgr- roA-iTv-mf" 3tptj>i4tC*prdi»"ij»a:JLaueT-cierf-i t(- &JerTiir»^"n^»7~^[n^ffon «cii*ntf-».»Jj" fi£U:ceittmSi^ui,i^tJriaxir- r^ti%dnfVK«^-ti -mom i~rliJ«f*" pi's" '"^ ¦ **'*-'\S" ' netnunutor-utn Cwi^;™"""'*" »i*ir-Q7i-u pUnx^Arre- L-Vi«.r,m, frKwJiWitTtt^ v, »-:^.7ijArtu*T»nicu[ur tj*^i/r(*.nj.jLi4«. ..3iuilid*rtT' ftjcau'A.'- Uior- yop*T-(K>fti(.u(7™Mr rroinJic'Jwr' ¦.-rrTiJumift paft^»0CU0a>. erwmet-»ir fce.irAi>reTrp«C3iiiM-BffI»»ui- *cuppf« e*opofu«iiCT-^«i (]U»i(»StmaU»-' Or Plate IX— ALCUIN'S BIBLE (Brit. Mus. add. 10546) Written at Tours, soon after Alcuin's death: a very good example of fine Caro- lingian minuscule. The. lines are of equal length. From F. G. Kenyon, "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. BIBLE REVISION 63 had won the confidence of Charlemagne and was appointed by him abbot of the famous monastery of Tours. Here, at the school of Tours, most of the work of revision was done (Plate IX) ; through Alcuin's influence the revision was mainly based on the text current in England. That this was the best text available at that time is now generally acknowledged by aU competent scholars. This was not so in Charlemagne's time; other scholars. Prank ish bishops, disapproved of Alcuin's work. They thought the revision would have come out much better if conducted according to the text prevailing in Spain. So Theodulf, bishop of Orleans, issued a version of his own (Plate X). It is always in structive to see how men were the same in former times as they are now: scholars seldom agree one with another. The result was that henceforth two forms of the Latin Bible were used through the next centuries — in the North, Alcuin's revision, in the South, the revision made by Theodulf. Charlemagne would not have cared so much for the text of the Bible had he not esteemed the Bible to be the one great text-book for his people. He himself was filled with Biblical notions. In his pri vate circle, a club for promoting classical reading, he was called David. And it was, indeed, the Old Testament idea of the theocratic king which gov- 54 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION erned his mind. The king chosen by God and elected by the people, the king a representative of God and the head of the people, the king a valiant warrior and a royal psalmist at the same time, this was his ideal, in which old German notions were combined with Old Testament views. WhUe re vering the priest, he always felt himself superior even to the bishop of Rome. He wiUingly accepted the role of a defender, of a protector; he never would have accepted his crown from the hand of a priest. Nothing is so alien to Charlemagne as the later mediaeval theory of the two swords, both given by God to Saint Peter, the one spiritual, kept by him self and his successors, the other worldly, given by them to the emperor. No, he had his sword from God directly, and his royalty included the power and the duty of looking after the church's affairs as weU. The Bible tells of a king of Judah, called Josiah, who, on being informed that the book of the Law given by Moses and hidden for a long time had been re discovered, forthwith ordered everything to be re formed and restored according to this law. That served as the model for Charlemagne's own eccle siastical work. Being the king, he felt responsible for the purity of worship and of doctrine. There fore, when the question arose in the East if wor ship was due to the pictures of Christ and the saints. f J. r. Ill l.«, ,u. *l.r— U. — isULt-— lU*-r Plate X— THEODULF'S BIBLE (Brit. Mus. add. 24142) Written in three columns like many Spanish manuscripts, and io lines of various length, "cata cola et commata," as St. Jerome says. From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. CHARLEMAGNE 55 and the bishop of Rome did not please him in his answer, Charlemagne himself, assisted by Alcuin and other theologians of his staff, wrote a treatise on the subject, which he himself thought to be decisive, the so-caUed Libri Carolini, a document of a rather Puritan character, showing the austere spirit of early Western theology. When in Spain a discus sion began about the divine nature of Christ, he again interfered, sending his theologians to discuss the matter according to the true teaching of the Bible — as is said expressly in their instructions — and after they had decided he even took political mea sures against those whom he believed to be heretics. We can scarcely understand his attitude in those cases without keeping in mind that he felt himself a new David and a new Josiah. Sometimes it is a true evangelical spirit which per vades his ordinances for the church. In a proclama tion of 811 he says: "We will ask the clergy them selves, those who are not only to read the holy Scriptures by themselves but are to teach them to others also: who are those to whom the apostle says. Be my imitators? or who is the man of whom he says, No soldier on service entangleth himself with the af fairs of this life? — or how to imitate the apostle and how to do service to God? What is it to leave the world? does it mean simply not to wear weapons and 56 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION not to be married publicly? does it mean to enlarge one's property daily, oppress the poor and induce men to perjury?" Charlemagne is particularly strict about avoiding perjury, not only in the solenm form of public oath, which is taken on the holy Gos pel or on the altar or on the relics of the saints, but in common conversation as weU. He tries to intro duce Matt. 5 : 16, "Even so let your Hght shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven," as the motto for every Christian's life. That is quite evangelical. But it is from the Old Testament that the tenor of his laws comes. They aU have a strong mark of se verity, in particular the so-called Saxon laws, which were imposed upon the Saxon tribes when after a very hard resistance they were finally defeated and subdued. Through this law runs, like a bloody thread, the frightful menace: morte moriatur, by death shall he die. This sounds harsh, but it is noth ing else than the adaptation of a well-known Bib lical phrase (Ex. 19 : 12; 21 : 12: "He shaU surely be put to death," R. V.). That is an example of BibHcal phraseology. But the Bible influenced the legislation of Charlemagne also in content. I choose three instances: in all three cases the work of Charle magne was prepared for by church councUs. Chris tianity had begun by voluntarily adopting Old STATE LAW 57 Testament laws; then the church had made their observance compulsory; now Charlemagne gives to the ecclesiastical ordinances the sanction of the state and inflicts penalty upon trespassers. The first in stance is Sunday; it was caUed the Lord's Day; from the sixth century synods and councUs had tried to make the people keep this day in a more solemn fashion. They did not refer to the Old Testament commandment at first; they did not even demand that all manual work should be stopped. The fre quent repetition of the decree seems to prove that it was rather unsuccessful even in this limited form. Now the government interferes, and its injunctions secure at once to the Lord's Day the strictest obser vance. It is remarkable that Charlemagne expressly refers to the Old Testament commandment. It is according to the Bible that the day was counted from sunset to sunset. This is the beginning of the Sabbatarian question in the West, the East preced ing the West, as we have seen, by about two cen turies. Our second instance is the tithe; it was to be paid, according to the Bible, by aU the other tribes to the tribe of Levi, who served at the temple. Now Christians began to pay voluntarily a tithe to their priests, accommodating themselves to the Old Testa ment rule; but by and by the clergy derived from 58 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION the Old Testament a right of asking for the tithe. The farmer had to pay his tithe to his parish priest. Charlemagne proclaimed this as a law of his king dom, referring expressly to God's commandments. The third instance is given in the prohibition against taking interest. It is said in Deut. 23 : 19: "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother." Ecclesiastical authorities took this as forbidding to take any interest in lending money, and they tried to impress this prohibition upon the minds of the Christian people. Here, again, Charlemagne gave his sanction to this ecclesiastical view and made the prohibition against taking interest a part of the pub Hc law. It is obvious that the economic life of the nation was deeply influenced by this compulsory adoption of Old Testament laws. Justice, with the Germans, was to a large extent exercised by means of the ordeals. We scarcely realise the importance these proceedings had at that time. People believed in a divine power bringing out guilt and innocence by means of these curious trials. It was but natural that the Bible, represent ing the divine oracles, should be present at the cere mony, that both parties should revere and kiss it. But people did more; they made thc Bible itself a means of deciding between guilty and innocent. They had a particular kind of ordeal which they BIBLE STUDIES 59 called determining by means of the Gospels, and another which was called the ordeal of the Psalter, a copy of the Psalter being swung over the head of the suspected person. I have referred to the palace school. This had its continuation in a graduate school, if we may so call a Bible circle among the theologians attending the court. These theologians, headed by Alcuin himself, were first-rate Bible scholars. They knew great parts of the Bible by heart; they had read all accessible commentaries of the fathers. They had ideas of their own, too, but they were traditional ists to such an extent that they would not say any thing of their own unless it was said and supported by the fathers. When asked to write brief com mentaries on Biblical books, because the patristic commentaries were too large and comprehensive for the students of this time, they simply gave extracts from the fathers and carefuUy avoided adding any thing of their own. One went so far as to take even the connecting words from the works of Saint Augustine; another, whose mental energy was too strong to keep him within the boundaries of pure traditionahsm, excuses himself whenever he intro duces an interpretation of his own. In these studies the ladies and gentlemen of the court took part. It is very interesting and often 60 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION amusing to see what kind of questions they bring before Alcuin as the great oracle of learning. One lady reading her Psalter was puzzled by the words in Psalm 116, "All men are Hars." How can babies be liars before they begin to speak, or dumb men? "The sun shaU not smite thee by day nor the moon by night" (Psalm 121:6) seemed to be incompat ible with the fact that the moon never burns. A scholar who had come from Greece troubled the court by putting the question: To whom was paid the price with which we were bought according to I Cor. 6:20; 7:23. Charlemagne himself has other questions. He is troubled by finding that the hymn sung by Christ and his disciples after the Last Supper has not been recorded by any of the Gospels. I wonder if he really was satisfied by Alcuin's answer. After a very learned explanation of the term hymn, Alcuin gives, first, three views of difierent inter preters: (1) That there was no special hymn, only a general praisegiving; (2) that they had sung the twenty-second Psalm; (3) that it was some Jewish prayer. Then he proceeds to establish his own solution: that it is, in fact, the prayer of Jesus, re corded in John 17, which was meant by the word hymn here. IncidentaUy, he makes some important remarks upon the harmony of the Gospels: "Al though we see in the Gospels some things told simi- ALCUIN THE BIBLE SCHOLAR 61 larly, others in a different way, we nevertheless believe that everything is true." That was the leading idea for the criticism of the fathers, and it was the same for nearly all the mediaeval centuries. Historical criticism, directed upon the Gospels, would have seemed to show intolerable lack of piety or certain evidence of heretical views. Theological thinking does not go beyond the lim its of Biblical doctrine. Scarcely one or two men dare to think in their own way or speculate on such problems as darkness and nothing (that is, what was before the creation) or on the nature of miracle. There was hardly any attempt at scien tific theories. And the best men, indeed, as, for instance, Alcuin, were proud of basing their theology entirely on Biblical ideas. The one great event in the expansion of Chris tianity among the German nations is the mission of Samt Augustine to England. When Pope Gregory found some Anglo-Saxon youths at the slave market of Rome and perceived that in the North there was stiU a pagan nation to be baptised, he sent one of his monks to England, and this monk, who was Saint Augustine, took with him the Bible and intro duced it to the Anglo-Saxons, and one of his fol lowers brought with him from Rome pictures show- 62 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION ing the Biblical history, and decorated the waUs of the church in the monastery of Wearmouth. We do not enter here into the difficult question of the relations between this newly founded Anglo-Saxon church and the old Iro-Scottish church. Differences of Bible text had something to do with the pitiful struggles which arose between the churches and ended in the devastation of the older one. The one point which interests us here is the fact that both Iro-Scottish and Anglo-Saxon monks were driven into missionary work by the Bible. When, in the service, they heard read from the Old Testament or from the epistle to the Hebrews that Abraham and the patriarchs had all left their home, their parents, their native country, and had gone to a foreign land which they did not know, simply in order to please God, then they felt bound to do the same. When at the mass the Gospel was read, 'And every one that hath left houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my name's sake, shaU receive a hundredfold and shall inherit eternal life," then they hurried away, not knowing where to go, looking only for a far-distant and desert place. It was this ascetic view of the Bible wliich drove the Iro-Scottish monks over the sea to France, Italy, Germany, which made them preach the gospel to the Germans who had not yet heard of it. It was ENGLAND AND GERMANY 63 this same motive which caused WUlibrord and Boniface to cross the North Sea and come to preach among the Frisians and Saxons. Boniface is said to have received the deadly stroke from a pagan while holding his Bible over his head. They still show the copy at Fulda. Again, it was the Bible which determined Charle magne to use force against the Saxons in order to bring them to baptism and Christian faith. Saint Augustine had discovered the passage in the Lord's parable of the great supper, where the servant is told to go out into the highways and hedges and "constrain" them to come in. This cage intrare, he explained, might excuse the using of secular power for the purpose of bringing heretics back to the church or of causing pagans to join the church. Charlemagne knew no better than to suppose that this was the true meaning of the saying of our Lord, and so he felt in conscience bound to use military force and the full strength of the law in christianis ing the Saxons. But it was the Bible itself and not Charlemagne's sharp sword and his cruel law which brought over the wild Saxon tribes into Christendom. They had among themselves a poet who had the gift of sing ing the gospel into their hearts. Charlemagne him self was fond of the national songs; he loved his 64 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION German language as much as he esteemed Latin. He was convinced that a man ought to pray to God in his native tongue. There are not only three sa cred languages, he says, in which to pray and to praise God — Hebrew, Greek, Latin — you may praise him in your German as well. Therefore he ar ranged that a priest should translate the Biblical lessons and the sermon to the people who did not understand Latin. He would probably have ap proved a German translation of the Bible; but the clergy were not prepared to do this. They took Latin as the basis of civUisation, and only a few of them had any regard for the uncultivated people. There are preserved some few attempts at translating parts of the Bible into German; they attest what might have come out of this Carolingian movement if the bigotry and narrowness of Charlemagne's son Louis had not stopped it. Among the Saxons a fresh and vigorous spirit was stUl alive. Having been introduced to Christianity by brute force of war, they embraced the gospel, trying to make it their own by putting it into the form of their na tional song. We do not know the name of the poet; he seems to have been a clergyman, instructed in the best commentaries of his time, such as were available at the monastery of Fulda. For the framework he used a Gospel harmony which is con- THE "HELIAND" 65 tained in the famous Codex Fuldensis of the Vulgate, originating at Capua (in south Italy) and brought probably by Boniface himself from England to Fulda. This Gospel harmony he translated freely into some six thousand Saxon verses. His poem is one of the finest assimUations of the Gospel history to national German feeling, to be compared only with Diirer's engravings and Eduard von Geb- hardt's paintings. Christ is the heavenly king; the apostles are his loyal kinsmen; he wanders with them through the Saxon wood; he stops at a native spring; all Oriental character has gone, but the gospel has lost nothing. It is as fresh and as real as it ever had been. The fact our author detests most is Christ's betrayal by one of his own men; nothing is so bad as this according to the German mind. Christ on the cross is not suffering; he dies as a victorious warrior. When he says, "I thirst," he expresses by this the fact that he is thirsting after the souls of men, to bring them into paradise. It is wonderful how the gospel has penetrated the German soul in order to produce a harmony Hke this. This "HeHand" by the anonymous Saxon poet we shall admire even more if we compare it with the other attempt at bringing the life of Christ into German poesy. It is by Otfried of Strassburg, whose 66 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION "Christ" is a very learned elaboration, partly in German, partly in Latin, therefore undoubtedly much preferred in the literary circles of that time, but infinitely inferior to the " HeHand " in freshness and popular quality. It is remarkable that there is something sim ilar to the "HeHand" in the Anglo-Saxon poem, the "Genesis." The theory has been successfully started and proved by later discoveries that both have the same origin. The Saxons of Germany and the Saxons of England were not so far away one from the other that they could not have intercourse and exchange (Plate XI). However this may be, it is evident that the Bible had an influence in teaching the German nations from the beginning, and that the new civUisation which was to be built would have the Bible as one of its foundations. '.TJcjpTCPcijiraTneHtMTn -^ TisnKii&pbDs caqTTnditn noSoimoii&chsapnlus SaoendaaumTDiKteiheL ¦ anns seanidinnocauid tentctconnengnsadpine' .XRI eqcpirrfram mrtcilia . ^.W ."«?»» ,. i« ¦ SCtti&BibuKeutKxiBniepQiCPouuiiiiuiuuinpTuu hcons DcccinniohainiiS? , ncv&ntooofr- ' cuucbcuuuuuuuscnnsi^ ^ pppfigEDfnaen&nmcaiio pooxmn Sed conpas dui ptRueROtim dian^Btioas uccc&piKLedtcctnoiiis os TJCiidenet-ncpmhcKctaveir Santtanraranm ccatms Tudno etina adaeuientis hctottnxxilum de6aiQ— iiousqacmnicoiiBoaaiiacn 1...... ,H..- .nfan..- poRdrocRcnniniePTna- ¦ aanqi&acnftaio caaai^ opDsnraicoiBa&ccpasinoam pRoedicanedrnnioo ocaEUonCaboiuxanruainn •nram cconns qoam rapRi oin6i mcenoirdiccneEed TDarmnjpnnmsccposraopi- dcsatn lauuiuiii uinneRi uiiiuuionem ditxtoli an g ixaot: attutopetap mtuUffOtwpe ftpfffHift In pr UOOI^ ^OOOrrVMl^ ijCnuuoiQ*toitciii (fat pa (UnUtru ntn- {cjnc fn> icru(iilf< tntrirnQlniJ£Bip«Bl'JA(^bil)Ocar off* feinr r?« tjertni Uc fap in> iB^iu0ii|f.5cfrij) ii>im(K}Rt{tftf tpa»r.-lnir((v Gi;tilii (wbdpniiO to ^ 4dHr< gooft.- uoc ^£tcr ^ (tu apAp«- uimfioir pcTAUnaitogi ^ m tn» t^uu: rritoif pmi itOq^ pt* \kpagaiuc ofpmA-'&iapc ucta tttotitm.Hi9twtiouttf9ta baup ttiMW pf twi«& cp uioiuf 4 ittrptatjuife pe Caflrwappufli' HUndiiwcc Cut in ttbum tattt pnevtuotpe lfoolpgootto«fjtii5 lol^diif poiifln ttu aitntt m to (ic 'fp»U:cpnti(4}'|i( pcd Ofi^cs pehir nlifuptup m it iiw OUtff iijfKttir.feO'-m^&l'f pnr was&dipajwcof motto ffioc^ei iiuften &iuu)itpftnPttttctiQ»mm jl^^etjwm ir(jpl/o(irj' I't anpntato Ur6ilftiuo- iDDutjr ffc tfooipgooit Mfiuf frt**i« ttrtiip of fau qt. of UtOas \xtt tVBAUOerof Uaa: fitit- tootiittXii \rcmijtrpcwaOiiaum toio m Od- f jat pr our of immpirr^^r- feea of pr mitrof rou^aourtO: aa* *jf(i^-"' (rcftaiiffiJ^tDtsrarf injjOtf.flna IC-; iitllfa^ffUB^UuotwMtoaUrtu^ AVcT -J/Prtuuji* m tmitMmi- Co yat pc J "^ "UU ftcio was dcpib (uijtmuacm ' ' VclmigageQf\fcm:pBttBptfias of ttiooDc ffiTzibpc It m IP tttf w Vcboaltcef^mt^^ftUBbtta aoH of bpui or lUBiif ttOxtano Uic cer oot pfWonKUrm ir- w/ff mt opcrtrtttc PC intaiopza^ o€ tmwptttMitbUtouetfoepsajc.pat-mat^ Um gabtiflto «ocrti«^|( twiaaUftpmf ?/i Wtfiepcpt^tr imicHtrdWm4Utaifcoiiraii , -as Opffl'UHpu^t fio I'c bavtptiu 'Df loou uuto pr CR\i IU mjitiic iicwe^ tsuni vp (tp-ne-ootiof ^i fcmimDoliitai)mig:iinUgr riu9 rarOitabif Dit ai iiortt.&fttra tamiSligtiii quoD (ilaianim eSfnue DroiditB aquani : qS fnidii Fuii Dabit in pfuo.'SCt bliii tiua no tifliitt : i srama quttuqi faut pcolpitabiiiur. >an At miw no lit : Mr tam^pul' quf ptoint omin a \m.t imrJC / no nfiitgiitinnifii niBitio : ntqt (raatoiro in tafilio luHorillGi uqm« am nouii tominue nia iuSoi; : i ittt imBoruraintibtt./Vaimu9 Aiiuo ^^uareItmiuRiitDim:tt^ntt'SjUbitati Hint inaniaf^Biimit ngfstmtitimndiiraiounnnmtm unu : abitrw Biinn aonlii'^inRii ti?. !t>"niniiara' ointfa to? : iMiam* a nobiB iugii 'ipo^^iliiiteoitai \a-. Iieiitit(tiittaa:ilineruUattabit(0'. iC^uuIoquif att main ita fuatiin ignottfuoiotutbabitroe^m™- mn tSffitut? Dim ni ab eo Oipitt inm Ironmnn fan*in':pi)i:>i< Bula a m; tt sabo libi gnm l)!titii< tamii ma :tt iidMrionc ma nninoe Kat) "^ igta toa f oirga Eetna : ¦* tan q 0^8 Kguli toKmota loa. 6i not itgia iniSligtit : nuliiimni \ mbiia.' ria tttta.&i trail Iiao i rimott : tt IJ ultatt tt iii itt«iott>sEl'fl)[rten!iia Oi-- (nplinmn : nt quatia itaiiatur Buni> nuai|mTaiietituiaiuSa.'< uinif|< aiftiiiinbimiiiatiua'.brariDnuua ipn lontiount in to .pfalmii; tmiid citmftiqnwf.mtiiubfolonfilliftH ^S anim qn mrdptem fiini qui ;*i?ImbnlatratfmuliiiBfutgutaB' uitlinn nu.ffluln ttiiiit anime mn : no iSrabis^uinbio tiua.t^^ uaiit Diff fufiipnii mt' ta : glonamia 1 tt< eltaatapui nuii.~0sit mta attbO' nmw ilaninui: t itaubiuit mt tt mos tt rsdo ruo.@(ss tbiroiui 1 liijnmi' fom :i tiTuititi qma Diia ruTtiiiit rat. ;^^onriro(ba miliapatiultntiiilan^ Iia rat : tpitgt biit faluiiiOT&t Dtue nuue.(iiiioniara u goiBiBi omia abuTantta nndn fint taura : btnna pnanmi tqtiimBi;XC>Dmini tft bP : Rlmutpopilu mum btntbidioaia, ]ii niinn iiiamiiiiibuf pfiUmiisO ^rtfnmiuiuuatftEdubiuiiintttita f^lJiuBiiirnittriittbulaoontliila taSi niitbi.(IXirtttit mn : tt itausi o< tanomnnaj!S(ili|birainuiuii;qm gimii out : ut quia billgiiia uamta^ tan It quttitia maBriuraf ^t anm quonia minlUauit biia Cadurarnii : Ima iraubiit rot ni damauno att IiL ^lounninittnoliitptaaiizqui&ic liM in nxtibiia DtOna in wbitibus oiSiia totnpmiBinnni3 wnSrat famEuii iuBiiit 1 tioait in Kimino : nmliil) Plate XV— GUTENBERG'S PIRST BIBLE (42 lines, Mainz, 1453-1456) Copy at Leipzig, on parchment, beautifully illuminated. The capitaU are painted by hand, but indicated by small priated letters. From "Er6ndung der Buchdruckerkunst." Published by Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld, Germany. BIBLE PRINTING 123 editions contained scarcely more than two hundred copies each; they were most of them In large folio, very unwieldy, and the price was enormous, though, of course, not so high as it is now, when for one copy of Gutenberg's first Bible $20,000 is paid. The Bible was not available for the average man. We know of scholars copying for themselves the Bible or the New Testament from a printed Bible. The clergy were rather opposed to this printing. They did not in the least encourage the printers; on the contrary, they tried to cause as many dif ficulties as possible. Therefore the circulation was a limited one. Copies were bought by churches for their services, by princes, and by very rich merchants, as to-day a splendid work is bought more as a luxury than as something for daily use. One cannot say that at this period the Bible, even by printing, acquired a circulation among the peo ple. This was accomplished only through the Refor mation. It was Luther's German translation which made the printed Bible popular and caused a num ber of similar translations. In order to make the Bible what it was destined to be, the book of the people, the printer and the translator had to work together. In former times many Protestants held the view 124 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION that Luther rediscovered the Bible, which had been almost entirely forgotten. They thought that there had been a meagre transmission of the Bible and no translation into the vernacular at all. This view, of course, is untenable. We have seen what a circulation the Bible had in the last cen tury before the Reformation, and that it had been translated into almost every vernacular. Never theless, Luther's version is a landmark in the his tory of translation; it marks a new period and rep resents the beginning of a new sort of translation. In order to realise this, let us look back over the former history of translations. In the first period we found the Bible translated from the Greek into Latin, Syriac, Coptic; in the next period Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Libyan, and Ethiopic were added, not to mention the several revisions ofthe former translations. About 600 a. d. the Bible was known in eight languages; in each of them there had been several attempts at translating. There were different dialects, too; in Coptic no less than five. The spread of Christianity in the next period is shown by the fact that the Bible is translated — and this again several times — into Arabic and Slavonic from the Greek, and into German, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and French from the Latin — rather, I should say, parts of the Bible, for it was only parts which people FORMER TRANSLATIONS 125 at this period tried to translate. We hear of a Gos pel, of a Psalter, of one or another book translated into the vernacular. Only when stimulated by the popular movements of the next period, as we have seen in the fifth chapter, was the work of translating into the vernacular prosecuted on a larger scale; from the thirteenth century on we may speak of Bibles in the vernacular. Beginning in the southeast of France, the tendency spread over Italy and Germany. We can still trace the influence of the French Wal densian Bible in the earliest Italian translations and also in some of the German ones. Another circle is defined by the northern French translation, which influenced the Flemish and Dutch and possibly even the Scandinavian. All these are based not so much upon the Bible itself as on a rearrangement known as the Historical Bible, teUing the stories and omit ting the doctrinal portions. A new start was made in England by Wycliffe, and this caused the Bo hemian translation into Czech, which was again in fluenced by the Waldensian Bible. It is like a net thrown all over Europe. We may count more than a dozen languages, many of them represented by different dialects and by several separate renditions, which were added to the eight languages of the former periods. The culmination came in the fif teenth century, when everywhere fresh translations 126 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION were attempted. In Germany more than forty dif ferent types of translation can be counted, and one of them, containing the whole Bible, was printed fourteen times before the period of the Reformation (Plate XVI). There was only one translation, how ever, with a value of its own, and that was the Spanish, for this was made from the Hebrew Old Testament by the help of some Spanish Jews. Both the king of Spain and the high clergy showed at that time a remarkable breadth of view in trying to get a trustworthy translation. All other versions in the West were based upon the Latin Vulgate as the recognised Bible of the church, and they were made with more devotion than knowledge. The trans lators usually did not know Latin well nor were they masters of their own language. They trans lated word for word, and the result was sometimes strange. It is of no great importance that, not recognising in "Tertius" and "Quartus" proper names, one of these translators said "the third" and " the fourth." It was worse when another explained "encfenia" in John 10 : 22, the feast of dedication, as meaning "wedding," or declared the words in Matt. 27 : 46, "EU, Eh," to be Greek. Sometimes the translation resulted in pure nonsense, and even where it made sense, it was difficult and often far from the true meaning. Now humanism insisted ^r"****""' ^AuffL-' rpnff am . h«- »ko»«»., frtiid, In dnw bftmrin tntTwinn.^bM- bl tmn minct tttbiM bwauub- *"tr.?^ ">«• Pf*t«w to ftinirbma . Xbtr w o# mW Mfl wgMno fibm fm t|: »n6 obfFo- 6a- Wta-.^btr tlto w>Ufc WM hMtuwlflmbi irAi •ViwrirtfrrintalU pf*lmhfmift»aUi**nen«u C-»no.L Vno Nr .Hcr il. «.ir ffrfpttxbm bito, W(jri|.6lffBiBftobmgfr4»il«n.j(i(,injir«pb-vrt]rM|bi^ifaiim.viio.ixi} fun chon-vA-i). bias: ffttmvnbfadxrMm'tfn mopfi'vnonn f4l«niS. Vnoairo r»in ™«& lUt pfiim bvirm tamM tin RUi idle «n*htin{^ ifMbfl in 6cr rul: 4nKrtb«(t> bimcwT,Xbtr6trluigfn6cnat(-f,(n(.t^)(v-vno g»n«iubifr|ea«apltt.nB;fiffrf(bnbn., Mb bin gratft 6w«Ufi- fanttft vnscr iniiiSn trf - hauBmnnnwtiira. ¦JrtibthB.wty^tftitfcb.ir mot«oinrr»:i«Bnbmt>h*tmgini.rbtrinoTgt1ti «no mnn vingtrbiUn tnvpc nn pfAlm-.Vn wa tfr Brr Oo- men bwtn bat arii6noi«t vn&grfaaw wi mir. •»«¦ bKKiUir hmwi friSer b«nni(b o-j bBrr. ^bat gil*nt Hum mgrf vtid b«c miib gi: fftrt:vnbbinMn gmoitKn i»ijti ten tib*1fm mrfn« wttwro. VnB rt-bit micbgrfjlbtt miM W faltm fBnn-bvmtertiistet. cKMn brdCn- wjvn fffii vA fra%- witB Crm bcntn nai nit tin wolgtu'lUit in fai.')(bbinanf(Pff4n9cn vnDbinMUgtgrnlUTntn tan hr^ftn pbilitrto. Xbtriibbabxnr^rasinada rdmitR wn r(in(rr(btt«.'vni> bib km tbgrfdiUat r«n Inulin. V>» "ira bib i* gmotntn &«• !•&«• vMeit fifMirtivsnemlimBimwnil'rabrI* 'XN*6 '^W^^r [Uffioi \btc ."DniaJf. bsAj^^^ f CMgifrbtrnimtrrnfibttn ^iMfT >n Mm nt tv vnmU 1 tmB tiCcbnn frOnb bi rf 7 Mr f Anivr: vni nftbrni .^ *uF ton MU tar twivaiit nwig . ¦^Ann frin will* Sfr ffl Cm- K ta) hRmi vtie in Tet j mr tt bnradnt cr t49> vnn . VnscrwhrtaU&ishjltftinitoilitgts gibe bl fcim )t^-'Vna Ten Uabrirftfafr nitivne «t(c bing »i(ir tfit »t( wtrtant gdbEhf«n .8) (r vn m'lltniTritklfocfirairet mmiui kl) Of gcfrOiy nj tar wins wn»6rfft tMa tam md&i; tar a«. lB(niuri> pUvnmilimDitirfnnlinitbitainvnf^t n«b »U TAtttr in to* ra t tar grr«titm . W«nn »r tanr triun t tan w^ tar {ttntbtt n i vn b tar frt^ tar vn ¦ntlmivtreim. ^flmuA "bAuA' ' *l'l'C'crlxir. ^*ffi imrBB b.fr mti (nn: in, „,eo btut t5Tdsw)ni7Tir ono irfjffibwr tit Init win nt* - vnewlhefiiningeii ,pl wn-ft.-R iAtf- ,„ „„„ •Wnirft rt t; vfi pAnA f^dl. rin v.ii ta,i»hn-.. >-ii5 mm hunlj, vmnnpt j vnt> mrtatarftm *'/!yi??'"'« **¦>•""*(»«« it. hrwrdrtt ««nWb. lrf> i>&nhr mt tviftnt ta9v«(diat*«M«ini(fat>mbffit)t:0tyi)'mtinAcn frt*afmB(hn.ilagm altt fi(t nur nxrtnt nitaiwemg cn uii:T>u b^tt wrtnifAt tU piB OM- tinJxr . "S>i( bbtltfjin l&0nbcmi:vnotamr(3ni fbtrbon volA. |«J. ...^^X Oicbanniffgiit mtinrr^iTtmki(ctrcr; ~A W turrt micb ! Bu bafr mit in-n't{>cttn mitn X-' xrihM.&iiirmbichmim-.vnatrliliimt! fl*ft.S4n« BwUnt vMtj roi. Unff* ftpt ir fcbwr ; tnbtrcjmi ittToDa* trlltblMb«cQiii>)pi(rhntvnB fBtfatbitlns.'KA wirrM|>rbnrbat0r«>unta;; titbr Tnn fanlETtnitar hnr rrhirt m(rb To icb rirf fd im.^Arntt »no nfdKrn wdt tintm roli olnj oit trr«ff«in(nr«inbMT|nt vnBmtwitncbin runm hBtmttHcln . d|rfFm m* epfftrcin ndit; unB vrr . r*(bc mrb Ul Dm taim : man ig rpnrticn t nvr rnjrt vniHr^imBui^. tlhrirOdaliccbttaitiBantliici Ifrg^tprixnt tibcr vn*: Bu bttft gigitm Bit fnatt in mom tartfDi . "Von tam »adKrtao mpBo cm* inmBvnBfni»Ma:rthitf(gtm4nisualn([(.'3nBiTtm rdbmFns:r(bl«ff icb vnD tfir. Wxnn o blr BH bifr micti grftbithtirunbniid) in (nutrhibt. fi ObnrmipfMib mein owrt mtt Ottvom -.vns vtmpm mdncnrOf. '^irnpmBtdiiQBrr frpA mrinc* nbncmtin hinig i>nB mem aot.Wannotan-irtjIifw jDBir: frffH^irftumtt fr^.'^F&ff«l(tieirwfiicbfiHi:Maoiibir(gatnirfiq wttUntBii vngangfun . Tjn- vbtlentmlet RJtbr^MrinodiBitvnQffMtmnuorMnaujnt . 'fetttMfrg^nnatUbielobritpbmtuxrdwntBic vngm^lmt:fa tvrlnifr aid Bie to rtBm biilajt*. UarbwT«wHjrantit»t tanffinoigmman vobbbi CttagUtbcn I «Miini(bb>ff(inBrrnimi9B(inrrrr: Uriito.^gw in rrinbanaiiAanEn 16 dnm tn): 8tn»i^inetinn-n>rcbt.6biTFiirmKbfa(n In tafnir gimfotihntii wn b mon winB ritbt mtfnm laejin OflntrbrfrtJ«m-\V-«'"i Bl»w"4wlt iti nit bl irem intoi»!ir(>rTt(t Ifr VffiB.> W ifr *m ef 1 Ant gr>bi% nttm htUstitt) in trm roiigmw go« Plate XVI-FIRST GERMAN BIBLE Printed at Strassburg by G. Mentell in 1466: the progress in printing made in these ten years is remarkable. Entnommeo aus W. Walthers "Deutsche BibelUbersetzung des Mittelalters.'' Verlag von Hellmuth Wollermann in Braunschweig. LUTHER'S TRANSLATION 127 upon going back to the original languages. Eras mus, in 1516, published the first edition of the New Testament in Greek. We see how Luther, at this time professor at the University of Witten berg, lecturing upon Romans when this edition came into his hands, was impressed by this new source of information. He eagerly set himself to leam Greek with the help of his friend Melanch thon, and so he was prepared for the great task of translating the New Testament directly out of the Greek into German. It was during his exile in the Wartburg that he found the neces sary time to make this translation. It appeared in print in September, 1522, and it is astonish ing in how short a time this New Testament cir culated all through Germany. It was reprinted everywhere, and often very carelessly, so that Lu ther had to complain against the printers as falsify ing his translation. He himself did not take any payment for his work; he wanted the publishers to sell it as cheaply as possible. And it was a master piece, not only for the beauty of the language, which was the best and most popular German that had ever been written but also in the way Luther translated, giving not the single words but the meaning of the sentences, not transferring from one vocabulary to the other but transmuting (if one 128 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION may say so) the whole expression of thought from Greek into German. The Bible became a German book; one hardly feels that he is reading a trans lation. Luther had more trouble with the Old Tes tament. In order to master the Hebrew he had to rely on friends; he even asked some Jewish rabbis to join their meetings. He tells us that they often had to look for a single word three or four weeks; that in particular Job was so difficult that they scarcely finished three lines in four days. The Pen tateuch was ready in the year 1523; then year after year the work went on. The prophets were not finished until 1532, and in 1534 the first complete Bible was issued. The work was highly praised by Luther's friends and unduly criticised by his an tagonists. He himself replied sharply to such criticism, and he had a right to do so because the attempts made by Eck and Emser, the champions of Roman Catholicism, to translate the Bible them selves were feeble and betrayed much dependence on Luther's translation, which they had so severely criticised. Luther himself never felt satisfied with his own work and always tried to improve it. At two different periods he held meetings with his friends for the purpose of revising the Bible. The records of these meetings of the committee for the revision of the Bible (if one may call it so) have ITS INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE 129 come down to us, and it is highly interesting to see how carefully they discussed every word and how it is always Luther himself who at last finds the most apt expression. It is a great privilege of the German nation that it received this excellent Bible at the very beginning of the new era. The German language is moulded by this Bible. In Luther's time the dia lects still prevailed. Luther's Bible had to be translated into the dialect of lower Germany. The south of Germany and Switzerland had quite an other dialect. The Zurich reformers, in 1529, pub Ushed a Bible in this dialect, translating from Luther's Bible as far as it existed at this time and providing for the rest a translation of their own. It is un questionably due to Luther's Bible that the Germans have now one language for all literary purposes. The German classic writers Herder, Wieland, Klop- stock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe were all trained from their childhood by the language of this Bible. Even now there is a remarkable difference in style be tween authors of Protestant and of Roman Catholic origin in Germany. In the easy and fluent lan guage of the former we see the influence of Luther and Goethe, whereas the latter often show a cer tain stiffness and a greater number of provincial isms. The attempts to translate the Bible inde- 130 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION pendently of Luther have never succeeded in gaining any large circulation, although there have been many such, not only from the Roman Cath olic side but also from Protestants. A famous one is the so-called Berleburg Bible, by certain mystics, pubhshed in 1726-42 in eight volumes. In the nineteenth century scholars undertook to give more scientific and more exact translations, but, valuable as these may be for scholarly purposes, the German people will never abandon its classic Bible. It is difficult even to introduce a revision. There was a revision some twenty years ago, but in this Luther's text was retouched and altered only at a very few points, most of the corrections intro duced by the revision committee being rather restitutions of Luther's original renderings, which had been badly "improved" by former printers. It is remarkable that even the printed Bible never stands still, but is always changing, the printers acting as the copyists did in former times. The copies of the revised text printed at Stuttgart differ slightly from the copies printed at Halle and Ber lin, to mention three of the modern centres of Ger man Bible printing. Luther's translation was the signal for a general movement in this direction. It is not so much translating the Bible into new languages — only a OTHER GERMAN TRANSLATIONS 131 few which had no Bible before were added to the hst given above — as rather the making of new transla tions in all languages of the Christian world as far as this was influenced by the Reformation. Of course some of these translations were inspired by humanism more than by the spirit of the Reforma tion. The humanists abhorred the vulgarity of the monkish Latin, and they extended their aversion to the official Bible of the church, the Vulgate of Saint Jerome; therefore they tried to translate the Bible into what they thought to be Ciceronian Latin, and some of them translated this again into French or German. But most of the translators were sim ply following Luther's model; nay, they used Luther's translation even more than the original. King Christian III of Denmark gave orders that the translators should follow Luther's version as closely as possible. In this way the Dutch, the Danish, the Swedish, the Finnish, the Lettish, and the Lithuanian Bibles were more or less influenced by or even based upon Luther's. It is different with the Enghsh and the French Bible. Wycliffe's translation never had been printed. William Tindale, a pupil of Erasmus, translated the New Testament and parts of the Old during his exile in Germany and HoUand, whither he had gone under Henry VIII because, as he says, there was 132 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION no place to translate the New Testament in all England. Printed copies of them were brought to England, but most of them were confiscated and destroyed. Once again the Bible was burned, but this time by the Christian kmg in agreement with the bishops of the English church; and with the Bible suffered many of its zealous readers. Tindale himself died a martyr for his faith and his Bible in October, 1536, at the hands of the imperial authorities in Flanders. But the work of Bible translation went on, nevertheless, and Henry VIII was still on the throne when the Bible gained the victory. Miles Coverdale, who had undertaken an other translation, issued the year before Tindale's death, failed to get royal sanction for its publica tion, but the book was not suppressed. John Rogers, a friend of Tindale's, the year after his death, under the assumed name of Thomas Matthew, published a Bible, chiefly made up from Tindale's and Cover- dale's work. Through Crumwell's mediation Cran mer secured the king's permission to sell this Bible in the realm. But the convocation was not satisfied with it. It asked for another translation, and therefore the so-caUed Great Bible was pub lished in 1539, Coverdale revising his former work under the direction of Crumwell, Cranmer, and others. This Great Bible was ordered by a royal THE ENGLISH BIBLE 133 warrant to be exhibited in all parish churches; copies were fastened to the pulpits by means of chains, and the public was allowed to read them "with discre tion, honest intent, charity, reverence, quiet beha viour," as is said in the admonition published by Bishop Bonner. This happened in the last years of Henry VIII. Under Queen Mary — ^bloody Mary, as she was called — the printing of Bibles was stopped, but the exiles who went to Geneva undertook a new revision, which was much more radical and had the privilege of bearing an introductory letter by Calvin himself. At the very moment of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, among other prisoners (ac cording to the expression of one of her courtiers) the four evangelists and Saint Paul were released, hav ing been long shut up in an unknown tongue, as it were in prison. The Great Bible was revised by some of the bishops under direction of Archbishop Parker, who did not shrink from using improve ments from the Geneva Bible. This Bishops' Bible, published in 1568, was the official one, but the Geneva Bible was far more popular, while the Roman Catholics made a translation of their own, printed in France at Rheims and Douai. The rivalry between the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva Bible was confusing. Therefore, in order to overcome it. King James, in 1604, appointed a committee for the 134 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION revision of the Bible, consisting of about fifty members, and divided into six groups, two of which met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge respec tively. They did excellent work, the result of which was published in 1611 and is known as the Author ised Version. It is in this version that the En glish translation attained its highest excellence. It is this form which gained the largest circulation and the greatest popularity among all English-speaking peoples. It still survives the recent attempt at re vision, which was made by an English and an Ameri can committee, both working on the same principles and in constant communication with one another. It is a well-known fact that the final corrections were cabled from England to America in order to procure a simultaneous publication on both sides of the Atlantic. Here again, as in the German revi sion, the two issues are not identical. It marks, however, a clear distinction between the German and the English Bible that the former reached its final form at its very beginning, whereas the latter did not achieve this result until a hundred years later. The Bible of Luther was creative of the German language, as we have seen, while the En glish Bible is rather a product of the period of high est literary culture in England. Luther produced Goethe. Shakespeare (d. April 23, 1616) is prac- THE FRENCH BIBLE 135 tically contemporaneous with the Authorised Ver sion. The development of the French Bible is still more slow and varied. There was a pre-Reformation translation, printed several times, at Lyons and at Paris; but it was of a purely mediaeval character. Then a humanist, Jacques Lefevres d'Etaples (Faber Stapulensis, d. 1536), undertook a new French trans lation from the Vulgate. The first French Bible translated from the original Hebrew and Greek was published in 1535 by Peter Robert Olivetan, a cousin of Calvin. The author himself, and Calvin, and others corrected and improved it from time to time, and nearly every twenty or thirty years a new editor would try to revise it. In this series of revi sions one of the most successful was that of Fre- d6ric Ostervald of NeuchStel, in 1744. But the process is still going on, French and Swiss theologians vying one with another in fair competition. More over, the Protestant translation found many rivals in the work of Roman Catholics, especially in the great period of French literature in the reign of Louis XIV. Some of these translators, for example Bossuet, aimed at making the style of their transla tion as elegant as possible, while others, under the influence of Port Royal, paraphrased the text with a view rather to cleamess. None of these versions 136 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION had real success; none has become final. France still suffers from the lack of a classic form for its Bible. The attitude of a nation toward its Bible is largely determined by the development of the translation. It is obvious that the Germans hold to Luther's Bible even more insistently than the English do to their Authorised Version, and that in France there is an open field for every fresh attempt at revising and translating. The nation has not become united with its Bible, and, as regards language, the famous "Dictionnaire de I'Academie," aiming at a standard of literary uniformity, is but a poor and artificial substitute for the influence exercised in a hving and natural way by the Bible. It is not our task here to trace the history of translations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and elsewhere. It is to a large extent a history of enthusiasm, devotion, and martyrdom, and at the same time of failure and oppression. Wherever the so-called Counter-Reformation, started by the Jes uits, gained hold of the people, the vernacular was suppressed and the Bible kept from the laity. So eager were the Jesuits to destroy the authority of the Bible — the paper pope of the Protestants, as they contemptuously called it — ^that they even did not refrain from criticising its genuineness and his torical value. OTHER TRANSLATIONS 137 To sum up: it was the Bible which trained printers and translators and thereby made a noble contri bution to modern civilisation and literature; on the other hand, it was printing and translating which made it possible for the Bible to become the popu lar book that ruled daily life. VII THE BIBLE RULES DAILY LIFE (1550-1850) The Reformation gave the Bible a new position — not that there had been no Bible before, nor that the Bible had had no influence. We have seen that there were numbers of Bibles, in Latin as well as in the vernacular, and that the Bible had been one of the foundations of mediaeval civilisa tion, yet it was only by Luther's translation and the other versions made on his model that the Bible became a really popular book, and it was only by the Reformation that the Bible was estab lished as the authority for daily life in a modern, that is, non-ascetic, sense. The two points insisted on by all the reformers were, first, that the Bible is perspicuous, that is, that every reader can by himself find out in his Bible what is essential for salvation; and, sec ondly, that the Bible is sufficient. The Christian does not need anything else; the Bible tells him everything which he requires — of course in its own domain, religion, or, to use the language of that time, the "doctrine of salvation." By the Refor- 138 THE PROTESTANT VIEW 139 mation the Bible got rid of all its rivals, such as tradition, Apocrypha, legend, canon law, and so on. It is wonderful to see — and I doubt if modern Chris tianity has realised the fact in all its importance — how by the preaching of the reformers all these things, which hitherto had been thought of as inte gral parts of Christianity, simply fell away. No cult of the saints, no adoration of their images, no leg ends, no fancy, no merriment connected with religion, but the pure Bible and the stern doctrine of it and the austere attitude of Puritanism corresponding to it were now uppermost. Nay, the letter of the Bible was binding in a stricter sense than it had ever been before. Catholicism made it possible to mitigate the strictness by allegorical interpretation; Protestantism insisted upon taking the Bible in its literal sense. There was now no way of escape; a man had to take whatever the Bible said or refuse the Bible altogether. In principle the mystery had gone; the Bible was plain and made itself under stood. It was the literal sense, as established by lexicon and grammar, which was to be followed. This caused the reformers to encourage and facilitate the study of the original languages of the Bible. When they tried to improve the grammar-schools and to found as many new ones as possible, it was not so 140 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION much the humanistic delight in the classical lan guages as the desire to secure a sure knowledge of Greek and Hebrew which might enable a boy to read and to interpret the Bible. It is evident from many utterances both of Luther and Calvin that their aim in all their school work was to provide good preachers of the true gospel, or good teachers of the genuine doctrine of the Bible. To be sure, there are differences of character, both personal and national, between the two great re formers, which account for a somewhat different de velopment of their churches. In Luther's piety the joyful experience of salvation brings in a happy note; the children of God praise his love and grace. In Calvin's devotion the feeling prevails that God's majesty is above all creatures and that his holy will is the supreme rule for our life. Religion with Luther is bright and cheerful, whereas with Calvin it has a darker tinge. But both are building on the same foundation and with the same end in view: from salvation to salvation, from grace to grace. The difference is but one of attitude toward the present life. The difference finds its best expression In a varying use of the phrase Word of God. Both, of course, believed in an historical revelation of God to mankind, and they were convinced that this rev- LUTHER AND CALVIN 14l elation was to be found in the holy Scriptures. God had spoken through his prophets; he had given his promises to his people; he had sent his Son and had fulfilled his promises through him. All this was to be found in the Bible and only in the Bible. The reformers refused the authority of tradition, just as they dechned to acknowledge the present individual inspiration of enthusiasts, or "Schwarmgeister," as Luther contemptuously called them. It was in the Bible that Christianity had to look for aU necessary information about God and salvation. And yet Luther, when using the expression Word of God, scarcely thinks of the written book. It is the living word as represented by the preaching of the prophets and the apostles, and perpetuated by the preaching of the ministers of the church. It is to him not a formal authority but an energising inspiration. Not everything in the Bible is authoritative, merely by the fact that it stands in the Bible; only what wit nesses to Christ is authoritative and is to be taken as the Word of God, On the other hand, Zwingli and Calvin frequently use the term Word of God when speaking of the holy Scriptures themselves. It is characteristic that the reformed churches of Switzerland felt it their duty to fix the exact num ber of writings included in this Word of God, just as the Roman Cathohc church did at the Council 142 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION of Trent, while no Lutheran creed ever defines the exact content of the Bible. To the former it was a book of law, to the latter a book of inspiration. Luther, owing to his familiarity with Saint Paul, understood that Christianity had nothing to do with the Law; the whole notion of the Law had to be dropped out from the field of religion. Law there must be in the government of the state — it would not be necessary even there, if all people were true Christians — but for the wicked there must be a law and there must be punishment. The Christian's life, however, is not a slave's obedience to injunctions but a child's glad doing of his father's will; he knows what his father wants him to do and he does it joyfuUy. Luther is especially interested in proving that Jesus' teaching, in particular the Sermon on the Mount, does not exhibit an ascetic law, but gives principles for the moral life of every Christian. One need not enter a monastery in order to fulfil Christ's commandments. It is in the tasks of the daily life that a Christian has to prove himself a true disciple of Jesus. The Bible is to rule the daily life of the Christian, but not in the sense of a law. When, in 1523, a preacher at Weimar aimed to introduce the Mosaic law instead of the common law, Luther treated him as a " Schwarmgeist," and, in fact, it was that proposal which lay at the basis of aU the LUTHER AND CALVIN 143 "Schwarmgeisterei." Such experiments, aiming to constitute a kingdom of the Saints on earth, as the Anabaptists made at Miinster and elsewhere, always failed, and made Luther and his friends suspicious of any such attempt. It is different with Calvin. He is interested in reaUsing the kingdom of God in the Christian con gregation, or, to put it more accurately, in the com monwealth of Geneva, which is to him identical with the Christian congregation of that place. So it is the commonwealth which is to be ruled by the Bible, and the Bible in this role acts as a law to which the whole community as weU as the individual has to submit. And again it is characteristic that Calvin takes the Bible as a unit. It is the Old Testament law as well as the gospel which is to be regarded as the indispensable rule both of public and private life. With the Calvinists the ten commandments become an integral part of the regular Sunday service. Of course there are many gradations between these two positions. Zwingh, the Zurich reformer, was of a different type from Calvin, while he was even more opposed to Luther than was the Genevan. Luther's rule was to abolish whatsoever was contrary to the Bible. Zwingli would permit only what was based upon or commanded by the Bible; he ob jected to the use of an organ, to the keeping of 144 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION festival days except Sunday, and so on. Luther even tolerated pictures in the church. He was sure that no one would adore them if pervaded by the true spirit of the gospel, and he was con vinced that this spirit could be successfuUy incul cated by means of preaching. Zwingli and Calvin both did away with all pictures in the churches. They had the walls whitewashed and the ten com mandments and other passages from the Bible painted on them. Nothing is so characteristic of this difference between the Lutheran and the Cal vinistic feeling as the history of an epitaph in an East Prussian church, the monument of the noble family of the earls of Dohna. At the time of the Reformation they joined the Grand Master, later Duke, Albrecht of Brandenburg in taking Luther's part. The epitaph, which was erected in the church of Mohrungen on the death of Earl Peter in 1553, was decorated with a picture showing the holy Trinity adored by the fanuly of the donor. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the family went over to Calvinism, and the painting was altered by covering the image of the holy Trinity with black varnish and putting over it some Bible verses in gold letters. The different attitude toward the Bible finds its expression also in the fact that the Lutherans used PSALMS AND HYMNS 145 hymns, whereas the Calvinists adhered to the Bibh cal Psalter. Of course the vigorous songs composed by Luther are most of them based upon Psalms and other Biblical passages, and so were the greater number of hymns in the Lutheran church. On the other hand, the Calvinists did not agree with the English church in taking over the alternative recita tion of the Psalter from the mediaeval exercises of the monasteries and large cathedral choirs. They used the Psalter in a rhythmical paraphrase adapted to modem singing, but keeping so near to the word ing of the Psalms that they even called it the Psalm- book. The difference was, in fact, slight, but they felt it to be essential. The Lutherans foUowed the usage of the church, the Calvinists the very word of the Bible. It is remarkable, however, that hymns gradually gained more importance among the Calvinists, especially since the time of the eighteenth-century revivals, and that nowadays the hymn-book, enriched by the contributions of recent time from poets of all denominations, is in favour with all Protestants and in some circles is even in danger of becoming a substitute for the Bible. In spite of aU these differences, these two great forms of Protestantism manifest almost the same at titude toward the Bible, and we see them changing their attitude almost at the same time and in the 146 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION same direction. The theologians of the orthodox period exaggerated the authority of the Bible to such an extent that critics like Lessing could speak of Bib liolatry or Bible-worship. They extended the notion of inspiration even to the smallest details in the printed text which lay before them, with no regard for the fact that those detaUs were late additions, sometimes even misprints, and that the various editions did not agree in these detaUs. True scholas tics as they were, they had no sense for facts but an unlimited desire for theory; the facts had to submit to the theory, and whoever would appeal to the facts against the theory was denounced as a heretic and driven out as a disreputable person. This doctrinal attitude changed when, at the end of the seventeenth century. Pietism in Germany and Methodism in England once again turned religion from ecclesiastical doctrine to personal devotion. The estimation of the Bible is not diminished — quite the contrary; yet it finds its expression not in stiff formulas of dogmatics but in beautiful hymns. Under the direction of P. J. Spener (d. 1705) peo ple once more gather in private circles to read and to interpret the Bible; once more the students are drawn away from dead scholasticism to the liv ing study of the Bible. To the theologia dogmatica is opposed a theologia biblica. People begin to real- PIETISM AND RATIONALISM 147 ise again what is the true use of the Bible, not as a text-book for dogmatic competitions and controver sies, but as the divine word of comfort and exhorta tion, a guide to salvation, and an expression of sal vation already gained. There is a beautiful tract written by A. H. Francke of Halle (d. 1727) and very often printed as a preface to the Bible in Ger man, "A brief direction how to read the Bible for edification." It sounds thoroughly modern, as it deals not with questions of theology but entirely with piety. This attitude was again changed by the so- called rationalism. That movement, too, entered the Protestantism of Germany as well as of England and America in various forms and under various names (deism, unitarianism), but with the same tendency. It may be that it had an easier start and a wider spread in the Lutheran church of Germany. We shaU speak of its influence in the next chapter. The Bible was submitted to reason or explained accord ing to reason. The Bible was to be followed for the sake of the precepts of reason contained in it or else not at all. It was, however, the com mon conviction that the Bible gave the most rea sonable injunctions, and whereas orthodoxy had been mostly intellectual and Pietism emotional, rationahsm by its moral strictness helped the Bible to retain its influence on daily life. 148 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION This influence was due to the fact that since Luther's time the Bible was in every house; it was the centre of the regular morning and evening prayers, the father reading and explaining to his family some chapters of the Bible. What a knowl edge of the Bible had been gained by the laity soon after the Reformation is shown by the prince elector of Saxony Johann Friedrich, who at the important meetings held at Augsburg in 1530 was able to quote from memory all necessary passages of the Bible. In Lutheran countries the influence of the Bible found expression in arts and crafts. Not only were the walls of the churches decorated with pictures taken from the Bible but also the waUs of private houses. The furniture of a farmhouse was painted with Biblical stories, very awkward paintings, indeed, but showing the spirit of simple and plain devotion. It is otherwise when a rich lady's dressing-table in baroque or rococo is decorated with such scenes. We feel that they are out of place there and that scenes taken from ancient mythology would suit such a purpose much better. We should consider it a little profane that, at a wedding dinner in the sixteenth century, between the several courses elaborate dishes were passed, representing Bib lical scenes. We cannot help remembering the re- PAINTING AND MUSIC 149 mark of that preacher of the old church who ex claimed: "Oh, that they had these stories painted in their hearts!" Much more important is the art of music. Luther was fond of it; he would never have given up a choir and an organ. He made it possible for the Lu theran church to produce the greatest masterpieces that music has ever achieved — Bach's oratorios. WhUe the Roman church directed the work of its great musicians toward the glorification of the mass, and the Calvinistic church became rigorously op posed to the very art of music, the Lutheran com posers were inspired by the Bible itself. The Biblical sonatas of Johann Kuhnau (d. 1722) seem to us mere trifling. The real work was done by Heinrich Schiitz (d. 1672) and Johann Sebastian Bach, the cantor of Saint Thomas in Leipzig (d. 1750), who succeeded in giving to the Bible a new voice, a voice which is still sounding and entering circles where the printed Bible would scarcely be read. The combination in Bach's oratorios is very striking — the majestic church hymns sung by the choir, the simple recitative of Scripture, and, last but not least, the arias giving the response of the pious individual to the words of God in the Bible. This is the most char acteristic part of it. Protestant piety cannot be 150 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION without the personal expression of individual feel ing; it is thoroughly subjective in the highest sense. As Luther in his catechism explains the Apostles' Creed thus, "I beheve that God has created me . . . ; I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, who has saved me . . . ; I believe that it is im possible for me to come to Jesus Christ without the help of the Holy Ghost . . . ," so Protestant piety gives to everything this subjective note. There is a Greek manuscript of the Gospels from the four teenth century, written in several colours to dis tinguish the words of Jesus, of his apostles, of his enemies, and of the evangelist. The narrative of the evangelist is given in green ink, the words of the Pharisees and other adversaries of Jesus in black, the words of the disciples in blue, and the sayings of Jesus himself are in red. It is a curious piece of work, showing the tendency of the Greek church to dramatise the sacred history of the Gospel. With this Greek copy we may compare a Protestant fam ily Bible mentioned by a modern German preacher. It is a plain old printed Bible, but the pious great grandfather has marked it all through with various colours, which he explains in a note: "What touched the sin of my heart: — Black. What inspired me to good : — Blue. What comforted me in sorrow : — Red. What promised me the grace of God in eternity: — SUBJECTIVISM IN PIETY 151 Gold." The difference between objective facts and subjective relation to them, between apprehension and appreciation, is evident. This is the new spirit which pervades the Protestant reader of the Bible, and therefore the Bible is much more to him than it had been to Christianity in former times. Where the Bible was read in such a spirit it was bound to gain an influence upon the daily life. We must admit this even if we have no direct evidence. The inward acting of the spirit in the individual is inaccessible to scientific observation and statistics. We are in a much better position regarding the Calvinistic circles, for here the influence of the Bible was a public one. The Bible here was recog nised as the only rule to be followed in public life as well as in private. The most characteristic feature is the attitude toward the Sabbath. Luther had explained the third commandment (according to his numeration, the fourth according to the Calvinists) as meaning "den Feiertag heiligen," to use the day, granted by God as a holiday, for going to church and listening to the preaching of the gospel; so the Lutherans, who never caUed it Sabbath, did not insist upon avoiding all work, but upon attend ing the holy service; besides, human feeling led them to relieve their servants and employees so far as possible from their labour. The Calvinists kept 152 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION the Sabbath, as they said, exactly according to the Old Testament commandment: "Thou shalt not do any work." It reminds us sometimes of the minuteness of rabbinical Sabbath controver sies when we see how carefuUy the Sabbath is kept as a day for doing no work whatever; even the chil dren are forbidden to play with their toys. It is a concession made to the gospel if works of piety, of charity, or of necessity are permitted. Another prominent feature is the use of BibUcal names. Among Lutherans and members of the En glish church the use of Christian names, mostly de rived from famous saints or kings, as Edward, George, Richard, Robert, Thomas, WUUam, con tinued; while the Calvinists preferred Biblical names such as Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, EU jah, Jeremiah, Nathaniel. They often chose the names of obscure persons from the Bible, such as Abia, Abiel, Ammi, Eliphalet, Jared, Jedidiah, Je- rathmeel, Reuben, Uriah. It was not so much the admiration for this or that hero in the Bible as the simple demand for something Biblical which gave to the children such unfamUiar names. Parents did not care for the real character of the man to whom the name first belonged provided he was mentioned in the Bible; neither DelUah nor Archelaus had a repu tation which would make their names desirable; but. BIBLICAL NAMES AND GAMES 153 nevertheless, they were given. Gamaliel was a Pharisee, a scribe, very far from being a Christian, but the name, being in the Bible, became a Chris tian name among the descendants of one of the PUgrim fathers. BibUcal reminiscences also are to be found in Christian names, such as Faithful, Faintnot, HopestiU, Strong; Praise-God Barbone, one of Cromwell's followers, is said to have had two brothers, baptised with the Christian names of "Christ-came-into-the-world-to-save Barbone" and " If -Christ-had - not-died -thou - hadst- been - damned Barbone" respectively; but this is apocryphal, and so is probably the American counterpart: "Through- many-trials-and-tribulations-we-must-enter-into-thekingdom-of-God" (Acts 15 : 22) as a Christian name. One can hardly deny that this Biblicism some times became an abuse of the Bible. The Scrip tures were used for investigating the future. This method, which we have already noted in the second chapter, was made an official one in the MoraAdan church. People used Bible verses in their games; riddles were taken from the Bible. As the one and only book the Bible had to serve as a whole library and provide all kinds of entertainment. That is the other side of the matter. The influence of the Bible on public life in the time of Puritanism is illustrated best by the records 154 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION of the first plantations in New England.^ When, in June, 1639, "aU the free planters" of the col ony of New Haven "assembled together in a gen eral meeting to consult about settling civU gov ernment according to God," the first question laid before them by John Davenport was: " Whether the Scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of aU men in all duties which they are to perform to God and men as well in the government of famUies and commonwealth as in matters of the church." "This was assented unto by aU, no man dissenting, as was expressed by holding up of hands." The second question was whether all do hold themselves bound by that (plantation) covenant that "in aU public offices, etc., we would all of us be ordered by those riUes which the Scripture holds forth to us." This was answered in the same way. Therefore it was voted unanimously, "that the Word of God shall be the only rule to be attended unto in ordering the affairs of government in this plantation." Before they go on to select officials from their number, the chapter on the institution of the seventy elders (Ex. 18) is read, together with Deut. 1 : 13 and 17 : 15 and I Cor. ' Cf. C. T. Hoadly, Records of the Colonic and Plantation of New Haven from 1638 to 1649, Hartford, 1857, and Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven from Mai/, 1653, to the Union (1665), Hartford, 1858. PURITAN LEGISLATION 155 6 : 1-7, and one of the planters declares that he had felt scruples about it, but that these had been removed by reading Deut. 17 : 15 at morning prayers. When a difference arises between two members of the colony they refer it for arbitration to brethren, in accordance with I Cor. 6 : 1-7. A prisoner is pressed to confess his crime by remind ing him of that passage of Scripture: "He that hideth his sin shaU not prosper, but he that con fesseth and forsaketh his sins shall find mercy" (Prov. 28 : 13). When a murder has been com mitted they sentence the guilty to death "according to the nature of the fact and the rule in that case. He that sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6). They refer to Lev. 20 : 15 in a case of bestiality in order to justify the sen tence of death. When questions and scruples arise between New Haven and Massachusetts about the justice of an offensive war. New Haven refers to the story of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, "who sinned and was rebuked by two prophets Jehu and Eliezer for joining with and helping Ahab and Ahaziah, kings of Israel" (II Chron. 17-20). From this, they say, one might infer that even a defensive war and all leagues are forbidden by the law of God. On the other hand, they rely on the conquest of Canaan and David's war against the Ammonites 156 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION (II Sam. 10) as examples for the justice of an offen sive war and even a vindictive war of revenge. It is their fundamental agreement, not to be dis puted or questioned hereafter, "that the judicial law of God given by Moses and expounded in other parts of Scripture, so far as it is a hedge and a fence to the moral law and neither ceremonial nor typical nor had any reference to Canaan, has an everlasting equity in it and should be the rule of their proceed ings." This fundamental law, as it is fixed in 1639 and reinforced in 1642 and 1644, shows clearly the spirit of this legislation. At the same time we learn from the many restrictions how difficult it was to adapt the Old Testament law to the needs of this Christian commonwealth. The first records of the Massachusetts Bay Com pany^ show indeed a marked difference. They are less Scriptural. In the royal charter given to the company by Charles I in 1628 the Bible is not mentioned; the aim of the colony is said to be "to win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind and the Christian faith." The governor is bound by his oath "to do his best endeav our to draw on the natives of this country, caUed ' Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, edited by N. B. Shurtleff. Boston, 1853. MASSACHUSETTS CHARTER 157 New England, to the knowledge of the true God and to conserve the planters and others coming hither in the same knowledge and fear of God," or, according to another form of oath, "to act accord ing to the law of God and for the advancement of his Gospel, the laws of this land, and the good of this plantation." But in the laws framed by the colonists them selves, the Bible is constantly appealed to. Pass ing a law against drinking healths, in 1639, the General Court declared this to be a mere useless ceremony and also the occasion of many sins, "which as they ought in aU places and times to be prevented carefuUy, so especially in plantations of churches and commonwealths wherein the least known evUs are not to be tolerated by such as are bound by solemn covenant to walk by the rule of God's word in all their conversation." This statement is a solemn one, and they put it into effect as far as possible. When discussing in the General Court the question whether a certain number of magistrates should be chosen for hfe, a question which had a good deal of importance for the future development of the colony, they decided in favour of it, "for that it was shown from the word of God, etc., that the principal magistrates ought to be for Ufe." Nay, even a question of minor importance raised by 158 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION the Scriptures, whether women must wear veils, was eagerly discussed, both parties relying on Scrip tural proofs. When, in 1646, the General Court found it nec essary to convoke a public assembly of the elders, they did so, protesting, however, that "their lawful power by the word of God to assemble the churches or their messengers upon occasion of counsel" is not to be questioned, and therefore the said assem bly of elders, after having "discussed, disputed, and cleared up by the word of God such questions of church government and discipline ... as they shall think needful and meet," is to report to the General Court, " to the end that the same being found agree able to the word of God, it may receive from the said General Court such approbation as is meet, that the Lord being thus acknowledged by church and state to be our Judge, our Lawgiver, and our King, he may be graciously pleased still to save us as hitherto he has done . . . and so the churches in New England may be Jehovah's and he may be to us a God from generation to generation." It is remarkable that not only the church synod is to judge what is "agreeable to the holy Scriptures" but the civU government takes it as its own duty to make sure that the resolutions of the synod are really in accordance with the Scripture and only then to give JOHN COTTON'S ABSTRACT 159 their approbation. It is the secular power which feels bound to the Word of God and to superintend its strict observance. But in fact state and church are not to be distinguished in this period of New England history. In 1641 the Rev. John Cotton, "teacher of the Boston church," published at London "An Abstract or the Laws of New England as they are now es tablished." The first edition does not mention Cot ton's name; this was added only after his death in a second edition, pubhshed in 1655 by his friend William AspinwaU. This Abstract by John Cotton does not represent, as its title seems to indicate, the actual law; it is a proposed code of laws for New England. But it has influenced to a great extent, if not the legislation of Massachusetts, at any rate the "Laws for Government, published for the use of New Haven Colony" in 1656. The remarkable feature is that Cotton gives marginal references to the Bible for each one of his riUes, for instance: "All magistrates are to be chosen (1) by the free Bur gesses — Deut. 1 : 13; (2) out of the free Burgesses — Deut. 17 : 15; (3) out of the ablest men and most approved amongst them — Ex. 18 : 21 ; (4) out of the rank of Noblemen or Gentlemen amongst them — Eccles. 10 : 17, Jer. 30 : 21," and so on. It is ac cording to the Old Testament rule that the eldest 160 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION son ought to inherit twice as much as his broth ers; it is a true expression of the Old Testament meaning when punishment is extended even to ani mals which kUl a man (cp. Ex. 21 : 28). The spirit of this legislation is almost as severe, not to say cruel, as the spirit of Charlemagne's Saxon law. Twenty-four kinds of trespassing are enumerated which are to be punished with death. It is evi dently against the legislator's own view that an exemption is made for simple fornication, "not to be punished with death according to God's own law," as he adds by way of apology. In the sec ond edition the Bible verses are printed at length in the text itself, the margin being devoted to learned remarks on different translations. The motto which expresses the character of this abstract is taken from Isaiah 33 : 22: "The Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us." The official Laws of Massachusetts, as established in 1658 and printed in 1660, have no Bible refer ences in the margin; but in the restriction of flog ging to the effect that no more than forty stripes should be applied, and in the requirement that sentence of death may be imposed only when two or three witnesses testify to the guilt, the Biblical rules given in Deut. 25 : 5 and 19 : 15 DISCIPLINE AND EDUCATION 161 are seen to be at work. Sabbath-breaking is to be punished with a fine of ten shiUings, the penalty being doubled in the second case. In 1630 a man had been whipped for shooting on the Sabbath. In 1647 the General Court passed a law ordering that each township containing over fifty households should appoint a schoolmaster, and if there were more than a hundred famUies, a grammar-school was to be supported. This care for education is in spired by the desire of securing a true interpreta tion of the Bible, as is proved by the following state ment of motives: "It being the chief project of that old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded by false glosses of saint-seeming deceiv ers; that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the church and commonwealth, therefore ordered," etc. After the college had been founded in 1636, they chose in 1643 for its seal a shield containing three books with Ve-ri-tas written on them, two open and one seen from the back. Oxford has between three crowns one book with seven clasps. This book evidently is the Bible; it has Dominu,s illuminatio 162 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION mea (Psalm 27 : 1) written on it. The seven clasps are said to indicate the seven liberal arts and the three crowns the three modes of phUosophy. It is characteristic of the Puritan spirit that their shield had nothing but three Bibles. The meaning of Veri tas, of course, is not (as it has been taken in recent times) that the aim of all research is truth. The Puritan fathers were not concerned with research; they believed in revelation, and it was by the revelation laid down in the Bible that truth was transmitted to mankind. The three Bibles may or may not be a symbol of the holy Trinity; the script on the front and on the back recalls the book written within and on the back in Rev. 5:1. They meant that the Bible was the fundamental source of aU knowledge. Harvard College was founded to be a training-school for ministers, who should know the truth and its source. Christo et ecclesice became the second motto of the college. That it has developed into a university, containing, besides a college and the divinity school, schools for law, medicine, applied science, etc., is due to a total change of public opinion at a much later time. The Puritan use of the Bible has disappeared, but some thing of the Puritan spirit may stiU be seen in the inscription on the front of the modern building of the Harvard Law School, drawn from Ex. 18 : 20: THE HARVARD SEAL 163 "Thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do." VIII THE BIBLE BECOMES ONCE MORE THE BOOK OF DEVOTION Having made our way through the centuries, we now approach our own time, and at once we remark two facts: Never before had the Bible such a circulation as it has now gained. On the other hand, it seems to have lost most of its influ ence. We must look at these two facts before we raise the question what value the Bible has for the civilisation of to-day. Printing greatly facilitated the circulation of the Bible and, as the result of the Reformation, it had become the book of the Christian famUy. And yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the circulation of the Bible was rather limited. The Bible might be a treasure of the household, but not the personal property of the individual. The first editions, as we have seen, scarcely exceeded one or two hundred copies. In contrast, one of the most assiduous and industrious promoters of Bible read ing. Baron von Canstein, who settled at Halle in 164 BIBLE SOCIETIES 165 A. H. Francke's institute, pubUshed during the last nine years of his life (d. 1719) forty thousand Bibles and one hundred thousand New Testaments. To day the British and Foreign Bible Society issues more than five miUion copies — one million Bibles, one and a half million New Testaments, and two and a half million parts of the Bible — yearly. The progress is due to the invention of the rotary press and other improvements in printing machinery. Besides, the circulation of the Bible has received strong support through the foundation of Bible societies. The story is weU known how Thomas Charles discovered the great desire for copies of the Bible among his Welsh countrymen, how, when he gathered some friends for the purpose of providing them with Bibles, the Baptist preacher Thomas Hughes put in the question, "And why not for other peoples, too?" and how on his motion the Society was started on March 7, 1804, as the British and Foreign Bible Society. It is wonderful to hear of the work done by this Society in the last hun dred years. If one visits the Bible House in Queen Victoria Street in London he gets an impression of the extent and the importance of the work done there. The Society has its presses as weU as its translators aU over the world; it has its agents scattered through aU the nations, and it has be- 166 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION gun to do not only a publishers' business proper but scholarly work as weU. A vast collection of Bible editions from all times and in aU tongues has been gathered, and a valuable catalogue published which is of great importance for bibliography in general. The greatest merit of the British and Foreign Bible Society, however, is the fact that it stimulated the foundation of other great Bible societies. There were some small beginnings in Germany and Switzerland. They suddenly became strong and influential in consequence of the report made concerning the British and Foreign Bible Society by its secretary, Doctor Steinkopf, and Basel and Stuttgart made a new start in 1804 and 1812. After the Napoleonic War in 1814, Mr. Pinkerton travelled through Germany with the result that Bible societies were started at BerUn, Dresden, El- berfeld, and Copenhagen, and in Holland, Norway, and even Russia. In 1808 Philadelphia joined the movement. The American Bible Society has twice canvassed the entire United States, find ing that five hundred thousand families were with out any Bible, and seUing sixty miUion Bibles. It is remarkable that in the beginning Roman Catholics joined the Bible societies enthusiasti cally. A Bible society was founded at Regens- BIBLE CIRCULATION 167 burg in 1805, supported almost exclusively by the Roman Catholic clergy. But as early as 1817, soon after the restoration of the Jesuits by Pope Pius VII, these Bible societies were dissolved; the Roman Catholics were forbidden to be members of the other Bible societies, and in the syllabus of Pius IX, in 1864, the Bible societies are reckoned among the dangers of our time, together with Masonry and other secret societies. By the help of the Bible societies it has become possible that Bibles should really spread among the people. In Germany each boy and girl who goes to school has his own Bible. Bibles and New Testaments are distributed among the soldiers. Most churches make a present of a Bible to each couple who are to be married. There is rather a superabundance of Bibles, which contrasts sharply with the estimation iu wliich the Bible is held. As Spurgeon, in his drastic way, said in one of his stimu lating sermons: "The Bible is in every house, but in many the dust on it is so thick that you might write on it: Damnation." It was a veteran Bible agent who, after thirty years' experience, said: "It is easy to give away dozens of Bibles, but only the one which you sell wUl be valued." The circulation has been greatly enlarged by num bers of translations. We remember that the first 168 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION translations of the Bible were connected with Chris tian missions; they were epoch-making for the lan guages, creating a written alphabet and a national literature. The translations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were of a different character; they were the result of a religious reformation; they represented for the nation the culmination point in language and a remarkable stage in literature. Now again Christian missions revived, and started on a wonderful career all over the world, and they needed to have the Bible translated. The Bible societies did their best to provide as many transla tions as possible. From the eight languages of 600 A. D. and some twenty-four in the sixteenth century the number of languages into which the Bible has been translated has grown up to four hundred, and if we count the dialects separately we have over six hundred. The whole Bible has not been translated into all these languages and dialects, but in every case parts of it, sometimes the New Testament, sometimes only one Gospel, have been translated, and other parts will fol low. It is interesting to hear the translators speak of the difficulties they have to overcome. One sees what influence the Bible has on civilisa tion. Often a language lacks some word which is indispensable for the translator; he has to adapt MORE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS 169 one or coin a new one. There is no idea more frequent in the Bible than the idea of God. The Chinese had no word which exactly corresponded, the usual words indicating either spirits or the sun or something of that sort. The Amshara lacks the idea of righteousness, the Bantu the idea of holiness. If the translator uses as an equivalent the word for separateness, his reader will get rather the notion of something split. Sometimes the translator will pre fer to keep the Greek word, as in the case of baptise, but he must be careful, for batisa in Bantu means "treat some one badly." So the language has to be remodelled in order to become suitable for the pur pose of translating the Bible. The Bible once again exercises a civUising influence on the languages of many peoples. With very few exceptions, such as a Malayan Bible of 1621 and a translation by John Eliot into the Massachusetts Indian dialect pub lished in 1666, most of these translations originated in the nineteenth century and are due to the present missionary energy of Christianity. Here again it is mortifying to see how the Bible is spread among peoples who never had had civihsation before, while among the Christian nations, who, to a large ex tent, owe their civilisation to this very Bible, it is disregarded. Besides the circulation we may also mention the 170 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION enormous amount of mental energy spent on Bible studies by the scholars of this last century. Not only students of theology but also classical and Oriental scholars have joined to study the Bible, to comment upon it, and make everything in it under stood. Specialisation in its inevitable course has caused a separation of Old Testament and New Tes tament studies. In order to understand and explain thoroughly the Old Testament one has to know several Oriental languages and follow up the daily increasing evidence for Oriental history, culture, and religion, whereas the New Testament scholar is bound to study the development of the Greek lan guage and the whole civUisation of the Hellenistic period. Nay, even the Old and the New Testa ment departments are each specialising into the textual and the higher criticism, the theology or the religious history both of the Jewish people and of primitive Christianity. One scholar studies the life of Christ, another makes the apostolic age the topic of his special research; one is commenting upon the Gospels, another upon the letters of Saint Paul. The literature in these different departments has grown so rapidly that it is almost impossible to follow it and to survey the whole field. Never theless, we need a comprehensive view, and a large number of scientific journals, in German, English, RECENT BIBLE STUDIES 171 French, some few also in other languages, are de voted to the summing up of results which have been attained by special research. There are dozens of dictionaries and encyclopedias dealing with Biblical matters either separately or in connection with other material. It is, indeed, wonderful what progress has been and is being made. One is astonished to find that every day brings new problems and new at tempts at solution, and one cannot help admiring the energy and sagacity which are put into these studies. But in spite of this circulation never attained be fore, and in spite of this active work of research, the fact remains indisputable that the Bible has lost its former position. There was a time, in the Middle Ages, when the Bible was at least one foun dation of Christian civUisation, not to say the one foundation (as the men of that period would have said). Then there was a time, during recent cen turies, when the Bible ruled daUy life almost com pletely. Whether we regret the fact or approve of it, it remains a fact, and we have to face it, that those times are gone. The Bible nowadays is one book among a thou sand others. It is stiU revered by the majority of the people, but it is not so much read as it was in the time when it was the one book the people pos- 172 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION sessed. The enormous statistics for Bible circula tion lose in effect if we compare the figures of the book-trade in general, the number of books pub lished every year, and the numbers of editions and copies which some of the notable successes have at tained. The old problem, the Bible or the classics or a combination of both, is revived in a new form. There is a neopaganism in literature, and often it seems incompatible to read both the Bible and modern literature, and most people decide in favour of the latter. Once again the Bible has its rivals very numerous and strong. The Bible in former times was held to be the divinely inspired text-book for all human knowledge. It was in the Bible that one had to look for infor mation not only about God and God's will and everything connected with God, but also about phi losophy, natural science, history, and so on. Now a secularisation of science has taken place by which all these departments of human knowledge are with drawn from the ecclesiastical, theological, and Bib lical authority. The mediaeval view of the world as taken from the Bible, or at least beheved to be taken from it, had been utterly shattered by the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When Co- NEW DISCOVERIES 173 lumbus found the way to America and Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape to India, and later others crossed the Pacific Ocean, the earth could no longer be considered as a round plane, it was proved to be a globe. Copernicus deciphered the mystery of heaven, the movement of the earth aroimd the sun; Galileo Galilei foUowed in the same studies, and Kepler reached the cUmax of proba bUity for the new theory. The church did not f oUow at once. It is remarkable that Copernicus did not win the assent of Luther. The great reformer, crit ical as he was, felt bound in this question to the authority of the Bible, and called the contradicting Copernicus a fool. It is weU known how the Roman church by its inquisition treated Galileo until he withdrew his theory — ^formally, still holding it in his heart (^ pur si muove, "and yet the earth does move"). Johannes Kepler, himself a Protestant and brought up with the fullest reverence for the Bible, found his own way out of the difficulty by distinguishing between the religious and the scien tific aspect of the Bible, an anticipation of the mod em solution. And if one is willing to mamtain the modem scientific view of the universe as it has been estabUshed by the three men just named, and strengthened by their foUowers, he must renounce the Bible as authority in matters of science. It is 174 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION a notable fact that even the Roman church, in 1817, withdrew the verdict against GalUeo's theory and similar theses, thereby admitting that a Christian may safely deny the Biblical assumption that the sun moves round the earth. The Bible in its first chapter tells us that the world was created in six days; geology now speaks of twenty million years and more. The Bible says that man was created on the sixth day by a special act of God; Darwin's theory is that the human race is the result of an evolution which eliminated numbers of former beings and developed ever higher species. The Bible tells of many miracles which can have no other meaning than that in certain cases the law of gravitation and other laws of nature are suspended; the scientist tells us that a law loses all meaning if it admits of exceptions. Of course, there are miracles and miracles: the heaUngs of Jesus we may accept as historical without any hesitation, but the standing still of the sun in Josh. 10 : 12 is nothing but a poetical form of speech, and the floating axe-head is as legendary in the story of Elisha (II Kings 6 : 6) as it would be in any other legend. In former times scholars wrote large volumes on the animals mentioned in the Bible and the flowers and the stones and so on; this they called sacred MODERN SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE 175 zoology and sacred botany and sacred mineralogy. It was not for their amusement: it was a serious study. The Bible was thought to be a text-book for every science, and it seemed to be much more valuable to get information of aU kinds from the Bible than to coUect real animals, flowers, or stones. LUjewise the human body was dealt with in the same scholastic way; it is a comparatively modern thing for physicians to be allowed to study the body and find out its real structure by dissection. Now adays it is universaUy agreed that science and med icine are autonomous and are not dependent on the Bible. The Bible was also the text-book for history, as we have seen. The history of mankind, according to this view, was limited to six thousand years. A great amount of mental energy was spent upon the question of Bibhcal chronology, which, however, proved to be hopelessly confused by the fact that various systems were used by the BibUcal authors themselves. History was the history of the Jew ish people, enriched by some gUmpses of contem poraneous pagan history. Now, the discoveries in Egypt and Babylon and the deciphering of the Ori ental inscriptions have illustrated the fact that the Jewish people was only one among others and one of the weakest of aU these Oriental nations. Assyr- 176 THE BIBLE AND QVILISATION ian kingdoms were established as early as 6000 B. c. The famous code of Hammurabi is much older than the Mosaic law. If we compare them, we find that the former represents a high level of civihsation, while the latter estabhshes rules for nomadic life, a relation similar to that which exists between the Roman law and the national laws of the Ger man tribes: though codified later, they represent, nevertheless, an earlier stage. The occupation of Canaan has come to be viewed in a new light through the exploration of Palestine. The his tory of the kings of Judah and Israel is now seen much more clearly than before to have been deter mined by politics; they are for ever steering between the influence of Egypt and that of Babylon. The accounts given in the Babylonian archives and the Egyptian inscriptions are to be compared with the Biblical account, and some may feel that the com parison is not always in favour of the latter. Even the social and religious position of the prophets is nowadays compared with contemporaneous facts in Greece, Persia, and India. The life of Jesus and the Acts of the Apostles have changed their aspect with the possibUity of literary comparison. It is not so much the literary criticism of the Gospels and the Acts by themselves as it is this facility of compar ison which contributes to shake the authority A NEW HISTORICAL HORIZON 177 of the Bible. We find the same miracles told of Jesus and of the emperor Vespasian; some say ings of Jesus can be compared with utterances of Caesar and Pompey. Many of his words have paral lels in the Jewish literature as well as in the writings of the Stoa. I feel sure that the originality of Jesus wiU but gain by such comparison, but it is obvious that originality must be taken in a higher sense than is often the case; it is not the wording but the meaning attached to it which is new and original. In this way everything which loomed so large when viewed standing by itself in the Bible has been reduced to its natural size; the earth has lost its central position; man is only one in a long line of simUar beings; the history of Israel enters the large field of universal history; and even the per sonahty of Jesus is subject to comparison and analogy. This reduction is the necessary complement of the independence and autonomy attained for human sci ence as the result of a long development. Already in the sixteenth century the humanists claimed for science the right to follow its own mles without being led and limited by the church's authoritative doctrine. They aimed at a civilisation free from ecclesiastical tutelage; going back to the classicism of pre-Christian times, they did not want the guard- 178 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION ianship of the Christian church and its clergy. But the time was not yet ripe for this view. Even the reformers, Luther as weU as Calvin, whUe they broke with the authority of mediaeval scholasticism and of the Roman church, were not prepared to ac knowledge the autonomy of science; they estab lished the primacy of the Bible in an even stricter sense than it had borne in the Middle Ages. The Bible was to rule everything, and it was the Bible in its plain and simple meaning, without the mitiga tions which tradition and allegory had allowed in former times. To be sure, Luther occasionally granted some independence to seciUar science. He was furious when Aristotle was quoted as an au thority in matters of religion, but would himself introduce him as an authority for civil government or for logic. He had a curious proof for this from the Bible itself. It was on the advice of his father- in-law, Jethro, a pagan, that Moses appointed the seventy elders to help him judge the people. Therefore for secular organisation one may take the counsel of the heathen, of the phUosophers. But Luther was not consistent; as we have already seen, against Copernicus he insisted upon the authority of the Bible. He did not see that it was a question of astronomy without any relation to religion. In the seventeenth century the phUosophers began to SLOW PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 179 claim independence for the human reason, and soon they estabhshed reason as the highest authority, even in religious matters. It is very interesting to see the effect of this claim at the beginning. Even the most advanced liberals were so convinced of the infallible authority of the Bible that they tried by all means at their disposal to reconcUe with the con tents of the Bible the principles which the rational philosophy of Descartes or Spinoza had established. They started a new method of interpretation in order to make the Bible agree with reason. A long time had to pass before it became obvious to aU com petent minds that the Bible and reason were not to be reconciled by means of a makeshift harmony. It was only in the nineteenth century that the view forced itself upon all scholars that the Bible has to be understood in an historical way; that it does not give inspired information upon natural science and history, its revelation dealing with God and religion only. By recent discoveries it is proved that the crea tion story in Gen. 1 is by no means a unique and original one; there is something simUar in the Baby lonian mythology; it may have been taken from there. The same holds true regarding the story of the deluge and others. So there is no reason for claiming for these stories the authority of revealed 180 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION science; the BibUcal author simply shares the ideas of his time. We are not bound to the scientific no tions of a period two thousand years before Christ and four thousand years before our own time. And yet there is something unique in this creation story, as told in Gen. 1, for which one looks in vain in all the alleged paraUels in Babylonian and other religions; it is the idea of the one God Almighty, who by his supreme will creates heaven and earth. That is the revelation conveyed to mankind by this chapter. We must not trouble about the specific descrip tion of creation; that belongs to the historical form. We cling with all our heart to the won derful idea of the one creating God, and we realise that here revelation is given to us. It is only by comparison that the real importance of a thing comes out. On a map of America, made on a small scale, the distances may seem short; comparing a map of Europe on the same scale one realises how long they are in fact. We are always in danger of taking some accidental feature for the main point. The frame does not make the worth of the painting. As the Bible has lost its exclusive authority in the domain of science, so in the fine arts it has ceased to be the single source of inspiration. Since the Renaissance motifs taken from ancient mythology SECULARISATION OF ART 181 and poetry have come into competition with the BibUcal scenes; the Dutch school cultivated the il lustration of the life of the people and presented even the sacred story in this fashion — ^the mystery of sacredness has gone; it is purely human, not to say profane. The French liked landscapes and used Bib lical subjects only as accessories. Pictures of bat tles, triumphs, apotheoses filled the galleries. Art to-day is anything but BibUcal; modern painters have, most of them, no sense for sacred art. I ven ture to think they do better to keep away from it. For if a modern painter, when trying to Ulustrate the parable of the prodigal son in a triptychon, puts in the large middle field the man feeding the swine, giving only the left-hand corner to the return to the father, he has proved himself incapable of a religious understanding of the story, however fin ished a work of art his painting may be. By aU this process of secularisation the Bible has been drawn back from general civilisation and re stricted to its own proper domain, religion. We must not insist on the fact that even here the Bible seems to have lost somewhat of its infallible authority. It is in the domain of theology as distinct from re ligion that this holds true. Strange as it may seem, it is a fact that the Bible is no more the text-book of theology. Theology, of course, can never do 182 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION without the Bible, but here also the Bible is the source of historical information, not the authorita tive proof for doctrine. Already in the period when the orthodox Protestants vied with one another in asserting the inspiration of the Bible in the boldest terms and relied on the Bible for answers to every question, Samuel Werenfels (d. 1740), a professor at Basel, wrote the distich: " Hic Iiber est in quo quserit sua dogmata quisque, Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua." " This is the book where each man seeketh his own ideas. In it accordingly each findeth his own beliefs." It was the support given by the Bible to every doc trine and every theory which made critical people doubt the propriety of proving truth by adducing proof-texts; and this not only for dogmatical ques tions but also for moral ones. It is well known how both parties in the controversy over slavery appealed to the authority of the Bible, and it would be diffi cult to say which party found the stronger support in the letter of the text. The same holds true regarding other questions of modern life; one can argue from the Bible pro and con regarding the use of wme. The Bible has been adduced in the question of polygamy. It can be quoted on THE BIBLE PRO AND CON 183 both sides with reference to woman suffrage. It is indicative of the present attitude toward the Bible that this is so seldom done. The use of the Bible for the settling of modern social problems has brought upon many Christian minds a pitiful confusion. It has proved impossible to deduce from the Bible, even from the teaching of Jesus, rules for modern life. Times have changed and the conditions of life have altered. All this prepared the way for the historical view of the Bible. Then the period of higher criticism began. It was to many a hard lesson; but we had to learn it. It was started — curious to say — ^by Roman Catholic scholars in France. Having the authority of the church behind them, they felt more free as regards the Bible than the Protestants did. Richard Simon made it evident that the transmis sion of the Bible excludes a mechanical view of in spiration. Astruc, a doctor, the physician of Louis XIV, discovered that in the Pentateuch two differ ent sources were used. During the eighteenth cen tury the theories of literary criticism were applied to aU the books of the Old and the New Testament, and the scholarship of the nineteenth century has taken up the task, perfected the method, and reached in some questions a general agreement. To-day the principles of Uterary criticism in their appli- 184 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION cation to the Bible are generaUy acknowledged. The books of the Bible are like other books; they are not to be treated as divine Scriptures but as human writings. One has to inquire in each in stance about the author, his methods of writing, the sources of his information, his tendencies, and so on. Criticism did not stop here; it overstepped the boundaries of purely literary criticism; it became historical criticism, too. The historicity of the facts reported in the Bible was called in question; recently the historicity of Jesus has been denied; and where his existence was admitted, still his teaching was criticised. Some people found it too ascetic, to others it was purely eschatological; in either case It could not be adapted to our own time. So even in its central points the Bible seemed to be attacked and its authority shaken. Instead of being restricted to the domain of religion, the Bible seemed to be denied even to the uses of devotion. But the present situation is not so desperate for the pious Bible reader as it looks. We have once more to face the two facts: the circulation of the Bible has grown rapidly — im mensely — and the estimation of the Bible has been reduced in nearly every field. Many a pious Chris tian, while rejoicing in the first fact, is greatly troub- PRESENT DIFFICULTIES 185 led by the second. Has the Bible ceased to be au thoritative? Has it lost its infalhbility? If the Bible is not true from cover to cover, then it seems to be not trustworthy at aU. We had better put it aside and leave it to deserved oblivion. That is an argument frequently brought forward nowadays, both by people who disbeUeve in the authority of the Bible and the truth of the Christian religion and by those who eagerly try to assert the old authority of the Bible as the inspired Word of God which re veals everything. They argue, and apparently not without plausibility, that if you destroy the au thority of the Bible at any point, it is lost altogether; there is no limit to the destructive energy of our time. Therefore do not touch this question; leave the Bible as it stands — ^the sacred book, undisturbed by pro fane hands. It is the book by which our fathers were taught. Why should we disbelieve in it? Both these positions seem to be logically consistent : every thing or nothing; infallible or no authority. But, in fact, the truth is never on one side. Hard as it may sound to our phUosophers, the truth is very seldom logical. What seems to be consis tency is, in fact, a confusion of two different aspects which ought to be kept separate. The Bible is not a text-book for any science — nay, not even for the science of theology. It is the book for Christian 186 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION devotion. This was its original intention, and I venture to think that it is not a loss but a gain if the Bible is once more applied to its proper purpose. As we have seen in the first chapter, the Bible proved itself to be an inexhaustible source of com fort and strength, of exhortation and inspiration to the Christians of the first period. They would not leave this book for any consideration — ^nay, they would even die for it. And so whenever the Bible was read by a pious Christian a new stream of life flowed through him and through the church. And this new life has always caused a strong desire for the Bible. There is a reciprocal influence between Bible and piety; the Bible creates piety, and piety demands the Bible. This is the experience of nine teen centuries; it is impossible that the twentieth century should alter it. As long as a pious Christian lives on earth, the Bible wUl exercise its influence upon him, and as long as there is such thing as the Bible there will be Christians. That is sure! It is not always easy to measure this private influence of the Bible on individual piety and devotion. People who read the Bible for edification usually do not talk much about it. In biographies it is not mentioned, either because the biographer took it for granted or because he did not care for it himself. INFLUENCE ON INDIVIDUALS 187 Seldom do we have an opportunity, like the one given in Bismarck's letters to his wife, where he mentions frequently what Psalm or passage of the Bible he read before going to bed and discusses some points which have struck him. It is impossible to say how many people read the Bible privately for their own edification. Seeing how few know the Bible thoroughly, we might suppose that very few read it, but it is said that Bible reading among the boys in the English pubhc schools is again increasing. And I feel sure that the time must come, and wUl come, when private reading of the Bible wiU again be a common practice among Chris tians. But the Bible's task is not only to sustain indi vidual piety; it has a second duty to perform. Christianity is not a mere aggregation of Christian individuals but a community — a church, if you wiU. It is necessary for any community to have a standard, for any church to have a creed. It is the Bible which has to supply this. Herein Ues the danger of aberration, as we have seen in the second and the foUowing chapters. The history of the church and of its doctrine gives ample proof of the fact that, taking the Bible as a riUe for the church's dogma, Christianity not only missed the right path for the development of doctrine, but even lost the 188 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION right use of the Bible. It is only by aiming at an historical orientation that the church can gain from the Bible the right direction for the setting forth of its doctrine. The doctrine of the church never can be, and never has been, identical with the doctrine of the Bible, because it is impossible to stop the development of history; besides, there are as many doctrines in the Bible itself as men who wrote the several books of the Bible, or even more. Saint Paul has not one doctrine of the atonement but half a dozen theories about it. The church has to formulate its own doctrine consistently with the Bible; that means a doctrine which keeps to the main line of religious development as testified to by the Bible; or, rather, to do justice to the variety of Biblical doctrines, permits a modern adaptation of the several modes in which religious experience is expressed. This seems vague, but it is the path which Christianity is bound to follow; and it prom ises success. The modern view is that it is the religious ex perience of men, as testified to in the Bible, from which both the individual and the church take their start. But Christians believe that through this hu man experience God himself is revealing his grace. Therefore it is stiU, as our fathers said, God's Word. And God wUl teach the church to formulate SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE CHURCH 189 the common experience by the help of his Word. That is the present position. But now what of the influence of the Bible on civilisation? Has it gone? It seems under present conditions reduced to very smaU proportions, if not made impossible altogether. I am prepared, however, to declare that just the opposite is true. The iofluence of the Bible on civihsation still con tinues, and it wiU grow greater the more the Bible is used in the proper way, as an influence not on outward form but in inward inspiration. The results of the influence exerted by the Bible in former centuries, when it was an outward rule of life, still go on. We cannot imagine what would have become of mankind if there had been no Bible. We cannot drop the previous history out of our life. We stiU speak the language which was modelled by our Bible; we still quote many proverbs which orig inate in the Bible, even without knowing that they come from the Bible. Our artists wiU go on choos ing motifs from the Bible. The civUised nations wiU never give up Sunday, although not keeping it as a Sabbath. They wiU continue to aim at a fuller measure of legal and social equality, convinced as many may be that it is impossible to create an out ward equality among men as long as there is no 190 THE BIBLE AND CIVILISATION equal sense of responsibility and duty in all mem bers of the nation. The influence of the Bible in its present position as the book of devotion Is of supreme impor tance for civilisation. Progress in civilisation is guaranteed not by constitution nor by law but only by the spirit which rules the individual and through the individual the community. We need strong characters who know the great truth of self-sacrifice. Such characters are formed by the inward inspira tion given by devotional reading of the Bible. Making men devout, it makes them strong and in fluential in the common effort to promote civUisa tion by removing everything which is contrary to the welfare of others. That is the most important influence which the Bible can have; and that in fluence it still exerts and ever will exert on civi lisation. YALE UNIVERSITY LIBHARY 3 9002 05047 3033 J". r--. ^*rii