EBROSSUBRARY

DI

"Igivst&eft vQookt
fan the founding of a CoUegt in. this Colony'

•YAJLE-VMVEissinnr-

j9oy

THE BROSS LIBRARY
volume n

THE BROSS LECTURES • • 190 k
THE BIBLE
ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE

SEVEN LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE
LAKE FOREST COLLEGE
ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE
WILLIAM BEOSS
BY THE REVEREND
MARCUS DODS, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF EXEGETICAL THEOLOGY
IN NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK .... 1905

COFTEIGHT, 1905, BY
THE TRUSTEES OP LAKE FOREST UNIVEESITT.
Published February, 1905

Nnrtoooo ffitzs
3. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

THESE LECTURES
3re (iratefwllg JBtfctcateti
TO
THE PRESIDENT AND PROFESSORS OF
LAKE FOREST COLLEGE
AND TO THE OTHER FRIENDS THERE
WHOSE HOSPITALITY AND KINDLINESS
MADE THEIR DELIVERY
AN UNUSUAL PLEASURE
AND A LASTING MEMORY
TO
THE AUTHOR

THE BROSS FOUNDATION
In 1879, the late William Bross of Chicago,
lieutenant-governor of Illinois in 1866-70, de
siring to make some memorial of his son,
Nathaniel Bross, who had died in 1856, entered
into an agreement with the " Trustees of Lake
Forest University," whereby there was finally
transferred to the said Trustees the sum of
forty thousand dollars, the income of which
was to accumulate in perpetuity for successive
periods of ten years, at compound interest, the
accumulations of one decade to be spent in the
following decade, for the purpose of stimulating
the production of the best books or treatises
" on the connection, relation, and mutual bearing
of any practical science, or the history of our
race, or the facts in any department of knowledge,
with and upon the Christian Religion."
In his deed of gift the founder had in view
" the religion of the Bible, composed of the Old
and New Testaments of our Lord and Saviour,
Jesus Christ, as commonly received in the Pres
byterian and other evangelical churches." His ob
ject was " to call out the best efforts of the highest
talent and the ripest scholarship of the world, to
vii

viii The Bross Foundation
illustrate from science, or any department of
knowledge, and to demonstrate, the divine origin
and authority of the Christian Scriptures; and,
further, to show how both Science and Revelation
coincide, and to prove the existence, the provi
dence, or any or all of the attributes of the one
living and true God, infinite, eternal, and un
changeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness,
justice, goodness, and truth."
At the close of the Trust Agreement, the
donor expressed the hope that, by means of this
fund, the various authors might, " every ten
years, post up the science of the world and show
how it illustrates the truth of the Bible, and the
existence of God," and that thereby " the gospel
of our blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ, and the glo
ries of His sacrifice and plan of salvation" might
be preached "to the end of time."
The gift thus contemplated in the original
agreement of 1879 was finally consummated
in 1890. The first decade of the accumula
tions of interest having closed in 1900, the
Trustees of the Bross Fund began at that time
the administration of this important trust.
The Trust Agreement prescribed two methods
by which the production of books of the above-
mentioned character was to be stimulated : —
1. One or more premiums or prizes were to
be offered during each decade, the competition

The Bross Foundation ix
for which was to be thrown open to " the scien
tific men, the Christian philosophers and histo
rians of all nations."
Accordingly, a prize of six thousand dollars
has been offered for the best book fulfilling
any of the purposes described in the foregoing
extracts from the Trust Agreement, the com
peting manuscripts to be presented on or be
fore June 1, 1905; for full particulars as to
this prize, application should be made to the
undersigned. Once in every fifty (or thirty years, accord
ing as the Trustees of the fund may decide at
the time) the entire amount of simple interest
accumulated during the previous decade is to
be offered as a single premium or prize for a
similar competition.
2. The Trustees of the Bross Fund were also
empowered from time to time to select and ap
point particular scholars, who should prepare
books, upon some theme within the terms of
the Trust Agreement, that would " illustrate "
or " demonstrate " or commend the Christian
Religion, or any phase of it, to the times' in
which we live.
Ordinarily, it is proposed that the writers of
the books thus prepared should be asked to
deliver the substance of such books in the form
of lectures before Lake Forest College, and any

x The Bross Foundation
of the general public who may desire to attend
them, such courses to be known as the Bross
Lectures. The Trust Agreement further provides for
the publication, by the Trustees of the Bross
Fund, of the books prepared under either of
the two methods above described.
Two writers have already been specially ap
pointed in pursuance of the second method : —
The first was the Reverend President Francis
Landey Patton, D.D., LL.D., of the Prince
ton Theological Seminary, who, in May, 1903,
delivered a course of five lectures before Lake
Forest College, on "Obligatory Morality."
These lectures are now the property of the
Trustees of the Bross Fund, and will be pub
lished in due season after the author has been
given the opportunity to revise and expand
them. The second of the writers thus specially
appointed was the Reverend Professor Marcus
Dods, D.D., of New College, Edinburgh, who,
in May, 1904, delivered a course of lectures
before Lake Forest College, on " The Bible :
Its Origin and Nature." These lectures are
embodied in the present volume.
As a token of the donor's affectionate remem
brance of his "friend and teacher," the late
Mark Hopkins, the distinguished President of

The Bross Foundation xi
Williams College, and as recording his own
appreciation of the notable work done by Presi
dent Hopkins in commending the Christian
Religion to his own day and generation, the
founder of the Bross Fund further directed its
trustees to acquire the book written by Dr.
Hopkins on "The Evidences of Christianity,"
and to publish the same as "Number one of
the series of books to be prepared under the
arrangement " provided for by the Bross Foun
dation. This book has already been purchased
from the executors of President Hopkins' estate,
and will be published, at an early date, as Vol
ume I of the Bross Library. Dr. Dods' lectures
are being published, therefore, as Volume II.
RICHARD D. HARLAN,
President of Lake Forest College.
Lake Forest, Illinois,
Christmas, 1904.

CONTENTS paob
L The Bible and Othek Sacbed Books . 1
EL The Canon of Scripture .... 29
III. Revelation ....... 61
IV. Inspiration .......99
V. Infallibility  131
vX The Trustworthiness of the Gospels . 165
VLL The Miraculous Element in the Gos
pels  211

THE BIBLE AND OTHER SACRED
BOOKS

THE BIBLE AND OTHER SACRED
BOOKS
The designation by which Muhammad in Sacred
the Quran usually distinguishes Christians is p^uiiar^
"the people of the book." This, however, is Christian
ity.
merely an illustration of the prophet's limited
horizon. For, in point of fact, the possession
of sacred scriptures was not the.n and is not
now a distinctive peculiarity of Christianity.
Religions now extinct, and even in Muhammad's
time obsolete, such as the ancient Egyptian and
Babylonian, had their sacred writings. So have
the great religions which now share with Chris
tianity the adhesion of mankind, — Zoroastri-
anism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism,
and Muhammadanism itself.
Singularly enough it was the most literary No sacred
of ancient races which possessed no sacred Q^ceor
writings. Among the Greeks their place was Bome-
filled by oracular responses, the prognostica
tions of augurs, and omens of various kinds ;
3

4 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
while the traditions regarding their gods and
the most authoritative religious and ethical
ideas were transmitted in Homer, Plato, and
the great Tragedians. In Rome, the place left
vacant by the absence of authoritative scrip
tures was filled, as the nation became sensible
of religious cravings, by the didactic philosophy
and preaching of the later Stoics. And although
the Greek philosophers and tragedians and the
Roman Stoics laid no claim to inspiration or
final authority, they yet wrote on an extraordi
narily high level of feeling and of thought, and
they gave utterance to much that has entered
into and become a permanent element in the
religious life of modern Europe. Teachings of
the deepest kind regarding the moral order of
the world and the relation of man to things
unseen abound in their writings, which are still
read with admiration and with profit. Yet
those remarkable utterances cannot be classed
as sacred books.
Sacred The great Eastern religions, however, are
East. B ric-k iQ sacre(I scriptures. Until a few years
ago all these, with the exception of the Quran,
were locked up in little-known languages, —
Zend, Sanskrit, Cingalese, Chinese. Recently,
however, they have been rapidly made accessi
ble to the English-reading public, especially in

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 5
the great series of " The Sacred Books of the
East," initiated and edited by the late Professor
Max Muller, and already numbering about fifty
volumes. It has become the fashion in certain quarters Character
to magnify these books and to leave it to be ZokT
inferred that there is little to choose between
them and our Bible. It might be enough in
correction of this phase of religious dilettantism
to cite the words of Max Miiller's editorial
preface to the series : " I confess," he says, " it
has been for many years a problem to me, aye,
and to a great extent is so still, how the Sacred
Books of the East should, by the side of so
much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful,
and true, contain so much that is not only un
meaning, artificial, and silly, but even hideous
and repellent." Elsewhere he says of the
Brahmanas : " These works deserve to be
studied as the physician studies the twaddle of
idiots and the ravings of madmen. They will
disclose to a thoughtful eye the ruins of faded
grandeur; the memories of noble aspirations.
But let us only try to translate these works
into our own language, and we shall feel aston
ished that human language and human thought
should ever have been used for such purposes."
It would indeed be difficult to name any

6 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
books which more seriously try the patience of
the reader. We may doggedly plough through
them to gain some insight into the state of
mind of those who once found or still find in
them their highest teaching, but no one who
has been brought up in Christian ideas and
modern thought need expect to find in them
religious stimulus or useful knowledge. At
the same time it is not to be denied, but rather
thankfully acknowledged, that in some of them
ethical teaching of a very high and pure strain
is to be found. Singularly enough this is
Confucian especially true of ,the Confucian and Buddhist
books, which can only by courtesy be called
sacred books. For Confucius was a professed
agnostic. " To give one's self earnestly to the
duties due to man, and while respecting spirit
ual beings, to keep aloof from them " — this, in
his own words, describes his normal attitude.
He would never commit himself either to belief
or disbelief of the spiritual world. He merely
declined to concern himself about matters which
were not of earth. His was a dry, prosaic,
practical mind. He was the typical Chinaman.
But if the Confucian books give us little reli
gion, they promulgate a singularly pure moral
ity. When one of his pupils, weary of maxims
and rules, said to Confucius, " Is there not one

and Bud
dhist Ethics.

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 7
word which may serve as a rule of practice for
the whole of life ? " the great teacher replied,
" Is not Reciprocity such a word ? What you
don't want done to yourself do not to others."
This was not a mere accidental hit or happy
thought. It was this same idea which per
vaded his teaching, and which he again formu
lated in the ever-memorable expression, as
striking as any ethical truth uttered by Western
philosophy, "Benevolence is Man." This doc
trine of his was taken up by a contemporary
philosopher, Mih-Teih, who demonstrated in an
elaborate ethical treatise that universal mutual
love is the root of all virtue and the cure of all
social evil.
In the Buddhist scriptures also there is much Buddhist
,,.,,,. j. , m, eradication
ethical teaching 01 great value. Ihe supe- 0f self-will.
riority of purity and love to all ceremonial
observances has never been more explicitly
or forcibly proclaimed. Never has the eradi
cation of self-will, self-assertion, self-pleasing,
been more stringently demanded. " Let a man
overcome evil by good ; let him overcome the
greedy by liberality, the liar by truth. For
hatred does not cease by hatred at any time ;
hatred ceases by love." Views and principles
of life calculated to make a lasting impression,
a code of morals sufficient to guide men to

8 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
righteousness, might easily be gathered from
the Buddhist scriptures. Yet Buddhism has
only to a very small extent cleansed society.
Failure of The failure of Buddhism is probably due to
u ism. .£g agnostic attitude toward God and its dis
belief in a future life. It is a system of de
spair, and of despair because of its materialism.
Buddha started with a deep impression of the
emptiness, sadness, and corruption of human
life. The sole escape he saw was to detach
one's self to the utmost from life. He was the
father of the Stoic and the Monk. To subdue
all desire was to become superior to life ; and
perfected triumph was to enter Nirvana, a state
of passionless, apathetic, unmoved existence or
non-existence. This was a view of life he
could not possibly have taken had he believed
in God, and his system fails because deeper
even than the thirst for righteousness is the
thirst for God. Without God, and the hope
which union with God begets, morality appar
ently cannot maintain itself among men. This
is the lesson which Buddhism writes in legible
characters across human history.
Christianity If we have believed that the chief distinction
Ethics. n between the Bible and other sacred books lies
in the contents of their moral teaching, our
faith may receive a shock when we find how

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 9
much of what is true and high those books con
tain. Hence the reluctance of some to admit
the facts. Instead of rejoicing to learn that
more of our fellow-men than we had supposed
have striven after purity and righteousness,
we are actually disappointed and disconcerted.
Mr. Kinglake, in his stirring history, our Eng
lish " Iliad," has admirably shown that the un
usual bloodshed at the battle of Inkerman was
in great measure due to the false issue on which
for part of the day the battle was fought. The
Sand Bag Battery, for the possession of which
hundreds of brave men fell, was utterly worth
less when won, and was not the key of the
position ; and yet it was round it that hour
after hour the main tide of battle was drawn.
Similarly it is only through a complete, and in
many cases disastrous misapprehension that the
contest between the Bible and rival books can be
drawn to a position of second-rate importance.
That men should be able to analyze their own
moral nature seems as likely as that they should
be able to anatomize the human body and dis
cover the purpose and uses and treatment of its
organs. At all events, it is a mistake to treat
Christianity or the Bible as if it were mainly a
system of morals, and to lay the stress of the
argument in its favor on its distinct superiority

10 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
in moral teaching ; because, even though this
position be gained, we do not thereby command
the whole field. What we seek in our religion,
and what those admirable moral teachers wholly
fail to give us, is the knowledge of God and the
establishment of right relations with Him. It
is this which gives us at once a moral criterion
and a moral dynamic. And it is here the supe
riority of the Bible appears. We find there the
proclamation of God's Fatherhood and the res
toration of right relations at once with Him and
with our fellow-men.
Non-Chris- Passing from the merely ethical sacred books
tian sacred , , -, t-t. r ±. ti_.lt--
books not t° those which protess to accomplish this very
enlighten- thing and restore right relations with God, it
must be owned that they are intensely dis
appointing. Without entering into detail, it
may be said generally that these books had
the misfortune to be written while religion
was in its legal and ceremonial stage. The
kind of religion which they represent is rudi
mentary and has been outgrown by those races
which, mainly through the enlightening power
of Christianity, have come to believe only in
a religion which is inward and spiritual. It is
this chiefly which makes these books dead to
us and the heaviest of reading. Ceremonial,
often of a revolting kind ; magic, the efficacy

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 11
of repeating certain forms of words, meet us
at every step.
Better things might have been expected of Tlie Qurm
the Quran, written as it was nearly six centu
ries after the New Testament. But the Quran
is a dull book. Unlike the other sacred books,
it is all the work of one man, and of a man
whose genius for religion was concentrated on
one point. Like our own Bishop Butler, he be
lieved that the whole of religion was comprised
in submission to the Divine will, and that which
gave him importance was the extraordinary
energy with which he propagated the idea of
one sovereign Ruler. With rare exception the
Suras of the Quran are characterized rather by
force than by felicity of expression : " Verily,
those who disbelieve in our signs we will broil
them with fire ; whenever their skins are well
done, then we will change them for other skins,
that they may taste the torment." In the later
deliverances it is painfully apparent that Mu
hammad invented supposed revelations to suit
his own convenience and minister to his own
pleasures. But its radical or capital condemnation is Radical
VlCS Of tJhQ
that it propounds an intensely legal religion. Quran_
It tells men their duty and enforces it by threats
and promises. It finds a sphere among primi-

12 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Nature of
the Bible.

Is a written
canon legiti
mate in
Christian
ity f

tive peoples and is accepted, as God's word by
over a hundred millions of our race. But like
police regulations, it is effective only within a
certain circumference, and commits the radical
error of proposing to rectify the conduct, not
the character. That religion which makes no
provision for transforming ourselves and impart
ing to us a spirit which will express itself in
righteousness is not the ultimate religion. In
a word, Muhammadanism is two thousand years
out of date. Whatever help it may furnish to
men at a certain stage of civilization, it can fur
nish none to any one who understands Chris
tianity. The essential differences between the Bible
and other sacred books will best be understood
by a consideration of the actual nature of the
former ; and to this we now proceed.
But no sooner do we set our Bible before us
as an object of inquiry than certain preliminary
questions arise. These cannot be fully ex
amined now, but one or two of them may at
any rate be alluded to. First, it may be ques
tioned whether a sacred and authoritative
written canon is a legitimate or necessary ac
companiment of a purely spiritual religion. A
written covenant was of the very essence of the
Old Testament dispensation, but no provision

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 13
was expressly made by the mediator of the New
Covenant for engrossing its terms in a docu-
nent. It may be alleged that it is incongruous
that a spiritual religion should be subjected
to an outward written rule. The Society of
Friends maintains that because the Scriptures
"are only a declaration of the Fountain, and
not the Fountain itself, therefore they are not
to be esteemed the principal ground of all truth
and knowledge, nor yet the adequate primary
rule of faith and manners." That is to say, the
Scriptures are a secondary rule, subordinate to
the Spirit. The Church of Rome, too, assigns
a first place to the Spirit speaking through
Christ's Vicar on earth. Both the Society of
Friends and the Church of Rome respond to
the claim made by the Christian heart that the
Church and the individual should enjoy the
guidance of the living Lord and should not be
referred back to the first century for all its
light and inspiration. And unquestionably if
the Bible tends to stifle this cry for a living God
and prompts us to lean more on the written
letter than on the present and active personality
of Christ's Spirit, it does harm.
But there is really no incompatibility between No incom-
the written word and the living Spirit. The ^en Bible
figure of Christ is once for all presented in the and Spirit.

14 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
Gospels, and in the Epistles the relation of
the soul to Him is once for all in essentials
declared ; and these are the means used by the
Spirit for bringing men into true fellowship
with Christ and filling them with the light
which accompanies faithful knowledge of Him.
The living Spirit of God is ever the Spirit of
Christ.
Origin of Again, we no sooner ask ourselves what the
Bible is, than we are led to consider its origin.
How did those various books come to be written?
Putting ourselves back into the days when as
yet there was no written record of the past,
with what object in view did the earliest writer
commence his work? Probably some early
prophet, Amos or Hosea, so stirred the hearts
of the people that his words were transcribed,
though with little idea that they were to ring
in the ears of men for nearly three thousand
years. Even before the eighth century there
may have been records of important events and
legendary accounts of remote transactions. The
building up of the books which form our Scrip
tures, their individual histories and separate
fortunes, and their eventual collection to form
our Canon, form an extremely interesting sub
ject of investigation, but to pursue it here would
take us too far aside from the particular line

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 15
we desire to follow ; and, besides, full informa
tion on these points is easily accessible.
Turning, then, to the Bible itself, we are first The word
of all struck with the fact that it is not one
book but many — thirty-nine in the Old Testa
ment, twenty-seven in the New. The very
name " Bible " indicates this plurality, because
it represents the Biblia of ecclesiastical Latin.
This was the transliteration of the Greek ra
BtBXCa, but it was used not only as a plural
(Biblia, -orum) but as a singular (Biblia, -ae).
Hence it has passed into English as a singular,1
which only exhibits one side of the Bible. The
Greek word to fiiBXiov or 97 /3('yS\o?, a book, was
derived from the material on which it was writ
ten after the Clay period had passed away. This
material was the Byblus or Papyrus, an Egyp
tian reed out of which the first paper was made.
At an early date, the expression at BCBXot or
tci, fiiBXia was used by the Jews to denote the
books by preeminence, the sacred writings. At
first, some explanatory designation was added,
as in 1 Mace. xii. 9, "the holy books" (ra
BtBXla ra ayia'). In Dan. ix. 2, we find iv Tats
/Si/SXot? used of Jeremiah's writings; and in
1 Nestle has shown (in Exp. Times, Sept., 1904) that
Biblia first appears in English catalogues in the thirteenth
century, Becker's earlier example being wrongly dated.

16 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
the Prologue to the Wisdom of Sirach there
occurs the classification, " the law, the prophets,
and the other hereditary books " (t5>v aXXmv
irarpCav BtBXtmv). But the first clear use of
to, yStySXia without qualifying addition to de
note the Bible or the Scriptures is found in
the Pseudo-Clement (XIV. 2). Subsequently
the usage became common, and how clearly the
Patristic and Mediaeval writers kept in view the
plurality of books forming our Bible, may be
gathered from their commonly speaking of it
as the "Divine Library" (Bibliotheca Divina).
What bond What, then, is the bond which ties these
^bolks? B books together? What is the element which
forms the common distinction, at once separat
ing them from other books and uniting them in
one whole? It is obvious that alongside of the
vast differences existing between these books in
date, authorship, form, and style, there must
be some common element powerful enough to
counterbalance and overcome these differences
and bring the books together in one solid body.
Within this collection we find traditions dimly
emerging out of the mists that obscure the ear
liest prehistoric times ; we find histories based
on documents which would seem to have long
since passed out of existence, genealogies which
aim at connecting later generations with the

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 17
progenitors of the race, biographies which im
mortalize their heroes in a form more monu
mental than brass ; songs of victory and of love,
hymns wrung from souls subjected to every
species of human distress and agony, and psalms
which serve for every age to utter its praise,
and its penitence, and its thirst for the living
God ; the sayings of the worldly wise, and the
inspired warnings, denunciations, and encour
agements of the prophets of God; we have
drama and essay, the simple gospel story, the
earliest annals of the Church, and the letters of
friendship and counsel that passed from the
founders to their churches. Had the purpose
been to present to our view the various literary
forms employed by the Hebrews during the
whole of their history in. their own land, a more
miscellaneous collection could not have been
brought together. If you bound into one vol
ume Knox's " History of the Reformation," the
" Olney Hymns," Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Prog
ress," Savonarola's " Sermons," the " Sayings of
Samuel Johnson," Cowper's "Letters," "Ham
let," you would not have a volume more mis
cellaneous in form than the Bible.
Yet the unity of the whole is unmistakable. The unity
Individuals may feel that this or that part is aWe
incongruous with the rest ; some may object to

18 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
the presence of the Song of Songs, some would
eject Ecclesiastes or Second Peter ; but on the
whole the unity of Scripture has been universally
recognized. Moreover, this unity is obviously
not designed and artificial; it is not even con
scious ; the writers of the several parts had no
intention to contribute nor any idea that they
were contributing to one whole. In uttering
their private confessions and their individual
longings the authors of the Psalms had no idea
they were contributing to an immortal liturgy.
When the worn-out artist relieved his feelings
by penning Ecclesiastes it was scarcely a place
in the Canon he expected; and when Paul
seized the opportunity of a casual post to Asia
Minor and sent a letter to some of his churches
there, he certainly did not anticipate that, two
thousand years after, his expressions would be
reckoned infallible. And yet when these vari
ous writings are drawn together, their unity
becomes apparent. In what does it consist?
Not the en- At first sight one is apt to fancy that the
tire litera- ., « 0 . , . ..
ture of a unity of scripture arises from the circumstance
race- that in the Bible we have the entire extant
literature of a race. But this at once appears to
be a superficial view. Even the earliest writers
in the collection depend on documents which
were not received into the sacred archives; and

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 19
the later writers had as their contemporaries
or successors many authors whose works are
partly lost and partly extant, but which have
been carefully excluded from the Canon. The
works of Philo were numerous, were devoted
to sacred subjects, were widely read, were rich
in devout suggestions and of great influence;
yet no one seems to have dreamt of admitting
them into the Canon. In like manner the claims
of Josephus were entirely neglected. In regard
to the New Testament the same holds good.
Our Bible, then, was not formed on the com
modious principle of embracing all Hebrew
literature. The Canon is not a carpet-bag
canon. It is an interesting fact, a fact with its
own significance, that all the writers represented
in our Bible were, with one exception, Jews.
But this is not the reason why their writings,
when brought together, are found to form one
whole. Again, it might be thought that the element Not their
which these writings possess in common and
which brings them together is the devout or
godly tone in which they are written. Dissim
ilar in the subjects treated, the point of view
and the tone are the same. Whether we read a
hymn, or a narrative of the exploits of some old
hero, or the cynical observations of one who

20 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
from an actor in life has become a spectator and
critic, or predictions of political revolutions, or
the annals of the early kings of Israel and Judah,
we find in all the same reference to God, the
same loyalty to Him, the same confident expec
tation that He will one day judge the world in
righteousness. However various the subjects,
however remote the dates, however differently
conditioned the authorship, there is everywhere
the same faith breathing through the writing.
The story of creation is told not in a scientific,
but in a religious interest ; the traditions of the
patriarchs are recorded not for the glorification
of the Jewish people, but for the glory of God ;
the annals of the Kingdom are written not as
secular history, but as an illustration of the care
with which Jehovah has trained His people;
the prophets appear on the field of politics not
as ambitious demagogues or fanatical alarmists,
but as the voice of God disclosing that at each
crisis of history there is a Divine Agent as
well as human forces. These books are sacred
books.
Though this It is interesting to find how universally it is
discernible, acknowledged that our Bible is characterized
by a consciousness of God and a consequent
elevation of tone. Testimonies might be pro
duced from Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, Ewald,

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 21
Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, and many other
unbiassed sources. But one must suffice. No
writer of the last century was more unbridled
in thought or speech than Heinrich Heine. In
the midst of one of his wildest and most
humorous outbreaks he suddenly says : " I
owe my conversion simply to the reading of
a book. A book? Yes, an old, homely -look
ing book, modest as nature and as natural as
it; a book that has a workaday and unassum
ing look, like the sun that warms us, like the
bread that nourishes us, a book that seems to
us as familiar and as full of kindly blessing as
the old grandmother who reads daily in it with
dear trembling lips and with spectacles on her
nose. And the book is called quite shortly —
the Book — the Bible." And it is necessary to
keep in view this self-evidencing character of
the Bible — the something about it which awes
and sobers the right-minded reader and makes
it independent of criticism and sets it in a place
apart. If it is true, as so many writers of
various dispositions unexpectedly testify, that
the Bible has everywhere nourished the best
life that has been known on earth ; if it be true
that it has in point of fact been the spring of
the highest aspirations men have cherished and
the ripest character they have attained; if in

22 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
every generation it has served for the healing
of the nations, lying at the root of all progress,
and insisting upon a finer and purer civiliza
tion; if, wherever it comes, it brings with it
courage and solace in danger and in death; if
it has brought heaven nearer to earth, and if it
reveals God as our Father and enables the
hopeless and broken and abandoned to hope
and to believe, — then certainly there must be
that in the book itself irrespective of our
knowledge of its origin which proclaims it to
be God's message to men.
Not all God's But even this characteristic, important as it
Scripture. is> can scarcely be that unifying element which
brings these books together in separation from
all other literature. For many books might be
named which also possess this characteristic and
which have, perhaps, more directly influenced
men for good than the Scriptures themselves.
God speaks to us through other channels than
Scripture. In nature, in history, in providence,
in conscience, His voice is heard. Day by day
He speaks to us through good men, through
good books, most loudly and explicitly through
our own experience. To many their first clear
sense of God's presence has come through the
example or remonstrance of a friend or through
some awakening incident in life. Far more

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 23
legibly and more convincingly than in Scrip
ture do we read in our own experience some of
the profoundest and most salutary lessons God
has taught us. Not all God's word is Scrip
ture. The spirit of God is not imprisoned in
the Bible nor limited by it. As already noticed,
Romanists and the Friends are right in reso
lutely maintaining that the Spirit is ever alive
and active in the imparting of truth.
Yet among all words of God Scripture holds But Scrip-
a distinctive, an authoritative, a normative wordof
position of its own. What, then, is the differ- God-
ence ? What is that which gives meaning to
our words when we call the Bible distinctively
the word of God? While we acknowledge that
the same Spirit speaks to us through the words
and writings and lives of all good men, why do
we set Scripture apart from them all and assign
to it a place of supremacy ? We do so because
those books which form our Bible are all in direct
connection with God's historical revelation which
culminated in Christ. It is this alone which
gives to the Bible its normative character and
separates it from all other literature. It is this
alone which forms the essential bond, the uni
fying element, in the books which form our
Canon. In some of its parts, in the prophetic
books, in the recorded utterances of our Lord,

24 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
and so forth, the Bible is the very organ of
God's revelation of Himself in that objective,
historical line that was consummated in Christ ;
and in all its parts, if it is not the immediate
organ of that revelation, then it is its record or
its result and product. It is from Christ the
central light that illuminating rays are shed
through the whole of Scripture; He is the cen
tral sun who holds together all its various
parts. It is in the Bible we find that word of
God which it concerns all men to hear. It is
in it that we listen to what God has to say to
His children on earth as a society or Church.
Here we have the public, common revelation,
from which all Christian institutions and all
Christian hopes spring and in which all Chris
tians can meet.
Bible con- This is a point which perhaps should be em-
tains the , - , .. . -, P, -. ,
consummate phasized, as it seems to be so often missed by
revelation tf^Q great writers who influence our thoughts.
Goethe, e.g., in writing to Lavater says : " You
find nothing more beautiful than the Gospel ; I
find a thousand pages written by both ancient
and modern men, graciously endowed of God,
as beautiful and useful and necessary to man
kind." Mazzini, too, exclaims : "No! Eternal
God ! Thy word is not all fulfilled ; Thy
thought, the thought of the world, not all

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 25
revealed. That thought creates still, and will
continue to create for ages incalculable by
man." And most impressive of all are Lowell's
words : —
" Slowly the Bible of the race is writ
And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone ;
Each age, each kindred, adds to it,
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan.
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains
shroud,
While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud,
Still at the prophets' feet the nations, sit."
The omitted idea in all these and a hundred
similar utterances is that, though not closed,
God's revelation is consummated in Christ;
and that as all that went before prepared for
that revelation, so all that follows illustrates,
unfolds, and applies it, and must be judged by
it. It is absurd to take the Bible piecemeal
and declare that out of Shakespeare you can
bring wisdom as profound and as helpful as
anything in Proverbs, or that there are pas
sages in Thomas a Kempis or Augustine or
Bunyan which are as truly from God as any
thing in the Song of Songs. The value of the
Bible results from its connection with Christ.
He is the supreme, ultimate revelation of God,
and the Bible, being the amber in which He is
preserved for man, is as inviolable and unique

26 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
as He. On all hands and in all ages there has
been knowledge of God. He has never and no
where left Himself without a witness : through
nature and through conscience and through the
experience of the misery that follows sin God
has spoken to men in general and to the indi
vidual in a language that many have been un
able to misunderstand. But all such revelation
is demonstrably incomplete without Christ. It
is only in that crowning revelation that all be
comes clear and that God is fully known. It
cannot be too often repeated that the element
in the Bible which differentiates it is not the
supreme and unrivalled excellence of all its
constituent parts, nor that in it alone God
speaks to man, but that it is the record of His
supreme manifestation in Jesus Christ.
This the It is here, then, that we find the key to the
e^ment9. secret of the unifying element which has
brought these books together and which justi
fies their elevation to the rank of a Canon of
Scripture. And this key, as was to be ex
pected, is not any accident of language, nor
any quality which these writings possess in
common with many others, but the essential
characteristic, the very meaning and substance
of the books. Prior to Scripture, and under
lying it, is God's revelation of Himself in and

The Bible and Other Sacred Books 27
to Israel. The Bible gives us an inspired
utterance, record, and interpretation of this
revelation. It is primarily the record of God's
manifestation of Himself in history as winning
and ruling men. Its unity is to be found
in the unity of God's purpose. Or it may
be said that its unity is to be found in its
centre, Jesus Christ. In Him is the supreme
manifestation of God; He is the culminating,
unique revelation of God, and in Him the
Bible finds its unity. It is either the record
of His life, the transcript of His revelation and
its interpretation, or it is the promise and
preparation for His life, illustrating how greatly
men needed this revelation, and tracing the
steps by which at last the crowning manifesta
tion became possible. Each part of Scripture
receives its place and function by its relation
to Jesus Christ.

II
THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE

n
THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE
The readiest way to reach an intelligible and
defensible position regarding the Canon is to
trace the course of reasoning into which Luther
was driven by his controversy with Rome.
If you ask a Romanist why he accepts cer- Romanist
tain books as canonical, he has a perfectly intel- "™ret 0n°teS'
ligible answer ready. He accepts these books Canon.
because the Church bids him do so. The
Church has determined what books are canon
ical, and he accepts the decision of the Church.
If you ask a Protestant why he believes that
just these books bound up together in his Bible
are canonical, and neither more nor fewer, I
fear that ninety -nine Protestants out of a hun
dred could give you no answer that would sat
isfy a reasonable man. The Protestant scorns
the Romanist because he relies on the authority
of the Church, but he cannot tell you on what
authority he himself relies. The Protestant
watchword is, "The Bible, the whole Bible,
31

32 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
and nothing but the Bible," but how many
Protestants are there who could make it quite
clear that within the boards of their Bible they
have the whole Bible and nothing but the Bible ?
If you asked them to show you that no canoni
cal writing has been omitted, and that no un-
canonical writing has been received, how will
they proceed to do so ? If you ask the average
Protestant to say why he receives the second
Epistle of Peter, which a large part of the
early Church declined to receive, or why he
accepts the Epistle of James, regarding which
Luther himself was more than doubtful, — what
can he say but that the Church to which he
belongs receives them? In other words, what
is the difference between the Protestant and
the Romanist on this cardinal point of canon-
icity ? Do not Protestants and Romanists alike
accept their canonical books at the hands of
the Church?
Council of Let us see if any light can be shed on this
dUree*. matter. And first of all, it may be well briefly
to indicate the position which the Church of
Rome assumed regarding the Canon at the
Reformation. Before the Council of Trent
there were laid four propositions which summed
up the heresy of Luther. Two of these con
cerned the Bible ; the first being that Scripture

The Canon of Scripture 33
was the sole and complete source of doctrine ;
the second, that the Hebrew Canon of the Old
Testament and the acknowledged books of the
New Testament should alone be admitted as
authoritative. In April, 1546, the Council,
after considerable debate, issued the following
decree : " The Holy, CEcumenical, and general
Synod of Trent legitimately convened in the
Holy Ghost . . . and having always as its
aim to remove errors and preserve the very
purity of the Gospel, which was promised be
fore by the Prophets, and in the Holy Scrip
ture, and which our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, first proclaimed with His own
lips, and then commanded to be preached by
His Apostles to every creature as the fountain
of all verity and saving truth, as well as of
instruction in conduct, and [this Council] per
ceiving that this truth and discipline are con
tained in written books, and in unwritten
traditions received by the Apostles from the
mouth of Christ Himself, or dictated to the
Apostles by the Holy Spirit, and handed down
as if from hand to hand even to us ; following
the example of the Orthodox Fathers [this
Council] receives and venerates with an equal
piety and reverence all the books as well of
the Old as of the New Testament; one God

34 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

This decree
a new de
parture.

being the Author of both, together with the
Traditions pertaining both to faith and to
morals, as proceeding from the mouth of
Christ, or dictated by the Holy Spirit, and
preserved in the Church Catholic by continu
ous succession. And that no doubt may arise
as to what these books are which the Synod
thus receives, it has seemed good to append
to this decree a Catalogue of the Sacred
Books." Then follows a list which includes
the books of the Old Testament and the Apoc
rypha, and all the books now composing our
New Testament. And the Decree concludes
with an anathema on all who shall not receive
as sacred and canonical these books and all
their parts, "as they have been wont to be
read in the Church, and as they are contained
in the old vulgate Latin edition."
Councils had previously taken the subject
of the Canon into consideration, and had pro
nounced upon it; but these councils were not
oecumenical and their decisions were not re
garded. In fact, the very circumstance that
the Council of Trent found itself compelled to
give a definite decision on the subject sug
gests that there was no previous decree to which
they could appeal. Hitherto usage had deter
mined the Canon. It was the universal use

The Canon of Scripture 35
of Jerome's Latin version, the Vulgate, which
practically led the entire Western Church to
adopt the same canon. But in the original
admission of books into • the Vulgate, Jerome
did not carry through any scientific principle.
He allowed himself to be guided by the gener
ally received opinion, preferring the opinion of
the primitive Church to that of a later date,
and following the majority in preference to the
minority. Previous to the Reformation, then, the ques- Canon
tion of the Canon was in abeyance. The 1%£%mA
Church rested in the practical determination of by the Vul
gate.
the question by Jerome's issue of a Latin Bible
which was everywhere received and used. And
it was determined by Jerome with a regard to
prevalent opinion in the Church, and not by the
thorough application of a principle or test of
canonicity, although no doubt underlying the
procedure, both of the Church and of Jerome,
there was the principle that those writings were
canonical which proceeded from the Apostolic
Circle. This principle had been explicitly
enounced by Tertullian, and it was only the
difficulty of making good the claims of certain
writings to be of Apostolic origin that pre
vented them from being universally accepted as
canonical.

36 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
This had This practical solution of the difficulty worked
ficed\ V ' very well as long as the Bible was merely used
as a book of edification, or to eke out a Church
service. But when Luther and his followers
proposed to make it the one law of everything
religious and ecclesiastical ; when they pro
posed on its authority to repudiate and condemn
what was imposed upon them by the authority
of the Church ; when they proposed to listen to
it, not as a law which must be interpreted and
modified by other laws, but as the one only rule
of faith and life, — then it became necessary to
define with precision what writings contained
this law and whence they derived their author
ity. In answering these questions the Church
of Rome found no difficulty. Even before
the Council of Trent was convened, one of her
theologians had asked, "How can you know
that the Scriptures are canonical except by the
Church ? " Another had said, " The whole
authority which the Scripture has among us
necessarily depends upon the authority of the
Church." "It is the Church which has in
vested with authority certain books . . . which
did not derive this authority either from them
selves or from their authors." When Luther
objected to Eck's citing a passage from Second
Maccabees to prove the doctrine of Purgatory,

The Canon of Scripture 37
Eck replied, " But the Church has received
these books into the Canon." To which Luther
answered : " The Church cannot give more
authority or force to a book than it has in
itself. A Council cannot make that be Scrip
ture which in its own nature is not Scripture." 1
These quotations sufficiently show the dia- Luther was
j. • i j. j- j.- i~ l J.T. •*.• ^ compelled to
metrical contradiction between the position of be ^ore
Luther and that of the Romanists. The Church exact.
of Rome decreed that the Old Testament books
(both those we receive and those called Apocry
phal), and the books of the New Testament as
we now have them, be received as Scripture.
They instituted no further inquiries into their
authenticity ; they simply closed all debate
regarding this matter by accepting Jerome's
Vulgate. With Luther such an easy course
was impossible. Denying the authority of the
Church, he was compelled to define clearly
the authority on which he rested. Claiming
the words of God as his sole authority, he must
set forth with distinctness where the Word of
God is to be found and how he can recognize it
to be the Word of God. There were two ques- and asks
tions which Luther found himself driven to ^onT^
answer : What assures me that Scripture is the
Word of God, and therefore authoritative? and,
i C. Berger, " Histoire de la Vulgate," p. 86.

38 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
What books are Scripture ? Prior to the ques
tion, What is the Canon of inspired Scripture ?
comes the question, Is there an inspired Scrip
ture ? Prior to the question, What writings con
tain the Word of God ? comes the question, Is
there a Word of God ? We cannot understand
Luther's answer to the one question unless we
recognize his attitude toward the other.
Is there a Now, according to ^ Luther, the prior ques-
^0/ tion, Is there a Word of God? or, Has God
spoken? is answered in the affirmative, and
with certainty, by every man in whom the Word
of God attests its own Divine origin and au
thority, and it can be answered with an assured
affirmative by none beside. Luther's explicit
and constant teaching is that this word is self-
evidencing and needs no authority at its back,
but carries in it its own authentication. Let us
hear some of his own strong statements to this
effect. Showing that the question between him
self and Rome was not whether God was to be
obeyed when He spoke, — for they were agreed
as to that, — he goes on : " The Romanists say,
Yes, but how can we know what is God's Word,
and what is true or false ? We must learn it
from the Pope and the Councils. Very well,
let them decree and say what they will, still
say I, Thou can'st not rest thy confidence

The Canon of Scripture 39
thereon, nor satisfy thy conscience : thou must
thyself decide, thy neck is at stake, thy life is
at stake. Therefore must God say to thee
in thine heart, This is God's Word, else it is
still undecided." Again: "Thou must be as
certain that it is the Word of God as thou art
certain that thou livest, and even more certain,
for on this alone must thy conscience rest.
And even if all men came, aye, even the angels
and all the world, and determined something,
if thou can'st not form nor conclude the deci
sion, thou art lost. For thou must not place
thy decision on the Pope or any other, thou
must thyself be so skilful that thou can'st say,
God says this, not that; this is right, that is
wrong ; else it is not possible to endure. Dost
thou stand upon Pope or Concilia? Then the
Devil may at once knock a hole in thee and
insinuate, ' How if it were false, how if they
have erred?' Then thou art laid low at
once. Therefore thou must bring conscience
into play, that thou may'st boldly and defiantly
say, That is God's Word, on that will I risk
body and life, and a hundred thousand necks
if I had them. Therefore no one shall turn
me from the Word which God teaches me, and
that must I know as certainly as that two and
three make five, that an ell is longer than a

40 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
half. That is certain, and though all the world
speak to the contrary, still I know that it is
not otherwise. Who decides me there? No
man, but only the truth which is so perfectly
certain that nobody can deny it."
Seif-evidenc- Why is Luther so urgent on this point ?
™odth°e ^e is urgent because he sees that the whole
basis of difference between himself and Rome hinges
Protestant- . . .
ism. here. If he cannot make good this position,
that the truth or the Word of God has power
to verify itself as such to the conscience it
awakens, he has no standing at all. The prin
ciple which made him a Protestant, and which
constitutes men Protestants always, is simply
this, that the soul needs not the intervention
of any authority to bring it into contact with
God and the truth, but that God and His truth
have power to verify themselves to the indi
vidual. Luther did not accept the Gospel
because it was written in a book he believed
to be inspired, or canonical, or the Word of
God; but he accepted it because it brought
new life to his spirit and proved itself to be
from God. He did not accept Christ because
he had first of all accepted the Scriptures, but
he accepted the Scriptures because they testi
fied of a Christ he felt constrained to accept.
In short, it is the truth which the Scriptures

The Canon of Scripture 41
contain which certify him that they are the
Word of God ; it is not his belief that they
are the Word of God which certifies him of
the truth they contain. The proclamation of
God's grace quickening a new life within him
convinced him this proclamation was from
God. The difference between the Romanist and Differentia
the Protestant is not what it is so often said tantism.'
to be, that the Romanist accepts the Church
as his infallible authority, while the Protestant
accepts the Scriptures as his infallible author
ity. The Romanist equally with the Protestant
accepts the authority of Scripture. The dif- ,
ference lies deeper. The difference lies here :
that the Romanist accepts Scripture as the
Word of God because the Church tells him
so, the Protestant accepts it as the Word of
God because God tells him so. The Protestant
believes it to be God's Word because through
it God has spoken to him in such sort as to
convince him that it is God who here speaks.
This is the one sure foundation-stone of Prot
estantism, — the response of the individual con
science to the self-evidencing voice of God in
Scripture. He does not need to go to the
Church to ask if this be God's Word ; his con
science tells him it is. Deeper than that for a

42 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

What writ
ings con
tain God's
Word?

foundation of faith you cannot get, and any faith
that is not so deeply founded is insecure — it
may last, and it may bring a man to all needed
benefit, but it is not reasonably defensible, and
therefore it is liable to be upset.
This, then, was Luther's first position regard
ing Scripture ; this was the fundamental posi
tion on which Protestantism is reared; viz.
that through Scripture God Himself so speaks
to the soul that the man is convinced without
the intervention of any other proof or authority
that this is the Word of God. The individual
does not need the Church to tell him that this
is the Word of God. God tells him so, and
makes all other authority superfluous.
But next comes the question, What writings
contain this word ? Are we to carry through
this fundamental principle, and maintain that
only such writings can be accounted Scripture
as approve themselves to be God's Word by
renewing or building up the fundamental faith
in God which has already been quickened with
in us? This fundamental principle of Prot
estantism — that God's Word is self -evidencing
— can we carry it over to the subject of canon-
icity and make it the sole, absolute test of
canonicity? Or can we at any rate say that
whatever agrees with the Word of God which

The Canon of Scripture 43
at first begot faith in us and presents to us the
same Gospel and the same Christ is canonical ?
This Luther does, subject to the limitation that
it springs from the Apostolic Circle. Or can
we only use this fundamental faith of our own
as a negative test, rejecting whatever does not
harmonize with that faith in Christ which has
given us spiritual life, or at any rate whatever
contradicts it ? In other words, can I say that
all those writings are canonical which awaken
faith in me, or can I say that all those writ
ings are canonical which present that same
Christ whose presentation at first awakened
faith in me ; or can I only say that those are
certainly not canonical which do not harmonize
with faith in Christ ?
Now we shall find Luther's answer to these Luther'!
questions in the judgments he pronounced on
the books actually forming our Canon. Tak
ing up his translation of the New Testament,
we find that the four writings — Hebrews,
James, Jude, and Revelation — which he con
sidered to be non-apostolic, are relegated to
the end by themselves, and introduced with
these significant words : " Up to this point we
have been dealing with the quite certain (rech-
ten gewissen) chief books (Hauptbuchef) of the
New Testament. But these four following

answer.

44 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
have in times past had a different position."
He then goes on to prove briefly but convinc
ingly that Hebrews is not by Paul nor by any
Apostle, and after extolling its ability and
pointing out what he considered faulty, he
remarks that "although the writer does not
lay the foundation of faith, which is the Apos
tolic function, he yet builds upon it gold,
silver, precious stones, and if, in accordance
with Paul's words, he mingles some wood, hay,
stubble, this is not to hinder us from accepting
with all reverence his teaching — although it
cannot in all respects be compared to the Apos
tolic Epistles." His criticisms on the Apoca
lypse are also very outspoken : " My spirit,"
he says, "can't accommodate itself to this
book : the reason being that I do not think Christ
is taught therein."1 His judgment of this
book, however, underwent considerable modi
fication ; and although, in contradistinction to
the body of modern critics, he seems never to
have been convinced that it was written by the
Apostle John, it is not probable that in his
later years he would have spoken of it so slight
ingly. But in his introductory remarks to the
1 Luther's "Prefaces" are to be found in old editions of
his translation of the Bible. See also Reuss's "Histoire du
Canon," p. 347.

The Canon of Scripture 45
Epistle of James he shows more explicitly his
criterion or test of canonicity. He refuses to
admit this Epistle among the Hauptbucher of
the New Testament, or to allow its Apostolic
authorship, and he defends his judgment in
these words : " Herein agree all the genuine
(rechtsehaffene*) holy books, that they all preach
and exhibit Christ. This, indeed, is the right
touchstone (der rechte Prufestein) to test all
the books, — if one sees whether or not they
present Christ, for all Scripture witnesses to
Christ (Rom. iii. 21) ; and St. Paul will know
nothing but Christ. That which does not
teach Christ is not Apostolic, though St. Peter
or St. Paul teaches it. That which preaches
Christ is Apostolic, though Judas, Annas,
Pilate, or Herod teaches it."
Luther's direct test of canonicity, then, is, Luther's
Does the book in question occupy itself with canonicity.
Christ or does it not ? So says Dorner : 1
" The deciding principle as to whether a writ
ing is to pass for canonical, lies, in a dogmatic
aspect, according to Luther, as is well known,
in this, whether it is occupied with Christ."
Luther, in short, recognizes that God has an
end to secure in making a revelation, and this
end is to bring clear before men His will for
1 " History of Protestant Theology," E. Tr., I., p. 252.

quacy.

46 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
our salvation; or, in one word, Christ. The
books that promote this end he accepts as
canonical.
Its inade- But while this was Luther's final and deter
mining test of canonicity, it is obvious that he
at the same time employed some preliminary
test. He applied his final test, not to all books
he knew, but only to a number already selected
and already passing for canonical. He never
thought of carrying his principle through all
literature and accepting as canonical every
book that was occupied with Christ. He did
not accept Augustine and Tauler as canonical,
though to them he in great part owed his
salvation, his peace, his light, his strength.
And it may, on the other hand, be questioned
whether, with all his boldness, he would have
dared to reject any writing which was proved
to be of Apostolic authorship. In point of fact
he does not reject any such writing. His test
of canonicity is, in short, only a supplemental
principle; it is a principle which can be applied
only in a field already defined by the applica
tion of some other principle, or by some uni
versal usage such as the Church-collection of
Scriptures had sprung from. Luther's method
is really this : he first accepts at the hand of
Jerome certain candidates for admission into

Luther.

The Canon of Scripture 47
the Canon, and to these selected candidates he
applies his test. He was aware that up to
Jerome's time the Church had always been
in doubt regarding certain of these writings,
and to these he freely applies the testing
question, Are they occupied with Christ?
Theoretically, therefore, Reuss is right in say- Reuss on
ing that Luther did not look upon the Canon
as a collection, more or less complete, of all
the writings of a certain period or of a certain
class of men, but as a body of writings destined
by God to teach a certain truth; and accord
ingly the test of the individual writings must
at bottom lie in the teaching itself.1 But
practically what Luther did was to apply this
test only to writings which already had some
claim to be considered Apostolical. The course
of his thought was briefly this : he arrived at
faith in Christ before he reached any clear
view of the inspiration or canonicity of certain
writers ; he reached faith in Christ apart from
any doctrine regarding Scripture. But having
believed in Christ, he found that certain men
had been appointed by Christ to witness to the
great facts of His life, death, resurrection, and
gift of the Spirit. The same faith which ac
cepts Christ as supreme, the same faith which
i "History of Protestant Theology," E. Tr., I., p. 344.

48 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
produces self-verifying results in his soul
compels him also to believe that the commis
sion of Christ to His Apostles was actually
effectual and that they are the appointed,
normative witnesses to Him and His salvation.
The writings of these Apostles he accepts,
though holding himself free to reject them if
they contradict the fundamental faith in Christ
which gave him his new life. The other books,
whose authorship is doubtful, but which from
the first have claimed admittance to the New
Testament Canon, he judges purely on their
merits, rejecting or admitting as he finds they
do not or do fit into the Apostolic teaching.
Liberty This, it will be said, leaves a ragged edge on
Luther. V *ne Canon. It leaves much to be decided by the
individual. A man may say to Luther, " I do
not find in the gospel of John agreement with
the three synoptic gospels, and as you throw
over James because he does not agree with
Paul, so I throw over John because he does not
agree with the synoptists." And Luther could
have made no satisfactory reply. Better, he
would think, let a man accept Scripture from
his own feeling of its truth than compel him
to do so by some external compulsion. Indeed,
his boldness in pronouncing his own opinion
is quite equalled by his explicit and repeated

The Canon of Scripture 49
allowance of liberty to every other man. Thus,
though he himself did not accept the Apoca
lypse as the work of John, he hastens to add,
" No man ought to be hindered from holding it
to be a work of St. John, or otherwise as he
will." Similarly, after giving his opinion of
the Epistle of James, he concludes, " I cannot
then place it among the chief books, but I will
forbid no one to place and elevate it as he
pleases." So that if we find ourselves in dis
agreement with Luther regarding the judg
ments he pronounces on some of the books of
Scripture, this is only what he himself antici
pated. Neither does the fact that his prin
ciple can never be applied without such
discordant results emerging, reflect any dis
credit on the principle itself. As Reuss says,
"To begin to speak to-day of the infatuation
of Luther's method of procedure, because in the
details of its application one cannot always
share in his opinion, this only proves that with
the modern champions of a pretended, privi
leged orthodoxy, ignorance and fatuity go hand
and hand in the van."
The same vagueness which marred the Lu- Caivinistic
theran doctrine of canonicity affected the Cai
vinistic position. The inward witness cannot
reasonably be expected to be sufficient for -the

50 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Confusion
of thought
regarding Canon.

Inadequacyof inward
witness.

task of certifying every word that God has
uttered to man. It cannot, in other words, be
expected to form of itself a sufficient test of
canonicity. The truth is there seems to have been some
confusion of thought in Caivinistic writers,
arising from the fact that in speaking of the
authority of Scripture they viewed Scripture as
a whole. Challenged by the Romanists to say
how they knew the Bible to be from God, they
said, We know it to be from God because
God's Spirit within us recognizes it as His.
But this inward witness could only become a
test of canonicity if the Bible were an indissolu
ble whole, part hanging with part, so that each
part stands or falls with every other part.
If, in order to prove the canonicity of all the
writings in the Bible, it were enough to say, the
Spirit within me recognizes God's voice in
the Bible as a whole, then this were a sufficient
test. If, in order to prove the canonicity of
the Epistle of James, it were enough to say, I
recognize the voice of God in the Epistle of
John, then the " inward witness of the Spirit "
would be a sufficient test. But the very thing
we are seeking for is that which brought the
parts together, the principle on which the Church
proceeded when it took one writing here and

The Canon of Scripture 51
another there and brought them into one whole.
What is it which is characteristic 'of each part,
so that even when the parts were lying sepa
rate, they could be and were recognized as
properly belonging to the Canonical Scriptures ?
The question seeking solution is, why do we re
ceive this or that book into the Canon ? There
is no question here as to whether we have a
word of God, nor as to the general collection of
writings in which we find that word ; the ques
tion is, how do we know that the Epistle to the
Hebrews or the Epistle of Jude, or any other
individual writing, is the Word of God ?
The Westminster Confession makes "inspira- Caninspira.
tion" the test of canonicity, although it does test 0f can.
not in express terms say so. After naming the °»J'C%?
books of the Old and New Testament, it pro
ceeds, "all which are given by inspiration of
God ; " and then in section 3 it goes on, " The
books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of
Divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of
Scripture." That is to say, writings which are
inspired are canonical, writings not inspired are
not canonical. But how are we to discover
what writings are inspired? The Confession,
singularly enough, says nothing of Prophetic
and Apostolic authorship, but refers us to the
various marks of divinity in the writings them-

52 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

How can
inspiration be recog
nized ?

Inspiration not always
recogniz able.

selves, and concludes in the well-known words,
" Our full persuasion and assurance of the infal
lible truth and Divine authority thereof, is from
the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing
witness by and with the word in our hearts."
There are two processes by which we can
arrive at the conclusion that a writing is in
spired. First, as in reading any book we form
an opinion of it and either pronounce it stupid
or feel in it the touch of genius, so in reading
the work of an inspired man we may arrive at
the conclusion that it has been written with
Divine aid. There may be that in it which
makes us feel that we have to do with a Divine
as well as a human author. Second, we may
believe in the inspiration of a book, because
we first of all believe in Christ and find that
He authorized certain persons to speak in
His name and with His authority and spirit.
When the well-authenticated writings of such
persons come into our hands, we accept them,
if we are already Christian.
But there are books in the Bible whose in
spiration cannot be ascertained by either of
these methods. There are books of which we
cannot say that they are written by prophet
or apostle or otherwise commissioned person ;
Chronicles, Esther, Job, Ecclesiastes, — no one

The Canon of Scripture 53
knows who wrote these books. One of the
methods of ascertaining inspiration is therefore
closed to us. And as to the other method, the
inward witness, I am not persuaded that John
Owen himself could have detected the book of
Esther as an inspired book, had it been found
lying outside the Canon. How, then, can we
justify the admission of such a book as Esther
— a book of which the authorship is unknown,
and to which the inward witness bears at the
best a somewhat doubtful testimony so far as
regards its inspiration ?
To say that we accept it because the Jews True test of
accepted it, is simply to fall back to the Ro- canonicitv-
manist position and take our Canon at the
hands and by the authority of the Church.
To affirm that the men who settled the Canon
were inspired, is to assume what cannot be
proved, and even to affirm what we know to
be false, because discussion was still going on
among the Jews regarding their Canon as late
as the year 96 A.D. We can only justify the
admission of these books on some such general
ground as that of Luther — their congruity to
the main end of revelation. If by " canonical
writings " we mean the writings through which
God conveys to us the knowledge of the reve
lation He has made, if this be the prominent

54 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

All canon
ical Scrip
tures not
equallyimportant.

idea, and if their being the rule of faith and
life be an inference from this, then we get a
broader basis for the Canon and can admit into
it all writings which have a direct connection
with God's revelation of Himself in Christ.
If the book in question gives us a link in the
history of that revelation, or if it represents
a stage of God's dealings and of the growth
His people had made under these dealings, and
if it contains nothing which is quite inconsist
ent with the idea of its being inspired, then
its claim to be admitted seems valid. There
fore I would be disposed to say that the two
attributes which give canonicity are congruity
with the main end of revelation and direct his
torical connection with the revelation of God
in history.1
It may indeed be said that if such a book as
Esther were lost, nothing that is essential to the
history would be lost, or that if several of
the Psalms were lost nothing essential would
be lost. But this is really to say no more than
that a man who has lost a joint of a finger or a
toe has lost nothing essential. No doubt he can
live on and do his work, but he is not a com
plete man. And there are parts of the body of
1 A similar, if not identical, conclusion was reached by
the late A. B. Bruce, but I have lost the reference.

The Canon of Scripture 55
which it is very difficult to say why they are
there, or why they are of the particular form
they are ; but there they are, and the want of
them would seem a deformity. So of the Bible,
we may not be able to say of every part what
is its exact relation to the whole ; nor yet may
we be able in honesty to say that we think any
thing essential would be lost were certain por
tions of Scripture to be removed ; and yet he
would be a rash man who would dare to aver
that he could improve upon the Canon, or who
should think it needful to excise from it such
parts as to himself may seem unimportant.
From all this, then, we must gather (1) that Canon not
churches should be cautious in speaking of the definite.
Canon as an absolutely defined collection of
writings, thoroughly and to a nicety ascertained,
based on distinct principles and precisely sepa
rated at every point from all extracanonical
literature. There is no reasonable doubt that
the bulk of the books of the New Testament
come to us so accredited that to reject them is
equivalent to rejecting the authority of Christ ;
but a few are not so accredited, and it is a
question whether our creeds ought not to reflect
the fact that in the early Church some books
were universally admitted into the Canon,
while regarding seven of the books of our New

56 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
Testament grave doubts were entertained. The
position taken by one of the greatest cham
pions of Protestantism, Chillingworth, is one
that commends itself : " I may believe even
those questioned books to have been written
by the Apostles and to be canonical ; but I can
not in reason believe this of them so undoubt
edly as of those books which were never
questioned : at least I have no warrant to damn
any man that shall doubt of them or deny them
now, having the example of saints in heaven,
either to justify or excuse such their doubting
or denial." This was the position of Luther
and of the Reformers generally, and for my
part I think it a pity it was ever abandoned.
It is not a calamity over which one need
make great moan, but unquestionably the com
bining of less authenticated books with those
that are thoroughly authenticated has rather
tended to bring the latter class under suspicion
with persons ignorant of their history.
Proper atti- We also gather (2) what ought to be the
^rotestoMt. attitude of the ordinary, lay Protestant toward
this subject of the Canon. Sometimes Roman
ists have taunted us with the absurdity of
inviting each Protestant, educated or unedu
cated, to settle the Canon for himself. The
taunt is based on a misconception. It is the

The Canon of Scripture 57
right of every Protestant to inquire into the
evidence on which certain books are received as
canonical, and the more that right is exercised,
the better. But even when the right is not used,
it is not thereby resigned. Protestants receive
the Canon as they receive historical facts, on
the testimony of those who have pursued this
line of inquiry. We may never have individu
ally looked into the evidence for -Alexander's
invasion of India, but we take it on the word
of those best informed regarding historical mat
ters, reserving of course the right to examine
it ourselves if need arises. So on this subject
of the Canon, the lay Protestant accepts the
judgment of the Reformed Churches, feeling
tolerably confident that after all the research
and discussion which learned men have spent
upon this subject, the results cannot be seri
ously misleading. But he of course reserves
the right to inquire for himself if opportunity
should arise, and does not dream that the deci
sion of the Church binds him to accept certain
books as Divine. The Protestant accepts the
decision of the Church precisely as he accepts
the decision of engineers or medical men or
experts of any kind in their respective depart
ments — he accepts it as the result arrived at
after deliberation by competent men. The

tion invited.

58 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
Romanist accepts the decision of the Church
as a decree or law issued because the Church
wills it so, and not as the mere finding of learned
men ; and the Romanist has no right to revise
the Church's decision. The Romanist holds
that the Church has power to make books
canonical ; the Protestant holds that irrespec
tive of any ecclesiastical decision there is that
in the books themselves which makes them
canonical. To confound the two positions is
ignorant or malicious.
Investiga- (3) Again, Protestants are taunted with the
diversity of opinion consequent on leaving such
questions to individual research and private
judgment. I reply that it is a vast advantage
so to leave such questions, for it is to invite
investigation, and to invite investigation is to
secure that one day the truth will shine in the
eye of the world. What value attaches to the
unanimity that is secured by closing every one's
eyes, and shutting every one's mouth? That
unanimity alone is valuable which the truth
itself commands. And this unanimity can only
be attained by diligent, reverent, truth-seeking
investigation. For my part, I think Luther
was right in holding that regarding some of
the books there must be difference of opinion
always ; but of the great bulk of the New Testa-

The Canon of Scripture 59
ment, — the four Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles
of Paul, the First of Peter, and the First of
John, — as there was no difference of opinion in
the early Church, so eventually there will be
entire agreement. Men do not differ regarding
the authorship of " Hamlet," nor the esteem in
which that writing should be held, neither will
private judgment and liberty of criticism cause
men to differ regarding the canonical books, but
will rather bring them to the only agreement
that is worth having.
Lastly, let us remember that the true Protes- Christ the
, . j n j j. -,1 • /~n . , , j. ..i ultimate au-
tant order is, first, faith in Christ ; second, faith tnority,
in Scripture. Our faith in Christ does not hang
upon our faith in Scripture, but our faith in
Scripture hangs upon our faith in Christ. Our
faith in Christ may depend on Scripture as a
true history ; but not as an inspired canonical
book. It is Christ as presented in Scripture or
by other means, by preaching as in the first age,
and often now, that evokes faith. He and he
only is the true Protestant who knows that God
has spoken to him in Christ, and who knows
this irrespective of any infallible authority sep
arable from Christ himself, whether that au
thority be the authority of the Church or the
authority of Scripture. We must not shift the
ultimate authority from Christ to Scripture.

Ill
REVELATION

Ill
REVELATION
If the Bible is the word of God par excellence, The Bible
because it is the organ and record of the reve- ^gJo«0n.
lation of Himself which God has given in his
tory, we shall understand the Bible better if we
endeavor to ascertain what we can regarding
revelation. It is a subject full of difficulty, ob
scured and perplexed by many controversies, and
on which light is only slowly rising. Avoiding
as far as possible the entanglement of needless
discussions, we may consider (1) What is meant
by revelation ; (2) Whether it is possible ; (3)
Whether any revelation has actually been made,
and where ; (4) The method that has been pur
sued ; and (5) The purpose in view.
1. First, we must understand what we mean Meaning of
when we use the word " revelation," for it has f. *e"e^
been and is used in different senses. Some- tion-"
times it is used to denote the immediate com
munication of truth to the mind, as when Paul
affirms that it was by revelation of Jesus Christ
he had received his gospel. Sometimes it is
63

64 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
used of the external manifestation or event
through which truth reaches the mind, as the
Flood is spoken of as a revelation of the right
eousness of God. Sometimes it is used of the
truth revealed. The distinction which pre
vailed during the eighteenth century between
natural and revealed religion imposed a special
meaning upon the word "revelation," and it
was used to denote the knowledge of God which
comes to us not through nature, but through
some special and supernatural action of God.
Thus Butler says : " Some persons upon pre
tence of the sufficiency of the light of nature
avowedly reject all revelation, as, in its very
nature, incredible, and what must be fictitious.
And indeed it is certain no revelation would
have been given, had the light of nature been
sufficient in such a sense as to render one not
wanting and useless." The term " revelation"
is thus exclusively applied to Christianity, and
Judaism as preliminary to it ; and is therefore
and with some confusion of thought applied to
the Bible itself as containing the substance and
history of this revelation.
Its proper But this use of the word is unfortunate.
For it assumes that God has not revealed Him
self to any who are beyond the pale of Chris
tianity, that He has not revealed Himself in

use.

Revelation 65
creation, and has actually left Himself without
a witness save in Jewish and Christian circles.
The distinction between Christianity and other
religions would be better expressed by the terms
" perfect " and "imperfect " or "final" and "pre
paratory " than by "revealed" and "natural."
For at the basis of every religion there is neces
sarily some knowledge of God, however slen
der ; and this knowledge of God can only be
of a God who has somehow revealed Himself.
There is a great and profound truth in Pascal's
words put into God's mouth : " Thou wouldest
not seek Me, hadst thou not already found Me."
All the feelings after God which are seen in
the various races of mankind are evidence that
God has been revealing Himself to them. Rev
elation, then, should be kept in its full and
proper sense and be used to denote God's mak
ing Himself known to man, whether in the
natural order or through what is supernatural,
whether with greater and more convincing
clearness or with dim intimations of His pres
ence. Another erroneous view of revelation, also Not the
, - . tl . , , , , , ,1 , communica-
current during the eighteenth century, was that tion 0j. cer.
it meant the communication of certain truths to tain truths.
the human mind — truths which the human
mind of itself could not reach, or could not so

66 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
quickly reach. This was due to the pedantic and
elaborate dogmatism of the seventeenth century.
The Bible had so persistently been used as a
text-book to prove dogma that this came to be
considered its main use, and it was never ques
tioned whether some higher purpose was not
meant to be served by it. Revelation was
identified with the Bible, and it was taken for
granted that the purpose of revelation was to
impart truth. There was great difference of
opinion as to the need of this Divine instruction
and as to its contents. Some supposed that in
the Bible all knowledge was to be found ; that
scientific and metaphysical mysteries were hid
den in its pages. Each of its utterances, no
matter in what department of truth, was sup
posed to be final and authoritative. " Who,"
said Calovius, " would dare to set the authority
of Copernicus above the authority of God ? "
Others limited the psedagogic function of Scrip
tures to the communication of truths regarding
God, immortality, and duty. The Westmin
ster Shorter Catechism, to the question, What
do the Scriptures principally teach ? replies
very wisely, " The Scriptures principally teach
what man is to believe concerning God and
what duty God requires of man." Nothing
could be better as an answer to the question,

Revelation 67
but nowadays such a question would not be the
first or only one about Scripture. Scripture is
no longer looked upon as a lesson-book.
One has only to look at the Bible to see how The Bible
singularly ill adapted it is to be a theological Zliditexu
text-book. God's object throughout human book-
history has evidently been not to make men
theological experts, but to make Himself known.
His purpose has not been to inform men regard
ing abstruse mysteries, free will, predestination,
the future state, but to give them assurance of
His own presence, and of His holiness and love.
And what we have in the Bible, therefore, is
not an inspired catechism nor a revealed creed,
but a record of the great momenta of God's
revelation of Himself. And Jesus Christ be
ing that consummate revelation of God which
absorbs and eclipses all others, the Bible may
best be considered as either a preparation for or
an exhibition and explanation of Jesus Christ.
Revelation, then, is not exactly equivalent to
the Bible; and although it might mean the com
munication of truth, and does involve the com
munication of truth, yet primarily, and properly,
it means God's making Himself known to man.
2. Possibility of Revelation. — To discuss the Revelation
possibility of revelation is needless. Theists
of all schools, by the fact of their theism, admit

68 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
the possibility of revelation. They are theists
because behind and beneath the world they
discern a spirit in whom is life and purpose.
Their fundamental belief is that through all
with which we are in sensible contact in this
life God makes Himself known. Paul indeed
says that the world by wisdom knew not God.
But by this he did not mean that it attained to
no knowledge of God, but only that it did not
reach a perfect knowledge such as we have in
Christ. Max M tiller, on the other hand, affirms
that apart from Judaism and Christianity men
have formed the highest conception of God.
But this is the exaggeration of a man biassed
by his favorite study. The world apart from
Christ has not reached the highest conception
of God, but it has recognized His existence and
His presence. Theism is simply the declaration
that this world cannot be rationally construed
without the hypothesis of purpose and of a mind
in which this purpose is formed and by which
it is guided; that is to say, that God has re
vealed Himself in the constitution of the world
and of man. The harmony of all nature and
the tendency of its most various constituents
toward one end are becoming daily more obvi
ous, and theists maintain that this consistency
of nature can be accounted for only on the sup-

Revelation 69
position that it is governed by purpose. The
instinctive persistency with which through all
interruptions man cleaves to a moral ideal,
never ceasing to have it in view and to work
toward it, implies an existence superior to his
own in which that ideal is actualized and which
is the guarantee of his attainment. Chiefly in
these two directions, in the harmony and prog
ress of nature and also in man's moral ideal,
theists maintain that God has revealed Him
self. On the other hand, to deny the possibility of No religion
revelation is to deny the possibility of religion Revelation.
or to declare it a delusion. " Of every reli
gion," says Principal Fairbairn,1 " the idea of
revelation is an integral part ; the man who
does not believe that God can speak to him will
not speak to God." However hidden and in
comprehensible the Divine Being is, there can
be no religion, unless it is believed that there
is a God, and consequently that somehow that
God has made Himself known. And, moreover,
to an absolutely silent God who in no way
responds to man's yearning for fellowship with
the Divine, and who gives no intimation of His
presence by word or deed in the life or heart of
His worshipper, homage must soon cease to be
1 " Christ in Modern Theology," p. 494.

70 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
paid. As Professor Tiele 1 says, " It is certain
that no communion of man with his God is pos
sible or conceivable if all the aspirations of the
pious soul, all its longings and entreaties for
help, light, and support, are to end in the de
spairing cynicism of Heinrich Heine, 'No one
but a fool expects an answer.' " A religion
that is entirely one-sided as surely falls to the
ground as a one-sided bridge, or a bird that
beats its wings in a vacuum. The rudest fetich
worship proceeds upon the assumption that the
unseen has a will and can somehow express it.
The Greek who consulted the oracle, the Roman
who waited for the augur's decisions, recognized
that religion could not be one-sided, but that
there must be Divine response to human in
quiry. And although often rudely enough con
ceived, the belief in God's power and desire to
make Himself and His will known to men is
sound and true.
Pfleiderer's A priori, it might justly be argued that spirits
argument. \[v[ng {n one another's presence and related to
one another as are God and man, should be able
to communicate with one another. Pfleiderer in
his "Philosophy of Religion"2 argues thus:
''Why should it be less possible for God to enter
i " Gifford Lectures," II., p. 157.
2 III., p. 305, E. Tr.

Revelation 71
into a loving fellowship with us than for men to
do so with each other ? I should be inclined to
think that He is even more capable of doing so.
For as no man can altogether read the soul of
another, so no man can altogether live in the
soul of another; hence all our human love is
and remains imperfect. But if we are shut off
from one another by the limits of individuality,
in relation to God it is not so ; to Him our
hearts are as open as each man's heart is to
himself; He sees through and through them,
and desires to live in them, and to fill them
with His own sacred energy and blessedness."
Others, again, have argued from the nature of Iiling-
personality that a Personal God must neces- Argument.
sarily reveal Himself. Thus Mr. Illingworth
has shown that love, desire for free intercourse
with other persons, is an essential of person
ality. According to Mr. Illingworth's search
ing exposition there are three constituent
elements of personality, — self-consciousness,
the power of self-determination, and desires
which irresistibly impel us into communion
with other persons ; or, in other words, rea
son, will, and love. "We are so constituted
that we cannot regard inanimate property,
uncommunicated knowledge, unreciprocated
emotion, solitary action, otherwise than as

72 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Is direct
intercoursewith God
possible ?

means to an end. We press on through it
all till we have found persons like ourselves
with whom to share it, and then we are at
rest." "We require to find in other persons
an end in which our entire personality may
rest. And this is the relationship of love."
If God, then, is Personal, this essential element
of personality must appear in Him. He must
desire the existence of persons in whom His
nature can find satisfaction. And alLwho fol
low Mr. Illingworth's argument will agree with
his conclusion that " we cannot conceive a Per
son freely creating persons except with a view
to hold intercourse with them when created."
Both Pfleiderer and Illingworth seem to
believe it possible for the Divine Spirit to
hold direct intercourse with the human spirit ;
that is to say, that the Divine Spirit apart from
any means or media can come into contact with
the spirit of man and communicate of His ful
ness to him. And certainly there is much in
Scripture, if not in common experience, which
seems to justify this idea ; although from the
nature of the case it is difficult to verify. It
is indeed at this point, the intercourse or con
currence of the human and the Divine, that
the human mind so often finds itself baffled in
various directions of theological inquiry.

Revelation 73
3. Has God revealed Himself, and where? Godre-

Necessarily God has revealed Himself in His
works. What He has created and what He
has done manifest His character. There may
or may not have been minds capable of appre
hending this revelation, but none the less has
the revelation been made. As you ascertain a
man's existence and come to understand his
character from his actions, so God, being ever
present and ever operative in the world, neces
sarily manifests His existence and His nature.
If all this vast universe, with its upholding laws
and forces, and its endless variety of living
forms, has sprung from the design and creative
will of God, then what we see in the world
around us cannot fail to show us something of
the nature of God. The heavens declare the
glory of God. There is much indeed that is
difficult to interpret, — the cruelty, the pain
that appear in all creation, — but at any rate
we learn the magnitude of existence, the regu
larity and resistless power of its forces, and so
come to some apprehension of the resource and
unthinkable power of God. Slowly the idea of
God has grown and expanded in the human
mind as men have pondered this revelation of
Himself in the world : many grotesque and
dishonoring thoughts of Him have had their

vealed in
creation.

74 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
day and been at last eliminated ; much has yet
to be learned from this manifestation of the
unseen Spirit in material works, but doubtless
the revelation is there for those who can under
stand it.
" Of this fair volume which we world do name,
If we the sheets and leaves could turn with care,
Of him who it corrects and did it frame,
We clear might read the art and wisdom rare :
Find out his power which wildest powers doth tame,
His providence extending everywhere,
His justice which proud rebels doth not spare,
In every page, no period of the same,
But silly we, like foolish children, rest
Well pleased with colored vellum, leaves of gold,
Fair dangling ribbons, leaving what is best,
On the great writer's sense ne'er taking hold ;
Or if by chance we stay our minds on aught,
It is some picture on the margin wrought."
— William Drummond (Hawthornden) ,
translated from Sonnet by Marino.

God re- But as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us,
vealed in
man.

God has "spoken," or revealed Himself "in
many ways." And the character of God is
more distinctly exhibited in the nature of man,
and in God's government of him in providence.
From man's recognition of his own moral
nature, his instinct to approve the good, his
admiration for what is heroic in self-sacrifice,
his homage to what is loving, he concludes the

Revelation 75
nature of God, the source of all this, his Crea
tor. As man grows in good, so grows his idea
of God. It is largely through his own efforts
after goodness and unaccomplishing instincts
for goodness that he perceives what God must
be. The best that is in him is surpassed, infi
nitely surpassed, by God; and as he himself,
under God's educating hand, grows to perceive
moral beauties and ideals that previously were
hidden from him, so he grows in wider and
truer thoughts of God. For it is still through
his own nature he conceives of God. As
Whittier puts it : —
" By all that He requires of me
I know what God Himself must be."
But the revelation of Himself, which prepared J« history.
for God's manifestation in Christ, was especially
historical. It was through His dealings with
men in providence that His people learned to
know Him. The readiness of certain races to
perceive God may be gathered from the quick
ness with which they deduced from the Elood
that God was a holy God. The instinct of
conscience was seen in their referring to their
own sins this devastating visitation. In that
event God conveyed to men the impression that
His holiness was genuine and essential. One

76 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
of the fundamental lessons which men could
receive was then given, and it was given in a
language suited to the times and intelligible to
the dullest mind. And all through the history
of Israel, in the calamities that followed wrong
doing, in the disgrace and weakness that fol
lowed unfaithfulness to God, the people with
always increasing clearness recognized that it
was a righteous and gracious God who was gov
erning them. They got nearer and nearer to a
true insight into His character, and this they
did by means of the revelation He made of Him
self in ordering the events which formed their
history.
God re- It is especially to be noticed that throughout
Redeemer *ne history of Israel God revealed Himself as a
Redeemer, as a God who befriends His people on
earth; thinking tenderest thoughts, thoughts
of good and not of evil, toward them ; forgiving
their iniquities, rebuking and chastening them,
but always readily receiving them again into
His favor. It was this which was indelibly im
pressed on the observant minds in Israel, that
Jehovah was a God bent upon the redemption
of His people, and that He was ever alongside of
them, carrying forward into higher stages this
redemptive work. The Psalms and the Proph
ets are standing evidence that this was the

Revelation 77
impression made upon Israel — that God had
actually made Himself known as the Redeemer
of His people.
But all this revealing history, with the vary- Revelation
ing experience of God's people under His hand,
and the various redemptive institutions which
kept alive the knowledge of God already won ;
all that through which God made His presence
felt and His attitude known, prepared for and
culminated in the consummate revelation made
in Christ. Two aspects o£ this revelation mani
fest its perfectness, — its personality and its
redeeming efficacy.
(1) It is personal and thus perfect. In Personal
Christ, God manifests His personal attributes fore perfect.
— His holiness, His love, His self-sacrifice —
in personal, human actings. He brings Him
self into intelligible connection with human
affairs. Only when Christ appeared could it
be said, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father." Only then could men say, This that
we see in Jesus is the sympathy of God, the
devotedness and self-sacrifice, the forgiveness
and solicitude for the sinner that are in God.
Accordingly, He introduced the highest idea of
God men have ever cherished, — an idea intro
duced by His own year or two of public life •
and by which now all other ideas are meas-

78 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Redemp-tively per
fect.

Method of
revelation.

ured. Sometimes one feels as if in attributing
to God all good we were merely creating a God
out of our own fancies and ideals. But when
we turn to Christ we find that it is from His
historical figure we have borrowed our ideals.
In Christ we have all the God we seek. In
Him we have a personal revelation of a per
sonal God. It required a Person fully to re
veal God.
(2) This revelation is also redemptively per
fect. Christ revealed God not as abstractly
wise and holy and loving, but as expressing
and using all Divine virtue and resource with a
particular end in view, — that of redeeming us
from evil. And this has so been achieved in
Christ that it need not be undertaken over
again, nor need additions and supplements be
made to His work. When He said, "I have
finished the work thou gavest me to do," he
uttered a bare truth. In Him God has recon
ciled the world unto Himself. God's thirst
for our salvation can never be more clearly ex
pressed ; nor shall we ever again see the power
of God unto salvation so put forth.
4. We have to ask, What has been the method
of revelation? Our answer to this question de
pends upon our idea of God. If we believe in
God as immanent in the world and man, then

Revelation 79
we shall necessarily believe that God reveals
Himself through human sensitiveness to the
Spiritual and inquiry after Him. If we believe
in God as merely transcendent, we shall think
of Him as moving man from without. In the
one case revelation will be internal and natural ;
in the other it will be external and supernatural.
Belief in the immanence of God tends to Immanence
abolish the distinction between the natural and
the supernatural. Everything is equally natu
ral, or, if we prefer it, equally supernatural.
All nature is filled with the presence and power
of the living God. "The lily can as little
bloom without the forthputting of His energy
as the prophet can reveal Him or the saint grow
into His likeness." If, then, those who believe
in God's immanence maintain that all revela
tion is natural, this does not mean that it is not
under the direct control of God. It means
that revelation proceeds hand in hand with
human development, is driven forward by simi
lar forces, and regulated by the same laws, all
of which are the manifestation and expression
of God.
The important point on which to fix atten- Method is
tion in our own day seems to be this : that
whether we believe in the immanence of God
or think of Him as transcendent, we must bear

80 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
in mind that in any case He is spirit, and that
His operations are spiritual. When it is said
that He " spoke " to Moses and the prophets,
enjoining this or that institution, or communi
cating this or that message, we are not to think
of any external intimation coming through the
bodily ear, but we are to understand that the
mind and spirit of the prophet were enabled to
perceive what was the mind of God. It was
through severe mental exercise that Paul at
tained his insight into Divine things and his
decisions on the difficult questions of practice
which were referred to him. As Sabatier says:
" When God wished to give the Decalogue to Is
rael, He did not write with His finger on tables
of stone ; He raised up Moses, and from the
consciousness of Moses the Decalogue sprang.
In order that we might have the Epistle to
the Romans, there was no need to dictate it
to the Apostle; God had only to create the
powerful individuality of Saul of Tarsus, well
knowing that when once the tree was made,
the fruit would follow in due course." 1
instances of In the thirteenth chapter of the book of
Acts we have a significant instance of reve
lation. We there read that as certain Christian
teachers were praying, "the Holy Ghost said,
1 " Outlines of Philosophy of Religion," p. 57.

revelation.

Revelation 81
Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work
whereunto I have called them." No reader of
these words fancies that a voice audible to the
bodily ear was heard uttering this command
ment. Every reader understands that the
Holy Ghost worked His will in a much more
inward and effectual manner, speaking within
the mind and spirit of those who sought His
guidance. Neither can we suppose that with
out any previous expenditure of thought on
the subject these men had this idea flashed
into their mind as a bolt from the blue. It
came as the result of their endeavor to discover
what was the mind of God or, in other words,
what was best in the circumstances to be done.
They were inwardly convinced that the step
they proposed was the mind of God. No more
important step was ever taken in the history
of the Church than the mission of Paul and
Barnabas. And this step was taken on the
safest, surest ground of inward revelation of
the mind of Christ. They were convinced
that they were fulfilling His will and seeing
with His eyes. Here we- have a key to the
method of revelation. Men in sympathy with
God understand His will, enter into His thought,
recognize His judgments and His purposes, and
so become organs of His revelation.

82 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
Criterion of But if it is thus impossible to separate the
thoughts of man from the revelation of God,
it may be asked, How can any one certainly
know what is from God and what is not from
God? what is the Divine spirit informing the
mind with true views of Divine things, and
what is a lying spirit leading men astray?
what is God making Himself and His will
known, and what is human fancy and error?
To such questioning it can only be replied that
" for the individual prophet or apostle himself
no test of the genuineness of the revelations
made to him could be superior to his own firm
and clear conviction of such communion with
God." " Whoso has felt the spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny ;
Yea, with one voice, Oh ! world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I."
And if it be asked whether the Church or com
munity of godly people is bound to receive such
communications on the word of the prophet, the
answer is, No ! the community has a responsibil
ity as well as the prophet and must receive or
reject his word according to its own conscious
ness of truth and of God in the message.
But the method of revelation will be more
fully understood if we ask : —

Revelation 83
5. Finally, what was God's purpose in re- Purpose of
sealing Himself to man ? It may be said gen- revelation-
erally that God, being a God of love, sought to
communicate and impart of His own fulness to
all whom He had made in His image, capable
of holding fellowship with Him. But in con
sidering particularly the revelation recorded in
the Bible we see that a more definite and par
ticular purpose may be said to be in view. For
from first to last in the Bible man is represented
as needing redemption, deliverance from evil
and sin. Its opening scene is the fall of man,
and all God's revelation of Himself in Israel and
in Jesus Christ was a revelation in view of
man's sin. It was a manifestation of God as a
God of grace, as a Redeemer. And it was a
revelation which it concerned all men to know.
We may, therefore, reasonably conclude that
God's purpose was to bring the knowledge of
Himself as Redeemer to all men.
But to obtain this result it was necessary that Recipients
more should be done than merely that God °£™mla~
should manifest Himself in the history and
institutions of Israel or even in the person and
life of Jesus Christ. It was needful that there
should be men fitted to recognize and appreciate
these manifestations. The initial and rudi
mentary intimations of God's presence were

84 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
made to all men. Not to the Jews alone, but
to all men has God manifested Himself as
a ruler who loves righteousness. But where
these preparatory lessons were not received,
higher lessons could not be given. In Israel
were found men fitted to understand what God
meant to teach. They were men whose spirit
was in sympathy with God. In other words,
inspiration was required to implement revela
tion. In order to utilize revelation there must
be men who have so much of God's spirit in
them as to discern, appreciate, and respond to
His manifestation in nature, in history, and in
Christ. And if this knowledge and apprecia
tion of God's revelation are to be a permanent
possession of the race, it must be recorded in
writing. Apparently, then, if revelation is to answer
its purpose, it must be made to those who can
understand it, and it must be recorded.
Here, then, emerge two points which call for
fuller discussion: (1) the progressiveness of
revelation and (2) its record in writing.
Revelation 1. Revelation must be progressive because
progressive, y. musj- accommo(jate itself to the condition of
those to whom it is made. It used to be one
of the stock difficulties of the Deists, Why did
not God reveal Himself in Christ at first?

Revelation 85
Why did He not follow up the fall with the
immediate manifestation of His grace? And
in our own day it is commonly objected to the
Old Testament that its morality is imperfect —
a difficulty as old as the second century, when
so many of the Gnostic sects were stumbled by
what they found in the Old Testament and de
clared that it was a different God who is there
represented. All such difficulties are overcome
as soon as it is recognized that by the nature
of the case God was compelled to accommodate
Himself to the condition of those with whom
He had to do. It was impossible that in the
childhood of the race such a knowledge of God
could be received as was possible in its maturity.
When Plotinus said, " He must become god- Accommo-
like who desires to see God," he uttered the recipients.
principle which lies at the root of the matter.
" Moral affinity is an essential of personal in
timacy. A man cannot understand a character
with which his own has no accord." We can
not make ourselves understood by those who
are utterly unlike ourselves, neither can God.
A loving and unselfish man, who goes among
persons hardened by vice and who have never
known love, is sure at first to be misunderstood,
and it is only by degrees he can make his
character known. At first he will be sus-

86 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
pected, misjudged. And it has been only in
proportion as men have become capable of ap
preciating the higher and diviner qualities of
character that God has been able to disclose
Himself more and more fully to the race. The
love of God could not be understood until His
righteousness and holiness were understood. It
was useless for Christ to die until the heart
and conscience of men had firmly grasped holi
ness and righteousness as essential to Divinity
— then only could His self-sacrificing love be
fully appreciated and intelligently estimated.
Morality of So, too, with the morality of the Old Testa
ment. By slow degrees morality had to be
cleansed and heightened, and if we wish to
ascertain whether it is a Divinely guided pro
cess which the Old Testament records, we must
ask, not what the early stages were, but what
the whole process resulted in. The circum
stance that men in some sense inspired, and
who at any rate were the organs of revelation,
as Abraham and David, were guilty of lying
and other iniquities, testifies to the truth of the
record and reflects no discredit on the revela
tion. In so far as the Divine accommodation
adapted itself to the imperfectly moral, with the
result of raising them to a higher level, that pro
cedure is justified.

Old Testa
ment

Revelation 87
This point is so constantly misunderstood andinfer-
, l , ¦, , , ences there-
tnat a word or two more may be given to it. from.
There are in the Old Testament not only im
moralities recorded, as there must be in any
full and true history, but there are actions re
corded which seem to have the Divine sanction
and yet are condemned by the New Testament
code. The practice of slavery and polygamy,
the slaughter of the Canaanites and the priests
of Baal, the destruction of innocent children
along with their guilty parents, the ferocious
and vindictive expressions in many of the
Psalms addressed to God, — these frequently
stumble readers of the Bible.
Regarding these things the argument of seep- Sceptical
tics is a brief one : This book professes to be ar^ument-
Divine, but it represents God as approving of
immoral actions and, therefore, it cannot be
Divine. Its claim is false, and we must disre
gard it.
This argument was perhaps justified by the itsfaiiacy.
claims which used to be made for the Bible and
by the manner in which these claims were
urged ; but the argument has no relevancy
against the real claim of the Old Testament
and the just and true view of God's method of
revealing Himself. The Old Testament is a
faithful record of a race which was being

88 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
trained to know God and to love righteousness,
and it shows us the steps in their progress.
The leading men of this race were sincere and
devoted servants of Jehovah and were in true
communion with Him, but they had not a per
fect knowledge of Him. They were gradually
advancing toward that perfect knowledge which
came only with Christ. They were able to
understand only so much of the Divine nature
as they had grown up to, as a child cannot
understand the whole of his father's character
and ways. And these imperfections in the
knowledge of God, the Bible, being a true
and faithful record, freely recounts ; briefly
showing us how the best men among the Jews
misunderstood God, but how, by adhering to
His law and seeking to hold fellowship with
Him, they gradually eliminated from their
knowledge of Him all that was crude and un
worthy. And it is not the imperfections and
mistakes which disfigure the earlier parts of
this growth which should arrest our attention,
but the sure and grand progress that at last
left behind all these imperfections and justified
the training hand and spirit of God. To look
upon the Old Testament as depicting a final
stage in knowledge or righteousness, and not
as a preparation, is a fatal error ; to look upon

Revelation 89
each part of God's revelation by itself and judge
it in separation from what goes before and
after, is a fatal error. If we would have clear
views, either of revelation or of the Old Testa
ment, we must above all bear in mind that
revelation was a growing light from dawn to
perfect day, and that though some in the gray
dawn trusted God and served Him as faithfully
as their successors, it was not possible that they
should know Him as well.
The summary argument of the sceptic, there- True con-
fore, falls to the ground when it meets the only ^fd Testa-
true idea of the Old Testament. The sceptic ment.
who coarsely selects from the Old Testament
all that shocks the modern conscience and
thrusts all these crudities in the Christian's
face, saying, " That is your God — a God who
approves slavery and vengeance," and the de
vout reader who wishes these things were out
of the book altogether, alike misconceive the
real state of the case. God revealed Himself
to men feature by feature as they were able to
receive it. He did not lift the Jewish people
at once and miraculously to the stage they were
at length to reach. He did not supernaturally
impart to the race at one flash the knowledge
of Himself which He meant to give them by
guiding their national history, by teaching their

90 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
best men to reflect upon that history and strive
to advance it. He revealed Himself to them
through their national life, through His deal
ings with them in their times of rebellion and
repentance. He was in no hurry to remove
misconceptions ; they could only see in Him
what they had grown up to be able to see ; and
serving Him according to their present knowl
edge was the only method of growing to know
more. The circumstance, therefore, that even
men like Elijah had not as yet the conception
of God that Christ has given us, and served
Him in ways that our conscience cannot
approve, is only another proof that the Old
Testament is a true and helpful account of the
actual process by which God revealed Himself
to man.
Christ the It will, however, be said : If this is so, if the
Tevelation ^ld Testament records the misconceptions of
good men as well as their contributions to the
permanent knowledge of God, are we not liable
to mistake the one for the other ? If God is
not in some particulars what some of these men
thought Him, how are we to know as we read
the Old Testament what to receive and what
to reject ? The person and teaching of Christ
are our test. In His perfect revelation of the
Father we have the criterion by which all

Revelation 91
that is imperfect is judged. By the finished
product we judge each part of the process
which prepared for it. If you read the his
tory of the steam engine, or of engraving, or
of electricity, or of astronomy, or any science,
you find that discovery has gone forward step
by step, and that brilliant ideas were often
accompanied by mistakes which for a time kept
back the result. And in tracing out the long
history of any discovery, it is not the mistakes
that chiefly engage the historian's attention,
but the continuous thread of progress that
connects the earliest thinker with the latest.
And no modern astronomer is misled by the
mistaken ideas regarding the motion of the
sun which were current in ancient times ; nor
is the engineer who possesses the actual work
ing machine perplexed by the false expecta
tions of early investigators into the power of
steam. And no sane person would think of
pouring scorn upon those who in bygone cen
turies worked at any science, but did so with
many misapprehensions of the truth. They,
with all their mistakes and strivings, were the
necessary antecedents to our knowledge. In
the discovery of God there is indeed a differ
ence. God revealed Himself, and did not leave
man to his natural powers of discovery; but on

92 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
the other hand God could only discover to man
what he was fit to understand, and this under
standing was regulated by the real historical
growth of the human mind. To look back
with contempt, then, on the thoughts and ac
tions of Old Testament saints is a kind of
spiritual parricide ; it is to forget the rock
from which we are hewn ; it is to despise the
great pioneers who have made our knowledge
possible.
Revelation, 2. God's purpose in revealing Himself being
horded 'o redeem mankind, it was, if not necessary, yet
most desirable that the revelation should be
recorded. Bishop Butler has indeed said that "we
are not in any sort able to judge whether it
were to have been expected that the revela
tion should have been committed to writing;
or left to be handed down, and consequently
corrupted by verbal tradition, and at length
sunk under it, if mankind so pleased, and
during such time as they are permitted, in the
degree they evidently are, to act as they will.
But it may be said, ' That a revelation in some
of the above-mentioned circumstances, one, for
instance, which was not committed to writing,
and thus secured against danger of corruption,
would not have answered its purpose.' I ask,

Revelation 93
what purpose? It would not have answered
all the purposes which it has now answered,
and in the same degree ; but it would have
answered others or the same in different
degrees. And which of these were the pur
poses of God, and best fell in with His general
government, we could not at all have deter
mined beforehand." This is a most useful
corrective to our readiness to presume that
such and such must have been God's purposes,
as well as a reminder that revelation is one
thing, the recording of it another, and that it
is quite conceivable that there might have been
a revelation without any written record of it.
Certainly a large part of God's revelation of
Himself has been lost. Much of His revela
tion in nature is not yet understood ; His
revelation in history has been only partially
recognized; even His revelation in Christ is
not fully recorded. But although beforehand
it might have been presumptuous to predict
what would happen, yet now that we find so
full a record of God's revelation actually made,
it is very easy to recognize the immense advan
tage of this procedure. This is nowhere better
stated than in the Westminster Confession.
" Although the light of nature, and the works
of creation and providence, do so far manifest

94 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to
leave men inexcusable, yet they are not sufficient
to give that knowledge of God and of His -will
which is necessary unto salvation ; therefore it
pleased the Lord at sundry times and in divers
manners to reveal Himself and to declare that
His will unto His Church ; and afterwards for
the better preserving and propagating of the
truth, and for the more sure establishment and
comfort of the Church against the corruption
of the flesh and the malice of Satan and of the
world, to commit the same wholly unto writ
ing; which maketh the holy Scripture to be
most necessary ; those former ways of God's
revealing His will unto His people being now
ceased." To the same effect says Rothe :
"We must not forget that the main point in
revelation is not that it shall produce an effect
on the immediate sphere in which it is opera
tive, but that the facts in which it consists shall
be abidingly present for man in his intellectual
horizon, as an essential datum in the complex
of his perceptions and experiences. It seeks
to introduce certain facts as elements of the
human world, which this world could not have
produced of itself."
Need of It may therefore be said that it is impossible
records. for us to see how the revelation could have ac-

Revelation 95
complished its ends had it not been committed
to writing : for, first, it is even difficult to un
derstand how the revelation could have been
completed without the aid of writing. The
revelation was historical, extending over long
periods of time. " One generation must tell to
another the truths revealed and the redemptive
deeds accomplished by God." The prophets
built upon the antecedent Law and on the pre
vious history of the people. The New Testa
ment writers were guided and aided by their
knowledge of the Old Testament. And it is
not apparent that in any other way than by
means of written records the continuity and pro-
gressiveness of the revelation could have been
maintained. As Professor Ladd says: "Bib
lical revelation is not spasmodic; it is histori
cal. Memory is as necessary to the growth of
the race as of the individual. It belongs to
the very idea of an historical revelation that
there should be an accumulated store of Divine
Communications." Again, it is the written record which pre
serves incorrupt and propagates through all
ages and all tongues the knowledge of God as
Redeemer which He has communicated. If
any one wishes to know what God is in His
relation to man, if it be desired to know what

96 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
Christianity is, or what are the facts on which
Christianity is based and the doctrines it de
livers, or if it be in dispute what men ought to
believe, it is to the Bible appeal must be made.
And therefore the Bible may itself legitimately,
if loosely, be called the revelation.
Summary. Conclusion. — From all this, then, it will be
gathered that God has revealed Himself espe
cially in His redemptive energy, that we see
most of God and of all that is essential to His
character and purposes in His approaches to man
and education of man in order to restore him to
Himself and to free him absolutely from all
evil. In the Bible we have the written history
of this approach of God to man, the record of
His revelation of His gracious and saving pur
poses and work. To think of it as a conven
ient collection or summary of doctrines, a
text-book in theological knowledge, is entirely
to misconceive it. " If we get out of it a system
of truth as to God and His relations to man, we
must do it as an astronomer gets a system of
astronomy from the heavenly bodies " (or as an
embryologist gathers his completed information
from watching the natural growth of the em
bryo). God has revealed Himself, and the lead
ing facts of this revelation are recorded for us
in the Bible, and from these facts we can gather

Revelation 97
what God wishes us to know about Him and
how He wishes us to think of Him. But the
Bible must not be thought of as "a collection
of truths formulated in propositions which God
from time to time whispered in the ear to be
communicated to the world as the unchanging
formulas of thought and life for all time."1
Here, also, we get the idea of inspiration, for
this revelation of God can only be understood
and appreciated by those who have His spirit
— inspired men must be there to receive the
revelation. Inspiration is the complement of
revelation — as sight is the complement of the
external world; it is that in man which per
ceives, appreciates, accepts, and in certain cases
records the revelation of God. There may be
revelation by God where there is no inspired
man to observe and respond to it as there are
parts of the external world the eye has never
seen. But the essential elements in revelation
have been understood and interpreted by men.
Much revelation has been made which there
were no inspired men to receive ; and much
revelation has been perceived by inspired men
which has not been recorded. In the Bible we
have that selected revelation which inspired
men have accepted and seen fit to record.
1 Harris, p. 458.

IY
INSPIRATION

IV
INSPIRATION
Theee things, then, should be held distinct Revelation
in our minds : God's revelation of Himself, record.
human apprehension of this revelation, and the
record in our Bible of this revelation as appre
hended. It is not indeed conceivable that such
a revelation of God as was made in Christ
should have failed to find appreciative minds ;
and, as during a long period of tike world's his
tory men had been accustomed to put in writing
what had impressed them, it was natural that
the further step of recording a recognized reve
lation should be taken. But by holding these
three processes distinct in our mind we gain a
clearer apprehension of the nature and place of
the Bible. Prior to the existence of the Bible,
God manifested Himself savingly to men ; but
it is equally true that it is through the Bible
God now makes Himself and His redemption
apprehensible by men. God revealed Himself
in Christ and saved the world in Christ before
there was any New Testament ; but the benefit
101

102 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
of that revelation is permanently conveyed to
the world through the Gospels and the epistles.
Accordingly, the Scriptures have been described
as " the mode by which God as He is in Christ
lives for the faith of the Church and before
the mind of the world. They as it were so
impersonate, immortalize, and universalize the
consciousness of Christ that it can exercise
everywhere and always its creative and norma
tive functions." Roughly, therefore, the Bible
is called the revelation of God because it brings
before us in a written record what God has
done to make Himself known, and what God-
inspired men have seen in that revelation and
have thought of God.1 The human qualifica
tion for understanding and recording revelation
requires fuller treatment. It is called Inspi
ration, which is the word used to translate
Inspiration. OeoTrvevcrTia. This quality is claimed for Scrip-
1 Obviously, this involves that in order to appreciate and
use the Bible the reader of it must himself have the same
spirit which enabled its writers to understand the revelation
of God and to record it. The Bible is a record, but it is not
a dead record of dead persons and events, but a record in
spired by the living Spirit who uses it to speak to men now.
It is more than a phonograph which has mechanically stored
up for ages the words and tones of the original speaker. It
is the medium through which the living God now makes
Himself heard and known. But to find in it the Spirit of
God the reader must himself have that Spirit.

Inspiration 103
ture and for the writers of it : (1) On the
grounds already stated that the presence of
the Divine Spirit is requisite to enable a man to
recognize God's revelation. Spiritual things
are spiritually discerned. Accordingly, our
Lord promised nothing more emphatically and
explicitly than the coming of this Spirit of
truth that His people might recognize what
God had revealed in Him. And (2) while the
writers of Scripture do not individually claim
this inspiration, but rest their claims to cre
dence rather upon other qualifications, yet in
the New Testament inspiration is claimed for
the Old. In 2 Tim. iii. 16, however we
construe the words, inspiration is claimed for
Scripture ; and in 2 Pet. i. 21 we have the
statement that prophecy was not the product of
human will, but men from God spake being
carried (fapofievoi) or borne along by the Holy
Spirit. Paul, too, in 1 Cor. xiv. 37, says, " If
any man thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let
him acknowledge that what I write is of the
Lord." And when in another part of the same
epistle (vii. 40) he says, " I think (Sokw) that
I have the spirit of God," the modesty of the
claim only gives us additional certification of
its truth. And if other writers whose books
appear in Scripture make no such claim, this

104 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Various
definitions.

A priori
conception inadmis
sible.

by no means involves that they did not possess
inspiration. But when we attempt to advance from the
simple affirmation that Scripture is inspired to
the inquiry, What is inspiration? we find our
selves beset with various contradictory opin
ions. Every gradation of opinion has found
advocates from the lowest to the highest ;
from the idea that the writers of Scripture
were inspired in the same sense as Milton or
Bunyan or Beethoven was inspired, to the be
lief that inspiration means that every word in
the Bible is as fully the word of God as if no
human instrumentality had intervened.
Much injustice has been done to the Bible,
and much harm has resulted to faith, by allow
ing a priori conceptions of inspiration and its
effects to rule. It has been argued that if God
is pleased to make known His will to men, this
revelation must be accomplished in such and
such a manner. It will be clear and unambig
uous in meaning ; it will be unadulterated by
any alloy of human error, and so forth. Thus
it was argued that the Hebrew vowel-points
must have been inspired, for otherwise the
reading would have been uncertain, and God
could not leave uncertainty in His word.
Similarly, it was argued that God could allow

Inspiration 105
no grammatical errors, no barbarous construc
tions, no faultiness of style in His word. Tex
tual criticism was frowned upon because it was
supposed that God could not leave His word to
the mercy of the ordinary accidents affecting
secular literature. All these preconceptions
have been found to be erroneous and have lent
emphasis to the warning pronounced by Bishop
Butler : " We are in no sense judges beforehand
by what methods and in what proportion it
were to be expected that this supernatural
light and instruction should be afforded us.
The only question concerning the authority of
Scripture is whether it be what it claims to \be,
not whether it be a book of such sort and so
promulgated as weak men are apt to fancy a
book containing a Divine revelation should be.
And therefore neither obscurity, nor seeming
inaccuracy of style, nor various readings, nor
early disputes about the authors, nor any other
things of the like kind, though they had been
much more considerable than they are, could
overthrow the authority of Scripture, unless
the prophets, apostles, or our Lord had prom
ised that the Book containing the Divine reve
lation should be secure from these things." inspiration
It is, then, only from the Bible itself we can to be learned
' ' •> from Bible
learn what an inspired book is. We may find itself.

106 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
many unexpected peculiarities in the Bible, but
these will not dismay us, if we have not gone
to it with a preconceived theory of what if
ought to be and of what inspiration must ac
complish. The Bible must not be forced into
conformity with our Procrustean theory of in
spiration ; but we must allow our theory to be
formed by the Bible. If we should find on
examination that much of what is human enters
into the Bible, we must expand our theory to
include this. If we should find discrepancies
or inaccuracies, these must help us to our true
theory. In Professor Bowne's small but excellent book
on the " Christian Revelation," he very truly
says : " The presence of inspiration is dis
cernible in the product, but the meaning and
measure of inspiration cannot be decided by
abstract reflection, but only by the outcome.
What inspiration is, must be learned from what
it does. We must not determine the character
of the books from the inspiration, but must
rather determine the nature of the inspiration
from the books" (pp. 44-45).
Problem of The problem in regard to inspiration is, to
adjust truly the Divine and the human factors.
The various theories which have been framed
and held differ from one another regarding the

inspiration.

Inspiration 107
proportion which the human element in the
process and in the result bears to the Divine.
According as greater or less predominance is
ascribed to the Divine influence we have the
following theories : —
1. That which has been known as the me- Mechanical
chanical or dictation theory. It is the theory of % eory'
complete possession, in which the Divine factor
is at its maximum, the human at its minimum.
What is human is suppressed; the indwelling
God uses the human organs irrespective of the
human will. The man is the mere mouthpiece
of the god, uttering words he need not know
the meaning of, thoughts which no free process
of his own faculties has reached. He is the
organ of a mind and will not his own.
This view has always been popular outside This a
of Christianity. Among heathen people the ^ory.
very sign of a man's being possessed by a god
is that he loses self-control. Paul's rule that
the spirit of the prophet is subject to the
prophet was incomprehensible to them. The
less command the prophet had over himself
the more surely was he inspired. Accordingly,
this state of frenzy was artificially produced by
inhaling fumes or by violent dancings and con
tortions, such as are still practised in Africa
and the East. Similarly, persons in a state of

108 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
trance can see what is invisible to them when
in possession of their faculties, and dreams are
supposed to be intimations of the Divine will.
This view of inspiration is announced not only
as the superstition of the heathen populace,
but by their authoritative exponents of belief.
Plato, for example, in the " Timseus " (71) says,
" God has given the art of divination, not to
the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man. No
man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth
and inspiration; but when he receives the in
spired word, either his intelligence is enthralled
in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper
or possession." And in the "Phsedrus" (244)
he gives an account of four forms of madness, —
prophecy, inspiration, poetry, love, and shows
that the self-possessed man cannot be the sub
ject of these inspirations.
eK(j)pa>v was the word commonly used to ex
press the human side of the condition most
receptive of Divine communications. Thus
in Plato's "Ion," 534, occurs the expression
evOeos re ical e/afipcov, and in Plutarch's " Themis-
tocles," c. XXVI., 2, a certain tutor Olbios
suddenly becomes inspired, eiccfrpav yevofievo*; ical
6eo<j)6p7]To<;. In the sixth "iEneid " Virgil rep
resents the priestess as striving to shake off the
god and struggling against his influence till she
is gradually subdued.

Inspiration 109
This theory, then, proceeds upon the idea Human
that the less the ordinary human faculties are p^^d™^
in operation, the fuller is the Divine inspira
tion. It is supposed that God finds freer ex
pression for Himself, not through the fuller
exercise of the human mind and spirit, but
through their suppression. Hence the relation
of the inspiring God to the inspired man was
often pictured by that of a player to the lyre
or harp on which he played, or of a writer to
the pen with which he wrote. The man was
a mechanical instrument, and into the work
accomplished his own thought, feeling, and will
did not enter. The result was purely Divine;
every word uttered was the word of God.
Only in some disguised form can this theory Popularity
now be held, although certainly it was common %^)t
until quite recently, and it has whatever pres
tige antiquity can give it. Some of the fathers,
especially Athenagoras, used the figure of the
lyre and the plectrum in a manner which at
least lays them open to the suspicion of holding
this mechanical theory. Athenagoras, speak
ing of the prophets, says, that " while entranced
and deprived of their natural powers of reason
by the influence of the Divine Spirit, they
uttered that which was wrought in them, the
spirit using them as its instruments, as a flute-

110 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Jewish be
lief.

Outcome of
this theory.

player might blow a flute." Philo, with all
his intelligence and knowledge, believed that
inspiration was a kind of ecstasy, and that
inspired men were mere voices uttering not
what they had themselves felt and thought,
but God's words.1
Hence to the Jews every word and letter of
the Scriptures was sacred. When Moses went
up into the Mount he found Jehovah making
the ornamental letters in the book of the Law.
Accordingly, they numbered the words and the
letters of every book, and found a mystery full
of significance in the most external and casual
features of the sacred book.
In the second century, Montanism gave an
impulse to this mechanical view and was ex
plicitly opposed by Miltiades in a treatise
entitled irepl rov fir] 8e2v irpo^>rrTr]V iv iiccrrda-ei
\a\eiv, i.e. That the prophet ought not to speak
in ecstasy. But the hold which this theory
took even upon Christendom is perhaps best

1 Philo (" Quis Eer. Div. Haeres," c. 53, p. 511, Mangey,
Vol. I.) says that so long as we are masters of ourselves, we
are not possessed by any extraneous influence ; but when
our own mind ceases to shine, inspiration and madness lay
hold of us. "For the understanding that dwells in us is
ousted on the arrival of the Divine Spirit, but is restored to
its own dwelling when that Spirit departs, for it is unlawful
that mortal dwell with immortal."

Inspiration 111
illustrated by the fact that it found expression
in the post-reformation "Formula Consensus
Helvetici," in which occurs this clause : Hebra-
icus V. T. codex, turn quoad consonas, turn
quoad vocalia, sive puncta ipsa, seu punctorum
saltern potestatem, et turn quoad res, turn quoad
verba 6eoTrvev<n6<s.
A theory of which this is the legitimate logi- This theory
cal outcome does not cover the facts of Scrip- untena e-
ture, and therefore becomes untenable. The
account which Luke gives us of his preparation
for writing his Gospel shows that he was not a
mere mouthpiece of another's thoughts. If
the penitential wailings and joyful thanksgiv
ings and ascriptions of praise which we find in
the Psalms are not the fruit of human sorrow
and of human thought and experience, they at
once become vapid and false. It is inconceiv
able, and contrary to all we know of the man
ner of God's working, that He should have
used men in this merely mechanical way.
And the supposed result of this supposed its supposed
process is as incongruous with God's usual
methods. The supposed result is a Bible in
which every word is as truly the word of God
as if He spoke it directly to ourselves apart
from all human intervention. There cannot be
the faintest infusion of error. Every histori-

112 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
cal, scientific, or chronological statement is ex.
actly true. It is, however, needless to follow
this theory into all its difficulties and incon
sistencies. It makes demands that cannot be
satisfied. It requires that we have a Bible of
which we are sure that each book is divinely
inspired in this absolutely inerrant sense; that
no book has been admitted which is not thus
authorized. It demands, also, that we have a
solution for all discrepancies in the several
books. If such a Bible was necessary, then
steps would have been taken to secure it to
us. But in point of fact we have a Bible
which we know does not in every particular
tally with that which at first was received.
Manuscripts have been corrupted, translations
are inexact; but it is with these that the
Christian people have practically to do. So
that the result of this theory of infallibility is
not, after all, to put in our hands an infallible
Bible, but actually to rob us of it. It is only
the original autographs which can claim such
an infallibility; and these are forever beyond
our reach. Had verbal accuracy been required
for our saving use of the Bible, it would have
been secured. It has not been secured, there
fore it was not required.
If it were requisite that we should know the

Inspiration 113
very words originally written, then were we Divergence
hopelessly shut out from the benefit of God's
word. For the text used by the Jews of the
centuries immediately preceding the Christian
era is not the Hebrew text we now use. The
text they used can be discovered from the
LXX x ; but the LXX is, to a considerable ex
tent, different from our Bible. Not only are
incidents in the life of David which we read
in our text omitted from the LXX, but in a
prophet so important as Jeremiah about one-
eighth of what we find in the Hebrew is
omitted from the Greek, while the arrange
ment of the material widely differs. Who can
tell us which of these texts, the Hebrew we
now use or the Hebrew used by the LXX, is
nearer the original? No one can certainly
say. There are two facts of Scripture which
are incompatible with the theory of verbal
inspiration. (1) The first of these is the manner in which Quotations
quotations from the Old Testament are made tamentin
in the New. Of such quotations there are theNew.
275.2 1 That is, the Septuagint translation of the Old Testa
ment into Greek.
2 See Toy's " Quotations from Old Testament."

114 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
Of these there are only 53 in which the
Hebrew, the LXX, and the New Testament
agree; that is, in which the LXX has
correctly rendered the Hebrew and been
correctly quoted by the New Testament
writer ....... 53
There are 10 interesting passages in which the
LXX has been corrected and brought into
harmony with the Hebrew . . .10
There are 37 passages in which the faulty ren
dering of the LXX has been accepted in the
New Testament quotation . . .37
There are 76 passages in which the correct
version of the LXX has been altered into
a rendering which does not agree with the
original ...... 76
And there are 99 passages in which the New
Testament quotation differs both from the
Hebrew and from the LXX . . 99
Now, on any explanation of this style of
quoting, it would certainly seem as if the New
Testament writers thought much more of the
sense of the sacred Scriptures than of the lan
guage. No doubt the language may in some
cases be so involved with the thought that
regard must be had to the actual wording of
the utterance. A case in point is the argu-

Inspiration 115
ment founded by Paul on the use of a singular
instead of a plural. But commonly one form
of words may express a thought almost as ade
quately as another ; and as the above statistics
prove, the New Testament writers set no spe
cial store by the exact words in which the Old
Testament writers expressed themselves.
It may be fancied that if this is the practice
of the New Testament writers, it runs counter
to the explicit affirmation of Christ that not a
jot or tittle of the law should pass away till all
be fulfilled. But it is only by reckless careless
ness that these words can be applied to the
words of Scripture at all. What our Lord
means is, as the context shows, that nothing
which God has ordained in the law or promised
in the prophets shall pass away till it has been
fulfilled in Him. Immediately upon saying
this He proceeds to repeal commandments of
the law, substituting for them commandments
of His own, showing that what He has in view
is not Scripture as Scripture, and that the ful
filment He thinks of is absorption in Himself.
(2) The second fact of Scripture which ap- Report of
pears to be incompatible with the idea of ver- ^rdfnot
bal inspiration is the fact that those who record literally
C'XAK.'t .
the sayings of our Lord greatly differ in their
reports. One would expect that here, if any-

116 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
where, sacredness would attach to the very
letter and precise language used. But it is
not so. Even in reporting the Lord's Prayer
the evangelists differ; and in His ordinary
sayings and conversations we congratulate
ourselves if the sense is the same in the
different Gospels and scarcely expect to find
absolute identity of language. But if inspi
ration involved perfect accuracy of language,
no such phenomena as the Gospels present
would appear.
Paul not an There is indeed a statement made by Paul
verbal " ° which to the superficial reader might seem to
inspiration. indicate that he believed himself to be taught
by the Holy Ghost the very words in which he
was to declare Christian truth. In 1 Cor.
ii., speaking of the things God had revealed
through His Spirit, he says, " Which things
also we speak not in the words which man's
wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost
teacheth." But Paul's intention is to contrast
two methods of teaching, two styles of lan
guage, — the worldly and the spiritual, — and to
affirm that the style he adopts was that which
the Holy Ghost taught him. He meant to
justify his use of a certain kind of language
and a certain style of teaching. The Spirit of
the world adopts one method of insinuating

Inspiration 117
knowledge into the mind; the Spirit of God
uses another method.
The idea of verbal inspiration has arisen Verbal
from the notion that the Spirit of God inserts Tafedln^1
or puts into the mind of the inspired man a error-
truth, as it were ready-made, and not in any
necessary connection with the previous con
tents of the inspired mind or its normal ac
tion. In this case, no doubt, the thought would
naturally be given in a definite form of words.
But everything in the Bible discourages this
idea. The impact of the Spirit's influence oc
curs at a point more remote from the result
than verbal inspiration presumes. It is the
man who is inspired. It is not that one in
spired thought is magically communicated to
him in the form in which he is to declare it to
his fellows. But the man himself is inspired,
so that he with all his natural powers and idio
syncrasies becomes the organ of the Spirit. The
elevating, refining, spiritual influence of inspi
ration may be compared in its mode of action to
the influence of some new passion, say, maternal
love, in the subject of it. It seizes upon the
whole person and uses all the faculties for
its purposes. Inspiration, therefore, does not
lift the inspired person out of all his limita
tions, but uses him as he is, and all his facul-

118 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
ties as they are for the fulfilment of a Divine
purpose.
Modifica- 2. Abandoning, then, this theory of possession
tions of the . , , n i j t £ n -±.
mechanical as untenable, we find a proposed relief from its
theory. inconsistencies in the theory that the Divine
energy did not annihilate the human coopera
tion. The Divine influence was dominant, but
not overpowering. Modifications of the theory
of possession are probably due to the Jewish
Rabbis. They differentiated the Law, the
Prophets, and the Kethubim. For the in
spiration of the Kethubim, or Hagiographa,
they considered that only a small degree of
inspiration was needed, a higher degree for
the prophetic writings and the highest for the
Law. The schoolmen followed them and some
distinguish four degrees of influence: superin
tendence, which saved from positive error ; eleva
tion, which imparted loftiness to the thought ;
direction, which prompted the writer what to
insert and what to omit ; and suggestion, which
inspired both thoughts and words.1 Without
definitely holding these various degrees or
modes of the Divine influence, many have
thought that difficulties would be escaped and
the accuracy of Scripture sufficiently guaran-
1 See Jewish Encyclopedia, art. "Inspiration" ; also, Far-
rar's art. on " Inspiration" in Theological Educator.

Inspiration 119
teed if it were held that God inspired the
thoughts but not the words ; that the truths
are communicated by the Holy Spirit, but the
form, the words and phrases in which they are
delivered, are due to the writer's own individ
uality. Plutarch has an interesting paper on
the Pythian responses in which the question is
discussed, why the oracles are not always given
in perfect form if they are Divine. And his
answer is twofold : (1) that the Pythia is not
less the organ of the god because she does not
clothe herself in purple robes and sprinkle her
self with perfumes when she goes down into
the cave ; the Passionless and the Pure does
not accord with what is pleasant to the senses ;
and (2) that while the god supplies the inspi
ration, the verses in which the will of the god
is uttered are the productions of each of the
prophetesses in turn. " If she were obliged to
write down, and not to utter, the responses, we
should not, I suppose, believe the hand-writing
to be the god's, and to find fault with it, because
it is inferior in point of caligraphy to the im
perial rescripts ; for neither is the old woman's
voice, nor her diction, nor her metre the god's ;
but it is the god alone who presents the visions
to this woman and kindles light in her soul re
garding the future ; for this is the inspiration."

120 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
The dy- This theory is known as the dynamic, and
theory ma5r roughly be said to embrace all theories
which hold that the truths uttered in Scripture
are Divine, while the imperfections and weak
nesses are human. Classical expression is given
to this theory in the words of Augustine, who
says that the writer is "inspiratus a Deo, sed
tamen homo." But not to mention that such a
severance of the Divine and human in inspira
tion is impossible, this theory has been found
to introduce confusion into the subject.
Roman To illustrate the working of this theory, let
theory. us take the statement of it by a Roman Catho
lic authority.1 " The only proper monotheistic
idea of inspiration is that an All-wise and Al
mighty God chose and moved His instruments
so that their action exactly corresponded to His
will, and did not try to play lyre-music on flutes
and harp-music on trumpets. Further, that
He used them as men preserving their human
faculties, and that they knew and understood
what they were saying and had said, though
they need not, therefore, have known all the
ultimate deductions from it, any more than a
teacher of arithmetic need know the differential
calculus." This explanation promises well; but
when this same writer goes on to declare that
i Tablet, May 5, 1894.

Inspiration 121
the words are the words of God, and that there
fore all error is excluded, we see that this theory
with all its professions is as mechanical as the
dictation or possession theory. The papal en
cyclical on the subject, issued by Pope Leo
XIII. , declares that "those who maintain that
an error is possible in any genuine passage of
the sacred writings pervert the Catholic notion
of inspiration, and make God the Author of such
error." This theory does not satisfy the facts
of Scripture, and must therefore be pronounced
incompetent. The only form in which the dynamic theory The"essen-
can be admitted is that which has sometimes ^ the~
been called the " essential " theory ; that is, the
theory that holds that the writers were so in
spired as to secure accuracy in all matters of
conduct and doctrine, while it declines to pledge
itself to the perfect accuracy of the writers in
non-essentials, or subsidiary particulars. This
theory was held by Erasmus, Grotius, Baxter,
Paley, Dollinger, and the great mass of German
theologians. It recognizes that God had a pur
pose to accomplish by the Scriptures, and that
only such inspiration was required as is suffi
cient for the attainment of this purpose. Men
were employed as instruments in carrying out
this purpose, but they were so employed that

quacy.

122 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
it was with their own free will, and using such
means and material as they had, that they ful
filled God's purpose. His purpose was laid on
human lines and was accomplished through the
free working of human instruments.
its inade- Those who hold this theory view with per
fect equanimity the investigations of criticism.
If errors in history or science be discovered, or
if discrepancies in the Gospels be pointed out,
they say with Coleridge, " Perhaps they can be
explained, perhaps they cannot, who cares a
straw whether they can or no?" But while
this theory is to be commended for its candor
in endeavoring to recognize the facts of Scrip
ture and to account for them, it cannot claim to
bring us much nearer any understanding of
inspiration itself. It does not explain, or even
attempt to explain, how writers should be pos
sessed of supernatural knowledge while inditing
one sentence and be dropped to a much lower
level in the next. It does not give us the psy
chology of that state of mind which can infalli
bly pronounce on matters of doctrine, while it
is all astray on the simpler facts of history. It
makes no attempt to analyze the relation sub
sisting between the Divine mind and the human,
which produces such results. In short, it is
rather a statement of the facts which Scripture

Inspiration 123
presents than a theory accounting for the facts.
It declares that Scripture is an infallible au
thority in essentials, but in non-essentials merely
human ; but how we are to distinguish between
these two elements in Scripture, or how we are
to think of the state of mind of the writers, it
does not explain.
We are left, then, without any sufficient theory, What it is
and we are often told that if not impossible, it ^mrm 're-
is at least not safe, to define inspiration or form addinginspiration.
a theory on so obscure a subject.1 But without
professing to define inspiration it seems safe to
affirm one or two elements which enter into it,
and must be included in any definition.
1. The first affirmation which may safely be That it
made regarding inspiration is that it signifies ceptionof
the presence and influence of the Divine Spirit, revelation.
The Spirit of God may truly be said to be
present and energetic everywhere. But the
same result of His presence is not everywhere
apparent. Infinitely various are human life and
human need ; infinitely various also is the work
1 Professor Wood proposes, as a tentative definition, the
following : " Biblical inspiration is the personal influence of
God which so guided all who took part in producing the
Bible that they made a body of literature unique in religious
value, and, so far as we now see, final in religious teach
ing." (See "A Tenable Theory of Inspiration," a lecture
which cannot be too strongly recommended.)

124 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
of the Divine Spirit. Under the Old Testa
ment inspiration was claimed for those who, like
Bezaleel and Samson, by extraordinary powers
fulfilled in one direction or another the will of
God for His people. The writers of Scripture
are designated " inspired," not as if they alone
possessed the Spirit of God, but because in
them that spirit is working as the Spirit of
Christ toward this special end of perceiving
God in Christ and making Him permanently
known. All Christians possess the Spirit of
Christ and are, by Him, being led into a full
knowledge of the truth that is in Christ, to a
full perception of that whole revelation of God
which is made in Christ ; and when some of
their number are characterized as "inspired,"
this means that these persons are distinguished
above their fellow- Christians by a special readi
ness and capacity to perceive the meaning of
Christ as the revelation of God and to make
known what they see.1
1 "Inspiration is a personal term. It means the breath
ing in by one person of a power from another. It is,
broadly speaking, another term for personal influence, and
is usually kept for its higher, more uplifting phases. . . .
Divine inspiration is the influence of the Divine person upon
the human — of God upon man. . . . Biblical inspiration
is a species of inspiration in general. It is the influence of
God which resulted in the production of the Bible." (Pro
fessor Wood's " Tenable Theory," pp. 9, 10, 16.)

Inspiration 125
2. Inspiration stands in a vital relation to That it im-
character. The Spirit of truth, promised to f^."""*"
the disciples, was the Spirit of holiness. It
was those who were most in sympathy with
the purposes of God, and who were most im
bued with the Spirit of holiness, who were best
prepared to see and recount His revelations.
The man who gave himself up to God, and who
was emptied of self-seeking and of worldly
ways of looking at things, was best fitted to
understand what God sought to disclose to
men. Such a man became the purest possible
medium of the Spirit. What he sees, he sees
clearly and truly, having no interest to see any
thing different from what God actually makes
known. And what he sees, he utters authori
tatively, knowing that it is not his own will,
but the will of God he is declaring. The in
spired man might not see the facts of history
any more clearly than the uninspired ; but he
saw God in history where the uninspired only
saw human passions.
Inspiration, then, is primarily a spiritual gift it is prima-
and only secondarily a mental one. Its influ- Hualam'
ence on the mental movements of its subject,
although indirect, is not slight. It illuminates
the mind as enthusiasm does, by stimulating
and elevating it ; it enriches the memory as

126 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
love does, by intensifying the interest in a cer
tain object, and by making the mind sensitive
to its impressions and retentive of them. It
brings light to the understanding and wisdom
to the spirit, as purity of intention does, or as a
high aim in life does. Occasionally, as in the
case of Paul, it seizes upon a man of the largest
natural intellect and of rich attainment. But
so far as we can gather from the Bible, inspira
tion does not confer intellectual acuteness where
that did not previously exist, nor does it impart
superhuman power of knowing what ordinary
inquiry can ascertain. Luke, for example, was
not exempted from the necessity of making
inquiries, and, if in some points his informants
gave him information slightly differing from
the account we have in Mark, this only shows
us that inspiration was directed toward a dif
ferent end from absolute uniformity in detail.
In the account given us of the creation, in
spiration enabled the writer, not to give a de
scription in which thousands of years afterward
perfect scientific accuracy might be found, but
to discover God in the work. And throughout
the Old Testament history it is not the material
which inspiration guarantees, but the spirit.
Many of the histories there recorded might
have done endless harm had they been recorded

Inspiration 127
in another spirit, in the spirit that glories in
vice, revels in sensuality, and finds the devil
everywhere. Recorded as they are, by inspired
men, God is seen everywhere, vice is made
dangerous and abhorrent, and the training of
mankind by the Heavenly Father elucidated.
This is primarily what inspiration gives. The
Spirit of God in the man observing perceives
and responds to the same Spirit in God reveal
ing. Inspiration enables its possessor to see
and apprehend God and His will, and to im
part to other men what he has himself seen and
apprehended ; but of any further power it con
fers it is precarious to make assertions.
3. Within this one great function of inspira- Variety in
tion considerable variety exists. The inspira- products.
tion of Isaiah or Paul is different from that of
the compiler of Proverbs or the annalist who
drew up Chronicles. The work intrusted to
one inspired man may be very different from
that intrusted to another, and we are not to
suppose that because their work is equally
inspired it is equally profitable. Look at the
Bible of an unsophisticated Christian and you
at once see proof that some parts are more prof
itable than others. The Psalms, the Gospel of
John, the Epistles, are blackened and illegible
with use, while the book of Leviticus or Prov-

inspira tion.

128 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
erbs is clean and crisp. In the human body
there are essential or vital organs without which
human life cannot be maintained, and there are
parts which are of less importance. So in Scrip
ture there are parts essential to its being and to
its fulfilment of its purpose, and parts essential
to its completeness.
Purpose of 4. But this brings us to consider the purpose
for which inspiration is given. It is not a
superfluous gift which has served no purpose
or a purpose which could have been served by
man's unaided faculty. If Scripture is inspired,
this is because, there was a necessity for inspira
tion; and the inspiration of Scripture will be
of a kind to correspond to this necessity. Now
the necessity which called for inspiration was
the necessity of having the self-manifestations
of God understood and brought into contact
with human knowledge and human wants.
This being the purpose of inspiration, we may
conclude that it fulfils this purpose, and that
we have in Scripture a trustworthy record of
the revelation of God and His will. And when
the word "plenary" is used of inspiration to
convey the idea that the inspiration of the
writers of Scripture was sufficient to enable
them to fulfil this purpose, then plainly the
affirmation of the plenary inspiration of Scrip-

Inspiration 129
ture is legitimate. But if by " plenary inspira
tion " it be meant that every phrase and letter
of Scripture is of Divine authority, this defini
tion cannot be sustained by what we know of
the purpose for which inspiration was given.
For that inspiration being given to enable men
to record the revelation of God and His will,
if this is accomplished, the purpose and func
tion of inspiration are accomplished; and we
have no reason to suppose that inspiration will
impart to its possessors keener insight into
matters which cannot be included in the cate
gory of such as pertain to the revelation of God
and His will.

INFALLIBILITY

INFALLIBILITY
It would be idle here to attempt a sketch of Criticism of
the work which criticism has accomplished in
connection with the Gospels. The investiga
tions of Abbott and Sanday and Carpenter, of
Wright and Wilkinson, Woods and Zahn and
Schmiedel, and especially of Sir John Haw
kins and Wernle, are widely known and their
results easily accessible. It may be presumed
that every one who is in any degree interested
in the subject is aware of the findings arrived
at and of the history by which they have been
reached. It may be presumed that we are all
more or less convinced that the earliest evan
gelic documents now traceable are the reminis
cences of Peter recorded by Mark, perhaps in
a form slightly different from that of the sec
ond Gospel; and a book of Logia, which may ,
approximately be recovered and which at any
rate is embodied in Matthew and Luke. It
must also be taken for granted that our own
perusal of the Gospels has justified to our
133

134 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
minds the pronouncements of criticism regard
ing the general relations of the Gospels and
their individual characteristics ; that Mark has
been used both by the first and the third evan
gelist, and that while Matthew (or the first
evangelist) writes for Jews to convince them
of our Lord's Messiahship, and manifests a
tendency to group both events and discourses,
Luke shows a disposition to embellish the sim
plicity of his predecessor, and, writing for a man
of education with a Gentile upbringing, selects
his material accordingly.
By-products But in pursuance of its object to discover the
origin, character, and relations of the Gospels,
criticism has thrown off some by-products, and
it is with these we now have to do. The most
important of these we must, however, mean
while neglect. Nothing influences more pro
foundly the criticism of the Gospels than the
presupposition of the incredibility of miracles.
This alters entirely the character of the life
of our Lord and necessitates the branding of
the evangelists as incompetent. No literary
or purely historical criticism cuts so deep into
the Gospels as this. But any defence of the
miraculous involves more than it is possible
here to discuss ; and, besides, it appears to me
that it will be of greater service to attend to

of criticism.

Infallibility 135
matters connected with Gospel criticism which
are actually disturbing the faith of some of
the members of the Church who have never
doubted that our Lord's life was in some re
spects miraculous.
Among the results of the more careful exami- Criticism
,. j. rj . , , , , . repudiates
nation of Scripture some have been subversive nierai
of previously conceived ideas of its infallibility, inerrancy.
Criticism with a virtually unanimous voice de
clares that literal inerrancy cannot be claimed
for the books either of the Old or New Testa
ment. That the substance of the history is
correct has been proved in a very remarkable
manner by the unearthing and deciphering of
long-buried records, written by non-Palestinian
races yet confirming the Hebrew annals in their
main particulars. But the same criticism which
has made good use of those ancient records and
monuments to confirm the statements of the
Bible has also pointed out certain errors in
chronology and in some other details. Re
stricting ourselves to the New Testament and
to the Gospels, and to the universally admitted
results of criticism, it has been put beyond all
reasonable doubt that there exist irreconcilable
discrepancies between the four accounts of some
of our Lord's sayings and actions, and that it
is impossible to determine, save on grounds of

136 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
probability, which Gospel we should follow.
One or two examples selected at random will
suffice. No two evangelists agree in their
report of the title on the cross, or in their ac
count of the appearances of our Lord after the
resurrection. According to Mark and Luke,
the women brought spices to anoint the body,
when it had already been in the sepulchre for
two nights and a day; according to John,
Joseph of Arimathsea and Nicodemus had
already anointed the body before placing it
in the sepulchre. According to Mark, Luke,
and John the women found the stone already
rolled away from the entrance to the tomb ;
according to Matthew this was accomplished
by an angel in presence of the women. The
narrative of the events accompanying the res
urrection, as it exists in Matthew, is generally
irreconcilable with that of the other Gospels.
Even in regard to the date of the last supper
and the crucifixion the Gospels differ. Some
times very puzzling discrepancies occur in the
report of sayings which have a direct bearing
upon the conduct of life. For example, in
Matt. xix. 9, we read, " Whosoever shall put
away his wife, except for fornication, and shall
marry another, committeth adultery." But
in Luke this great law is given without any

Infallibility 137
exception, " Whosoever putteth away his wife,
and marrieth another, committeth adultery."
Which of these two very diverse laws ought
the Church to follow ? Not only are the Gos
pels at variance with one another in certain
passages, but the individual writers seem not
to have been exempt from liability to error.
Mark quotes Malachi under the name of Isaiah ;
and Matthew ascribes to Jeremiah words spoken
by Zechariah.
Now there are three methods of dealing with Three
these and other more serious findings of criti- ™reeaung
cism. The first is to deny the existence of discrepan
cies.
these or any errors. The second is to admit
the errors and to infer from their existence that
the Bible is untrustworthy, not infallible. The
third is to admit the errors while at the same
time maintaining and exhibiting the infallibil
ity of the Bible notwithstanding.
The first method seems likely to blind men First
to the true nature of the Bible and to lead to met ° '
disingenuousness, mischief, and unbelief. The
second method is the result of ignorance, and
especially of a misunderstanding of infallibility.
The third gives us a sure standing ground and
leads us to recognize the actual infallibility
of Scripture. It can, I think, be demonstrated
that although we grant to criticism all it

138 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
claims, the Bible remains the infallible and
authoritative word of God; that, in fact, it
is independent of criticism. As Professor
Stevens of Yale long ago said, "Amid all
the controversies about the Bible and the at
tacks upon it, the Christian heart may rest
secure in this conviction, that the unique char
acter and value of the Bible are as secure as
are the unique character and significance of the
person of Christ." 1 It is a common presump
tion nowadays that the Bible has been dis
credited by criticism ; that like some old and
musty document preserved for ages in a sacred
obscurity, it has crumbled to dust as soon as
frankly exposed to the light of day ; that it
has been so riddled with the shot and shell of
modern scientific warfare as to be on the point
of sinking. But this involves a misunderstand
ing of the Bible and of the secret of its infalli
bility. Modern assaults have developed new
methods of defence and a fresh perception of
the real strength of the Bible. Until criticism
made it impossible for us any longer to identify
1 " Doctrine and Life," p. 58. Cf. Professor Wood's
"A Tenable Theory of Inspiration " • "The Bible can never
be replaced until some history has been produced that shall
reveal God more clearly than the history of Israel and of
the first Christian century. A better book than the Bible
cannot be written until a better life than that of Christ has
been lived."

in-

Infallibility 139
infallibility with literal inerrancy, it was a de
lusive and non-existent infallibility that was
ascribed to the Bible. But now the real seat
and character of its infallibility is discovered,
and it is found to be an infallibility that can
never be taken away from it.
How this is so we shall shortly see. But
first, a word or two on the spurious infallibility
or literal inerrancy of Scripture.
I have said that with a practically unanimous Criticism
voice criticism declares that Scripture is not aegainst
absolutely free from error. It may be said that errancy of
J J Scripture.
no critic of repute denies that, in more or fewer
particulars, mistake of more or less magnitude
has crept in. There are, however, theologians
of repute who maintain that every statement
of the Bible is infallibly accurate ; that whether
it be science or chronology or history that is
touched upon, all is absolutely inerrant. Drs.
Hodge and Warfield, for example, men of wide
learning and well-earned theological repute,
maintain that God presided over the sacred
writers in their entire work of writing, "with
the design and effect of making that writing
an errorless record."1 And again, "A proved
error in Scripture contradicts not only our doc
trine, but the Bible claims, and therefore its
1 Presbyterian Beview, Vol. II.

140 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Recoil from
claim of
inerrancy.

inspiration in making these claims." 1 And not
a few less distinguished persons declare that
their salvation depends on the absolute accu
racy of every word from the first in Genesis to
the last in Revelation. Happily their salvation
depends on nothing of the kind, but on a living
Person whom we can know and trust if the
Gospels are no more trustworthy than Plutarch
or Tacitus, or any ordinary history or biog
raphy. If Matthew affirms that Jesus was
asked by the people, Is it lawful to heal on
the Sabbath-day ? while in point of fact, as
another Gospel tells us, it was He who put that
question to them, is my salvation thereby im
perilled? If we are told in Samuel that the
price paid for Araunah's threshing floor was
fifty silver shekels, while in Chronicles we are
told that it was six hundred gold shekels, does
this prevent my perceiving that Christ reveals
God and accepting that revelation? To me the
assertion seems simply monstrous. And that
intelligent Christian men should avow that
their faith hangs on so precarious a tenure is a
most significant circumstance.
This uneasiness about the inerrancy of Scrip
ture in all matters of detail is worthy of atten
tion, because many are seriously disturbed by
1 Presbyterian Beview, Vol. H., p. 245.

Infallibility 141
the results of criticism and in some instances
the recoil from a belief in the infallible accu
racy of Scripture has had disastrous conse
quences. It is truly said that " the man who
binds up the cause of Christianity with the
literal accuracy of the Bible is no friend of
Christianity, for with the rejection of that
theory too often comes the rejection of the
Bible itself, and faith is shattered."1 In Re-
nan's case this was the result. He tells us in
his " Recollections " 2 that he had been brought
up in the belief that it was essential to the ortho
dox doctrine of Scripture to accept it as iner-
rant in every line. When he entered upon the
study of the history of Israel he soon discov
ered that such a claim was untenable, and ac
cordingly parted company with the Church.
So, too, Charles Bradlaugh, from an ingenuous
i Snell, " Gain or Loss," p. 20.
2 " In a divine book everything must be true, and as two
contradictions cannot both be true, it must not contain
any contradiction. But the careful study of the Bible which
I had undertaken, while revealing to me many historical and
aesthetic treasures, proved to me also that it was not more
exempt than any other ancient book from contradictions,
inadvertencies, and errors." — Benan, " Recollections,"
p. 256. " The mildest Catholic doctrine as to inspiration will not
allow one to admit there is any marked error in the sacred
text, or any contradiction in matters which do not relate
either to faith or morality " (p. 257).

142 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
and inquiring youth, was turned into a bittei
opponent of the faith because a kind of faith in
Scripture was demanded of him which he could
not honestly give. The whole force of Inger-
soll's arguments, by means of which he turned
hundreds from Christianity, depends on an ac
ceptance of the literal and total infallibility of
Scripture. Given a true view of Scripture, his
whole contention falls to the ground. Those
who maintain that we must accept every state
ment of Scripture, or none of it, should con
sider that no doctrine more surely manufactures
sceptics. " It seems," says Dr. Stearns, " a very
good and pious thing to insist that the Bible is
absolutely without error. But nothing is good
or pious that is contrary to facts." And to
those who avow that their faith hangs upon the
infallibility of the letter, nothing better can be
said than what was indignantly said by Fred
erick Denison Maurice : " I will not believe any
Christian man, even upon his own testimony,
who tells me that he should cease to trust in
the Son of God, because he found chronological
or historical misstatements in the Scriptures, as
great as ever have been charged against them
by their bitterest opponents. If I did suspect
him of such hollowness, I should pray for him
that he might never meet with any travellers or

Infallibility 143
philologers who confirmed the statements of
Scripture, none but such as denied them or
mocked at them, because the sooner such a
foundation is shaken, the better it will be for
them." I have said that the denial of errors in the Disingenu-
Gospels leads men to a disingenuous treatment ment 0f "
of the narratives. If they find that one Gospel GosPels.
relates the healing of one blind man as Jesus
entered Jericho, while another relates the cure
of two blind men on His leaving it, the harmo-
nizer at once steps forward and solves the dis
crepancy by affirming that of course three blind
men were healed, — the one at the entrance,
the others at the exit. This he will do not
withstanding the fact that it is Matthew's habit
to duplicate, and regardless of the similarity or
we may say identity of the narratives in other
respects, — in the pause made by Jesus on the
road, in the question He puts, and in the answer
He receives. This I think may, without harsh
ness, be called disingenuous, and moreover it
turns attention away from the feature of the
narratives which prompted its recital, the fact,
not that Jesus was at the one gate or the other
of the city, for that is of no significance, but
that He was addressed as Son of David. That
in some instances the Gospels complete one

144 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

No literally
infallibleScripture.

another is no doubt true ; but this harmonizing
by simple addition is a method which may very
easily betray us, and which at any rate becomes
quite useless when the Gospels contradict one
another. Another method of evading the acknowledg
ment of error, if not disingenuous, is thought
less. I refer to the method of shifting the claim
of infallibility from Scripture as we have it, to
Scripture as it came from the writer's hand.
This is a vain subterfuge, and it is based upon
a misunderstanding of the character of the
errors alleged. These errors are not such as
could be introduced into the text by the blun
ders of copyists. They are not confined to sin
gle words or lines. Such errors in numbers
or names may exist in the Old Testament.
But in the Gospels the misstatements pointed
out by criticism are such as could only have
been made by the original writers. The sub
terfuge is based, then, upon a misapprehension.
But also it is idle. For what possible use to us
can an infallible Scripture be which has long
since passed out of existence ? If a Scripture
literally infallible is necessary to salvation,
where is it to be found ? We know that our
present texts are only an approximation to
what was originally written. We cannot be

Infallibility 145
quite sure in every case that this or that was
the word used by an apostle or spoken by our
Lord. This demand, in short, for a literally
infallible Scripture cannot by any possibility
be satisfied.
The reluctance to admit the existence of Natural re-
c, • i • i • . i . luctance to
errors in Scripture is not surprising, and is even admit error.
in a sense commendable. It arises from our
natural instinct to reverence and exalt those
who have been the organs of revelation, and
in a manner mediators between God and us.
Knowing how much we owe them, we cannot
bear to ascribe to them any least degree of
faultiness. When Peter and Paul disagree, we
turn away from the quarrel, and refuse to draw
the necessary inference that Peter did his best
to mislead the Church on a matter of vital
importance. More powerful everi" than this wholesome Results of
Christian instinct the misunderstanding of in
spiration and its results has led Christian people
to believe in the infallibility of the writers of
Scripture. Inspiration is the indwelling of the
Divine Spirit. All Christians believe that they
themselves enjoy this indwelling, but they are
not conscious of becoming infallible. Some of
the men who have most fully possessed the
Spirit of Christ have been profoundly ignorant

146 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Inspirationone thing,
infallibility another.

persons. A priori we cannot affirm what re
sults inspiration will have in the writers of
Scripture. How far it produced a more accu
rate knowledge of things external and non
essential we can only gather from examination
of the actual results as found in their writings.
Certainly a high degree of inspiration, such as
that enjoyed by Paul, brings a man into a close
fellowship with Christ; and his experience of
the source, the graciousness, the power, and the
joy of that fellowship gives him knowledge of
the true eternal relation of the soul to Christ
fitted to make him an authoritative teacher of
others. But the full indwelling of the Holy
Spirit, the " inspiration " of Paul or of Stephen,
did not prevent them from stumbling in dates
and details.
Looking, then, at the facts of Scripture, we
see that inspiration is one thing, infallibility
another. Presumably the writers of the books
of Kings and Chronicles were inspired, yet it
is matter of common knowledge that many
discrepancies exist in these books. Professor
Sayce, one of the most conservative of living
critics, tells us that " Assyrian inscriptions have
shown that the chronology of the book of
Kings is hopelessly wrong." We also find
that the historical writers of the Old Testa-

Infallibility 147
ment refer to older documents as their authori
ties, precisely as secular historians depend on
national archives and contemporary accounts.
And if inspiration did not give a direct knowl
edge of past events, but left inspired writers
to depend on contemporary witnesses, is it
credible that inspiration would enable them to
detect mistakes in those older writers? If
inspiration gave the latter species of insight,
one does not see why it should not have given
the former.
Throughout the New Testament also there
is evidence that inspiration did not render its
subjects infallible in their criticism or lift them
above the level of contemporary knowledge.
Jude, an inspired man, cites the apocryphal
book of Enoch, written shortly before his own
time, as if it were the utterance of the ante
diluvian who walked with God. All the
writers expected the speedy return of Christ —
an expectation which events have proved to be
erroneous. In short, the facts of Scripture put
it beyond doubt that inspiration does not in
volve infallibility.
Admitting, then, the finding of criticism that Inaeeu-
inerrancy cannot be claimed for the Gospels or scripture
for Scripture generally, we go on to ask how are sli9ht-
this affects the infallibility of Scripture. It

148 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
is this which lends interest to the subject.
For, apart from the error ascribed to the Gos
pels on account of their narration of supposed
miracles, the misstatements found in them are
trifling. None of them are such as to make
the reader feel uncertain about the trustworthi
ness or general accuracy of the writers. In
deed, no one can fail to be struck with the
manner in which they stand the tests which fresh
discoveries are from year to year applying to
their accuracy. For example, the topographical
errors so freely ascribed to the fourth Gospel
a few years ago are now, since the Palestinian
Survey, no more heard of. The inaccuracies
which do occur are so trifling that one feels
ashamed to point them out. They are the
little cracks or miniature crevasses in the con
tinuous surface of the glacier which are un
noticed and taken in the stride of the honest
wayfarer bent on attaining the summit. If the
pedestrian wantonly thrusts his foot into a
hole, he may twist his ankle and prevent
further progress, but for the honest man they
present no real break, hindrance, or pitfall.
Why notice Why, then, notice them ? We are compelled
to notice them, partly because without recog
nizing the facts of the Bible we cannot hope to
reach any just conception of its nature ; partly

them ?

Infallibility 149
because it is necessary to call attention to the
insignificance of these discrepancies ; but mainly
because they lead us to distinguish between a
spurious infallibility and that which is genuine.
Before going on to exhibit the genuine infal- The craving
libility of Scripture, it may be well to ask what ubilgwide.
grounds we have for demanding or expecting
an infallible guide in religion, of the kind that
is sought in the Bible. The craving for such a
guide arises from two sources. The first is the
shrinking from responsibility which character
izes not all men, but the vast majority. Vari
ous are the devices by which men have sought
to evade the burden of self-determination : the
lot, the oracle, supposed providences, the merest
turn of a coin or opening of a book, anything
which will give them a pretext for trusting
some other impulse than that of their own
reason. The second source of this craving is the sup- For a judge
^ ^ n . ¦• , ¦ oi in contro-
posed need of a judge in controversies. So long versies.
as a man uses the Bible only to find his own
way to God, it does not occur to him that any
stringent theory of infallibility is required. He
seeks for God, and he finds Him. It is only
when he begins to urge his views upon others,
and becomes impatient at the slowness with
which conviction grows in them, that he seeks

150 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Common
liability to
error.

No evasion
of responsi
bility possi
ble.

an irresistible authority that compels submis
sion. It is, at bottom, unbelief in spiritual
forces. An external, irresistible authority is
sought, — an authority easily accessible and
easily applied, — as if men could not be trusted
to recognize truth when they see it, or even to
wish to find God.
In other departments of knowledge men have
been allowed to sift the false from the true at
the greatest expenditure of time and of life ;
they have been allowed to make mistakes and
to follow those mistakes to their issues; they
have been allowed to sacrifice thousands of hu
man lives in every generation to mistaken ideas.
It may be urged that in religion the consequence
of error is so grave that it cannot be supposed
men should be left to any uncertainty here.
But in point of fact the majority of men have
been left in ignorance, or with only such wit
ness to God's existence and goodness as could
be available for those who were prepared to
search, to sift, to think, to act.
Escape from all possibility of error and from
the responsibility of determining our own future
is impossible whether we choose the Church as
our infallible guide, or Scripture, or Christ Him
self ; it must be our choice that is exercised, our
judgment that determines this great step. We

Infallibility 151
cannot get behind ourselves and find some other
spring of action than our own determination.
It must be by the response of our own con
science to Christ's personality and words that
we choose Him as our ultimate authority. The
testimony of others may aid us : the Gospels
are necessary to show us what He is and to
preserve to us His true image and His very
claims ; but it is we ourselves who must for our
selves determine whether this Person is what
He claims to be.
But the main question for us is, What is the Nature of
infallibility which may be claimed for Scripture determined
and especially for the Gospels ? Many persons °yPurP°se
lightly claim infallibility for Scripture without ture.
once asking themselves the question, "Infalli
ble for what ? " The whole matter hinges here. v
What is the infallibility we claim for the Bible?
Is it infallibility in grammar, in style, in his
tory, in science, or what ? Its infallibility must
be determined by its purpose. If you say that
your watch is infallible, you mean, as a time
keeper ; — not that it has a flawless case, not that
it will tell you the day of the month, or predict
to-morrow's weather. The navigator finds his
chart infallible as a guide to lighthouses, and
shallows, and sunken rocks, but useless to give
him the time of day or to inform him of the

152 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Purpose of
Scripture.

Minor er
rors no diffi
culty.

products and prices of the land he is bound for.
A guide may infallibly lead you over a difficult
and not easily found pass, although he is igno
rant of any language but his own and knows
little that happens beyond his own mountains.
What, then, is the purpose of the Bible ? Its
purpose is to exhibit Christ. As our Lord
Himself defined the Scriptures, " They are they
which testify of me." By means of the Scrip
tures the knowledge of God's saving love in
Christ is communicated to the world. It was
not God's purpose to teach science or ethnology
by them, nor to give us knowledge of matters
about which men are always curious, such as
the conditions of a future life ; it was not His
purpose to make us theological experts, — else
He had signally failed, — but His purpose was
to set Christ before men in living grace and
majesty, and so perpetuate the knowledge of
Him upon earth. In Christ we have the supreme
revelation of God, and if Scripture conveys to
us a sufficient knowledge of Christ, it accom
plishes its purpose. Luther was right when
he said, " That is not Scripture which does not
exhibit Christ."
Now no sooner do we grasp this conception
of Scripture than we recognize that discrepan
cies in the Gospels, or errors in other parts of

Infallibility 153
the Bible, are of no consequence at all as affect
ing the account given us of Christ. The four
Gospels differ from one another in this or that
part of their narrative, but it is the same Christ
which each exhibits. The trustworthiness of
the Gospels is guaranteed both by the agree
ment, in the main, of these four accounts, and
by the fact that the ordinary Christian has
never found any difficulty in forming one con
sistent image of Christ out of the four accounts.
The discrepancies only become dangerous when
they are used as a lever to subvert the infalli
bility of Scripture. And they are frequently
thus used by persons who take advantage of
the claim of literal infallibility advanced by
well-intentioned but inconsiderate persons. This
claim of literal infallibility is easily disposed of
by means of these discrepancies — here are clear
instances in which it is impossible to claim this
kind of infallibility ; and hence the inference
is at once drawn that the Bible is not in any
sense infallible. The inference is utterly un
justifiable. Literal infallibility is not that for
which we contend ; and these discrepancies
might be multiplied a hundred fold and yet
avail nothing to discredit the true infallibility
of Scripture. And this for two reasons : —
1. Unimportant errors in detail are never suf-

154 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
They do not fered to discredit a historian. The rule "falsus
the Msto- in. uno, falsus in omnibus " is valid in the law
Han- courts as applicable to a witness who is found
intentionally distorting truth. A witness on
oath who, with intent to deceive, withholds or
perverts truth is of course discredited in the
whole of his testimony. But the maxim has no
application to ordinary life or to the writing of
history. For there is no man who has not
occasionally stumbled into error, — error at once
condoned and which reflects no shadow on his
general reputation for truth. Tacitus has been
found in error, but we do not on that account
read his Annals or his Histories with a watchful
suspicion. There is no historian who has not
been proved in error ; but occasional, uninten
tional, and unimportant error is lost to view in
the general reputation for accuracy which the
historian acquires.
What errors 2. And, secondly, if it be said, is not all error
portant. ' important where Divine truth and eternal inter
ests are concerned ? we answer, No ! else God
would have provided for the absence of all
error. Error is unimportant when it does not
affect the purpose of the whole. Errors in gram
mar are of no consequence when the meaning
remains intelligible and the sense unaffected.
No errors in Scripture are of importance which

Infallibility 155
do not prevent it from accomplishing God's
purpose of preserving for us the knowledge of
His revelation in Christ. It must be judged
by its fulfilment of its object, and its object was
to enable us to apprehend God in Christ and
lead us to Him. This object it has infallibly
accomplished. Men who have devoutly sought
God in Christ have found him. The Christian
ages stand behind us with their irrefutable
testimony. The Scriptures have infallibly led
men to Christ. They have fulfilled the function
which Christ ascribed to them. They have set
before men a Christ in whom God is found.
It is perhaps worth while to adduce the testi- Testimonies
mony of one or two authorities on this subject.
The last century produced no more daring and
untrammelled thinker than Heine, no man less
controlled or influenced by other men's faiths
and opinions, but we find him saying, " He that
has lost his God can find Him again in this
book, and toward him who has never known
Him it wafts the breath of the Divine word."
After Dr. Martineau has cut away from the
Gospels ten times more than a sober criticism
warrants, he is still constrained to say, " No one
can affect ignorance of what Jesus was ; enough
is saved to plant His personality in a clear space,
distinct from all that history, or even fiction,

to Scripture.

156 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
presents."1 Still more definitely Robertson
Smith: "So long as we go to Scripture only to
find in it God and His redeeming love mirrored
before the eye of faith, we may rest assured
that we shall find living, self-evidencing, infalli
ble truth in every part of it, and that we shall
find nothing else. . . . Since Scripture has no
other end than to convey to us a message which,
when accompanied by the inner witness of the
Spirit, manifests itself as the infallible word of
God, we may for practical purposes say that
Scripture is the infallible word of God."
Touchstone Here we reach the true touchstone of Scrip
ture, ture. Why do I receive it as the word of
God? Is it because the Church certifies it and
assures me it is infallible? But the Church
herself is not infallible, and she may be in error
in this as she has been elsewhere. Is it because
Scripture itself claims infallibility? But Scrip
ture does not ; and if it did, how do I know I
should believe it? Many have claimed to be
Divine messengers who have been proved false.
The only possible ultimate ground for believing
Scripture to be the word of God is that there is
that in the truth delivered which convinces me
that God is its Author. In the last resort you
must depend solely on your own conviction
1 " Seat of Authority," p. 607.

Infallibility 157
that here God speaks to you. If there is not a
self-evidencing power in Christ and in His rev
elation, you will never find evidence of His
truth anywhere else.
It would seem that the members of our Christ is
churches are yet far from understanding that tica'ting.*™'
the authentication of Christ cannot be touched
by criticism ; that He is His own best witness,
and that this witness is independent of any doc
trine or theory of the inspiration or infallibility
of Scripture. That Christ has given to the
world the highest idea of God ever promul
gated, that the conscience of every man who is
brought into His presence acknowledges Christ
as the best and divinest he knows or can con
ceive — these are incontestable facts. Before
we form any opinion about the Gospels, and
even though we see much in them that we can
not accept, they set before us this unique figure
— a figure far beyond the creative power of the
writers and earning in it its own authentica
tion, its own direct appeal to heart and con
science and reason. We need as little fear the
nibblings of criticism as we fear the minute
erosions of our shores by the ocean. The
knowledge of God actually conveyed to all
who read the Gospels cannot be taken away,
and that knowledge is life eternal.

158 The .Bible : Its Origin and Nature
Two ex- The two extreme positions, then, are alike
tiom_ untenable. It is impossible to maintain the
infallibility of Scripture on the ground of its
literal accuracy in every one of its statements ;
and it is impossible to deny the infallibility of
Scripture as a spiritual guide on the ground
that there are found in it certain errors and
discrepancies. Our acceptance of Scripture as
the word of God depends, not on its absolute
freedom from error of every kind, but on our
recognition of God's voice in it. Criticism may
work its will on the books of the New Testa
ment; it cannot take from us the Christ they
embody. That figure is self-certifying as it
was to those who knew Him while He dwelt
on earth. As a great German critic whose
work was prematurely cut short has said : "The
man who refers Christianity to Scripture as the
fundamental witness of Christ, assumes on that
very account an attitude of inner freedom tow
ard its historical form, because he has found
Christ in it, and because he judges all that is in
it from this central point. If we are sure of
this, that Scripture in its entire contents wit
nesses of Christ, then we are no longer puzzled
about the worth of Scripture, even though here
or there we meet with irregularities over which
we cannot make our way. If we are sure that

of the aver
age man.

Infallibility 159
God's Spirit speaks to us in Scripture, then we
are no longer timidly anxious when historical
investigations into the persons of the human
composers are set on foot. The determining
fact abides, that the living God, the God of our
salvation, in Scripture speaks to us of Christ,
whoever be the human author who here or
there with heart and hand has put himself at
His service." 1
It only remains that a brief answer be given Difficulties
to the questions put by the somewhat puzzled
average man. To transfer one's faith from a
literally infallible Scripture to an infallible
Christ is not an absolutely easy undertaking,
and difficulties arise in the process. It has,
for example, been asked, " Can a fallible Scrip
ture infallibly lead to Christ ? " " If we have
no infallible record, we have no guarantee of
an infallible Christ." Enough has already
been said to explain how a Scripture, which is
not in one sense and for one purpose infallible,
may be infallible in another sense and for
another purpose. Enough has been said to
show that Gospels of which we cannot affirm
absolute inerrancy do yet set before us a self-
verifying Christ. The pilot who has never
lost a ship, and who is practically infallible
i Gloel, "Die jungste Kritik," p. 96.

160 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Scripture
always
judged by
the Chris
tian reader.

within his own domain, may yet believe in
mermaids and sea serpents, may never have
heard of Cromwell or Milton or Washington,
and may think brandy a cure for every human
ill. Again, it is frequently said, If there is the
slightest error in Scripture, then I must judge
for myself what I am to receive, and how am
I to find out what is true and what is mislead
ing? It may, I think, fairly be replied, This
is precisely what every one who reads the Bible
is already doing. And the fact that men are
not aware that they thus judge Scripture for
themselves proves how little serious considera
tion they have given to the subject. Who is
at the reader's elbow as he peruses Exodus and
Leviticus to tell him what is of permanent
authority and what was for the Mosaic economy
only? Who whispers to us as we read Genesis
and Kings, This is exemplary; this is not?
Who sifts for us the speeches of Job and en
ables us to treasure as Divine truth what he
utters in one verse, while we reject the next
as Satanic raving? Who gives the preacher
authority and accuracy of aim to pounce on a
sound text in Ecclesiastes, while wisdom and
folly toss and roll over one another in confus
ingly rapid and inextricable contortions ? What

Infallibility 161
enables the humblest Christian to come safely
through the cursing Psalms and go straight to
forgive his enemy? What tells us we may eat
things strangled, though the whole college of
apostles deliberately and expressly prohibited
such eating? Who assures us we need not
anoint the sick with oil, although in the New
Testament we are explicitly commanded to do
so? In a word, how is it that the simplest
reader can be trusted with the Bible and can
be left to find his own spiritual nourishment
in it, rejecting almost as much as he receives?
Paul solves the whole matter for us in his bold
and exhaustive words, " The spiritual man —
the man who has the spirit of Christ — judgeth
all things." This, and this only, is the true
touchstone of Scripture by which all things are
tried. To use the words of one of the most
thoughtful writers of our time, " It is the same
spirit which has embodied truth in the Bible
that infuses the love of truth into the Christian;
and no magnetism gives more assurance of its
reality in material things than such sympathy
gives in spiritual, that the sincere seeker shall
ultimately find all such truth in the Bible as
there is a moral fitness, or necessity, that he
should possess." x
i Myers, "Catholic Thoughts," p. 132.

162 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
How is the If, then, it still be asked, How is the plain
plain man , j- ,. ¦ -i Q TT ,-, .-,
to judge? man *° distinguish.' How is the man in the
street to know what is true? How can you
refer him to the word of God if there are
statements in it which may misinform him ?
the reply is, No statement will mislead the
man who is honestly seeking his way to God.
If it is spiritual guidance the man is in search
of, then you may refer him absolutely to the
Bible. To scruple to do so, because the Gos
pels disagree in their accounts of Christ's res
urrection, or because, possibly, 2 Peter is a
forgery, is grotesquely absurd. If a man de
sires to acquaint himself with the history of
the ancient world, there are other books to
which you would more naturally refer him ;
but if he seeks enlightenment regarding the
preparation made by history for the coming of
Christ, you would refer him to the Bible. If
he seeks information regarding the formation
of this globe, and the introduction of life upon
it, there are works in palaeontology which will
satisfy him ; but if he desires to be impressed
with the relation of God to the world and its
life, you will refer him to Genesis. If he
craves a knowledge of the times of Christ,
there are other books he may profitably con
sult; but if he wishes to know Christ, and

Infallibility 163
through this ultimate revelation to see the
Father, you do not hesitate to say, In the
Gospels you will find what you seek. It is
idle to assert that if we cannot say of each
clause of the Bible, " This is infallibly true,"
we cannot refer to the Bible as the Word of
God at all. With the most perfect freedom
we can refer to it every man who is seeking
infallible guidance to God. " Try to treat the
volumes as a flawless chronological or scientific
record, and you will be disappointed. Treat it
as a means of religious edification, and you
cannot fail."1 1 Snell, " Gain or Loss," p. 27.

VI
THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE
GOSPELS

VI

THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE
GOSPELS
The present and pressing need of reconsider- The critical

ing the trustworthiness of the Gospels is too
obvious to call for much comment. The need
arises from the emergence of a new method of
inquiry and new material for prosecuting it.
The new method is known as historical
criticism, — sometimes since Eichhorn's time
unhappily called " higher criticism," — a method
which is really not in itself new, but is now
employed with much greater vigor and exact
ness than in the past. It is important to
observe that this method is inevitable. The
popular suspicion or jealousy of it arises from
a misunderstanding of its nature, its aims, its
instruments. Sometimes it is even spoken of
as antagonistic to Christianity. It is identified
with certain of its manifestations, and is forth
with condemned. But the abuse of an instru
ment or method does not nullify or condemn
its legitimate use. The erroneous conclusions
167

method.

168 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
of scientific inquiry can only be corrected by
further and more searching inquiry of the same
scientific character. Criticism is not a hostile
force hovering round the march of the Chris
tian Church, picking off all loosely attached
followers and galling the main body; it is
rather the highly trained corps of scouts and
skirmishers thrown out on all sides to ascertain
in what direction it is safe and possible for
the Church to advance. Our attitude toward
criticism should not be that of grudging and
reluctant submission as to an unfortunate epi
demic; rather we should welcome it as we
welcome convalescence. It is the convenient
designation of the most approved methods of
ascertaining historical truth. It is a process
of which every inquirer, more or less con
sciously, avails himself. Every living man
has his own tests which he applies to all he
hears or reads ; and by these tests he determines
whether or not belief is warranted. If a sailor
tells us he found oranges growing among the
ice-hummocks of the Arctic circle we refuse
to believe him, because his information is
tested and condemned by the knowledge we
already possess. If a document professing to
belong to the age of Queen Anne makes free
reference to electric lighting, telephones, or

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 169
photography, we know that its claim is spuri
ous. In short, every man is necessarily a
critic, and criticism as a science collects and
applies all the criteria which experience has
approved for the determination of the dates of
documents, of their character and credibility,
and for discriminating between what is to be
accepted as historical and what must be re
garded as fabricated or embellished. Without
criticism it is impossible we should reach the
very truth about the Gospels or any other
ancient documents. By allowing criticism
within our gates, we no doubt admit a treat
ment of the Gospels which some will take
advantage of to get rid of everything which
does not suit their conception of Christ and
His teaching. But this is a state of matters
we must face. We must examine objections
and difficulties in detail with candor, patience,
and a determination to reach the truth. How
do those who decline the severest scrutiny
propose to find what the Gospels actually are ?
The novelty of the material furnished to the Critical
critic of our time is more striking than the
novelty of the method. For the knowledge
of the past the critic is now provided with an
apparatus which has never before been within
his reach. Archaeology, history, anthropology,

170 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
psychology, — each makes its distinct contribu
tion toward the ascertainment of the real con
dition and events of long past periods in the
life of man.
Archseoiogi- Archaeology brings its quota, exhuming the
Itrial. ancient world which so long has lain buried out
of sight and knowledge, and bringing a revivi
fied past before the mind. Inscriptions, monu
ments, excavated cities, thousands of papyri
from Egyptian tombs and ruined villages and
crocodile cemeteries, the brick libraries of the
valley of the Euphrates, put in the hands of
scholars material for the reconstruction of the
ancient world such as never before has been
available. We are thus furnished with a new
means of testing the accuracy and ascertaining
the true character of parts of the Old Testa
ment. The discovery of legends very similar
to those which occupy the early chapters of
Genesis cannot but be used for the truer under
standing of these records. The facts brought
to notice by palaeontology, and even the in
scribed monuments of ancient races, compel us
considerably to expand the chronology of Scrip
ture ; while the doctrine of evolution suggests
modifications of our idea of creation and the
date of man's appearance on earth.
In the study of the Gospels we have now to

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 171
take into account a good deal that is either Compara-
newly discovered or that has hitherto been dis- gion_
regarded. Miracles have found a new foe in
evolution, which demands that every event in
history be referred to causes previously exist
ing in the world. No interruption of the rigid
chain of cause and effect is permissible: no
irruption from the outside. This prohibition
of the miraculous is buttressed by the examina
tion of the biographies of saints and founders
of religion; for this has brought to light that
not to Jesus only have miracles been ascribed
by enthusiastic followers, but to Buddha and
to the Bab, and even to Thomas a Becket
and St. Francis of Assisi, and many besides.
The comparative study of miracles has been
introduced and has necessitated a revised de
fence. Again, anthropologists have taught us that Anthro-
at a certain stage of civilization all disease is po °9V'
referred to demoniacal possession, that at a
somewhat higher stage certain diseases, such as
epilepsy, neurasthenia, and mania, are so re
ferred, and that in various countries, both in
our own and other times, exorcism is practised.
We cannot simply put these facts aside and
aver that the demoniacal possession spoken of
in the Gospels belongs to a different category.

172 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Other sa
cred books.

Necessary
inferences.

Criticism
cannot be
barred out.

The publication of the sacred books of othei
religions has had its effect, for in them we find
stronger claims to inspiration and infallibility
than we find in our own Scriptures. And it is
quite fairly and pertinently asked: "How can
such claims be disproved by arguments which
are not equally applicable if urged by a Hindu
against similar pretensions which may be raised
on behalf of the Bible ? "
Confronted, then, with these various facts,
the candid student cannot but ask whether our
Gospels belong to the class of somewhat un
trustworthy and irresponsible biographies which
have obscured the life of our greatest men ;
whether they are just on the same plane as the
records which embalm the memory of Buddha
and the Bab, and must be subject to the same
deductions if we are to reach the truth; or
whether they carry in themselves notes of truth
which command our confidence and incline us
to believe, if not every event or word as re
corded, yet the truthfulness of the portrait of
Jesus they present.
To turn this whole inquiry aside by the sim
ple affirmation that the Gospels are inspired,
and are therefore infallibly accurate in every
detail, is in the highest degree mischievous. If
infallibly accurate, then they need not shrink

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 173
from the keenest criticism. But none of our
Gospels professes to be infallible or even in
spired. Only one of them tells us how its
writer obtained his information, and that was
by careful inquiry at the proper sources. But
even though all of them claimed inspiration,
this would not give us an answer to our ques
tion. The indwelling of the Spirit of God does
not impart omniscience to the human mind,
does not even impart knowledge of human his
tory or science. It is only by examining the
Gospels themselves that we can discover how
far they are trustworthy. To attempt to bar
out criticism by affirming inspiration is a futile
enterprise. The day for that is past. You
cannot now do it. Men will for themselves
inquire and will test the accuracy of the Gos
pels because they are resolved to know the
truth; for let us make no mistake, the freest
inquiry is the only possible path to sound con
viction. God's world is a world of progress ;
the tide is now flowing, and he who stiffly clings
to his old moorings will inevitably be swamped.
We must obey God's call and without fear let
truth carry us where it leads.
The importance of having an inspired record Results of
consists in two of its results. (1) We have inspira w"
the ministry of Jesus recorded in the same

174 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
spirit in which it was enacted, by men sympa
thetic with His mind and intention. We may
be sure that those features of His life are
recorded which He Himself considered signifi
cant. We are not told the color of His hair or
the kind of clothes He wore; physical details
are absent, and the writers would be surprised
to learn how much the modern mind has made
of trifles. But their inspiration assures us
that if Jesus was the Christ, this will be
brought out ; and if He proclaimed deliverance
from sin, that will be recorded. And (2) it
assures us that there is no intentional deception
in their narrative. They present Christ as
they believed Him to be. Error there may
be, but not deliberate misrepresentation. The
writers, conscious of the greatness of their
theme, cannot but have desired to ascertain
the truth. The very form of their narrative,
its freedom from all exclamatory or personal
matter, is proof that subjectivity was at its
minimum in them, that they were conscious of
a responsibility to the public and sought to
discharge it worthily.
We live in a No time, then, need be spent in exhibiting the
critical age. SUpreme importance of determining whether and
how far we can trust the Gospels ; still less in
deprecating or depreciating criticism, the only

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 175
instrument whose employment gives any prom
ise of our reaching the truth. We might as
well try to lift ourselves into the age of Homer
as try to breathe an air not impregnated with
criticism. The classics have been subjected to
quite as severe an ordeal as the New Testament,
and, as a great Greek scholar has said, "Against
this onslaught, it is not surprising that the
average scholar has taken refuge in deafness,
or looked on with sympathetic hope, while
Herbst does his magnificent gladiator-work in
defence of everything he believed in the sixties
— the time, as he plaintively says, when he
felt, in opening his Thucydides, that he was
' resting in Abraham's bosom.' " For the in
telligent student of the New Testament the
" sixties " with their ingenuous methods are as
irrevocably past as our own childhood, and from
the unquestioning security of "Abraham's
bosom," we have passed, for the time at least,
into the cleansing fires of the critical purgatory.
But here again two cautions must be added. But the
(1) Our hope is in criticism free, fair, full, has not yet
But we have yet to search with a lantern for appeared.
the ideal critic. Even the most circumspect of
those who at present influence opinion cannot be
acquitted of an occasional craving for novelty
or of accepting possibilities as probabilities or

176 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
even as certainties. As the savage is not rated
as a man until he can produce a few scalps or
heads, so the Privat-Docent or budding theo-
logue hopes to win his spurs by fleshing his
sword on some well-established belief and is
not greatly concerned about the finality or
truth of his discoveries. This is accountable
for much ill-considered writing and an exasper
ating waste of time for any one who tries to
keep pace with critical literature. But, what is
worse, it leads to partisanship and one-sidedness.
Criticism (2) A second caution seems continually dis-
not peculiar , , mi • • 1 j. • i i " -j.-
to our time, regarded, lhis age is characterized by criti
cism. A lack of originality turns the mind
keenly back upon the work done by former
ages. But too often critics speak as if their
methods were unknown to the ancient world
and that any statement was allowed to pass,
and no laws of evidence recognized. We hear
too much of " the trained historical critic," and
he is so flaunted as to reflect discredit on the
credulity of the ancient world. The result is
that we judge ancient writers with a precon
ceived idea that they were ready to accept and
give currency to idle tales. They are damaged
from the outset by this prejudice, and all that
is extraordinary in their narrative is set down
to their credulity.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 177
But, while unquestionably criticism is culti- But culti
vated now as it never has been before, it should "christian™
be borne in mind that the grounds of rational do^-
belief are expressly laid down in the " Rhetoric "
of Aristotle and in the speeches of Demosthenes,
who directs the attention of the judges to the
distinction between circumstantial evidence, the
testimony of eye-witnesses, and mere proba
bility. This was a necessary result of legal
procedure in such courts as those of Greece and
Rome. And how well the grounds of trust
worthiness were understood by historians two
centuries before our Gospels were written is
illustrated in the preface of Polybius, who
states that he begins his history from the year
220 B.C., "because the period thus embraced
would fall partly in the life of my parents,
partly in my own ; and thus I should be able to
speak as eye-witness of some of the events and
of others from the information of eye-witnesses.
To go farther back and write the report of a
report, traditions at second or third hand
seemed to be unsatisfactory either with a view
to giving clear impressions or making sound
statements." And no one can read Polybius
without recognizing his bright intelligence, his
perception of the snares of the historian, his
critical discernment of the sources he may safely

178 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
use. Take, for example, this description of
two of his predecessors : "I do not suppose
that these writers have intentionally stated what
was false ; but I think that they are much in
the same state of mind as men in love. Par
tisanship and complete prepossession made
Philinus think that all the actions of the Car
thaginians were characterized by wisdom, cour
age, and honor, those of the Romans by the
reverse. Fabius thought the exact opposite.
Now in other relations of life one would hesi
tate to exclude such warmth of sentiment ; for
a good man ought to be loyal to his friends and
patriotic to his country; ought to be at one with
his friends in their hatreds and likings. But
directly a man assumes the moral attitude of an
historian, he must forget all such considerations.
For, as a living creature is rendered quite use
less if deprived of its eyes, so if you take truth
from history, what is left is but an idle, unprof
itable tale." It may be added that the latest
editor of Polybius makes the following signifi
cant remark — which is not without application
to our subject : " That Polybius thoroughly
knew and carefully recorded the facts about
which he wrote might seem a truism hardly
worth stating, if it were not that it is so
wantonly forgotten whenever his authority

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 179
comes into collision with the last invented
theory." 1
The critic must, therefore, be on his guard Were the
against unduly widening the interval between ZedulolT?
modern and ancient methods and against the
presumption that the writers of our Gospels
questioned not at all, but set down all they
heard. No doubt it remains to ask how far this
regard to sufficient evidence, which is found
in some ancient writers, penetrated the minds
of those who compiled our Gospels. But cer
tainly the authors of the third and fourth Gos
pels appreciated the value of eye-witness ; and
by their explicit manifestation of this apprecia
tion they reveal not merely their individual
estimate of its value but the sense of it cher
ished by the community. In a word, if we
would reach the truth, we must not start with
the wholly unwarranted assumption that the
Gospel writers were credulous and incompetent,
ready to accept all they heard and to set down
as fact whatever they fancied would magnify
their hero.
In proceeding, then, to inquire into the trust- Object of the
worthiness of the Gospels, it must first of all
be clearly apprehended that by trustworthi
ness we do not mean perfect accuracy in every
1 Strachan-Davidson, "Polybius," p. x.

180 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
detail, but a faithful fulfilment of their pur
pose to perpetuate the true image of Christ.
It has been over and over again demonstrated
that minute accuracy cannot be claimed for the
Gospels. What we contend for is that these
documents preserve a true picture of Him whose
ministry they describe. A nibbling criticism has
done much, and may do more, to eat away some
elements in the Gospel story, but the question
is, Can it so eat it away as to leave us without
a sufficient knowledge of Christ ? Suppose we
yield the stories of the childhood, suppose we
admit — as indeed we must — that some of the
things recorded are questionable, it remains to
ask, Is it within the possible achievement of
criticism to obliterate the image of Christ pre
sented in the Gospels? The object of the Gos
pels is to preserve this image. The picture
may be photographic, or it may be impression
ist : in any case it is sufficient if it conveys to
us an idea of Jesus similar to that which His
associates received. You do not put a Titian
or a Raphael or a Vandyke under the micro
scope and pronounce the picture worthless when
you find a crack in the paint or a flaw in the
canvas ; you don't throw it aside as inaccurate
or misleading because a fold of the dress is in
bad drawing or because the painter has set a

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 181
jewel where it was never worn ; neither is our
esteem of the Gospels lessened by finding in
their narrative events which perhaps never
happened. The Gospels perfectly discharge
their function if they present us with a Christ
who is self-authenticating as the Revealer of
God; if they show us how He claimed to be
the Christ and how He made good this claim,
if they reproduce a figure or personality which
accounts for the Church and the Church's faith.
The reasons urged by criticism for our not Difficulties
accepting everything in the Gospels just as it ^tlcism.
stands are by no means groundless. On the
contrary, they are such as cannot fail to emerge
on sincere and thorough inquiry. The diffi
culties which one encounters may be distributed
under four heads : (1) The general insecurity
of oral tradition. (2) The tendency to admit
what is mythical into the history of a hero and
especially of the Christ. (3) The likelihood
or possibility that the writers should allow
their own opinions to color their statements.
It has also (4) been observed that the three
synoptists not infrequently disagree ; and this
is especially true of some of the more impor
tant parts of the narrative, such as that which
recounts the resurrection.
1. We must take into account the insecurity

182 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
insecurity of oral tradition and its liability in the course
tradition. °f years to become seriously adulterated. The
circumstance that the Gospels were not written
until nearly or quite a generation had elapsed
since the events, and that during the interval
the incidents of the life of Jesus had been
orally handed down, can scarcely fail to have
had some perceptible result in the character of
the Gospels as we now have them. If the sub
stance of them was the common property of the
Christian Church during a whole generation,
and if, during that period, every man was telling
the story to his neighbor according to his own
knowledge or fancy, if parents were crumbling
the solid food for the use of their children, and
preachers adapting the stories to the aptitudes
of their audiences, is it not probable that the
facts would come to be in some measure adul
terated by fiction ? As Orello Cone says :
" That the tradition of Jesus, in the absence of
a fixed and definite form, should have under
gone no modification in passing through the
media which it traversed before it was recorded
in the Gospels, is incredible to any one who
regards the conditions from an historical or
psychological point of view."
This state of matters is at first sight alarm
ing. But certain considerations reassure us.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 183
(1) Too much may very easily be made of the Record not
distance in time between the events and their n°en0uTwith~
record. A second generation is sometimes events.
spoken of as if it arrived all at once, and in a
day displaced and abolished the first genera
tion, like changing guard at a military post, or
like the sudden displacement of day by night
in the tropics. But many persons who had
seen Jesus in Jerusalem and Galilee must have
survived till the end of the century. Many
must have been of an age to check the romanc
ing of the evangelists, if such there was, by
their own knowledge. And although our Gos
pels were not written till some considerable
time had elapsed, their sources were probably
current much earlier. Moreover, remoteness
in time is often counterbalanced by the proba
bility of the event and its congruity with the
narrative of which it forms a part. The secu
lar historian accepts testimony which has only
come to light long after the event. Thus, in
recording how Lady Nelson left the room when
Nelson admiringly spoke of " dear Lady Hamil
ton," his biographer, Mahan, says, "Though
committed to paper so many years later [in
point of fact, forty-five] the incident is just one
of those that stick to the memory and probably
occurred substantially as told." And of an-

184 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
other occurrence the same writer says, "This tri
fling incident, transpiring as it now does for the
first time, after nearly seventy years . . . bears
its own mute evidence." And the significant
utterance of Principal Drummond of Oxford is
here relevant : " If we suppose that the Synop
tic Gospels were written from forty to sixty
years after the time of Christ, still they were
based on earlier material, and even after forty
years the memory of characteristic sayings may
be perfectly clear. ... I have not a particularly
good memory, but I can recall many sayings
that were uttered forty or even fifty years ago,
and in some cases can vividly recollect the
scene."
The Gospels (2) Another common error is to speak of our
popular tra- Gospels as if, not being written till a genera-
dition. tion after the events, they were, therefore, the
mere careless transcript of a popular tradition
adulterated by forty years of oral transmission,
and modified by the exigencies, idiosyncrasies,
and caprice of individual narrators. Whereas,
on the contrary, Luke expressly tells us that
he had made it his aim to get behind this popu
lar tradition and to draw his narrative from
the original source, the eye-witnesses. Of
Mark's Gospel it is generally believed that
something similar may be said, and that it rep-

eye-witness.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 185
resents not the popular tradition, but the remi
niscences of Peter. In other words, it is not to
be assumed, as it so commonly is assumed, that
because a Gospel is not written, say until the
year 70 a.d., therefore, it is the transcript of
the popular tradition of that period, the result
of a generation of distortion and adulteration
of history. On the contrary, it may be written
for the very purpose of correcting such popular
misconceptions. (3) We must take into account the fact that Value of
one of our Gospels professes to be from the
hand of an eye-witness. Of all means of
ascertaining historical truth, the most satis
factory is the testimony of an eye-witness.
An eye-witness may be confused, as in com
plicated political affairs or in a great battle ;
he may be biassed, or his memory may be
treacherous, or he may have in view some
other end than that of merely recording what
took place. But although an eye-witness may
err, the presumption is always in his favor, and
his account is received until proved erroneous.
Thus — to make use again of the biography
already alluded to — Mrs. St. George, mother
of Archbishop Trench, records in her journal
that on one occasion she saw Nelson under the
influence of wine. And on this entry Nelson's

186 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
biographer remarks : " However much to be
deplored, such an occurrence is not so impos
sible as to invalidate the testimony of an eye
witness, even in a man of Nelson's well-estab
lished habitual abstemiousness, which indeed
his health necessitated."
Fourth Now one of our Gospels expressly claims to
clalmslobe ^e from the hand of one who saw and was a
eye-witness. part 0f what he describes. In the fourth Gos
pel we not only find the sworn evidence of an
eye-witness in regard to one astonishing circum
stance, — the issuing of blood and water from
the pierced side of the crucified, — " He that
saw it bear record and his record is true ; "
but the whole Gospel is vouched for as the
work of an eye-witness by the appended note:
"This [viz. the disciple whom Jesus loved] is
the disciple who testifieth of these things and
wrote these things, and we know that his testi
mony is true." For my own part I have not
the audacity to disregard this express affirma
tion. Whether the order of events in this
Gospel is the actual order, whether the dis
courses are recorded as delivered, what lib
erties have been taken with the material,
these are other and subordinate questions ;
but that those who first published the Gospel
knew it to be from the hand of the Apostle

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 187
John, I have no doubt. When it was written,
the date at which John began to put in writing
that which filled his life, cannot be ascertained.
Probably much of it was written long before its
publication. But the inevitable meaning of the
note is, that the Apostle John was not only
the source or guarantor of the tradition which
is perpetuated in the Gospel, but that he act
ually wrote it. The attempted evasions of this
plain statement can scarcely be taken seriously.
As countervailing this express affirmation, or Evidence
at any rate as obscuring the mode in which the s^gSn^'t%a
material has been treated, there is of course claim.
much that must be taken into account. It is
a different Christ that is here represented, it is
said. But this is a difficulty decisively set aside
by Christendom, which has always found it easy
to form one consistent portrait from the four
accounts. Or we are told that the author was
a philosopher, not a fisherman. Would any one
but a fisherman have told us the exact number
of his catch, one hundred and fifty-three?
Even Dr. Evelyn Abbott finds in this num
ber mysterious allusions to the Church as
evolved from the Law and the Spirit, and
so forth. Did Dr. Abbott ever know of a
fisherman who did not count his take and
loudly proclaim its number if it was large?

188 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
Who but a boatman would have given ua
that complicated arrangement of boats in the
sixth chapter, to account for the transfer of our
Lord's audience from one side of the lake to
the other, a transfer for which there was no
possible necessity if the author was not writing
the fact as it happened, but freely inventing ?
Memorable (4) When we allow for the lapse of time
cJidvctctcf of
the events, between the events and their record, we must
also allow for the extraordinary and memorable
character of the material. The character of
Jesus, it will on all hands be admitted, was so
unique and impressive that even if His associ
ates could not present the whole of it in all its
aspects, yet they were likely to retain very
clearly in their minds some main features of it.
Napoleon was a man of whom we have very
diverse details handed down to us by his officers
and members of his household and court, yet
the general impression he makes and the idea
commonly held of his character may be said to
be uniform. In the case of our Lord inadequate
representation was likely enough, erroneous rep
resentation not so likely. The same is true of
the most striking scenes and incidents of His
life. Such things make at once an ineffaceable
impression. Who that saw the paralytic let
down through the roof was at all likely to for-

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 189
get the scene ? And, when the whole public
life was of this striking kind and the death of
so conspicuous and impressive a character, mis
take was not so likely as with a commonplace,
ordinary, uneventful existence.
But it is, as I have said, mainly the person- Rapid
ality and general features of Christ and His marvels.
ministry we need to know and seek to know,
and the admitted impressiveness of this charac
ter must be taken into account. Dr. Abbott
has been at great pains to illustrate the untrust-
worthiness of the Gospels from the untrust-
worthiness of the records of the life and death
of Thomas a Becket. Some of these accounts
were written within five years of his martyrdom,
and many of the miracles recorded were set
down in writing at the very time of their sup
posed occurrence, and yet there can be little
doubt that, as Dr. Abbott says, "portentous
falsehoods " have crept in, and that even eye
witnesses fall into astonishing errors. And Dr.
Percy Gardner calls attention to the analogous
fact that in the course of the half-century which
followed the death of St. Francis of Assisi, " his
legend went on growing and changing, forming
round itself a larger and larger halo of super
natural power and glory, and adapting itself to
the fortunes of the Franciscan Society."

190 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Does not
obscure im
pression made by
character.

Especiallyimpressionupon simple
minds

unblurred by previous
impressions.

But these arguments only serve to bring out
how powerless such legends are to dull the im
pression made by the man round whom they
cling. Notwithstanding this accumulation of
fictitious excrescence, the characters of Becket
and of Francis stand out clearly. How much
more is this the case with the transcendently
powerful and impressive character of Jesus.
The impression He made on those who com-
panied with Him was unique, an impression
not likely to be dulled by time, an impression
made upon many.
Account must also be taken of the character
and circumstances of those who received this
impression. It is sometimes objected to them,
as it was by the pedants of the Sanhedrin, that
they were unlearned and ignorant men. But
this very characteristic rendered them more
susceptible of pure and unbiassed impression,
an impression impossible or not so likely in
men who already had definite opinions and pre
possessions. They were the "babes," on the
tabula rasa of whose open and uninscribed minds
Jesus could imprint His influence.
As an eloquent writer has said : " With the
man who lives a life full of bustling energy im
pression overlays impression, till all is blurred
and confused. But in the life of a peasant im-

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 191
pressions are so rare that they assume abnormal
vividness ; and thus a certain event or incident,
which at the time seemed extraordinary, is an
indelible spot of light in the gray gloom of
many monotonous and narrow years. The men
who saw most of Christ were of this order.
The most thrilling hour they had ever known
was that in which Christ first addressed them.
In many cases their meeting with Christ had
been associated with some tragic or impressive
incident which they were not likely to forget —
the threatened death of a parent, the recovery
from sickness of a friend, the recall to sanity of
a demented child. . . . The wings of wonder
had hovered over the gray lives of these men
for a day and a night, their hearts, their imagi
nations, had been strangely stirred. Was it
likely that they could forget ? " 1
2. The known tendency to admit what is Mythical
mythical into the account given of any hero " '""'' ''"
naturally excites suspicion that something of
the kind may have happened in the case of our
Gospels. The narrative of Jesus ran the risk
of being adulterated by the tendency to ascribe
to Him every marvellous quality and action
which had been ascribed to the heroes of the
Old Testament; and especially to relate of
i Dawson, " Life of Christ."

192 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
Jesus, as accomplished facts, all that the proph
ets had foretold of the Messiah. In the Old
Testament they found certain actions and at
tributes ascribed to the Messiah; Jesus was
the Messiah, therefore all those actions and
attributes must have been manifested by
Him.
Applied to This line of criticism and the material it
affords were thoroughly exploited, and with
consummate ability and knowledge, by Strauss.
And it maintains its hold on some of the fore
most living critics. Holtzmann, for example,
maintains that although in details it may be
difficult always to lay one's finger on the Old
Testament reminiscence which reappears in the
Gospels, yet the support which a legendary
representation has in the events of the actual
life of Jesus can be shown. And Dr. Percy
Gardner, in his " Historic View of the New
Testament," has the following : " When the
first missionaries went to preach in the towns
of Judaea, the commonest objection which they
would meet to the proclamation of Jesus as the
Messiah would be that the life of the Master,
His birth, and His death did not conform to
the prophetic writings. How could the Mes
siah be born in Galilee ? How could He fail to
be of the family of David ? He must, like the

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 193
prophet of Isaiah, be silent in the presence of
His accusers ; He must, like the King in Zecha-
riah, come riding upon an ass. His garments
must have been seized and divided among His
enemies, according to the words of the twenty-
second Psalm. He must have made His grave
with the rich, and so forth. Now by far the
easiest way of meeting these objections would be
to say, 'Exactly, thus it was with our Master.'
And thus many tales, however arising, which
possessed the great merit of bringing the life
of Jesus into conformity with prophecy, would
have a natural advantage which would insure
their survival in the competition for existence,
and which would secure them a place in the
biographies accepted in the Society."
Now, in the first place, the limited range of Applies only
this objection must be remarked. It is not ^taiU
doubted that in essentials Jesus more than ful
filled the anticipations of the prophets — that
He was a Messiah of a spiritual grandeur far
surpassing the picture we can compose from
the scattered features drawn in the Old Testa
ment. If any Evangelist was met by the sup
posed objection that Jesus did not correspond
to the Old Testament picture, and if he yielded
to the temptation to bring the reality into
apparent harmony with the expectation, this

194 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
could only happen in relation to some of the
insignificant externals and details.
And mainly It should also be remarked that this induce-
jewsf ment to falsification could exist only in preach
ing to Jews, and, among them, to those who
had made some study of the Messianic predic
tions. How variously these were interpreted
is well known. The Gentile Church could at
first have little interest in such points. That
some Jews might ask, that some did ask,
for a correspondence between Jesus and the
prophecies regarding the Messiah is certain,
but that an Evangelist would unscrupulously
falsify facts, which might be quite as well
known to the objector as to the preacher, is
not so credible. For let us take the case
selected by Dr. Gardner, the descent of the
Messiah from David. We know that this was
a main point in the identification of the Mes
siah, " Hath not the Scripture said, that Christ
cometh of the seed of David, and out of the
town of Bethlehem, where David was ? " And
the Evangelists met this demand, but how?
Not by making a bare affirmation, unsupported
by any evidence, that in this respect Jesus
verified prediction, but by publishing his
genealogy — a method which exposed them
to final refutation if it was fictitious, for a

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 195
Jewish pedigree could be ascertained beyond
question. But the truth is, that there is no evidence First be-
that the first believers in general were greatly triflerg.
concerned about such matters. Even Paul,
whom one might have expected to make a great
point of such correspondences, rests his faith on
much more central and essential matters. And
if any credit is to be given to John's account of
the manner in which the earliest disciples at
tached themselves to Jesus, we can recognize in
it how little weight these correspondences had.
"Can any good come out of Nazareth?" says
the objector; and the answer is, "Come and
see ; " not as Dr. Gardner would have us be
lieve, " He does not belong to Nazareth but to
Bethlehem." 3. We must take into account the likelihood Are the
that the writers would allow their own opinions partisan?
to color their statements. By the time the
Gospels were written many thorny questions
had arisen in the Church, and men had taken
their sides. Some quoted Jesus as supporting
their opinion, while others held Him to have
meant quite the opposite. It was not in human
nature that a writer who had a strong view
on some controverted point should compose a
Gospel without letting it be seen to which

196 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
party he belonged. Holtzmann positively says,
" No evangelist writes history like Herodotus,
merely to repeat what he had heard ; they all
pursue more or less some religious interest."
The personal equation must be ascertained. As
Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in chemical
terms, " Smith gives you the Smithate of
truth; Brown gives you the Brownate."
Reaction Little, however, need be said of this diffi-
ideamttMs culty. At present its day would seem to be
done and a reaction against it has set in. Thus,
we find even Schmiedel saying that "on the
whole, such tendencies as have been spoken of
manifest themselves only in a few parts of the
Gospels." Of course the different objects the
evangelists had in view must have influenced
their choice of material. Matthew, for ex
ample, omits features of various incidents
which are carefully delineated in the other
Gospels, because Matthew's constant aim is to
get at the sayings of our Lord and put them on
record. The language, too, of a writer is nec
essarily influenced by his temperament, educa
tion, and object; and such differences of this
kind appear in the Gospels, as one would expect.
But that the writers' aims or predilections have
seriously damaged the trustworthiness of the
Gospels need not be suspected.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 197
4. The discrepancies in the accounts which Discrepan-
the Gospels give of the same event are supposed
to invalidate their testimony. Thus, Schmiedel,
in his article on the Resurrection in the " Ency
clopaedia Biblica," makes much use of this objec
tion, and lays down the canon that discrepant
accounts cannot be accepted in their main point
of agreement unless this is confirmed from other
sources. Regarding this argument, it is enough
to quote, and it is a pleasure to quote the opin
ion of an unduly discredited author, whose
strong Yorkshire sense would be invaluable at
the present time. Paley says : " I know not a
more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the
understanding than to reject the substance of
a story by reason of some diversity in the cir
cumstances with which it is related. The
usual character of human testimony is substan
tial truth under circumstantial variety. This
is what the daily experience of courts of justice
teaches. When accounts of a transaction come
from the mouths of different witnesses, it is
seldom that it is not possible to pick out ap
parent or real inconsistencies between them.
These inconsistencies are studiously displayed
by an adverse pleader, but oftentimes with lit
tle impression upon the minds of the judges.
On the contrary, a close and minute agreement

198 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
induces the suspicion of confederacy and fraud.
When written histories touch upon the same
scenes of action, the comparison almost always
affords ground for a like reflection. Numerous
and sometimes important variations present
themselves ; not seldom also, absolute and final
contradictions; yet neither the one nor the
other are deemed sufficient to shake the credi
bility of the main fact. The embassy of the
Jews to deprecate the execution of Claudius'
order to place his statue in their temple, Philo
places in harvest, Josephus in seedtime ; both
contemporary writers. No reader is led by this
inconsistency to doubt whether such an order
was given. Our own history supplies examples
of the same kind. In the account of the Mar
quis of Argyll's death in the reign of Charles II,
we have a ve^ remarkable contradiction. Lord
Clarendon relates that he was condemned to be
hanged, which was performed the same day ;
on the contrary, Burnet, Wodrow, Heath, Ec-
hard, concur in stating that he was beheaded,
and that he was condemned upon the Saturday
and executed on a Monday. Was any reader
of English history ever sceptic enough to raise
from hence a question whether the Marquis of
Argyll was executed or not ? Yet this ought
to be left in uncertainty, according to the prin-

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 199
ciples upon which the Christian history has
sometimes been attacked."
But there are certain positive evidences of Positive
trustworthiness which must also be taken into em ?™ce'
account. (1) The sayings of Jesus have been preserved Sayings of
..-, ii-i ci c j_i Jesus accu-
with remarkable accuracy. Some of them were rateiy re-
of a self-preserving kind. They could not well v°rted.
be forgotten. They may have been dissevered
from their original connection, but that is of
less consequence. Strauss himself says : " The
pithy sayings of Jesus could not, indeed, be dis
solved by the flood of the oral tradition, but
were, perhaps, not seldom torn from their natu
ral connection, floated away from their original
strata, and landed, like fragments of rock, in
places where they do not really belong." Nat
urally the oral evangelist grouped together
sayings that served his purpose, irrespective of
the occasions on which they were spoken. In
Matthew we have sayings culled from various
scenes and occasions ; but, as Renan with true
literary sense remarks, there is in them an un
mistakable ring which proves them to be the
true product of the mind of Christ.
No one can read the parables without feeling inparticu-
sure that they are genuine and accurately re- parables.
ported. The finish upon them, their family

200 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
likeness in style and method, their aptness, all
testify to accuracy of report and exclude the
idea that they have been invented, tampered
with, or misrepresented by the evangelists.
How they have been so accurately reported is
something of a problem. But there they are ;
and even Schmiedel seems to imply that they
are genuine. Dr. Percy Gardner indeed says,
"There are no entirely undisputed sayings of
Jesus." We might quite as truly say, "There
are no undisputed plays of Shakespeare," be
cause some literary lunatic declares them to
have been the work of Bacon.
Retention of (2) A somewhat striking evidence of the
fidelity of the evangelists is to be found in their
retention of names and designations of our
Lord which had become obsolete in the second
generation. In that generation the name Jesus
had largely given place to the title Christ.
Christ had become the name of Him who bore
the office ; but in the Gospels the regular name
used is Jesus. Similarly the designation " Son
of Man " was superseded in the second genera
tion, but the evangelists, although never hear
ing it used in their own day, preserved its use
by Jesus Himself. Other instances of a similar
fidelity might easily be adduced.
(3) Another sure evidence of the fidelity of

obsoletenames.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 201
the Gospel narratives has usually and justly Exposure of
been found in their unhesitating and frank 0f Apostles.
exposure of the weaknesses and failings of the
Twelve ; their slowness in apprehending the
meaning of the parables, the failure of their
faith on critical occasions, the worldliness of
their ambitions, their wrangling with one an
other, their abandonment of the Lord in the
hour of His need, all is frankly related. Noth
ing is hidden, nothing explained away, nothing
excused. The thing as it happened is told,
quite irrespective of the credit or discredit it
reflected on this or that person. This charac
teristic of these narratives is of great impor
tance, revealing as it does the objectivity of the
narrative, the absence of personal considera
tions, the habit of mind which sees the thing
as it is. Professor Fisher in his " Grounds of
Theistic and Christian Belief," elaborates this
argument and warrantably asks, " What surer
mark of an honest narrative can exist than a
willingness to give a plain unvarnished account
of his own mortifying mistakes, and the conse
quent rebuffs, whether just or not, which he has
experienced ? When Boswell writes that John
son said to him, with a stern look, ' Sir, I have
known David Garrick longer than you have
done, and I know no right you have to talk to

202 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
me on the subject,' or, when an author tells us
that his hero said to him, ' Sir, endeavor to clear
your mind of cant,' no one can doubt that the
biographer is telling a true story. Men are not
likely to invent anecdotes to their own dis
credit. When we find them in any author, a
strong presumption is raised in favor of his
general truthfulness."
External The strongest external attestation of the
attestation *. ±.\.c i c j_t_ n i j.j.- j>
by Paul. truthfulness of the Gospel representation of
Jesus is that which is furnished by the letters
of Paul. It is very questionable whether Paul
ever saw any of our Gospels. Certainly he
had not seen any of them prior to the forma
tion of his own belief. But it is the same
Christ we find in his letters. Here is the same
person recognized as the Christ, the same per-
fectness of human character, the same underly
ing Divinity, the same death and resurrection.
If Paul had known Christ through the Gospels,
we do not know what alteration that could have
made. The real Christ who appeared to him,
and whom he learned to know by his own expe
rience and by conversation with those who had
known our Lord on earth, is in no respect dif
ferent from the Christ of the Gospels. In
short, the Christ we find in the Gospels is the
Christ who won the faith and devotion of those

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 203
who knew Him at first hand, and upon whom,
as its foundation, the Church was founded.
The picture we have here is not a replica
touched up by a painter of a later generation
who has ideas of his own as to the expression
of the features; it is the original painting
which satisfied the personal friends of the
subject. Obviously, then, the critic cannot accept all A touch-
^tOUP TP.m
and everything he finds recorded in the Gospels, quired.
but must possess himself of some touchstone by
which all excrescence may be eliminated and
the fact remain. This of course applies to the
sayings of Jesus- as much as to the events re
corded. Where the synoptists present different
forms of our Lord's sayings, it is sometimes as
difficult as it is important to determine which
is genuine. What, then, is the touchstone? Schmiedei's Schmiedei's
article in the " Encyclopaedia Biblica " may be
accepted as the high water mark of the criticism
that claims to be scientific ; and one satisfactory
feature of that article is that it attempts to fur
nish us with a criterion by which we may sift
the credible from the incredible in the Gospels.
The criterion is thus stated : " When a profane
historian finds before him a historical docu
ment which testifies to the worship of a hero

touchstone.

204 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
unknown to other sources, he attaches first and
foremost importance to those features which
cannot be deduced merely from the fact of this
worship, and he does so on the simple and suffi
cient ground that they would not be found in
this source unless the author had met with
them as fixed data of tradition. ... If we
discover any such points, — even if only a few,
— they guarantee not only their own contents,
but also much more. For in that case one may
also hold as credible all else which agrees in
character with these, and is, in other respects,
not open to suspicion. Indeed, the thoroughly
disinterested historian must recognize it as his
duty to investigate the grounds for this so
great reverence for Himself which Jesus was
able to call forth; and he will then, first and
foremost, find himself led to recognize as true
the two great facts that Jesus had compassion
for the multitude and that He preached with
power, not as the Scribes." The meagre re
sults yielded by his criterion might well have
provoked a reexamination of its merits. The
fact is, Schmiedel starves himself for fear of
being poisoned. He throws away the baby
with the dirty water of the bath. The founder
of the Christian Church he finds to have been
a benevolent person who was also a good

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 205
preacher ; a combination of Howard and White-
field. Not only do the results reflect discredit on its incompe-
this criterion, but its inherent incompetency is tence'
apparent. To put aside all the elements in the
record which can be deduced from the fact of
the hero's worship is to put aside all that is
essential and to begin at the wrong end. Ap
ply the principle to any other hero. At Nel
son's death the nation sang : " His body is
buried in peace, but his name liveth for ever
more." In order to ascertain why his name
thus lives, Schmiedel would, I presume, direct
us to the facts that Nelson was vain and easily
flattered, that he was carried off his feet by the
blandishments of Lady Hamilton, that he was
always ill when he went to sea — how far will
these non-heroic facts carry us to the Nile and
Trafalgar? Is it not obvious that we must
begin with the facts which can account for the
worship ?
Here, I think, we find our proper starting- The true
point for the criticism of the Gospels and the criterion"
true criterion of their credibility. We find in
them that which alone explains the Christian
Church; the one key which fits the lock. Do
the Gospels set before us a self-authenticating
Revealer of God ? It is in the fact that Jesus

206 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
claimed to be the Christ, the representative oi
God on earth, and justified this claim by giving
us in His life, death, and resurrection, a self-
authenticating revelation of God, — it is in this
fact that the Church finds its explanation, and
it is this figure, the figure of the Christ, that
the Gospels present. Whatever fits this claim
and is congruous with it is credible. The testi
mony of an eye-witness is only accepted when
he relates what is credible : and the testimony
of one who is removed by half a century from
the event he relates, may yet be accepted as
trustworthy if the incident he relates is con
gruous with what we otherwise know of the
person involved. So that credibility is the
touchstone of testimony; and of credibility
itself, the criterion is congruity with what is
otherwise known. Things that would never
be disputed if related of one person, will be
doubted and contested if told of another. And
in the claim of Jesus to be the Christ, and His
acceptance as such by the disciples and the
Church, we have the criterion by which the
Gospels must be judged. It is this central fact
which enables us to believe what they tell us of
His miracles and His resurrection. If Jesus
was the representative of God on earth, if He
authenticates Himself as such, we may expect

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 207
unique incidents and much that is beyond
the ordinary reach of man. Particular mani
festations may be doubted by this or that indi
vidual, but in the Messiahship there is laid a
ground for belief in the main tenor of the life
as related in the Gospels. We can believe of
this person, the Christ, what we could not be
lieve of any other.
Here, then, we return to the question as The Christ
stated in the outset, Do the Gospels set before %os^eis self-
us a credible Christ ? Is the figure they depict authenticat-
a true representation of the Christ ? That it is
so in essentials cannot be questioned. The
figure presented in the Gospels is self-verifying
as God's representative. A revelation of God
superior to every other is made by the person
and ministry depicted. In these records we
find the best and highest we know — in a word,
God manifest in the flesh.
No doubt it may still be objected that this Was He the
figure was the creation of the disciples, and the evange-
never really existed. That objection was ex- lists?
ploded as long ago as Rousseau ; and Ullmann,
in his criticism of Strauss, may be said to have
finally disposed of the alternative, Did the
Church create Christ? or did Christ cre
ate the Church ? A figure so. wholly dis
appointing current Messianic expectation, so

208 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
traversing the ideas of good Jews that even the
Baptist misunderstood Him, could not be the
invention of a few peasants. It suffices to cite
John Stuart Mill, who says : 1 " It is of no use
to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels,
is not historical — who among His disciples or
among their proselytes was capable of invent
ing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagin
ing the life and character revealed in the
Gospels ? Certainly not the fishermen of Gali
lee, as certainly not St. Paul."
Essential The grand essential characteristics of out-
Christmade standing individuals are understood by the
good. people, even though their birth or the particu
lars of their career are little known. Clive
is recognized as having laid the foundations of
the British Indian Empire, Wellington as hav
ing broken the power of Napoleon, Watt as the
developer of the steam engine. That Jesus was
the Christ was also recognized, and His rejection
and crucifixion by the authorities testify to His
claim. The details by means of which this
claim was made and justified will be viewed
variously by various minds, but the claim is so
unique and marvellous that it discounts all sur
prise at particular marvels, which are recorded.
Conclusion. What, then, may we reasonably conclude from
1 "Essays," p. 233.

The Trustworthiness of the Gospels 209
all this? It is not possible to say of the Gospels,
"Everything herein recorded happened precisely
as related." This is impossible for the simple
reason that in some instances the several Gospels
give us discrepant and irreconcilable accounts
of the same event. Some events, such as the
Virgin-birth, depend for their acceptance so
largely upon preconceptions and the mental
attitude of the reader, that it may be impossible
to adduce convincing evidence of their truth.
Of other narratives, such as that of the Gadarene
demoniac, it may be felt that there is either
some misunderstanding of what actually took
place or some link omitted whose presence
might have shed light on the incident. But
such difficulties, omissions, and discrepancies
cannot be said to alter or even to dim the cen
tral figure. It matters nothing so far as our
preception of Christ and our belief in Him is
concerned, whether He healed two blind men
in Jericho or only one, nor whether this healing
took place at His entrance to the city or His
exit from it. What is it we seek in the Gospels?
It is the knowledge of Christ. That the Gos
pels present us with a lifelike portrait of Christ
and with so accurate a report of His words that
we can form a true estimate of His teaching,
this is not to be doubted. It is the Christ of

210 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
the Gospels that has won the heart of Christen
dom and that in millions of instances has been
found true and efficacious in the bringing of
many sons to glory and to God. And from
that majestic figure we must not allow our
minds to be drawn aside by the minutiae of
criticism. The danger of criticism is not in
what it discovers but in turning the mind aside
to details and externals. Those who work in
it tend to lose perspective and atmosphere.
The warning of Amiel in another sphere is
applicable to this : " There is a way of killing
truth by truths. Under the pretence that we
want to study it more in detail we pulverize
the statue. It is an absurdity of which our
pedantry is constantly guilty." 1
1 "Journal," II., 258.

VII
THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN
THE GOSPELS

VII
THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN THE
GOSPELS
That Jesus considered the healing of disease The healing
of dlSBCtSG
an important, or even an essential, feature of essential to
His work, is apparent both from His practice ^e work °S
and from His words. His practice again and
again elicits from the evangelists the remark
that they are unable to record every individual
cure. They content themselves with such sum
maries as we find in Luke iv. 40, "All they
that had any sick with divers diseases brought
them unto Him ; and He laid His hands on
every one of them, and healed them." The
prominence which these physical cures had in
His ministry is convincingly reflected in His
fear lest the Messianic function should come
to be identified with this form of ministry.
And yet He found Himself constrained more
than once to draw attention to His works
of healing and to their significance. When
Herod's threat was reported to Him, He
almost gave the impression that His whole
213

214 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
work was to heal: " I will perform cures to-day
and to-morrow: and the third day I will be
perfected." Still more significant is His expla
nation of His reason, or one of His reasons, for
exorcism, which may be reckoned among His
works of healing. His justification is, that
the strong man armed who guards his own
house, — that is, Satan, — must be bound if
the contents of his house are to be spoiled.
The casting out of the devils was the binding
of the strong man, the necessary preliminary
to the taking possession of the Spirit of man
and the abolition of all Satanic results therein.
It was the sign that the kingdom, or reign
of God, had really begun among men (Luke
ii. 20).
Disparage- At the present time, however, the idea very
miracle, commonly obtains that Christianity would float
more buoyantly and prosperously were the
miraculous element in the Gospel narrative
thrown overboard. Men favorable to Chris
tianity and of weighty mental caliber disparage
miracle, and deny that it is needed. Matthew
Arnold goes so far as to say,1 " There is noth
ing one would more desire for a person or a
document one greatly values than to make them
independent of miracles." Harnack, the most
1 " Literature and Dogma," p. 137.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 215
prominent of living German critics, recently
undertook to tell the world what was "the
essence of Christianity," and he definitely
excludes the miraculous : " We must either
decide to rest our belief on a foundation un
stable and always exposed to fresh doubts or
else we must abandon this foundation alto
gether, and with it the miraculous appeal to
our senses." And again : " We are firmly con
vinced that what happens in space and time is
subject to the general laws of motion, and that
in this sense, as an interruption of the order of
nature, there can be no such thing as miracle."
It is not only professed sceptics who in our even by
time assume this attitude of distrust or sus- apo °9Utsi
pended judgment toward the miraculous.
Defenders of the faith manifest the same
uneasiness. Dr. Rashdall, certainly one of
the ablest living philosophical theists, while
maintaining that the visions of our Lord after
the resurrection "were not mere subjective
delusions," yet expresses himself strongly in
regard to the miraculous. " We may be quite
confident," he says, " that for minds which have
once appreciated the principles of historical
criticism, or minds affected by the diffused
scepticism which has sprung from historical
criticism, neither religious faith in general

216 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Miracles an
incubuswhile mis
understood.

nor any doctrine of primary religious impor
tance, will ever depend mainly upon the evi
dence of abnormal events recorded to have
happened in the remote past."1
But it is needless accumulating testimonies.
Every one is already aware that the idea very
widely prevails that the Gospel miracles are an
excrescence marring the simplicity and beauty
of the life of our Lord, and that if once they
served a purpose, which is very doubtful, it
were better now to say nothing about them.
Thus Browning compares them to the dry twigs
stuck round a newly sown flower-plot to pre
serve it from the trampling beasts, but when
the plants themselves are grown, visible, strong,
overtopping the hedge, the preserving sticks
are thrown into the rubbish heap.
The ethics of Christianity, it is supposed, if cut
free from this incubus, would assert their supe
riority and attract all men. And of course so
long as the miracles of our Lord are not recog
nized as an essential part of His revelation, so
long will they be felt to be a hindrance and not
a help to faith. But Jesus evidently consid
ered miraculous works of healing an essential
element in His work, and whoever feels uneasy
about the miraculous, and fancies that perhaps
1 " Contentio Veritatis," ^ 58.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 217
it would be well to yield the point and surrender
miracle, must be looking at the matter with
very different eyes from those with which our
Lord viewed it. Hence the importance of con
sidering His attitude toward miracle.
It has recently been most pertinently asked :
"If it was worth Christ's while in His short
earthly life to fatigue Himself in physical mira
cles of healing, is it not worth our while to
attend to the fact, to be grateful for it, and to
hand on to others, undiminished, the full record
of His gracious help to human need, and of His
manifold appeal to human faith ? " 1
The points which seem especially to demand Points de-
consideration at present are these : What pre- ronsiJera-
cisely we claim for Jesus in claiming the power tion-
to work miracles. Is it merely faith-healing or
some greater power? What importance and
significance did Jesus Himself attach to the
working of miracles, and in what relation did
they stand to the whole of His work of reveal
ing the Father ? After considering these
points, we may take up one or two of the
common objections.
1. First, then, the Gospels claim for Jesus Terms de-
some greater power than that of healing the miracle.
sick — some power which they called and which
i Mackintosh, "Apologetics," p. 48.

218 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
we also call miraculous. There is little need
that we lay down any hard-and-fast definition
of miracle. But one or two words of explana
tion are perhaps necessary at the outset. In
the New Testament we find four words applied
to the same phenomenon, marvel, sign, work,
power. Our word " miracle " corresponds only
to the first of these, and therefore leaves out of
view three-fourths of the characteristics of the
phenomenon. It is not only a marvel calling
men's attention, "ringing the bell of the uni
verse," as John Foster said ; it also responds to
the attention and inquiry aroused by being a
"sign," revealing a spiritual presence, or em
bodying and illustrating a spiritual truth ; it is
also preeminently a " work " advancing some
beneficent and worthy object and fitting itself
in as an essential part of the task given Him
by the Father to do. It is, besides, a " power,"
transcending ordinary human endeavor and
bringing to bear on human affairs and for the
relief of human needs a force of irresistible
might.1
Explana- These are the features of miracle which
t&OYLS of YftiV*
ade, should be presented to the mind when we
speak of the miracles of Jesus. Sometimes we
1 Cf. Lyman Abbott's "Theology of an Evolutionist,"
p. 134.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 219
know a thing better when we do not try to de
fine it. But if definitions are wanted, they can
be found in abundance in Chapuis' " Du Sur-
naturel," or in Trench, or Mozley, or in Pflei,-
derer's "Philosophy of Religion." There are
two explanations of miracle which are interest
ing : that which explains it as the introduction
of a higher and to us unfamiliar law, and that
which refers it to the immediate action of the
Divine will. Of the former explanation Car-
lyle in his " Sartor " may be taken as the ex
ponent. "But is not a real miracle simply a
violation of the Laws of Nature ? ask several.
Whom I answer by this new question, What
are the Laws of Nature ? To me perhaps the
rising from the dead were no violation of these
Laws, but a confirmation, were some far deeper
law now first penetrated into, and by Spiritual
Force, even as the rest have all been, brought
to bear on us with its Material Force." But
this supposition, although it finds much to sup
port it, remains an unverified, and by the nature
of the case unverifiable, hypothesis.
The reference of miracle to the direct action Referable to
of the Divine will is the most straightforward wiU
explanation. In ourselves we have before us
the constant proof that spirit acts directly upon
matter : our will, invisible, intangible, spiritual,

220 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
moves our hands, feet, and other organs — how
we do not know. But here we see spirit act
ing directly on matter ; and, instructed by this
experience, we seem to find it not inconceivable
that the Divine will should be so intimate to
the material world as to act directly upon it
and accomplish results which without the inter
vention of that will would not have taken place.
and Now our Lord claims that the miracles He
lam. V performed were the works given Him by the
Father to do. They were done, no doubt,
through His own will, but there was behind
it the Divine will. And therefore He declared
that the power of working miracles was within
reach of every one who believed in God.
When the disciples asked Him why they were
unable to heal a lunatic boy, His answer was,
"Because of your unbelief, for verily I say
unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard
seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove
hence to yonder place, and it shall remove, and
nothing shall be impossible unto you." Peter
is assured that he also could have walked on
the water had he had sufficient faith. It was
not on an independent power of His own nor
on the magic of His own personality our Lord
depended, but on His closeness to the Father.
Just as He rebuked the young man who

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 221
ascribed to Him independent goodness, so
would He say of His miracles, There is none
mighty but God.
It is important to observe this reference by Faith-
our Lord to the will of the Father, because it healin9-
differentiates Him from the mere hypnotist or
faith-healer. That many of our Lord's cures
may legitimately be classed with the ordinary
manifestations of faith-healing is not to be
denied. It is needless in our day to insist
upon the reality of such manifestations, be
cause science has taken up a line of inquiry
which puts them beyond question and at the
same time explains their nature. In Tuke's
"Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind
upon the Body in Health and Disease," or in
Carpenter's "Mental Physiology," or in Alice
Fielding's " Faith-healing and Christian Sci
ence," sufficient evidence is cited to show that
one of the most potent agents in dispelling cer
tain forms of disease is confident expectation
of cure. Thus Dr. Carpenter in his authorita
tive work states : " That the confident expecta
tion of a cure is the most potent means of
bringing it about, doing that which no medi
cal treatment can accomplish, may be affirmed
as the generalized result of experiences of the
most varied kind, extending through a long

222 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
series of ages. . . . For although there can
be no doubt that in a great number of cases
the patients have believed themselves to be
cured, when no real amelioration of their con
dition had taken place, yet there is a large
body of trustworthy evidence, that permanent
amendment of a kind perfectly obvious to
others has shown itself in a great variety of
local maladies, when the patients have been
sufficiently possessed by the expectation of ben
efit and by faith in the efficacy of the means
employed."
Faith-cures The certification, by medical science and
psychological observation, of the genuineness
of cures wrought by the expectation of cure,
has been eagerly accepted by many as giving
all the explanation required of the miracles of
Christ. Those cures were actually performed
and gave the suggestion and the ground of the
ascription of other and greater miracles. Al
though those cures are now explained in con
formity with well-ascertained natural laws, yet
in the time of our Lord they were supposed to
be miraculous, and once the door was opened to
miracle, crowds entered without the legitimate
pass. Certainly this explanation will occur to
any thoughtful mind.
Our reasons for being dissatisfied with it are

genuine.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 223
(1) that while in some respects the cures ac- Different^
complished by Jesus resembled those of the miracles.
hypnotist or faith-healer, in other respects they
differed. They resembled them in always re
quiring faith in the patient. Where there was
no faith our Lord could do no mighty works.
Sometimes, that faith seems to have been a mere
expectation to be healed, a vague, superstitious,
ignorant expectation. But the faith of the
patient was not recognized by our Lord as the
sole or even the main factor in the cure. His
own faith was always directed toward the su
preme will. He prayed before raising Lazarus.
He declares that certain kinds of exorcism can
only be achieved by prayer. On the one hand
He brought Himself into so living a sympathy
with the sufferer that it could be said that " He
took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses,"
while on the other hand He became the pure
channel of the Father's will. It was not by a
mere wave of the hand or utterance of a for
mula the cure was accomplished, but only by
putting Himself in the place of the sufferer on
the one hand and by being in the purest and
most absolute harmony with God on the other
hand. It may no doubt be said that our Lord was
mistaken in supposing that the special will of

224 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature

Miracles of
Jesus not
exclusively cures of
nervous dis
orders,

God had anything to do with the cures ; that
they were instances of the ordinary law, that
expectation of a cure, irrespective of any spe
cial intervention of God, works wonders in
certain forms of nervous disorders. We should,
I think, be slow to ascribe such ignorance to
our Lord ; but, in any case, the fact remains
that He was conscious of being in harmony with
God, and thus in His hands these works became
the expression of the Father's good will to men.
But (2) besides this, cures of nervous disor
ders were not the only form in which Christ's
power of working miracle was manifested.
His ministry was characterized further by heal
ings of leprosy, fever, and other maladies, by
healing at a distance where no physical contact
was possible, even by raisings from the dead,
and by remarkable manifestations of power
over nature. And undoubtedly the proof of
these will depend not upon our knowledge of
the similarity of the powers of Jesus to those
of ordinary men, but upon the conception we
entertain of that which distinguished Him from
others. If we accept Him as the Christ and
believe in His unbroken and perfect union with
God, we shall be prepared to admit that excep
tional manifestations may be expected in His
career.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 225
(3) It is further to be observed that the norexciu-
miracles which exhibit power over nature come IffJaHng. **
to us on the very same documentary evidence
as the miracles of healing. This does not com
pel belief, but it requires that the introduction
of such occurrences into the Gospels should be
accounted for. Generally it is accounted for
by the assertion that these accounts were the
reflection of the opinion of those of the second
Christian generation in whose time they were
written. But unfortunately for this hypothe
sis, remarkably little account was made of
Christ's miracles in that generation. Neither
in the Epistles of Paul, nor in the Acts, are
they alluded to more than once or twice. And,
as Dr. Chase has pointed out, this constitutes
" a strong historical argument against the posi
tion that in the days when the Gospels were
written there was a tendency at work among
the disciples which impelled them to decorate
the story of their Master's life with fictitious
miracles."1 But if we are to accept miracle, we must first Function of
recognize its true function and significance — m^rac e.
the relation it holds to the entire work of
Christ. What, then, was our Lord's purpose
in performing miracles? The answer is, He
1 "Supernatural Element," p. 16.

226 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
performed them not to convince people that
He was the Messiah, the messenger and rep
resentative of God, but because He had that
understanding of God's love and that perfect
fellowship with God which made Him the
Messiah.
Not to con- He wrought no miracle for the purpose of con
vince men . , . __. _ _ . 7 7 . „ , „
of His Mes- vmcmg men of Mis Messiahship. r rom the first,
indeed, this constituted one of His typical, nor
mal temptations. The people expected that by
some stupendous sign, such as leaping from the
temple roof, and alighting unhurt in the court
below, the Messiah would declare Himself. But
any such sign wholly disconnected from the
spiritual character of His work He resolutely,
peremptorily, and persistently refused. Nor
were any of the wonderful works He did done
for the purpose of persuading men. Their
primary purpose was to relieve distress. He
came to proclaim and establish God's Kingdom
among men, to manifest God's presence and love.
This He did more effectually by His works of
healing than by His teaching. It was His mira
cles that impressed men with a sense of the
Divine compassion ; they were the revelation
of the Father's sympathy. Disease, Christ felt,
is incongruous with the Kingdom of God ; and
if he is to exhibit that Kingdom, it must be

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 227
manifested in the physical as in the spiritual
sphere. He was grieved when confronted with
disease and death. This, He felt,, is not the
world as the Father would have it and means it
to be. In so far as He had power to remove the
distresses of men, He felt called upon to do so.
Those healings were the works given Him by
the Father to do. They manifested God's love
because done out of pure compassion in the
Father's name and with the Father's power.
As it was by the power of God He achieved
those cures, so it was the love of God that
prompted them; and therefore He could say,
" If I by the finger of God cast out devils, then
is the Kingdom of God come unto you." These
were the works congruous to God's presence,
and accomplishing results which exhibited the
Kingdom. But just because the primary purpose of the yet did con-
- . . , „ ,, vince men.
miracles was to give expression to God s mercy
and not to prove our Lord's Messiahship, on this
very account they can be appealed to as evi
dence that Jesus was the Messiah. The poet
writes because he is a poet, and not for the
purpose of convincing the world that he is a
poet. And yet his writing does convince the
world that he is a poet. The benevolent man
acts precisely as Christ did when He laid His

228 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
finger on the lips of the healed person and
charged him to make no mention of His kind
ness, and therefore all who do come to the
knowledge of it recognize him as a charitable
person. Actions done for the purpose of estab
lishing a character for courage or compassion
or what not, are much more likely to establish a
character for vanity and love of display. And
it is just because the primary intention of
Christ's miracles was not to establish a char
acter for this or that, but directly to help needy
persons, and so give utterance to God's love,
that they do convincingly prove Him to be
God's representative, the true King of the new
Kingdom. Accordingly Jesus does not scruple
on occasion to appeal to His miracles: "The
works which the Father hath given me to finish,
the same works that I do, bear witness of me,
that the Father hath sent me ; " and again,
" Though ye believe not me, believe the works."
wiiat the St. Matthew records (xvi. 1-4) a significant
"T/„„„>» conversation between our Lord and the com-
are. bined Sadducees and Pharisees on this point.
They came to Him with their usual demand for
a convincing sign from heaven, continuing thus
the initial temptation to end all dubiety about
His Messianic dignity by some astounding feat
or outward display. To this appeal He replies:

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 229
" In the evening ye say, It will be fair weather,
for the sky is red : and in the morning, There
will be a storm to-day, for it is lowering red.
Ye know how to read the face of the sky, and
can ye not read the signs of the times ? " You
know the sequences of nature, and understand
that certain results uniformly follow certain
appearances. But you have no eye for spiritual
sequences. You do not recognize that a clever
feat, or a supernatural marvel which makes
men stare, has no natural relation to the bless
ings of the Messianic Kingdom. Neither do
you perceive that the presence among you of
One in perfect harmony with God and devoted
to human interests must result in a kind of
weather altogether new in the spiritual world.
You do not see that the entrance into the world
of perfect humanity, of God in human form,
applying Himself with all His Divine love and
power to the actual needs of men, portends
more good to the race than the greatest physical
marvel could suggest. Suppose I did clothe
the sun with a cloud as ye gaze upon it in the
bare heavens ; suppose I commanded those
mountains to be removed, or leapt unhurt from
the temple roof to the courts below, there is
no necessary and infallible connection between
such marvels and the establishment of God's

cles as
signs

230 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
Kingdom among men or their deliverance from
sin. You could not from your observation of
such phenomena predict what would result ;
but if you could read the signs of the times,
you might infallibly argue that One in perfect
accord with God could not enter into this
world's life and become a part of its history
without setting in motion a train of never-
ending and infinitely beneficent consequences.
The mira- } Very markedly and repeatedly in the fourth
Gospel is the faith that is quickened by a sense
of the personal majesty of Jesus shown to be
more trustworthy than a faith founded on His
miracles. But we must not on that account
deny any virtue to miracles in creating faith.
As our Lord Himself told Nicodemus, the King
dom of God is a spiritual thing, and could only
be spiritually discerned by those who are born
of the spirit. Those only could enter it who
were attracted to Him by spiritual affinities.
His claims were recognized by those who had
eyes to see them, that is, by those who could
appreciate Divine goodness, the glory that con
sisted in humiliation and in being the servant
of all. But the miracles served as object-les
sons for those who were not in the front rank
of the spiritually sensitive. His power to give
the blind their sight suggested God's desire to

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 231
remove spiritual blindness; His feeding the
hungry was His way of saying, Your Father
suffers with you and cannot see you want.
His strengthening of the impotent man plainly
said, I will that you have eternal life and
vitality. They were, in short, a prominent, im
portant, and legible part of the revelation of the
Father made by Christ.
It is, then, to misunderstand Christ's own Revealing
conception of His miracles and their function, mirtlhsf
either, on the one hand, to suppose that their
main function was evidential, or, on the other
hand, to suppose that they have no evidential
function. To consider them an obstacle rather
than a help to faith is to misconceive the situa
tion. The fact that they occupy so large a part
in the narrative, and so large a part in the life
of Christ is proof enough that they served an
important purpose. That purpose was to bring
the love of the Father into contact with the
woes of men. They were the greatest means,
second to the Cross, of manifesting God's love.
The objections which at present are brought
against the Gospel miracles are chiefly two, —
that they cannot be proved, and that they are
useless even though proved.
The apparently weightier objection that mir- ^ ™ra'
acles are impossible is not now urged. The bief

232 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
position of those who refuse to accept miracle
has shifted since the time when Spinoza could
say, " A miracle, whether contrary to, or above
nature, is a sheer absurdity." The argument
which led him to this conclusion is interesting
and enlightening. It was this : " Nothing hap
pens in nature which does not follow from its
laws ; these laws extend to all which enters the
Divine mind; and, lastly, nature proceeds in a
fixed and changeless course — whence it follows
that the word ' Miracle ' can only be understood
in relation to the opinions of mankind, and sig
nifies nothing more than an event, a phenome
non, the cause of which cannot be explained by
another familiar instance. ... I might say,
indeed, that a miracle was that, the cause of
which cannot be explained by our natural un
derstanding from the known principles of natu
ral things." The core of this argument is the
same as that which lingers in some scientific
schools; viz., that as all nature with its laws is
the expression of the Divine mind, if anything
happens contrary to these laws, this must be
repugnant to the will of God. But obviously
this position of Spinoza's is a petitio principii,
— it takes for granted the main question, Is
the whole will of God expressed in nature?
In fact, this argument of Spinoza's leads us to

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 233
see that the question of the possibility of mira
cle is really the question, Is God supernatural ?
Granting that the Divine life is immanent in
all nature, is there also a transcendent will
which is not bound by nature's laws, but can
assert itself on occasion irrespective of them ?
In other words, Is God identified with nature,
or is He different from and superior to it ?
But this position of Spinoza's is generally Huxley's
departed from. And no one has more deci- impossibii.
sively pronounced against it than Professor **"¦
Huxley. "Strictly speaking," he says, "I am
unaware of anything that has a right to the
title of an ' impossibility,' except a contradic
tion in terms. There are impossibilities logical,
but none natural. A ' round square,' a ' pres
ent past,' ' two parallel lines that intersect,' are
impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by
the predicates, 'round,' 'present,' 'intersect,'
are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the
subjects, -square,' 'past,' 'parallel.' But walk
ing on water, or turning water into wine, or
procreation without male intervention, or rais
ing the dead, are plainly not 'impossibilities,'
in this sense." It might be otherwise, he goes
on to say, if our present knowledge of nature
exhausted the possibilities of nature, " but it is
sufficiently obvious not only that we are at the

234 The Bible: Its Origin and Nature
beginning of our knowledge of nature, instead
of having arrived at the end of it, but that the
limitations of our faculties are such that we
never can be in a position to set bounds to the
possibilities of nature. We have knowledge of
what is happening and what has happened ; of
what will happen we have and can have no
more than expectation, grounded on our more
or less correct reading of past experience, and
prompted by the faith begotten of that experi
ence, that the order of nature in the future will
resemble its order in the past." In this re
markable passage Huxley is careful to exclude
the Divine Will, and thus virtually excludes
what is implied in the Gospel miracles. Na
ture may have surprises for us, but we must
be guided in our expectations by our experi
ence of her uniformity. In short, he is so sure
of the impossibility of proving the occurrence
of what is contrary to natural law, that he does
not feel called upon to deny the possibility of
such phenomena.
Impossibil- It is, then, the impossibility of proof rather
than the a priori impossibility of miracle which
is now urged. This received its classical ex
pression from Hume in the often cited words :
" There is not to be found in all history, any
miracle attested by a sufficient number of men,

ity of proof .

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 235
of such unquestioned goodness, education, and
learning as to secure us against all delusion in
themselves ; of such undoubted integrity as to
place them beyond all suspicion of any design
to deceive others; of such credit and reputa
tion in the eyes of mankind as to have a great
deal to lose in case of their being detected in
any falsehood ; and at the same time, attesting
facts performed in such a public manner, and
in so celebrated a part of the world, as to ren
der the detection unavoidable ; all which cir
cumstances are requisite to give us a full
assurance in the testimony of men." How far
this attitude toward the Gospel miracles has
gained upon thoroughly Christian critics may
be gathered from the very able statement of
the matter which is given by Dr. Rashdall in
" Contentio Veritatis," 2 and in which the follow
ing occurs : " The idea of a suspension of natural
law is not a priori inadmissible. At the same
time, since such an admission would destroy all
the criteria, both of scientific and historical
reasoning, the admission of such a suspension
could not reasonably be accepted without an
amount of evidence which is practically unat
tainable in reference to the events of the dis
tant past." This sense of the extreme difficulty
i p. 56.

236 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
of finding sufficient evidence to establish any
breach of the uniformity of nature in the past,
has been, I need scarcely say, enormously
reenforced in recent years by the extended
knowledge of natural law, and the increased
sensitiveness to the uniformity of nature which
results from the dominance of scientific re
search, as well as by the more exact study of
history which has vastly increased the percep
tion of the kind and amount of evidence re
quired to establish any supposed occurrence.
Compara- Together with this, the study of history has
miracles! a^so enabled us to pursue the comparative study
of miracles. Many sincere inquirers cordially
accept Matthew Arnold's words : " The time
has come when the minds of men no longer
put as a matter of course the Bible miracles in
a class by themselves. Now, from the moment
this time commences, from the moment that
the comparative history of all miracles is a
conception entertained and a study admitted,
the conclusion is certain, the reign of the Bible
miracles is doomed. " x This comparative study
of miracles has been zealously pursued, and it
has been shown that supernatural powers have
been freely ascribed to the Buddha and the
Bab, to Thomas a Becket and St. Francis of
i " God and the Bible," p. 46.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 237
Assisi. The miracles of Jesus are supposed to
be so analogous to those of other founders and
saints that if we reject the one we are bound
to reject the other. Thus Mr. Percy Gardner,
in his instructive " Historic View of the New
Testament," 1 says : " Whether we investigate
the history of the past or turn our attention
to the less civilized countries of the world in
which we live, we find that no class of phe
nomena is a more constant concomitant of the
story of the rise and progress of religions than
the miraculous ; that a prophet will scarcely be
listened to in any land unless he is credited
by his followers with the power of reversing or
superseding the laws of nature; that marvels
follow the steps of the saint by an inevitable
law of human nature." Similarly, Professor
Carpenter, in "The Bible of the Nineteenth
Century," 2 puts forward the same plea : " The
truth is," he says, " that the studies of the last
generation have brought to light a wide range
of facts showing that from the lowest forms of
savage cults up to the more refined beliefs of
the higher religions the presence of the miracu
lous is invariable."
Here, then, we are confronted with two Conditions
of cvBclibil-
difficulties, neither of which is a vamped up ity_
i p. 147. 2 p. 358.

238 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
objection, but on the contrary it is what will
inevitably occur to every one who is trying to
find a reasonable faith. The miracles ascribed
to Jesus are violations of the uniformity of
nature as known to us, and miracles are very
commonly ascribed to the founders and saints
of religions. I think both these difficulties are
removed if we take into account the occasion,
the nature, and the worker of the Gospel mira
cles. We may legitimately ask for stronger
evidence for a miracle so stupendous as the
standing still of the sun, the occasion being
merely to make a defeat more crushing. We
may feel we have not sufficient evidence to
enable us cordially to accept that astounding
miracle recorded by Matthew of the dead bodies
of the saints coming out of their tombs appar
ently to accomplish nothing. But the miracles
of healing and even the miracle of the resur
rection do not seem incredible when we con
sider the greatness of the occasion, the character
of the miracles in question, and especially the
uniqueness of Him who wrought them.
Huxley's This will be more evident if we accept Hux-
enge. \e-y's challenge and choose a concrete instance
with which to compare the Gospel miracles.
He asks in a somewhat triumphant tone if any
testimony would suffice to make it credible

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 239
that a centaur had been seen trotting down
Regent Street. The instance selected does not
show Huxley's usual sagacity, but it enables us
to see clearly some guiding lines in the com
parative study of miracles ; for in two signifi
cant respects the supposed centaur bears no
analogy to the miracles of the Gospels.
For (1) the centaur is itself a monstrosity. The centaur
The miracles of the New Testament are all <?™onstros-
on the plane of nature. Feeding the hungry,
healing the sick, raising the dead — all these
are removals of obstructions which hinder na
ture from being the perfect and direct expression
of God's goodness to man. They are hints of
an ideal state which nature will one day reach,
accelerations of her slower processes. So far
from the truth is Matthew Arnold's dictum
that " from the moment that the comparative
history of all miracles is a conception enter
tained and a study admitted, the conclusion is
certain that the reign of the Bible miracles is
doomed " — so far is this from the truth that it
is precisely when we bring the miracles of Jesus
into comparison with the prodigies of Greece
and Rome or the grotesqueness of mediaeval
miracles, that we more clearly than ever discern
the finger of God and detect, perhaps for the
first time, the essential and distinctive char-

240 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature
acter of the works of Christ as truly revealing
the God of the nature we know.
and an (2) But secondly and especially, the centaur
isolated • ¦ i j_ t i t x
phenome- ls an isolated phenomenon ; proceeding from
non- nothing, going nowhither, accomplishing noth
ing, signifying nothing, meaningless, irrelevant,
incredible. That a man of Huxley's sagacity
should compare such an appearance to the Gos
pel miracles is another warning to examine
for ourselves ; another demonstration that the
ablest men may sometimes be satisfied with
touching but the surface of a subject. The
miracles of the Gospels were wrought by an
unique person, by one who has actually revealed
God and altered the world's attitude toward
God ; they were wrought as a part of that reve
lation, and they have actually lodged in men's
hearts the conviction that God is merciful and
kind. They appear as the natural outcome and
concomitant of a manifestation which had been
prepared for, and even expected, through a
long previous history. Between miracles so
imbedded in the supernatural, so congruous to
the circumstances, and trailing such a history
behind them, and a centaur trotting down
Regent Street, where is the analogy?
But it is precisely here where all arguments
against the credibility of the Christian miracles

son.

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 241
fall short. The strongest evidence in their Congruity
favor is their congruity with the person who with™
wrought them, and with the revelation in con- Christ's per-
nection with which they were wrought; and
this evidence is generally, one may almost say
regularly, left out of account. In this respect
Matthew Arnold, who compares them with the
portents and prodigies of Grecian history, is as
superficial as Huxley. Of course we should
find it difficult to believe in the resurrection of
Nero or of Trajan ; but, given a person already
miraculous in his sinlessness, on whose resur
rection the hope of the world depended, and I
find the incredibility immeasurably diminished.
Is it nothing in favor of the miracles of our
Lord, that they were wrought for the accom
plishment of the greatest end that could be
served in this world ? Does it make them no
more credible, that they were relevant, signifi
cant, congruous, necessary? The miracles are
Christ's miracles, and that makes precisely all
the difference.
In prosecuting the comparative study of Differentiaof Chviat's
miracles we must not, then, be content with mjmcze«.
recognizing that supposed miracles abound,
and that no more credence can be given to
those ascribed to Jesus than to those ascribed
to Becket or the Bab. We must consider the

242 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Are mira
cles useless
even though
proved ?

Matthew Arnold's
objection.

differences, as well as the likenesses, which the
various miracles betray, and especially we must
estimate their likelihood by a consideration of
the occasion, the nature, and the worker of the
miracles alleged. Doing so, we find that the
miracles ascribed to Jesus stand on quite a
different footing from those ascribed to other
founders. The other objection to the acceptance of the
Gospel miracles which one meets everywhere
at present is, that even if provable they are
useless. The doctrine proves the miracle,
rather than the miracle the doctrine. Thus,
Dr. Rashdall says, " It is not a priori incon
ceivable that in the whole course of history
there should be one single exception to such
a uniform mode of action ; but it may well be
thought morally inconceivable that any spiritu
ally important consequences should be depend
ent on the belief in an historical event which
would be so utterly incapable of establishment
by testimony as a supposed solitary exception
to an otherwise uniform course of nature."
To this objection Matthew Arnold has given
the classical expression in his well-known
words : " One may say, indeed, Suppose I
could change the pen with which I write this
into a penwiper; I should not thus make what

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 243
I write any the truer or more convincing.
That may be so in reality, but the mass of
mankind feel differently. In the judgment
of the mass of mankind, could I visibly and
undeniably change the pen with which I write
this into a penwiper, not only would this which
I write acquire a claim to be held perfectly
true and convincing, but I should even be
entitled to affirm, and to be believed in affirm
ing, propositions the most palpably at war with
common fact and experience."1
Every friend of Arnold must wish his pen 77m a mis-
had been changed into a penwiper2 before he
wrote this sentence, for it shows that he mis
conceived both the nature and the purpose of
the New Testament miracles. It is a libel on
the common sense of the mass of mankind to
assert that they would be influenced by a mere
piece of legerdemain, which had no relation to
the truths to be enounced. We accept the
miracles of Christ because they embody the
very thing to be proved. Miracles are not
gratuitous, superfluous, inconvenient, and ir
relevant credentials; they are themselves
didactic and revealing. They were not cre-
i "Literature and Dogma," p. 132.
2 I seem to have seen this somewhere else ; but where,
I cannot tell.

understanding.

244 The Bible : Its Origin and Nature

Christ Him
self the
greatestmiracle.

dentials of the kind that can be examined,
approved, and then laid aside that the sub
stance of the mission may be gone into. They
were something very different from the seal on
a letter which, as soon as recognized, is torn off
and thrown away that the contents of the letter
may be read. They were rather like the very
contents of the letter, which in every line re
veal and certify the writer. They were like
the munificent gift which suggests but one
possible giver, the far-reaching benefaction
which guarantees its own authorship.
But while we believe that our Lord healed
the sick, had power over nature, and rose from
the dead, the greatest miracle of all was insepa
rable from His own person: the perfect man
hood, the ideal relation to God and man He
constantly manifested. It was this, and no
external miracle, which drew to Him His ear
liest and most devoted followers. For, seeing
Christ, it was God men saw, and saw Him to
be more and better than they had thought.
To escape from the supernatural at this point
by denying the sinlessness of Jesus is a sorry
shift. This is the crowning, or root miracle
which lends credibility to all others : a miracle
unique and separating Him from all other men ;
a miracle which convinces us that at this point,

The Miraculous Element in the Gospels 245
at all events, He had transcended all human
experience and passed into a region beyond
human calculation. Is a miracle in the spir
itual world less or is it greater than a miracle
in the physical? Which is the more divine,
the turning water into wine or the perfection
of character that is impervious to sinful thought
and desire? The one thing is as unexampled
as the other, as truly beyond experience.
It is the personality of Christ which enables
some to dispense with the miracles He wrought;
yes, but it is His personality, also, which makes
them credible.