Part 17 (1/2)

The Bible is the choicest extant literature of the people of religion, the record and embodiment of the evolution of ethical wors.h.i.+p, through its varied moods and tenses, into its perfect type in Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Bible-books form, therefore, the cla.s.sics of the soul, in which we are to study the nature and secret of goodness; the manual which every earnest man and woman, intent on building character, should use habitually for ethical culture, and for the ethical wors.h.i.+p which is its inspiration.

This is the truest use of the Bible.

The intellectual use of the Bible, in critical and historical studies, is legitimate and needful. Reason should lay the bases for faith. Knowledge must rear the altar on which wors.h.i.+p is to be lighted. Theology shapes religion. It is all important, therefore, that the books which the intellect chiefly uses to found and form its thoughts of G.o.d should be rightly used, so as to give man right conceptions of the Divine Being, and to waken right feelings toward Him. This intellectual use of the Bible is not for scholars alone. There is no longer any isolated cla.s.s of scholars.

All educated people are now taken into the confidence of the learned, in every sphere of knowledge. The average man will reason about the great mysteries quite as much as the scholar; perhaps more than the true scholar, and with more insistent dogmatism. To the issue of that simpler, n.o.bler Religion of Christ which is struggling to the birth within the womb of Christianity, in the travail throes that are upon our age, it is of vital moment that all intelligent people should learn to use their Bibles intelligently in a knowledge of the nature of its writings, and in reasonable reasonings therefrom. Therefore I have spoken concerning the critical and the historical uses of these sacred writings.

But, when this knowledge is won and duly employed in our theologizings, the truest use of the Bible remains for us to make, to our highest pleasure and profit. It is the book of religion, not of theology; save as it records the one authoritative Epistle of Theology, the Word of G.o.d, the Christ. It is not a body of divinity, it is the soul of divinity. To use the Bible critically and historically for our theologizings, is, after all, to use it, however rightly, for its secondary and not its primary purpose. Religion--as the awed sense of the Eternal Power and Order revealed in nature, the Infinite Goodness and Righteousness revealed in man--is the art of the soul; its finest feelings, its loftiest imaginations, its n.o.blest enthusiasms its profoundest tragedies thrown out into the cry of the human after G.o.d.

There is a science in the sculptor's art. It is doubtless needful that this art should be studied for the sake of its science. Artists, however, may be glad that Winckelmann has a.n.a.lyzed the Apollo Belvedere, and has given them the laws of proportion deduced from this human form divine; leaving them free to feast upon its beauty. For in the scientific study of art, art itself may be lost. Some great figure-painters have been unwilling that their pupils should study anatomy; fearing that the bones would stick through the flesh in their paintings.

This danger shows itself plainly in all critical and historical uses of the Bible, in the old-fas.h.i.+oned as in the new-fas.h.i.+oned study of the Bible.

The international series of Sunday-school lessons burden the brief hours of the Lord's Day with a ma.s.s of matter, which may or may not be true knowledge about the Bible, but which certainly is not the true religion of the Bible. A child may learn the tables of the Israelitish Kings, the geography of the Holy Land, and the architect's plans of the temple of Jerusalem, and may be learning nothing whatever of the real religion which is shrined within the Bible. That is very simple:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: And thy neighbor as thyself.

The time spent on these more or less interesting matters may rob the child of his one weekly opportunity of learning to use the Holy Scriptures so as to become wise unto salvation. To use their words of wise men, and their tales of holy men, to inspire the love of goodness as the love of G.o.d, this and this alone is to teach religion from the Bible. Bread that consists of two-thirds bran and one-third white flour is eminently laxative; but it is generally supposed that this age is lax enough in its hold of truth. A little more wheat and a little less bran, ye good doctors, might strengthen the const.i.tutions of our children.

The new study of the Bible is perhaps even more in danger of missing its real secret. An interest in the literature and history of Israel may divert the mind from that which is, after all, the heart of these ”letters,” and the core of this history.

Fear G.o.d and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.

Of this danger I think that I see signs, in some of the great masters to whom we owe our new criticism, in some of the manuals which are popularizing it, and in some of the gifted preachers who are reconstructing theology around it. The science of religion is absorbing too much of the life that should go into the art of religion; and we have fine forms of thought, mantled with flabby flesh of feeling, in which no red blood of holy pa.s.sion pulses.

To read Homer with a view of understanding the fables of superst.i.tion, and of interpreting the mythology of the ancients, may have been needful for the later Greeks, who would preserve religion from the death that was stealing over it, in the divorce of the educated and the popular thought of the Grecian Bible. Such a use of Homer, however, must have missed the essential charm of Homer--the immortal poetry of these heroic legends; the breath of fresh, simple, wholesome human life which animates them, and which through them inspired men to brave and n.o.ble being. Socrates saw this in his day.

”I beseech you to tell me, Socrates,” said Phaedrus, ”do you believe this tale?” ”The wise are doubtful,” answered Socrates, ”and I should not be singular if, like them, I also doubted. I might have a rational explanation.... Now I have certainly not time for such inquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says. To be curious about that which is not my business while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.”[54]

Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:

No one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to enjoy the Bible; and he who takes legend for history, and who imagines Moses, or Isaiah, or David, or Paul, or Peter, or John, to have written Bible-books which they did not write, but who knows how to enjoy the Bible deeply, is nearer the truth about the Bible than the man who can pick it all to pieces but who cannot enjoy it.... His work is to learn to enjoy and turn to his benefit the Bible, as the Word of the Eternal,[55]

The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.

Coleridge said:

Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and the habits of reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ours Ives and in nature.[56]

The use of the Bible then is to enn.o.ble our ideals, to quicken our aspirations, to clear the illusions of the senses, to dissipate the glamor of the world, to purify our pa.s.sions, to bring our powers well in hand to a firm will; and, through the mystic laws of nature and of conscience which we thus endeavor to obey, to breathe within our souls a sacred sense of the Presence of a Power, infinite and eternal and loving righteousness--whom to know ”is life eternal.”

De Quincey cla.s.sified all writings as belonging either to the literature of knowledge, or the literature of power. There are books to which we go for information. They give us facts and ideas. They const.i.tute the literature of knowledge. They teach us. There are books to which we go for inspiration; to which we turn for joy and pleasure, for strength and courage, for patience and endurance, for purity and peace. They const.i.tute the literature of power. They move us. Herbert Spencer's books belong to the literature of knowledge The ”Imitation of Christ” belongs to the literature of power.

The literature of knowledge needs to be reissued every century or generation or decade, corrected up to date. The literature of power is immortal; fresh to-day though born milleniums ago. The problems of character and conduct face us much as they faced the Romans and Greeks, the Egyptians and Hindus. The invisible in nature and in man touches us with the same feelings that it stirred in Persians, Chaldeans and Akkadians Even though the Spirit's voice spake once in a language of the intellect which has now become obsolete, its utterances are not therefore obsolete. How archaic is much of the thought of the ”Imitation of Christ;”

shot through and through as it is with the tissue of mediaeval Catholicism!

But we forget these archaisms in the spell of a holy soul, in love with wisdom, ”intoxicated with G.o.d.” No archaisms in Biblical thought destroy its spiritual power over us. Nay, rather do they strengthen that power: as in our devotions we naturally seek old and quaint forms, buildings unlike other structures, music which sounds from out the past, words that are mellow with the rich hues of age; as the archaisms of the language of our English Bible hold a power that is lost in the raw correctness of the revised version.