The Bible and the Child 
 
 F.W.FARRAR,D.D. 
 
 R.F.HORTON,M.A.,D.D. 
 
 ARTHUR S.PEAKE,M.AJ||| 
 
 WALTER F.ADENEY,M.A. 
 
 W.H.FREMANTLE,D.D. 
 
 WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D. 
 
 FRANK C.PORTER, Ph.D. 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
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■ REESE LIBRARY ^ 
 
 (»i- Till-; 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
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THE BIBLE AND THE 
 CHILD. 
 
The Bible and 
 
 the Child: 
 
 The Higher Criticism and the Teaching: 
 of the Young. 
 
 F. W. Farrar, D.D., 
 R. F. Horton, M.A., D.D., 
 Arthur 5. Peake, M.A., 
 Waiter F. Adeney, M.A., 
 W. H. Fremantle, D.D., 
 Washington Gladden, D.D., 
 Frank C. Porter, Ph.D., 
 Lyman Abbott, D.D. 
 
 London T 
 JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14, FLEET ST, 
 
 1897. 
 
LCAoi 
 -3A 
 
 ji^^t> 
 
Contents. 
 
 I.— By the Very Eev. F. W. Farrar, 
 D.D., F.E.S., Dean of Canter- 
 bury 1 
 
 II.— By the Rev. R. F. Horton, M.A., 
 
 D.D 29 
 
 III.— By Arthur S. Peakb, M.A., 
 Tutor in Biblical Subjects, 
 Primitive Methodist Theo- 
 logical Institute , Manchester ... 51 
 IV.— By the Rev. Walter F. Adeney, 
 M.A., Professor of New Testa- 
 ment Exegesis, History and 
 Criticism, at New College ... 69- 
 v.— By the Very Rev. W. H. Fre- 
 
 MANTLE, D.D., Dean of Ripon 89 
 VI. — By the Rev. Washington Glad- 
 den, D.D., Author of "Who 
 
 Wrote the Bible," &c 109 
 
 VII.— By Frank C. Porter, Ph.D., 
 Professor in the Yale Divinity 
 
 School 127 
 
 VIII.— By the Rev. Lyman Abbott, 
 
 D.D 151 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/biblechildhigherOOfarrrich 
 
By the Very Rev. 
 
 F. W. Farrar, d.d., f.r.s., 
 
 DEAN OF CANTERBURY. 
 
I GLADLY accede to a request to 
 say a few words upon a subject 
 of real and urgent importance — 
 ^*^the right way of presenting the 
 Bible to the young in the light of 
 the Higher Criticism ; " Id© so 
 because an unwise^ or unfaithful, 
 way of dealing with the facts 
 forced upon us by the progress of 
 research may be prolific of de- 
 plorable results. 
 
 The change of view respecting 
 the Bible, which has marked the 
 advancing knowledge and more 
 earnest studies of this generation, 
 is only the culmination of the dis- 
 covery that there were different 
 documents in the Book of Genesis 
 — a discovery first published by the 
 physician, Jean Astruc, in 1753. 
 There are three widely divergent 
 
THE BIBLE AND 
 
 ways of dealing with these results 
 of profound study, each of which 
 is almost equally dangerous to the 
 faith of the rising generation. 
 
 1. Parents and teachers may go 
 on inculcating dogmas about the 
 Bible and methods of dealing with 
 it, which have long become im~ 
 possible to those who have really 
 tried to follow the manifold dis- 
 coveries of modern inquiry with 
 per^ctly open and unbiassed 
 minds. There are a certain 
 number of persons who, when 
 their minds have become stereo- 
 typed in foregone conclusions, are 
 simply incapahle of gTasping new 
 truths. They become obstructives, 
 and not infrequently bigoted ob- 
 structives. As convinced as the 
 Pope of their own personal infalli- 
 bility, their attitude towards those 
 who see that the old views are no 
 longer tenable is an attitude of 
 anger and alarm. This is the 
 usual temper of the odiuTn theolo^ 
 gicum. It would, if it could, grasp 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 the thumbscrew and the rack of 
 mediaeval inquisitors^ and would, 
 in the last resource, hand over all 
 opponents to the scaffold or the 
 stake. Those whose intellects have 
 thus been petrified by custom and 
 advancing years are of all others 
 the most hopeless to deal with. 
 They have made themselves in- 
 capable of fair and rational exam- 
 ination of the truths which they 
 impugn. They think that they 
 can, by mere assertion, overthrow 
 results arrived at by the life-long 
 inquiries of the ablest students, 
 while they have not given a day's 
 serious or impartial study to them. 
 They fancy that even the ignorant, 
 if only they be what is called ^^ or- 
 thodox," are justified in strong 
 denunciation of men quite as truth- 
 ful and often incomparably more 
 able than themselves. Off-hand 
 dogmatists of this stamp, who 
 usually abound among professional 
 religionists, think that they can 
 refute any number of scholars. 
 
6 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 however profound and however 
 pious^ if only they shout ^^ In- 
 fidel ! ^' with sufficient loudness. 
 But^ as the holy Bishop Ken 
 says : 
 
 The older error is, it is the worse ; 
 
 Continuation may provoke a curse. 
 
 If the Dark Age obscured our fathers' 
 
 sight, 
 Must their sons shut their eyes against 
 
 the Light ? 
 
 If there were no opposition to 
 critical inquiry, except what is of 
 this crude kind^ it would hardly 
 be deserving of any notice^ but 
 might be passed over with silent 
 indifference. There are^ however^ 
 many true and tender souls^ in- 
 capable of severe studies^ and 
 wedded to beliefs which they have 
 identified with their holiest hours^ 
 who are too old or too fixed in 
 opinion to make progress^ and who^ 
 from honest dread lest they should 
 be dragged into doubt respecting 
 views dear to them as lif e^ cannot 
 get rid of the belief that there is 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 something ^^ wicked " in free in- 
 quiry. Like Cardinal Newman, 
 they think it their duty to treat 
 their reason as though it were a 
 dangerous wild beast to be beaten 
 back with a bar of iron. Ought 
 they not to bear in mind the 
 warning of the great Bishop Butler 
 that our reason is the only faculty 
 which God has given us by which 
 w^e can judge of anything, even of 
 Revelation itself ? 
 
 Besides this large class of Chris- 
 tian people, there are always some 
 who, with the same temper of mind, 
 but with more abiUty and know- 
 ledge, are ready to supply masses 
 of tortuous " harmony " and casu- 
 istically plausible conjecture, which 
 may give a semblable possibility ta 
 the old views. The answers which 
 they supply are no answers, but 
 usually avoid the real issue. The 
 impossible and dreary nature of 
 the defence serves to deepen in 
 other minds the conviction that 
 the cause which needs such argu- 
 
8 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 ments is lost. I can only say^ in 
 my own case^ that wlien^ more than 
 forty years ago^ I came to the con- 
 clusion that the Book of Daniel^ as 
 now we have it^ could not have 
 seen the light before the age of the 
 Maccabees^ my conclusion was in- 
 definitely strengthened by reading 
 Dr. Pusey's elaborately ingenious 
 treatise in defence of its genuine- 
 ness and authenticity. 
 
 We cannot greatly respect the 
 possibly pious but obstinate and 
 illiterate priest who^ having been 
 accustomed to read the non- 
 existent word ^^ mumjpsimus '^ to 
 his congregation^ on being cor- 
 rected^ indignantly grumbled that 
 he was not going to give up '^ his 
 old " *^ mumpsimus " for their new 
 " sumpsimus,^' But every one 
 should be a little ashamed and 
 afraid to be of those who are the 
 last to give up their adherence to 
 opinions which have long become 
 naturally obsolete. ^^ There is 
 nothing so revolutionary/' said Dr. 
 
THE CHILD. 9 
 
 Arnold^ ^' because there is nothing 
 so unnatural and convulsive^ as the 
 strain to keep things fixed^ when 
 all the world is^ by the very law of 
 its creation, in eternal progress ; 
 and the course of all the evils in 
 the world may be traced to that 
 natural but most deadly error of 
 human indolence and corruption 
 that it is our duty to preserve and 
 and not to improve." A study of 
 the past shows us that it has been 
 one of the chief duties of each age 
 in succession to cast off the slough 
 of old ignorance. The advance of 
 knowledge is a direct work of 
 God's revealing power. '^ God 
 shows all things in the slow victory 
 of their ripening '' ; and since 
 the light of all certain know- 
 ledge which comes to us from 
 the long results of time is light 
 from heaven, how can it lead us 
 astray ? 
 
 This at any rate is certain, that 
 if children are still taught to 
 regard as articles of their religious 
 
10 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 belief opinions about the inerrancy^ 
 universal equal sacredness^ verbal 
 dictation^ or supernatural infalli- 
 bility of all that is contained 
 between the covers of the sixty-six 
 books which we call the Bible^ the 
 faith of those children^ if they 
 develop any intelligent capacity or 
 openness of mind hereafter^ is 
 destined to undergo a rude and 
 wholly needless shocks in which it 
 will be fortunate if much of their 
 religion does not go by the board. 
 Some of those Books of Scripture 
 are separated from others by the 
 interspace of a thousand years. 
 They represent the fragmentary 
 survival of Hebrew literature. 
 They stand on very different levels 
 of value^ and even of morality. 
 Eead for centuries in an otiose^ 
 perfunctory^ slavish^ and super- 
 stitious manner^ they have often 
 been so egregiously misunderstood 
 that many entire systems of inter- 
 pretation — which were believed in 
 for generations^ and which fill 
 
THE CHILD. 11 
 
 many folios now consigned to a 
 happy oblivion — are clearly proved 
 to have been utterly baseless. 
 Colossal usurpations of deadly 
 import to the human race have 
 been built^ like inverted pyramids, 
 on the narrow apex of a single 
 misinterpreted text. From the 
 days of Origen (a.d. 253) to those 
 of Nicholas of Lyra (a.d. 1340) 
 the whole science of exegesis was 
 stultified by non-natural attempts 
 to read into all Scripture a 
 fourfold sense (literal, allego- 
 rical, mystical, spiritual), much of 
 which was as absurd as the 
 Jewish Cabbala. Unintelligent and 
 humanly-invented theories about 
 Inspiration became prolific of 
 monstrous exegesis. 
 
 The old forms of allegorical 
 interpretation which, from the 
 days of Philo to those of Bishop 
 Wordsworth, once crowded enor- 
 mous commentaries with useless 
 irrelevance, would be simply 
 laughed at if they were offered to 
 
12 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 US in these days as though they 
 possessed any validity. 
 
 For I see that througli tlie ages one in- 
 creasing purpose runs, 
 
 And the thoughts of men are widened 
 by the process of the suns. 
 
 Of all ways of dealing with 
 ^^the Higher Criticism^," none is 
 more futile^ and none will more 
 certainly bring its own Nemesis^ 
 than that which thinks it sufficient 
 to brand its followers with charges 
 of wilful faithlessness^ and to 
 crush them with impotent ana- 
 themas^ which will only rebound 
 upon the heads of those who utter 
 them. 
 
 2. Another way^ equally common 
 among controversialists of the 
 opposite extreme^ is to talk as if 
 the Higher Criticism had robbed 
 the Bible of all value^ and had 
 shown it to be a mass of falsity 
 and imposture. Here again it 
 requires some knowledge of lan- 
 guage^ of literature, of history, of 
 
THE CHILr. 13 
 
 national idiosyncrasies^ to be even 
 capable of estimating* the real 
 nature of a result arrived at. 
 Ignorant attempts to discredit and 
 \ilify the Bible are even more 
 egregiously illiterate than the 
 super-exaltation which would turn 
 it into a fetish or an amulet. 
 
 Let me give an instance or two. 
 
 The immense majority of scholars 
 of name and acknowledged com- 
 petence in England and Europe 
 have now been led to form an 
 irresistible conclusion that the 
 Book of Daniel was not written, 
 and could not have been written, 
 in its present form by the prophet 
 Daniel, B.C. 534, but that it can 
 only have been written, as we now 
 have it, in the days of Antiochus 
 Epiphanes, about b.c. 164, and that 
 the object of the pious and 
 patriotic author was to inspirit his 
 desponding countrymen by splendid 
 specimens of that lofty moral fiction 
 which was always common among 
 the Jews after the Exile, and was 
 
14 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 known as "the Haggadah." So 
 clearly is this proven to most critics 
 that they willingly snffer the 
 attempted refutations of their 
 views to sink to the ground under 
 the weight of their own inadequacy. 
 Even Delitzsch^ a truly learned 
 man^ and '^ orthodox " by every 
 instinct of his mind, after vainly 
 trying to hold out against modern 
 conclusions, found the" love of 
 truth too strong within him to 
 admit of his continuing to resist 
 arguments to which he felt that 
 he could furnish no valid answer. 
 Those who understand the Bible 
 aright find an intelligent faith 
 cleared and strengthened by better 
 knowledge of the books which they 
 reverence ; but some uneducated 
 sceptic gets hold of this conclusion 
 about the age of the Book of 
 Daniel and declares to gaping 
 audiences that scholars and divines 
 regard the book as no longer 
 sacred, but as an unblushing fable 
 and an impudent forgery. He 
 
THE CHILD. 15 
 
 does not tell his hearers that, 
 among those who find the critical 
 conclusion so irrefragable as not 
 to require any further argument, 
 have been found some of the ablest 
 and most instructive commentators 
 on the book, and that, only by 
 reading it in the light of its true 
 date, is it possible for us fully to 
 grasp the bearing of its moral and 
 spiritual lessons. Still less does 
 he see that when he talks of 
 '^ falsity " and '' forgery " he is 
 using idle misjudgments and 
 anachronisms, which only reveal 
 his own incompetence to under- 
 stand the correct significance of 
 literary problems. He is judging 
 the methods and views of the 
 second century before Christ by 
 the literary standard and habits 
 of the nineteenth century after 
 Christ. 
 
 Or let us take the case of the 
 Pentateuch. Those who now 
 regard it as a matter of demon- 
 stration that, in its present form, 
 
16 THE BIBLE AISTD 
 
 it embodies the handiwork of at 
 least four different writers^ and 
 that it contains at least three 
 varying strata of legislation^ do 
 not^ on that account^ lose one 
 essential element of its moral 
 greatness and religious teaching. 
 One case may illustrate this. In 
 the book of Leviticus'^ a large 
 space is occupied by the arrange- 
 ments and ceremonies of the Day 
 of Atonement, and the way of 
 dealing with the scapegoats^ and 
 it is now known to all students 
 that^ except in the book of Levi- 
 ticus^ there is not so much as the 
 dimmest trace of any observance 
 of the Day of Atonement^ not even 
 in passages where^ by every law of 
 literature and psychology^, we 
 should have thought it most 
 certain that such allusions would 
 be found ; not even^ for instance^ 
 in the account of Hezekiah^s or 
 Josiah's Reformations ; not even 
 in the elaborate Levitism of the 
 * Lev. xvi. 
 
THE CHILD. 17 
 
 book of Ezekiel^; not even in the 
 reorganisation of Judaism in the 
 days of Ezra and Nehemiah. 
 Ezekiel, in his '^ ordinances of 
 worship/^ mentions the first and 
 the fifteenth of the seventh months 
 but does not say a syllable about 
 the supreme and all-important 
 tenth. It is said that this is a 
 mere argu7nentum e silentio, and 
 they must indeed be easily con- 
 \dnced who accept that phrase as 
 an adequate reply. Is it^ then^ 
 nothing that what would naturally 
 have been regarded as a central 
 ordinance of religion^ and as the 
 unique day of the religious year^ 
 should not so much as once be 
 alluded to in the entire religious 
 literature of the nation ? and that 
 the first allusion to the only insti- 
 tuted fast-day in the Jewish year 
 should be in an Apocryphal Book 
 — Ecclesiasticus i. 1-5 — in the 
 third or second century before 
 
 * 1 Kings viii. ; Ezek. xiv. 18-20 ; Zech. 
 vii., viii.; Ezra iii. 1, 6 ; Nehem. viii. 13-17. 
 
 UNIVERSITY J 
 
18 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 Christ ? It is, to me^ almost 
 humiliating to see on what slight 
 straws of a mere phrase many will 
 be content to rest the weight of 
 great conclusions. Would any 
 one be able to persuade us that 
 the festivals of Christmas and 
 Easter had been from the earhest 
 days among the most sacred of 
 Christian festivals^ if not a trace 
 of them^ not an allusion to them, 
 were to be found in a thousand 
 years of Christian literature ? On 
 this ground, then, alone, is it not 
 inevitable that many should be led 
 to doubt whether the Day of 
 Atonement can be proved to have 
 been originally of Mosaic origin ? 
 And how much more if that infer- 
 ence is strengthened by many 
 quite different, yet converging, 
 lines of argument all tending to 
 the same conclusion? But, sup- 
 posing that we are unable to resist 
 this inference, in what single 
 respect does it weaken our sense of 
 the deep and blessed symbolism 
 
THE CHILD. 19 
 
 enshrined in the ordinances of that 
 unique day in the Jewish year ? 
 Is one moral or spiritual lesson 
 about the exceeding sinfulness of 
 transgression^ and the mercy of 
 God^ and the gracious revelation 
 of God's forgiveness of sins to the 
 sincerely penitent^ in any way 
 weakened or dimmed by holding 
 that the institution of the scape- 
 goats and the blood of sprinkling 
 originated at a later rather than 
 at an earlier date ? Is the light 
 of revelation only granted to man- 
 kind in intermittent flashes at 
 intervals of millenniums ? Or, 
 rather, is the Spirit of Man the 
 candle of the Lord, and is there a 
 light that lighteth every man who 
 is born into the world ? Half the 
 errors about the Bible would 
 vanish if men would remember 
 that revelation is continuous^ and 
 that God has promised His Holy 
 Spirit to them that ask Him. 
 
 3. There is a third way of treai^ 
 ing the Higher Criticism — even 
 
20 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 more common than either of the 
 other ways^ less unwise^ perhaps, 
 but still undesirable. It is simply 
 to ignore all critical results^ and 
 to act and speak as if they had no 
 existence. This^ however^ is not 
 so easy^ and at the best it is but 
 the ostrich policy_, which tries to 
 bury its head in the sand in order 
 to escape its pursuers. Modern 
 discoveries are already beginning 
 to be recognised in books written 
 for the use of the^ young which are 
 indispensable to the Biblical 
 teacher. If children are left 
 unaware that the views of those 
 most competent to represent their 
 generation are widely different 
 from those which were all but 
 universal in the days of their 
 grandfathers^ the discovery will 
 certainly come to them later on^ 
 and may come so suddenly as to 
 imperil their faith. If over- 
 growths of alien ivy are suffered 
 to become too dense and vigorous, 
 and to thrust their fibres into the 
 
THE CHILD, 21 
 
 interstices of every stoiie^ then, 
 when it is necessary to tear them 
 away, it is often found that they 
 have seriously injured the stabiUty 
 of the building which they were 
 originally intended to adorn, but 
 have too long been suffered to 
 injure and enshroud. If we would 
 save the building from destruction 
 and decay we must cut away the 
 ivy directly we begin to perceive 
 how injurious may be its effects. 
 
 If, then, the methods (1) of 
 denunciation; (2) of exaggerated 
 misapplication ; and (3) of silent 
 ignoring be unwise, what should 
 be the attitude of parents and 
 teachers to the Higher Criticism ? 
 It has always been my humble 
 endeavour to speak without any 
 subterfuge and with perfect plain- 
 ness, and though space forbids 
 me from developing' the subject 
 here, I hope that the following 
 brief remarks and aphorisms may 
 be found serviceable by the 
 thoughtful and the sincere. 
 
22 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 I. We should be profoundly and . 
 unswervingly truthful. We ought 
 never to practise that falsitas 
 disjpensativa, that '^ economy of 
 truth/' which found favour among 
 some of the Fathers^ and has 
 often been an avowed principle of 
 action in the Church of Rome. 
 Truth is too sacred a thing to 
 admit of manipulations or jug- 
 gling. Traditionalism or profes- 
 sionalism, or self-interest should 
 never for a moment be suffered to 
 obscure our sense of its eternal 
 obligation. We are not bound to 
 teach children all we know, but 
 we are most solemnly bound not 
 to teach them anything which we 
 feel to be doubtful as though it 
 were certain, and still more are we 
 bound not to teach them anything 
 of which we ourselves begin to 
 suspect the reality. 
 
 II. Into a vast part of our 
 teaching — by far the largest and 
 most important part of it, no 
 question of the Higher Criticism 
 
THE CHILD. 23 
 
 enters at all. The object of the 
 best and most sacred Bible teach- 
 ing is to form the character^ not 
 to store the intellect. It is moral ; 
 it is spiritual ; it has to do with 
 things eternal; it far transcends 
 all minor questions of the date or 
 historicity of the books in which it 
 is enshrined. Does a child fail to 
 grasp the meaning of the parables of 
 Christy though he is told that these 
 are not necessarily founded on real 
 incidents^ but are ^'^ tales with a 
 purpose ^' ? Why^ then^ should it 
 be different with the stories^ say^ 
 of Balaam or of Jonah ? There is 
 a remarkable book by Dr. Van 
 Oort^ written in Dutch by a pupil 
 of the great Professor Kuenen and 
 under his supervision, called ^' The 
 Bible for the Young." It has 
 been translated into English, and 
 goes much farther, on many points, 
 than I should myself go ; but it is 
 a learned and most interesting 
 book, and it demonstrates that 
 there need be no evaporation of 
 
24 THE BIBLE AKD 
 
 any of the best lessons of Scrip- 
 ture even in the hands of teachers 
 who are advanced votaries of the 
 Higher Criticism. Not even the 
 most timid need make a bugbear 
 of recent results. They only 
 become harmful to the cause of 
 ^^ sound learning and religious 
 education ^' when they are glar- 
 ingly misused by their adherents 
 or by their antagonists. 
 
 III. The manner in which the 
 Higher Criticism has slowly and 
 surely made its victorious progress, 
 in spite of the most determined 
 and exacerbated opposition^ is a 
 strong argument in its favour. 
 It is exactly analogous to the way 
 in which the truths of astronomy 
 and of geology have triumphed 
 over universal opposition. They 
 were once anathematised as '^^ in- 
 fidel '^ ; they are now accepted as 
 axiomatic. I cannot name a single 
 student or professor of any emi- 
 nence in Grreat Britain who does 
 not accept, with more or less 
 
THE CHILD. 25 
 
 modification^ the main conclusions 
 of the German school of critics. 
 In G-ermany itself^ the land of 
 laborious and devoted study^ there 
 are scores of learned professors^ 
 and among their entire number 
 there is said to be only one — and 
 he a man of no name — who clings 
 to the old '' mumpsimus.^^ Truth 
 is great, and will prevail. 
 
 IV. Our knowledge of Scripture 
 will not remain stationary now, 
 any more than it has done in the 
 past. On the contrary, there never 
 was an age in which we were more 
 likely to be led to new truths of 
 interpretation than this. Tor in 
 this age the increase of all sources 
 of information has been unprece- 
 dented, and we can now read the 
 Bible in the light of a philology, a 
 literary breadth, an acquaintance 
 with comparative religion, and an 
 insight into history and psychology, 
 such as have never been equalled 
 in any past century. We are not 
 using the language of boastful 
 
26 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 arrogance^ but of profound grati- 
 tude to Him who is the Lights the 
 Truth^ and the Way^ when we say 
 of this generation. 
 
 We are heirs of all the ages, in the 
 foremost files of Time. 
 
 We should do well, then, to take 
 to heart the wise warnings of four 
 great and holy theologians who 
 lived before the Higher Criticism 
 was even dreamed of — Hooker, 
 Bishop Butler, Eichard Baxter, 
 and J. Robinson. 
 
 " Whatsoever is spoken of God, 
 or things appertaining to God," 
 says Richard Hooker, ^^ otherwise 
 than truth, though it seems an 
 honour yet it is an injury. And 
 as incredible praises given unto 
 men do often abate and impair the 
 credit of their deserved commenda- 
 tion, so we must likewise tahe 
 great heed lest, in attributing to 
 Scripture Tnore than it can have, 
 the incredibility of that do cause 
 even those things which it hath 
 
THE CHILD. 27 
 
 most abundantly to he less reverently 
 esteemed,'^ 
 
 ^^ And here/' says the great and 
 good Richard Baxter^ ^^ I must tell 
 you a great and needful truth, 
 which Christians^ fearing to confess^ 
 by overdoing, tempt men into 
 infidelity. The Scripture is like a 
 man's body, where some parts are 
 but for the preservation of the 
 rest, and may he maimed luithout 
 death.^^ 
 
 "I am convinced," said the 
 Pastor, John Eobinson, in his fare- 
 well address to the Pilgrim Fathers 
 before they sailed in the Mayflower 
 from Delft harbour, ^^that the 
 Lord hath yet more light and 
 truth to break forth from His 
 Holy Word." 
 
 Ajid Bishop Butler thought it 
 ^^ not at all incredible that a book, 
 which has so long been in the 
 possession of mankind, should 
 contain many truths as yet undis- 
 covered." 
 
 V. To conclude, then, no one 
 
28 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 who fearlessly loves and follows 
 the truth will have the smallest 
 difficulty in co-ordinating the 
 teachings of Scripture — and all 
 the more in proportion as he 
 wisely loves the Bible — to the 
 results of modern inquiry. He 
 will still be able to say with the 
 large-minded Quaker poet of 
 America : 
 
 We search the world for truth ; we cull 
 The good, the pure, the beautiful. 
 From graven stone and written scroll, 
 From all old flower-fields of the soul ; 
 And, weary seekers of the best, 
 We come back laden from our quest 
 To find that all the sages said 
 Is in the Booh our mothers read. 
 
n. 
 
 By the Rev. 
 
 R. F. Horton, m.a., d.d. 
 
n. 
 
 To some of us it is a matter of 
 amazement that the misunder- 
 standings — I will not venture to 
 say the misrepresentations — con- 
 nected with this subject should be 
 so persistent and obstinate. It 
 taxes all our charity to find men^ 
 good men^ presumably religious 
 men^ continuing to discuss the 
 question in a spirit of bhnd and 
 uninquiring prejudice. They will 
 not take the trouble to learn what 
 it is about which they so confi- 
 dently affirm. With a scorn which 
 is the twin sister of ignorance they 
 seek to stamp out truth by 
 humiliating and deriding its advo- 
 cates. "Were ever the genuine 
 advocates of truth so intemperate^ 
 so denunciatory^ so blind, and so 
 ignorant as the men who have 
 
32 THE BIBLE AKD 
 
 been loudest in the outcry against 
 the Higher Criticism? The only- 
 parallel in history is the tone of • 
 the Pope — the infallible Pope — , 
 and even the Pope is nowadays 
 more courteous. I hope it is not 
 a severe judgment, but I believe 
 this tone of anger and vehement 
 anathema is only founds and can 
 be only found, » when men are 
 defending positions which in their 
 hearts they suspect to be insecure. 
 When the foundations are sus- 
 pected the defenders will use any 
 device to prevent an examination 
 of them. If you propose to rest 
 your religion on an infallibility of 
 any sort the only chance is to 
 surround your infallibility itself 
 with an inviolable ring which 
 forbids criticism^ and to resent 
 any suggestion of doubt, dealing 
 with it as impiety to be denounced, 
 and not as argument to be met. 
 Now what is the issue in this long 
 and excited controversy ? It is 
 simply this : Are we required to 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 accept the Bible — just as it stands 
 — as the voice of God in such a 
 sense that to question any of its 
 assertions is blasphemy, or to 
 examine the composition of its 
 books is an offence against the 
 Holy Spirit who wrote it ? Or, on 
 the other hand, are we permitted, 
 and even required, to study the 
 books, and find out all we can 
 about them, in just the same way 
 that we deal with other literature, 
 and then allow the voice of God to 
 speak to us as it will through the 
 books thus studied and under- 
 stood ? 
 
 The old orthodoxy, which these 
 angry critics still accept, decided 
 the question in the first way. The 
 Bible from Genesis to Revelation 
 was a smooth, consistent voice of 
 God, like a Delphic Oracle. One 
 was to read it as God's letter to 
 the human race. If you came 
 across any contradictions or incon- 
 sistencies you were to attribute 
 these to your own feebleness of 
 
 3 
 
34 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 apprehension^ but never allow that 
 there could be anything wrong* in 
 the book. Piety was to be proved 
 by showing that the inconsistencies 
 were harmonised. If^ for example^ 
 it said in 2 Chron. xvii. 6^ that 
 Jehoshaphat '^'took away the high 
 places and the Asherim out of 
 Judah/' and then in ch. xx. 33^ 
 '' howbeit the high places were 
 not taken away/' it was a proof 
 of reverence to the infallible word 
 to show how the high places were 
 both taken away and not taken 
 away by Jehoshaphat because '^ the 
 Word of God " cannot be broken. 
 If in reading the Bible you came 
 across sentiments of fierce retalia- 
 tion or deeds of savage blood- 
 thirstiness^ against which a man 
 of ordinary morality might natur- 
 ally revolt^ it was your duty to 
 justify these sentiments because 
 they were the Word of Grod_, 
 and to find excuses for the deeds 
 because they were recorded without 
 censure in the Word of God. 
 
THE CHILD. 35 
 
 You were not allowed to argue 
 that because the sentiment was 
 not godly it could not come from 
 God^ or because the deed was 
 unchristian it could not be 
 approved by God. That was 
 treated as presumption^ as judging 
 God^ as setting up the intellect 
 against its Maker. 
 
 This was^ and is^ the decision of 
 the old orthodoxy. And what is 
 its result ? Plymouth Brethrenism 
 on the one hand^ and infidelity on 
 the other. It is this view of the 
 Bible which has enabled the infidel 
 publication, Reynolds Newsjpajper, 
 to regale its Sunday readers lately 
 with columns of extracts from the 
 Bible which run counter to even a 
 worldly man's sense of righteous- 
 ness, as the " Word of God." If 
 the Plymouth Brethren account of 
 the Bible is correct Reynolds News- 
 jpaper is justified. As to the 
 honesty of Reynolds in assmning 
 that Plymouth Brethrenism is the 
 religion of Christendom, and ig- 
 
86 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 noring that no man of scholarship 
 or education holds the view of the 
 Bible which would justify this pro- 
 cedure^ I will say nothing, for that 
 is a side issue. But while the 
 loudest and most vehement de- 
 fenders of the Bible persist in 
 advocating this impossible view, 
 infidelity will have a thousand 
 weapons ready to its hand. 
 
 Now I venture on the assertion 
 that the result of criticism has 
 been to take all these weapons out 
 of the hand of every honest sceptic. 
 When Reynolds^ or any other infi- 
 del teacher, bases his attack against 
 the Bible and Christianity on this 
 unintelligent view of the Bible he 
 convicts himself of ignorance. He 
 starts from premises which no one 
 grants — I mean no one but Ply- 
 mouth Brethren and the small 
 number of Christians who have set 
 themselves against the fair exam- 
 ination of the Bible. The simple 
 fact is that this old view of the 
 Bible is not justified by any asser- 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 37 
 
 tioii of the Bible itself^ unless some 
 misquoted and misapplied texts, 
 which even ignorance hesitates to 
 cite, are to carry the day; texts 
 just as much misquoted, misapplied 
 as those which are supposed to 
 support the Papacy ; nor is that 
 old view supported by any external 
 authority of Church or Council, or 
 even unbroken tradition. It is not 
 consistent with the use which the 
 New Testament writers made of 
 the Old ; and it goes to pieces, like 
 a mummy brought into the fresh 
 air, directly any unbiassed mind 
 begins to study and examine the 
 Bible to see exactly what it is. 
 
 Now, of course I am not con- 
 tending that the critics are right 
 in their conclusions ; all I say is 
 that they are justified in their 
 methods. Not only are we allowed, 
 we are literally required, before the 
 Bible can give its real message to 
 the world, to bring every resource 
 of scholarship, the examination 
 and collation of manuscripts, the 
 
38 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 emendation of the texts, the con- 
 sideration of authorship and stjle^ 
 the internal evidences of dates^ the 
 witness of archseology and history^ 
 and above all the developed system 
 of Christian Kf e and teachings to 
 settle the exact bearings relation, 
 and authority of each book and 
 each section of the Bible. Unless 
 and until this is done the Bible 
 may be wrested, by selected cita- 
 tion, by ignorant confusion of 
 dates, and purposes, and applica- 
 tion, or by an arbitrary method of 
 allegorising, to teach just what 
 each man wishes it to teach. And 
 in place of the Divine Truth, which 
 must be one and absolute, you 
 have every man his own exegete, 
 and every exegete his own Pope ; 
 and presently, as the system de- 
 velops, you have the world rising 
 up impatiently against these 
 myriads of petty Popes, as it did 
 once before against the imposing, 
 though effete, single Pope. The 
 answer to Popery is not that 
 
THE CHILD. 3& 
 
 private judgment which makes 
 every one an authority entitled to 
 speak ex cathedra from the Bihle^ 
 but that free^ honest and reverent 
 study of the Scriptures^ aided by 
 all the best scholarship of the age^ 
 which tends more and more to 
 make Biblical Theology an intelli- 
 gible and progressive system, and 
 in its highest Christian develop- 
 ment a final test and authority in 
 religion. 
 
 It is no answer to the critical 
 method to prove that Wellhausen 
 has made mistakes^the critical 
 method is not bound up with the 
 infallibility of Wellhausen — or 
 that Cheyne is arbitrary in fixing 
 the dates of the Psalms. The only 
 real refutation of it would be to 
 furnish some proof from the Bible^ 
 or from God^ that we are forbidden 
 to make these candid inquiries into 
 the structure of the literature ; or^ 
 if you will^ to show that the Chris- 
 tian religion is injured instead of 
 being cleared and strengthened by 
 
40 
 
 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 the fearless use of those faculties 
 which God has given us for the 
 discovery of truth. Neither of 
 these has been done. Indeed, I 
 will venture to close with an illus- 
 tration^ which is one of a thousand 
 easily adducible, to show how reli- 
 gion gains, if orthodoxy suffers, by 
 the candid work of criticism. 
 
 Let us turn to the 137th Psalm. 
 I suppose no one was ever so far 
 blinded by tradition as to think 
 that David was its author. It 
 tells its own tale. It was written 
 five centuries after David's time 
 by an exile in Babylon. But 
 according to the traditional ortho- 
 doxy this exile psalmist was the 
 penman of the Holy Grhost. He 
 uttered the sentiments which God 
 breathed into his heart, and told 
 him to commit to writing. Any 
 of these verses might therefore be 
 quoted as the Word of God, That 
 was the theory. And consequently 
 it must be regarded as a beatitude 
 pronounced by God on any man 
 
THE CHILD. 41 
 
 who should take the little innocent 
 Babylonian children and dash 
 them against the rock. It is not 
 a sentiment that seems suitable in 
 the heart of the Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ; and the old 
 orthodoxy must bear its own 
 responsibility for maintaining a 
 dogma which made such a conclu- 
 sion inevitable. But there was a 
 greater difficulty still. The Lord 
 had spoken through Jeremiah 
 xxix. 7, commanding the exiles to 
 seek the peace of Babylon and to 
 pray to Him for it. How could 
 the same God have breathed into 
 the exile psalmist this cruel and 
 bloodthirsty sentiment ? 
 
 I need not labour the point to 
 prove how religion gains^ how the 
 truth of God gains^ how Christ's 
 view of God is established^ by a 
 mode of handling the Bible which 
 emphatically denies that this bitter 
 thought of the exile was God's 
 thought at all ; a mode of handling 
 the Bible which, instead of treating 
 
 O OF 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
42 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 every passage in the Bible as the 
 Word of God^ seeks dihgentlj to 
 find and understand the Word of 
 God^ which is unquestionably 
 there. 
 
 The Higher Criticism^ we may 
 depend on it, is of God, and what- 
 ever is to be said of individual 
 scholars, the method must prevail^ 
 to the lasting benefit of religion, of 
 the Church, and of mankind. 
 
 When it is once realised that 
 the result of criticism has been, 
 and will be still more, not to lessen 
 but to intensify the spiritual value 
 and the teaching power of the 
 Bible, it will be the plain duty of 
 both parents and Sunday-school 
 teachers to start in the instruction 
 of their children from the position 
 which criticism has securely estab- 
 lished. The baseless dogma about 
 the nature of the Bible must not 
 be given to the children ; the Bible 
 itself must be given. But more. 
 Not only must the Bible itself be 
 given, but it must be given with so 
 
THE CHILD. 43 
 
 clear and convincing an explana- 
 tion of what the Bible actually is, 
 that childi-en may escape the 
 " sunless gulfs of doubt " into 
 which we and our fathers were 
 plunged. 
 
 Psalm cxxxvii. may be quoted 
 as an instance of the spiritual 
 illumination and the clearing 
 of the ethical teaching, which 
 may be gained by fearlessly 
 applying criticism to Scripture. I 
 was very much affected by the 
 words of a dear old friend, a faith- 
 ful and loving Christian from his 
 boyhood, who told me how a diffi- 
 culty of many years' standing had 
 been removed by my exposition of 
 this Psalm. How could it be 
 otherwise? What miserable con- 
 fusion must be wrought in the 
 mind of a child if he is taught 
 that the a^vful imprecation — 
 
 Happy shall he be that taketh and 
 dasheth thy little ones against the rock 
 
 is the Word of Grod ! It is im- 
 
44 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 possible^ ill the face of such an 
 error^ to give children a true idea 
 of the God and Father of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Nor can I forget the storms of 
 unbelief to which I was subjected 
 as a boj in preparing the Book of 
 Judges for a Cambridge Local 
 Examination. 
 
 No pastor or master ever hinted 
 to me that the deeds of treachery 
 or blood in that book^ wrought by 
 men on whom the Spirit of God 
 was said to have come^ were not 
 approved bj God Himself. I sup- 
 posed that the dastardl}^ deed of 
 Jael was religiously praiseworthy^ 
 and that Samson must be a 
 character that we should do well 
 to copy. 
 
 I know, of course, that a large 
 proportion of the boys brought up 
 with me on the same principles 
 of Biblical interpretation have 
 actually become unbelievers — or, 
 at least, callously indifferent to 
 the Bible. A few, like myself, have 
 
THE CHILD. 45 
 
 been saved from that melancholy 
 fate by the revealing light and 
 truth which^ under the hand of 
 dihgent critics, '' have broken 
 forth from the Word " in the last 
 twenty years. 
 
 And^ if I may be pardoned 
 another personal reminiscence, the 
 first shock to faith which I 
 received in Oxford was not from 
 the so-called unbelief, or from the 
 philosophical speculations^ of the 
 University^ but from preparing the 
 Book of Acts for the entrance 
 examination. It was in a shady 
 room, looking out on the loveli- 
 ness of the New College gardens, 
 that I was confronted by the fact 
 that the speech of Gamaliel 
 referred to certain predatory out- 
 breaks which did not occur until 
 after the date of his speech. If I 
 had encountered such an error in 
 Thucydides or Livy^ it would not 
 have shaken my confidence in 
 those great historians ; but to 
 meet with a historical sHp in an 
 
46 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 Infallible Book sliook the whole 
 untenable foundation of my faith. 
 I speak^ therefore^ from my own 
 experience of sorrowful and 
 unnecessary shocks to the religious 
 life when I plead that a true view 
 of what the Bible is should be 
 placed before children from the 
 beginning. 
 
 I think I must also mention an 
 incidental injury which a wrong 
 conception of the Bible has 
 wrought in the training of the 
 young. The unreahty and tedium 
 of much Sunday-school teaching, 
 which issue in the children leaving 
 early and imbibing a permanent 
 dislike to the Christian Church, 
 must have an explanation. It is 
 easy to lay the blame at the door 
 of the teachers. It is inadmissible 
 to charge the fault on the Bible it- 
 self. Surely the mistake lies in the 
 conception of the Bible which most 
 teachers are themselves taught, 
 and feel in their turn bound to 
 teach. They have to smooth over 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 47 
 
 and explain away the moral 
 incongruities or the historical 
 discrepancies of Old Testament 
 scriptures. They have to give an 
 allegorising meaning to passages 
 which in the original intention 
 could have had no such meaning. 
 For instance^ a worthy corres- 
 pondent assured me^ some years 
 ago^ that Esther was to him the 
 most precious of books^ because^ 
 after much prayer^ it had been 
 revealed to him that Ahasuerus 
 is Almighty God^ Mordecai our 
 Lord Jesus Christy and Haman the 
 Devil. My correspondent is the 
 editor of a widely-read newspaper 
 and represents the orthodox ideas 
 of Bible-interpretation. But to 
 teach children a view of that kind 
 is fatal. It not only must destroy 
 all respect for the Bible^ but also, 
 what an idea of God must it give 
 them if they are to see Him in the 
 arbitrary and sensual Persian king ! 
 or what an idea of our Lord if 
 they are to interpret Him by the 
 
48 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 hard and cruel character of that 
 bitter-hearted Jew ! As for Ha- 
 inan^ I am ready to admit that he 
 may present a plausible portrait 
 of the Devil ; but it would leave 
 on the child's mind the im- 
 pression that the Devil has been 
 hanged^ which is^ unfoi^tunately, 
 not true. 
 
 May I conclude by commend- 
 ing to Sunday-school teachers 
 two admirable pamphlets written 
 by Charles Edward Walch^ of 
 Hobart^ Tasmania; one on Sunday- 
 school teachings the other on 
 Gospel Sickness. These are pub- 
 lished by James Clarke and Co. 
 They are full of sense and re- 
 ligion ; they show how an earnest 
 Sunday-school teacher had him- 
 self discovered the need of 
 Biblical criticism before he had 
 become acquainted with its work ; 
 and they suggest that a new 
 day of vital interest in the 
 Sunday-school and in the home 
 teaching of children will begin 
 
THE CHILD. 49 
 
 when the true view of the Bible 
 has become generally known and 
 accepted. 
 
 Meanwhile^ every child should 
 be taught from the first that the 
 Bible is a compilation of many 
 different books^ written by diff- 
 erent authors and at widely distant 
 periods of time. He should 
 be taught that these books con- 
 stitute a rough record of the 
 stages by which God has been 
 revealed to the worlds and of the 
 difficulties^ the doubts_, the rebel- 
 lions which His gradual self- 
 revelation has encountered among 
 men. No word should be said 
 about the Bible being infallible^ 
 for the term is wholly misleading. 
 And every effort should be made 
 to show that Christ is the end of the 
 law, so that the teaching should 
 rather be what Christ is, has 
 done, and is doing in the world 
 to-day, than the slow and dubious 
 steps by which the w^orld was 
 prepared for His coming. The 
 
60 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 latter is a necessary study for 
 theologians. The former alone is 
 needed for^ and is capable of 
 riveting- the attention of^ our little 
 children. 
 
III. 
 
 By 
 
 Arthur S. Peake, m.a., 
 
 TUTOR IN BIBLICAL SUBJECTS, PEIMITIVE 
 
 METHODIST THEOLOGIAL INSTITUTE, 
 
 MANCHESTER. 
 
III. 
 
 Among the awkward questions that 
 the Church has to face we must set 
 that of the best methods to be 
 chosen in bringing before our 
 young people the results of 
 Biblical criticism. To some it is 
 not awkward at all^ either because 
 they are unaware of the attain- 
 ment of such results^ or because 
 they roundly refuse to believe in 
 them. Others will not entertain 
 it, on the too-popular principle, 
 " Why can't you let it alone ? " 
 Those of us who are satisfied that 
 real results have been won, and 
 that for the advancement of the 
 faith it is vital that they should 
 not be kept back from our young 
 people, cannot acquiesce in a 
 conspiracy of silence. However 
 awkward, the question is most 
 
54 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 pressings and on the way it is 
 answered much of the future 
 depends. There is not even this 
 excuse for silence^ that if we say 
 nothing they will hear nothing. 
 The truth is quite otherwise. They 
 will hear much that is crude and 
 garbled^ but roughly effective none 
 the less^ and if they hear it all 
 unprepared their position is dan- 
 gerous indeed. They have learnt 
 no defence^ and believe that 
 Christianity is hit in a vital place. 
 How much better if they already 
 laiow^ and know better than those 
 who flaunt these things in their 
 face^ what the results of criticism 
 really are^ and know^ too_, that 
 their feet are planted on a rock of 
 certainty which no criticism can 
 shake. If I may repeat a phrase 
 I used in an article some years 
 ago^ criticism ^^has drawn the 
 fangs of the secularist lecturer/' 
 perhaps I ought to add : only he 
 is not aware of it. In other words^, 
 criticism has swept away many of 
 
V- OF THK ' r ^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 THE CHILD. 55^S;2^ALIFOR^ 
 
 the things most chosen by the 
 Secularists for attack. It is our 
 privilege to place our young people 
 at the right point of view, and 
 preserve a faith which shall not be 
 incompatible with intellectual in- 
 tegrity. "We must vaccinate them 
 with criticism to save them from 
 the small-pox of scepticism. 
 
 When we pass to the methods 
 to be employed, it will be readily 
 seen that the question is largely 
 one of presuppositions. We find, 
 a set of ideas about the Bible 
 already in possession when we 
 begin our work. Children in 
 Christian homes form their views 
 of the Bible from the reverence 
 always paid to it, its use in family 
 worship and in the Church, and 
 all the other indications that it is 
 to be regarded as a book quite 
 sacred and apart. Why it should 
 be so treated they hardly know ; it 
 is taken for granted as part of the 
 natural order of things. They 
 know nothing of Inspiration. I 
 
56 
 
 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 remember when I was eight years 
 old reading some of " The Anti- 
 quities of Josephus." I was very 
 much interested, and said^ '^^Why 
 this is just like the Bible." I was 
 told that Josephus was not inspired. 
 What with the child is unreasoning 
 acceptance becomes with the boy 
 or girl intelligent acceptance^, but 
 on grounds received without ques- 
 tion. In this state of mind good 
 and bad elements mingle^ and the 
 good probably predominate. It is 
 highly important that the Bible 
 should be reverenced as the record 
 of the revelation and redeeming^ 
 activity of God^ that it should be 
 set above all other books^ and 
 indeed placed in a unique position. 
 But it is not well that this should 
 be held to involve extravagant 
 claims for the Bible^ claims beyond 
 what it makes for itself^ or beyond 
 what can be established by sound 
 proof. Yet these are almost uni- 
 versal, and constitute the great 
 difficulty of the teacher. 
 
THE CHILD. 57 
 
 The first thing to be done^ if our 
 young people are to be taught the 
 critical view of the Scriptures^ is 
 to destroy their illusions. And 
 this will be done by various lines 
 of proof. I scarcely venture to 
 suggest what order should be 
 followed^ but I will name some of 
 the points it is necessary to prove. 
 The corruption of the text both of 
 the Old and New Testaments must 
 be urged to prove that Providence 
 has not attached so much import- 
 ance to the exact transcription of 
 the words of the autographs as to 
 secure miraculous immmiity from 
 errors of copyists. This may be 
 used with great force against the 
 doctrine of verbal inspiration^ and 
 it should be shown that in many 
 cases the best scholars are not 
 agreed as to the true reading. 
 Another thing that should be 
 insisted on is that there is no 
 orthodox doctrine of Inspiration^ 
 in other words, there is no doctrine 
 to which the Chui'ch is committed. 
 
68 THE BIBLE AISTD 
 
 This may be shown by pointing to 
 the great variety of view that has 
 prevailed on the subject^ and^ 
 therefore^ since the question is not 
 closed^ we must claim, as Pro- 
 testants, the right of private 
 judgment upon it. In this con- 
 nection it is well to adduce the 
 example of the leaders of the 
 Reformation, Luther and Calvin^ 
 who treated the Bible with con- 
 siderable freedom. Next, it might 
 be shown that the popular view of 
 the Bible has largely come to us 
 from the rigid scholastic theolo- 
 gians of the seventeenth century, 
 whose conclusions in some other 
 departments of theology we are 
 almost unanimous in rejecting. It 
 might then be pointed out that 
 they came to their doctrine of 
 Scripture in an a priori way^ and 
 formed it with very little reference 
 to facts. The essential irrever- 
 ence of this method should be 
 brought out, in that it presumed 
 to form a theory of what God 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 59 
 
 must have done^ instead of humbly 
 setting to work to discover what 
 He had actually done. Over 
 against this false method^ which 
 has given us the popular view^ the 
 true scientific and historical method 
 should be set. The teacher should 
 make it clear that the only satis- 
 factory way is not to spin theories 
 out of one's own inner conscious- 
 ness^ but to set to work patiently 
 to investigate the phenomena 
 which the Bible presents^ and form 
 the doctrine as a result of the in- 
 vestigation. It might be well to 
 enforce this by instances^ from 
 other departments of knowledge^ 
 of the ignominious end of passion- 
 ately defended a priori theories. 
 Another illusion^ which is persis- 
 tent and troublesome^ is what is 
 known as the '^ all or nothing " 
 doctrme. It springs directly from 
 the popular view that the Bible . is 
 a whole^ of equal authority and of 
 equal inspiration from end to end. 
 If a single error is admitted^ the 
 
60 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 Bible cannot be inspired at all. 
 This is often very difficult to deal 
 with.^ and the teacher cannot be 
 too careful in his treatment of it. 
 Once this has been cleared away 
 the path will be comparatively 
 easy. The proof of the falsity of 
 this position should come from 
 several sides. The most important 
 thing is to show that for the pur- 
 pose for which it is assumed that 
 the Bible was given, such errors in 
 matters of fact as are alleged are 
 unimportant. The moral and reli- 
 gious value remains unimpaired. 
 This might be illustrated by those 
 numerous passages in both Old and 
 New Testaments which speak to 
 us with such an immediate and 
 authentic Divine voice, that they 
 carry with themselves proof of 
 their own inspiration. In this 
 way the impression of inspiration 
 does not depend on perfect histori- 
 cal accuracy, as to which we could 
 never from the nature of things be 
 sure of our ground, but on the 
 
THE CHILD. 61 
 
 conviction that the voice of God 
 alone could say such things to us. 
 The testimony is that of our own 
 religious consciousness. In this 
 way the belief in inspiration will 
 be placed on a firmer basis^, while 
 it will be detached from such an 
 accretion as a belief in inerrancy. 
 The '' all or nothing " argument 
 may be met in another way by 
 pointing out the unfairness with 
 which it ti'eats the Bible. If a 
 man discovers a blunder in his 
 daily paper he does not jump to 
 the conclusion I have heard for- 
 mulated with reference to the 
 Bible in this way : " If all of it 
 ain't true, there's none of it true." 
 A man should treat his Bible as 
 fairly as he treats his newspaper. 
 It is unfair in another way. We 
 have no right to expect of the 
 Bible more than it professes to 
 give. And it makes no claims to 
 ' inerrancy. On another side an 
 effective appeal may be made to 
 Christian loyalty. We cannot 
 
62 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 place the words of any one on tlie 
 same level as the words of Christ. 
 This helps us to recognise distinc- 
 tion of value in various parts of 
 the Bible^ and the argument may 
 be reinforced by illustrations of the 
 fact that some portions of the 
 Bible speak much more directly to 
 our souls than others. It is also 
 of great importance to emphasize 
 the fact that the Bible is not a 
 book^ but a collection of books^ 
 gradually formed and fluctuating 
 in extent^ so that even now Pro- 
 testant scholars cannot regard the 
 limits that should be set to the 
 Canon as fixed beyond dispute. 
 These may serve as hints of the 
 way in which this difficulty should 
 be met. 
 
 The removal of illusions is only 
 one^ though the most important^ 
 part of the preliminary work. It 
 should be supplemented by the 
 positive proof that the position ' 
 taken up is better in itself. These 
 are some points that should be 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 63 
 
 made clear. Criticism has made 
 the Bible more precious to us 
 because it has made it intelligible 
 and interesting. It has made the 
 uniqueness of the religion of Israel 
 and of Christianity stand out with 
 far greater clearness. It has driven 
 us to Christ, the only "^ impregna- 
 ble rock," as our supreme religious 
 authority. It has thus withdrawn 
 apologetics from the useless task 
 of defending shattered outworks to 
 the invincible fortress itself. And 
 if it be urged that the authority of 
 Christ guarantees the traditional 
 authorship of Old Testament books, 
 it must be said in reply that the 
 Incarnation involved a surrender 
 of omniscience that He might be 
 like us in all things except sin, 
 and that even if His knowledge on 
 these points transcended that of 
 His own time, it would have been 
 to cast a needless stumbling-block 
 in the way of His hearers to discuss 
 critical questions with them. The 
 relation in which the Son stands 
 
64 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 to the universe did not cause Christ 
 to reveal the secrets of nature^ 
 which our own age has so largely 
 discovered^ nor to correct the 
 astronomical errors of His con- 
 temporaries. 
 
 One point more may be briefly 
 mentioned. It is of great moment 
 that while the teacher is conduct- 
 ing his class over this delicate 
 ground he should make abundantly 
 evident his own devotion to Christ 
 and the Gospel. The practical 
 problem that presents itself to the 
 pupil is : If I revise my views of 
 the Bible, how do I know that I 
 shall not end by giving up Chris- 
 tianity ? Nothing will reassure 
 him more than the feeling that 
 the teacher is a living example of 
 the reconciliation of faith with 
 criticism. 
 
 So much for the preliminaries. 
 It is so much^ because they are the 
 most important. Who should the 
 teacher be ? In most cases^ I think^ 
 the minister — that is^ where he has 
 
THE CHILD. 65 
 
 been sufficiently conscientious to 
 give earnest study to the subject. 
 I have further assumed that a class 
 will be formed for the systematic 
 study of the subject. Such a 
 course as I have already sketched 
 will take some time^ and then the 
 actual teaching of the subject will 
 begin_, and will need continuous 
 work. As a rule^ critical questions 
 should be let alone in the pulpit. 
 They may unsettle the faith of 
 older Christians who are unable to 
 distinguish between form and sub- 
 stance ; and_, apart from this^ the 
 pulpit is meant for another purpose. 
 The class might consist of any who 
 wished to join^ but I think it would 
 be prudent to admit none under 
 fourteen, and perhaps that limit is 
 too low. A text-book is badly 
 wanted, and till a satisfactory one 
 appears each teacher must make 
 his own. Professor Eobertson's 
 "The Old Testament and its 
 Contents^' might be used at a 
 pinch, but those who are not satis- 
 
66 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 fied with a halfway house will 
 prefer to wait for something more 
 critical. The question of the New 
 Testament is less pressing. Dr. 
 Dods' ^^Introduction to the New 
 Testament/' or Mr. M'Olymont's 
 ^^The New Testament and its 
 Writers/' would do as a text-book. 
 Common sense will indicate the 
 necessity of placing only those 
 results before a class which are 
 generally accepted by critics. As 
 to the order^ I should suggest that 
 the Hexateuch be taken firsts since 
 here the work has been most com- 
 pletely and perhaps most finally 
 done. If I were writing for 
 students^ who wished to examine 
 the subject for themselves^ I should 
 recommend a different order^ but 
 this will^ I think^ be found best in 
 this case. There is no need to 
 sketch an outline of study; a 
 teacher who knows his subject will 
 find the line that suits him best. 
 But^ on another pointy is it too 
 much to ask of the ofiicials and 
 
THE CHILD. 67 
 
 Church that if they cannot help 
 they will at least not hinder the 
 work ? They cannot be more 
 anxious for the welfare of the 
 young people than the minister. 
 And in his efforts to keep them, 
 by making Christianity credible to 
 tliem^ they may rest assured that 
 he will not play fast and loose with 
 the essential truths of the religion 
 in which^ in common with them- 
 selves^ he finds his highest inspira- 
 tion and joy. The wisest policy is 
 to trust him and let him take his 
 own course. We are in a time of 
 change^ and the only thing which 
 will preserve the unity of the 
 Church is the love that ^^hopeth 
 all things" and ^^believeth all 
 things^" even the orthodoxy of the 
 minister who is a critic. 
 
IV. 
 By 
 
 Walter F. Adeney, m.a., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 EXEGESIS. HISTORY AND CRITICISM AT 
 
 NEW COLLEGE. 
 
IV. 
 
 I HAVE no doubt that to many 
 readers the suggestion that the 
 Higher Criticism should be brought 
 into any connection with the 
 teaching of children must seem 
 about as absurd as a proposal that 
 Quain's " Anatomy " should be 
 made up into reading-lessons for 
 an infant class. The very associa- 
 tion of the phrases is painfully 
 incongruous. It should be re- 
 membered, however, that when we 
 refer to the teaching of children 
 we are not always thinking of the 
 ABC lessons of lisping babes. 
 There is more difference in mental 
 grasp between a child of four years 
 and a boy or girl of fourteen than 
 there is between the latter and a 
 man or woman of forty. Even 
 young children have an awkward 
 
72 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 habit of springing upon us, in the 
 most unconscious innocence^ ques- 
 tions which persons who are ac- 
 quainted with the results of the 
 latest research can only answer 
 honestly in the light of that 
 research. This is the point. It 
 is not to be supposed that any 
 sensible people are eager to 
 transform the rising generation 
 into an army of critics. The 
 judgment is the latest faculty to 
 ripen ; with some of us it seems, 
 to remain green for a lifetime. 
 To urge the exercise of it pre- 
 maturely is only to rear an ugly 
 crop of prigs. 
 
 What^ then^ have children to do 
 with the Higher Criticism? I 
 should say that their relation to it 
 is concerned with the results 
 rather than with the processes. 
 Let us clearly understand what we 
 mean by this often-repeated 
 phrase^ ^^the Higher Criticism.'^ 
 The angry style in which it is 
 handled by the more ignorant of 
 
THE CHILD. 73 
 
 those people who take upon them- 
 selves to heap indiscriminate 
 denunciation upon it would seem 
 to imply that it is simply an 
 indication of the self-conceit of its 
 authors, who mean by the use 
 of it that their critical methods 
 are superior to the methods of 
 less advanced students. A more 
 ridiculous misinterpretation can 
 hardly be imagined. Of course, as 
 every student of its first elements 
 knows, the Higher Criticism is not 
 so named as being better than an 
 inferior criticism that it affects to 
 despise, but simply in contrast 
 with another kind of criticism, 
 which is equally valid in its sphere 
 — the lower criticism concerning 
 minute questions of the settlement 
 of the original text, &c., and the 
 higher passing on to inquire into 
 the age, authorship, character, and 
 tendency of the books it concerns, 
 as far as these can be ascertained 
 from an examination of their con- 
 tents. Surely no reasonable person 
 
 If ^ 
 
 OK ':^^)^. 
 
 ((UNIVERSITY 
 
74 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 can object to such a study being 
 pursued^ although it is quite open 
 to any competent person to say 
 that it is erroneously carried on by 
 some of its disciples. One thing, 
 I think, may now be affirmed in 
 regard to this matter. There are 
 whole reaches of inquiry that have 
 been so thoroughly surveyed that 
 we can no longer treat them as 
 lying in the mists of uncertainty. 
 The fog has lifted over these 
 regions, so that we can see their 
 outlines. In other cases, where 
 perhaps we were once accustomed 
 to think we could discern the capes 
 and bays of a sharply-marked 
 coast-line, the powerful telescope 
 of criticism may prove that we were 
 only gazing at a bank of clouds. 
 That cannot but be an unsatifying 
 result to arrive at ; and yet our 
 personal disappointment is no 
 excuse for smashing the telescope. 
 At all events, it is best to know the 
 facts. Then the question arises. 
 If we know the facts, what reason 
 
THE CHILD. 75 
 
 or justification have we for con- 
 tinuing to teach children just as 
 we did before we had reached 
 them ? I have no wish to perplex 
 and puzzle children with abstruse 
 questions ; but I feel the grave 
 mistake of ignoring the fairly- 
 established results of criticism. 
 We may not be able to explain 
 Kepler's laws to young children, 
 but that is no excuse for doggedly 
 persisting in representing to them 
 that sun^ moon^ and stars all 
 revolve round the earth. 
 
 One of the commonest mistakes 
 about the Higher Criticism is that 
 it only issues in a mass of dreary 
 negations. I am by no means 
 ready to take a brief for every 
 person who chooses to style him- 
 self a critic. There are men who 
 come to the consideration of 
 Biblical problems with a marked 
 prejudice against the transcen- 
 dental, the spiritual, everything 
 that is not in agreement with 
 everyday London club life — men 
 
76 
 
 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 who are so obviously blind to the 
 religious wonder of revelation that 
 they put themselves out of court 
 at once when they set forth their 
 arid negations. Their criticism is 
 as uncritical as Jeffreys' criticism of 
 Wordsworth. By every word they 
 utter they prove themselves to be 
 inhabitants of another world from 
 that of the inspired writers^ and 
 therefore utterly unfit to present 
 themselves as their judges. There 
 are men^ too^ with whose character 
 and temper we may have no reason 
 to quarrel^ and yet who are mani- 
 festly so extravagant and one-sided 
 that what they give out as critical 
 results must only be accepted by us 
 as obiter dicta. But when a full 
 discount has been allowed for all 
 these eccentricities and irrele- 
 vances^ there remains a heavy 
 balance to the credit of sound 
 criticism^ the accumulated returns 
 of the labour of a number of sober 
 workmen whose converging har- 
 mony of opinion cannot be brushed 
 
THE CHILD. 77 
 
 aside without impertinence. Now 
 here it is that we find results that 
 are by no means barely negative. 
 The mining is not all for the 
 shaking of ancient foundations ; 
 the best of it is carried on in new 
 fields for the discovery of hidden 
 treasure^ and with the result that 
 already we have been presented 
 with some precious nuggets of gold. 
 Is it nothing that this criticism 
 has quickened our interest in the 
 Bible — ^that it has given new life 
 especially to the Old Testament? 
 Some of us who would still fain 
 believe we are young men can yet 
 recollect the time when there was 
 a manifest danger of the Old 
 Testament falling altogether into 
 neglect among the more progres- 
 sive teachers of Christian truth. 
 In the present day the study of 
 the Old Testament has come to be 
 courted with the keenest interest. 
 Criticism has thrown new light 
 upon the history of Israel. For- 
 merly the writings of the Hebrew 
 
78 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 prophets were handled as though 
 thej were so many scattered 
 Sibylline leaves. Now they are 
 made to discourse eloquently 
 of the ages from which they 
 sprang, and to re-clothe their 
 authors with the flesh and blood of 
 real life. There is no reasoii why 
 children should not have their 
 share in these happy gams so far 
 as they are able to appreciate them. 
 Then as we pass on to the New 
 Testament we have still larger and 
 richer results of sound criticism. 
 The critical comparison of the 
 Synoptic Gospels one with another 
 and with St. John's Gospel has led 
 to such a clear understanding of 
 the life and teachings of Jesus 
 Christ as was probably never 
 before reached in the history of 
 Christendom. Until quite lately 
 it was customary to mix up sayings 
 of our Lord with texts from any of 
 the epistles^ not to mention Old 
 Testament quotations, as though 
 they all ran on the same plane^ to 
 
THE CHILD. 79 
 
 the confusion of any character and 
 specific meaning. Now we are 
 able to see the teaching of Jesus in 
 its own crystalline clearness. That 
 is an infinite gain. It is much, 
 too, that the latest criticism has 
 demonstrated the essential unity 
 of that teaching as it appears in 
 all the four Grospels. At the same 
 time we are able to detect the 
 different standpoints of the several 
 evangelists, and when we come to 
 the apostles, to see their several 
 ways of presenting the Grospel, 
 each characteristic, each valuable. 
 The truth itself is better appre- 
 hended when regarded in these 
 various lights than it was when all 
 differences were blurred by the arti- 
 ficial contrivances of the harmon- 
 ists. Thus the New Testament 
 lives to us with a crispness of outline 
 and a vividness of colour which it 
 owes to the clarifying processes of 
 criticism. Is there any reason why 
 children should not be introduced to 
 these fresh and interesting results ? 
 
80 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 But now if criticism has yielded 
 us these profits, it cannot be denied 
 that it has unsettled some old- 
 established positions^ and here we 
 come to the crux of the matter. 
 The first question will be^ How are 
 we to deal with the narratives of 
 the earliest times in the light of 
 criticism? To be simply silent 
 about them is to take the feeblest 
 course imaginable. Though it may 
 not be desirable to set them as 
 formal Sunday-school lessons, just 
 as if they were on a level with the 
 Gospel story, to throw them aside 
 altogether would be to follow a 
 counsel of despair. To put the 
 matter on the lowest ground^ a 
 person who had grown up in 
 ignorance of such time-honoured 
 narratives must be held to be un- 
 educated. Moreover, the beauty, 
 the charm, the moral and religious 
 significance of many of these 
 stories will win the hearts of 
 children in the future as they have 
 won the hearts of children in the 
 
/ Y* OF THR ' '' 
 
 1^ UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE CHILD. SI^^^^^LC^LIFORH^^^ 
 
 past. This winsome grace of the 
 antique stories is one of the proofs 
 that they are presented to us with 
 the power and life of Divine in- 
 spiration. We cannot afford to 
 lose sight of them^ say what the 
 critics may about them. The 
 child's Bible would be sadly im- 
 poverished if these favourite parts 
 were to be missing. But let the 
 stories be given in their quaint^ old- 
 world simplicity. When we are deal- 
 ing with those concerning which 
 we may think historical grounds of 
 assurance cannot be made out, it 
 will be misleading to drag in allu- 
 sions to modern geographical and 
 archaeological data. The stories 
 should be set by themselves, framed 
 in their own mystery. As soon as 
 the children are able to understand 
 it they should be informed quite 
 simply, and without any painful 
 sense of reserve, that they are 
 different from the later history, 
 because the books in which they 
 are recorded were not written till 
 
82 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 many hundreds of years after the 
 times to which they refer. Chil- 
 dren have to learn how all history 
 begins among the mists of un- 
 certainty, in the dim ages of a 
 far-off antiquity. They know this 
 with regard to the story of Britain^ 
 and it does not make them sceptics 
 of the history of the Norman and 
 Tudor lines. If they are told that 
 possibly King Arthur was a myth, 
 they are not thereupon so confused 
 as to doubt the landing of William 
 the Conqueror. These points of 
 difference would be above the com- 
 prehension of very little children ; 
 I am not now referring to such, 
 but to boys and girls of some 
 growth in intelligence. Take^ for 
 instance, the story of Adam and 
 Eve. To know nothing of this 
 would argue gross ignorance ; and 
 it is better to come upon it in the 
 grand simplicity of its original 
 form in Genesis than to meet with 
 it for the first time clothed in 
 Milton's strange mingling of 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 83 
 
 Puritan theology and sensuous 
 poetry. This story is not only 
 touched with antique charm ; it is 
 replete with profound lessons con- 
 cerning* man^ his sin^ and his fate 
 — lessons which^ coming to us as 
 we receive them in the austere 
 simplicity of the primitive narra- 
 tive, awe us with a sense of the 
 Divine. Yet I suppose very few 
 educated people take the narra- 
 tive as prosaic history. Then why 
 should children not be told that it 
 is an old tale teaching great 
 lessons^ and not an account of the 
 way things actually happened ? 
 
 The case of the patriarchs is not 
 of the same kind. I must confess 
 that I am old-fashioned enough to 
 cling to the stories of Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob; and certainly 
 we have had gleams of light from 
 the desert and the monuments that 
 suggest points of verification. 
 Still, it cannot be denied that the 
 rearrangement of the Pentateuch 
 has raised questions in many minds 
 
84 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 as to grounds of certitude con- 
 cerning these narratives. Simi- 
 larly^ the new order in which the 
 records of the Pentateuch are now 
 arranged cannot but affect the 
 whole story of the tabernacle in 
 the wilderness. The plain state- 
 ment about these things is that 
 the narratives in their present form 
 were written so many hundreds of 
 years after the events occurred 
 that we cannot be as certain about 
 them as we are about contemporary 
 records. I do not see any reason 
 why we should not say this to 
 children who are old enough to 
 understand what is^ after all^ a 
 very simple statement. It will be 
 objected that this is a dangerous 
 position^ but I venture to affirm 
 that a furtive and timorous reserve 
 is a far more dangerous one. 
 
 If^ however, criticism touches 
 the New Testament^ it is natural 
 to inquire with more anxiety as to 
 what are its effects. Here we 
 have come out into broad daylight, 
 
THE CHILD. 85 
 
 and the answer can be given with 
 more assurance of finality. But 
 here^ too^ criticism brings us no- 
 thing to fear. The effect of the 
 most searching and ruthless inquiry 
 is that the central Figure of all 
 history and all religion stands out 
 with a new clearness of outline^ 
 and at the same time with com- 
 manding majesty^ nay, with the 
 awfulness of true Divinity, so that 
 we are constrained to exclaim with 
 Thomas, ^^My Lord and my God." 
 After that what do the details 
 matter? Yet these details are 
 useful in filling up the background 
 of the canvas. Now it is not so 
 much the Higher Criticism as a 
 mere ordinary literary criticism 
 that has brought to light certain 
 small inconsistencies in the several 
 Gospel narratives. These are puzz- 
 ling to the historian, whose busi- 
 ness it is to settle every disputed 
 point in the story, but they are of 
 no religious importance whatever. 
 The dangerous thing is to attempt 
 
86 THE BIBLE ANI> 
 
 to smother them up under a con- 
 fusion of words. The simple, 
 natural^ straightforward course is 
 to admit them without perturba- 
 tion ; for it is not the inconsistency 
 in the narrative but the perturba- 
 tion in the teacher that upsets the 
 child's faith. If children were 
 not brought up with an unfounded 
 belief in the verbal inerrancy of 
 the Bible^ these discrepancies 
 would run off them as water from 
 a duck's back^ admittedly real^ but 
 incapable of penetrating to the 
 deep regions where faith lives and 
 where doubt may be bred. I was 
 almost saying that those people 
 who so deliberately set the terrible 
 stumbling-block of verbal inerrancy 
 in the path of Christ's little ones 
 are themselves in danger of the 
 millstone ; but I know they are 
 acting from the best motives as 
 the friends of the children. Still, 
 what a huge blunder they have 
 fallen into^ and how disastrous are 
 its consequences ! They believe 
 
THE CHILD. 87 
 
 themselves to be defenders of the 
 faith ; but their feverish anxiety 
 seems to be engendered by the 
 unwholesome effluvia of a decaying 
 creed. Faith can look the whole 
 world in the face and welcome 
 light from every quarter, knowing 
 that the foundation standeth sure. 
 When we feel the Spirit of God 
 breathing on us from the pages of 
 the Bible^ we may regard the work 
 of criticism with equanimity^ hav- 
 ing the satisfying inward assurance 
 that no arguments can touch our 
 one supreme^ indubitable fact. 
 Without this perception it matters 
 not what becomes of the battle of 
 the critics ; at best it can but issue 
 in one more literary verdict with 
 which to cumber the libraries of the 
 learned. Above all^ while we have 
 a settled faith in Christ, confirmed 
 by the experience of the Christian 
 life, we may as well imagine 
 that some new theory was about 
 to filch the sun from our sky as 
 fear that any criticism could ever 
 
88 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 rob US of our Lord. If this is the 
 right position to take up^ surely it 
 is our business to lead children 
 into it by the straightest course 
 possible. 
 
V. 
 By the Very Rev. 
 
 W. H, Fremantle, d.d., 
 
 DEAN OF EIPON. 
 
The Higher Criticism is often 
 supposed to mean negative criti- 
 cism^ but it really means the criti- 
 cism, not of texts, but of the 
 underlying ideas of a work ; it is, 
 therefore, much more congenial to 
 the faithful and Christian teacher 
 than the lower criticism, which 
 deals with manuscripts and read- 
 ings. Of the works of Lachmann 
 or Tischendorff, or of Westcott 
 and Hort^ on the text of the New 
 Testament only a few scholars can 
 judge ; but of the questions raised 
 by Ewald or Kuenen we can all 
 judge. Could the Book of Deuter- 
 onomy, they ask, which assumes 
 that there is only one altar, and 
 vehemently condemns worship in 
 the High Places, have been in 
 existence when Samuel, the chosen 
 
92 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 leader and inspired prophet^ sacri- 
 ficed at the High Place in Eamah ? 
 or^ Could the words, ^^Who saith 
 of Cyrus, Thou art my shepherd, 
 saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be 
 built, and to the Temple, Thy 
 foundations shall be laid," have 
 been written by Isaiah 150 years 
 before the Temple was destroyed, 
 and 200 before Cyrus reigned? 
 Of such questions, I say, we can 
 all of us judge. And, further, we 
 are all of us unconsciously among 
 the '' higher critics " when, for 
 instance, we read Ps. cxxxvii., and 
 ask whether the words, '^^ Happy 
 shall he be that taketh and dasheth 
 thy little ones against the stones," 
 express the mind of the Divine 
 Spirit, or whether they belong to 
 a class of ideas and feelings which 
 have been done away in Christ. 
 Here Christian faith is itself the 
 Higher Criticism. 
 
 Such questions are sure to be 
 asked as the child grows into the 
 man or woman, and it is of the 
 
THE CHILD. 9S 
 
 utmost importance that we should 
 so teach the Bible that they may 
 not prove a fatal stumbling-block. 
 The late M. Taine, one of the fore- 
 most writers and thinkers in France^ 
 became a Protestant because he 
 felt sure that, if his children were 
 taught the literalisms which, in 
 the hands of French priests, made 
 the Bible a tissue of incredibilities^ 
 they would, as they grew up, cast 
 away their religion, whereas the 
 sane explanations of the excellent 
 Pastors Bersier and HoUard, to 
 whom he entrusted them, would 
 make possible a continuance of 
 belief. We may well ask ourselves 
 whether the cause of the aliena- 
 tion from Christian faith is not 
 often this, that we have bound up 
 with religion during childhood a 
 number of ideas which the adult 
 sees to be untenable, but from 
 which he finds it impossible to 
 disentangle it. 
 
 This danger may be to a great 
 extent obviated by showing that 
 
94 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 what is paramount in the Scrip- 
 tures, as explained by criticism^ is 
 the religious interest. Take the 
 question of the books of the law^ 
 on which so much criticism has 
 been expended. The higher critics 
 have mostly come to the conclusion 
 that Exodus^ Deuteronomy and 
 Leviticus contain successive hand- 
 lings of the law^ the rudiments of 
 which came from Moses^ just as 
 the Psalms have their source in 
 David^ but they believe that each 
 re-editing of the law has a dis- 
 tinctly religious purpose. On this^ 
 therefore^ the teacher should fix 
 the child's attention. He should 
 show how stress was laid in each 
 epoch upon the points most need- 
 ful for the religious life ; firsts in 
 Exodus^ for the primitive social 
 life of the nation ; next, in Deuter- 
 onomy, for the final struggle 
 against idolatry in the period from 
 Hezekiah to Josiah ; and lastly^ in 
 Leviticus, for the time after the 
 captivity when the sense of sin 
 
THE CHILD. 95 
 
 and the need of sacrifice were so 
 fully developed. It is not neces- 
 sary to go into minute criticism 
 with the young ; but it is a distinct 
 gain to the teacher^ say in reading 
 Deuteronomy, to be able to 
 describe the ^^hill-altars" and the 
 ^^Asherim " existing in every 
 corner of Judaea, and the degrada- 
 tion of the worship of God as 
 described by Hosea and the early 
 prophets, and thence to show the 
 need of the limitation of sacrificial 
 worship to the central sanctuary 
 at Jerusalem. And, similarly, it 
 is a gain to realise the state of 
 mind of the Jews in the great 
 revulsion from idolatry under 
 Ezekiel and the second Isaiah, 
 and to associate the lamentations 
 for national apostasy which we 
 find in Nehemiah ix. or Ps. cvi., 
 or the denunciations of Leviticus 
 xxvi., with the passionate longing 
 for atonement with God, which 
 brought into prominence the 
 priestly code of Leviticus. 
 
96 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 The Psalms and the prophets 
 and histories are comparatively 
 easy to deal with in the light of 
 criticism. In the histories the 
 chief difficulties are caused by dif- 
 fering traditions which have been 
 placed side by side^ as in the vary- 
 ing accounts of the elevation of 
 Saul to the kingdom, and of 
 David's introduction to Saul. 
 When these are frankly admitted, 
 as they would be in any other case, 
 the difficulty is gone, but the 
 religious lesson is unimpaired. As 
 to the Psalms, the dates and con- 
 struction of them are still sub 
 Judice; but this is of little concern 
 for their religious bearing; they 
 are of all ages, and give voice to 
 the universal needs of the human 
 soul. The criticisms, however, of 
 Cheyne, which show that they 
 have a national as well as an indi- 
 vidual bearing, should be of use to 
 us in training the young to public 
 and social duty, which is among 
 the greatest needs of our time. 
 
THE CHILD. 97 
 
 As to the prophets^ criticism has 
 made them stand out as vivid, 
 struggling personalities^ their 
 words gaining force from the 
 clearer disclosure of the special 
 circumstances of their time. How 
 much more real does such an 
 utterance as that of Isaiah Ixiv. 
 10, 11 become: ^'^Zion is a wilder- 
 ness, Jerusalem a desolation, our 
 holy and beautiful house wherein 
 our fathers praised Thee is burned 
 with fire," when we think of it 
 as springing warm from the heart 
 of the great unknown prophet of 
 the exile as he depicted with pa- 
 triotic sorrow the actual state of 
 desolation, than when we try to 
 conceive of it as written 200 years 
 before, in the time of Hezekiah, 
 when the temple stood firm and 
 Jerusalem was unscathed by fire. 
 
 Let us now pass to a different 
 sphere, that of the narratives 
 which have created most contro- 
 versy. Take the account of the 
 Creation. If we believe it to be a 
 
98 THE BIBLE ANI> 
 
 poetic vision of the upgrowth of 
 the world under the hand of God, 
 we can surely make the pupil 
 understand this. To be sure, 
 children are, as Goethe said, 
 '' inveterate realists," and are sure 
 to ask " Was it all true ? " But 
 the great religious lessons — the 
 universe a great unity, the mani- 
 festation of one principle, one 
 agent, and that the Holy One ; 
 the world prepared for man, who 
 is to master it and use it according 
 to God's will ; the spiritual element 
 supreme over the material, the 
 consecration of the whole by its 
 issue in a Sabbath of holy rest ; 
 man made after God's image, his 
 innocence as the witness that sin 
 is not a necessary part of his 
 nature, the sanctification of human 
 love and family and social life by 
 the blessing on the first parents of 
 the race — all this is so preponder- 
 ant, and in the hands of an earnest 
 teacher can be made to stand out 
 so clearly, that the mere process 
 
THE CHILD. 99 
 
 of creation falls naturally into a 
 subordinate place. 
 
 This may rightly lead us to 
 consider the attitude which we 
 should take towards the miracles 
 of the Old Testament. We should 
 dwell on the Divine purpose and 
 its result, not upon the particular 
 mode of working. The word 
 miracle^ as used in Scripture (put 
 Paley aside) ^ is quite undefined, 
 and simply implies to the religious 
 mind a wonderful and striking 
 fact which makes us realise the 
 presence of God. On the action 
 of God, therefore, we should fix 
 the attention. Take the account 
 of the deliverance of Israel by the 
 passage of the Red Sea. We may 
 take the old precritical view 
 which made even Matthew Arnold 
 speak of the narrative as instinct 
 with supematuralism, or we may, 
 with the Speaker's Commentary, 
 take it as wholly natural. The 
 latter is surely the most vivid and 
 attractive ; we see, and can make 
 
100 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 the pupil see^ the sea driven back 
 by the strong east wind, the storm 
 cloud helping the Israelites by its 
 lightnings but beating in the 
 faces of their enemies^ the sun as 
 the eye of God looking forth in 
 the morning watch from the pillar 
 of cloudy and the tide returning in 
 its strength. Yet upon none of 
 these in themselves must the 
 attention be fixed^ but upon the 
 combination of all these forces 
 under the hand of God for the 
 deliverance of Israel. We need 
 not be anxious to explain the 
 processes through which God 
 wrought either as identical with 
 or as differing from the processes 
 known to human experience. What 
 we want to impress is the sense of 
 God working out His righteous 
 and loving purpose, whether in ways 
 within or in ways beyond our com- 
 prehension. And further, we 
 want to make the pupil realise 
 that the wonder of the old time 
 is the heightened or concentrated 
 
THE CHILD. 101 
 
 example of that which is in its 
 essence repeated day by day in 
 the action of God towards us. 
 Even now, with all our advance 
 in knowledge^ how little do we 
 know of the secret forces of 
 Nature. The saying of Newton 
 is still true, that we are like 
 children picking up shells on the 
 shore of an ocean whose depths 
 are unexplored. Our philosophers 
 have to speak of an " energy " 
 which is the source of all action, 
 yet is in its essence unknown. We 
 may, therefore, with entire frank- 
 ness^ adopt in our teaching such 
 words as those of the Psalmist : 
 '*^ Thy way is in the sea, and Thy 
 paths in the great waters, and 
 Thy footsteps are not known." 
 
 There are, we must admit, some 
 stories in the Bible which we 
 cannot take literally, such as that 
 of the axe-head swimming at the 
 word of Elisha, or the three 
 childi'en in the fiery furnace. But 
 a tactful teacher will know how to 
 
102 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 get over the difficulty. In other 
 cases he will pass it hj, as the 
 Germans say^ ^^with light foot^'' 
 especially where^ as in the first of 
 these instances^ no spiritual lesson 
 is directly connected with it. In 
 other cases, as in the second of 
 these instances_, he may rightly 
 say that, the story being told after 
 three hundred years, it is quite 
 possible that its details have been 
 altered, but that in any case it 
 represents an instance, such as 
 has often been known, of faithful 
 confessors delivered from a cruel 
 death; and he may thus suggest 
 what is the real religious use of 
 the story to us — that Grod's peo- 
 ple are constantly passing through 
 the " smoking furnace '^ (Gren. xv. 
 17 ; compare Deut. iv. 20, 1 Kings 
 viii. 51), and are like the bush 
 bathed in fire, which has suggested 
 the motto of the persecuted 
 Church, '^ Et tamen non consume- 
 
 A similar mode of treatment 
 
THE CHILD. 103 
 
 may be adopted as to the moral 
 difficulties of the Old Testament ; 
 they must in some cases be 
 avoided^ in some cases explained. 
 But here we are on j&rmer ground, 
 having the plain declarations of 
 our Lord Himself to guide us. He 
 admits the doctrine of develop- 
 ment in moral matters. What 
 was '^ said to the men of old times '^ 
 needed to be corrected by what He 
 said. Moses gave laws for the 
 hardness of men's hearts^ which 
 He repealed. The disciples were 
 not to imitate Elijah in calling 
 down fire from heaven. We need 
 not scruple^ therefore, to tell our 
 children, as they are able to bear 
 it, that expressions like the long 
 <3urses of Ps. cix., ending with 
 ^^ Let this be the reward of mine 
 adversaries from the Lord," could 
 not be allowed in the mouths of 
 Christians. With the younger 
 children such passages may best 
 be left unread, and in devotional 
 exercises they must not be intro- 
 
104 
 
 THE BIBLE ANI> 
 
 duced. I presume that few pastors 
 who have free choice would dwell 
 upon them in the congregation ; 
 and I think that^ when these pas- 
 sages are set down to be read in 
 the appointed order in church, the 
 liberty which the law now gives to 
 vary the Psalms under special cir~ 
 cumstances may be held to justify 
 the exclusion of expressions of 
 hatred. Our congregations contain 
 persons of all classes and all ages^ 
 and we must beware of suggesting-^ 
 to young or old what will be cer- 
 tainly perplexing, and may lead to 
 deadly error. 
 
 It is in the teaching of the Old 
 Testament that the difficulties 
 chiefly arise which it is the design 
 of these papers to meet. But there 
 are difficulties also in the New 
 Testament ; and though these are 
 not so numerous, they are aggra- 
 vated by the fact that the critical 
 results are far less clear. The time at 
 which the Gospels were composed, 
 the account to be given of the 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 105 
 
 wide variations and the minute 
 agreements of the first three 
 Gospels^ and of their relation to 
 one another and to the fourth 
 Gospelj, are as yet undetermined. 
 On the other hand^ many of the 
 discrepancies which have perplexed 
 pious souls, and which have been 
 met by strange evasions or at- 
 attempts at reconciliation, become 
 non-existent to us as soon as we 
 put aside the fictitious assumption 
 of an exact accuracy in the narra- 
 tives. We can then say : It 
 matters nothing whether Christ 
 healed two blind men going out of 
 Jericho, as St. Matthew reports, or 
 one blind man coming into Jericho, 
 as St. Luke states ; or which of 
 the versions of the title upon the 
 cross, which is given differently by 
 each Evangelist, is the true one. 
 We hardly ask such questions in 
 the case of other books, but are 
 content to say: "These are dif- 
 ferent versions, slightly varied, 
 of the same transaction." There is 
 
 9^ OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
106 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 no difficulty in saying the same as 
 to the Gospel accounts either to 
 ourselves or to our children. What 
 is more difficult is to make them 
 understand the state of human 
 nature which existed in Palestine 
 in our Lord's time and long after 
 — a state in which leprosy and 
 hysterical affections and demo- 
 niacal possession were common 
 phenomena^ and in which^ there- 
 fore, the presence of a Divine 
 personality must produce effects to 
 which our later Western life pre- 
 sents hardly an analogy. But 
 something of this kind must be 
 suggested in order to prevent in 
 later years a sense of unreality 
 besetting the subject and obscuring 
 the character and teaching of 
 Christ. 
 
 In conclusion^ I think that our 
 own religious experience on these 
 subjects is our best guide in 
 teaching. If we are thoroughly 
 persuaded of the main results of 
 modern criticism^ and have rear- 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 107 
 
 ranged the Bible in our own minds 
 as the history of an orderly 
 development culminating in Christy 
 the true Prince of mankind, and if 
 this has fortified our own faith by 
 a sense of historical veracity, we 
 need not fear to speak plainly to 
 the young ; for we can hardly fail 
 to convey to them the consciousness 
 that the religious aim is paramount 
 with us, and that we wish it to be 
 so with them. When they can 
 realise that, through the results of 
 criticism. Christian piety and zeal 
 are not slackened but increased, 
 and that both the Old Testament 
 history and Christ Himself are 
 made to stand out in clearer out- 
 line, the danger lest light and 
 truth should in maturer life come 
 to them as destructive and 
 disintegrating powers will have 
 passed away, and we may tinist 
 that the Bible will grow to them 
 more real and more precious the 
 more their knowledge and experi- 
 ence extends. 
 
VI. 
 By the Rev. 
 
 Washington Gladden, d.d., 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 "WHO WROTE THE BIBLE," &c. 
 
VI. 
 
 The Bible is the book of religion, 
 but it is also, by eminence, the 
 book of literature. Well may we 
 call it The Book ; it is the prolific 
 mother of books ; since the inven- 
 tion of printing the book-makers 
 have been busy, a good share of 
 their time, in producing Bibles, 
 and books about the Bible. 
 
 The influence of our English 
 Bible upon our language in keep- 
 ing our speech simple and direct 
 and unstUted is beyond all com- 
 prehension. Euphuistic dandyism 
 and Johnsonese magniloquence 
 have been slain by its homely 
 eloquence ; and not only have 
 thirsty souls with joy drawn the 
 water of life by its aid from the 
 wells of salvation, but scholars 
 and writers of books have drawn 
 
112 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 the freshness and grace of literary 
 form from its pure well of English 
 undefilecl. It is scarcely an ex- 
 aggeration to say that our greatest 
 English writers have been the men 
 who best knew their Bibles. John 
 Bunyan read almost no other book^ 
 and he contrived to write a book 
 of which, it is said^ more copies 
 have been printed than of any 
 other English book except the 
 Bible itseK. Of men as far apart 
 in their view of life as Byron and 
 Kuskin^ it could with equal truth- 
 fulness be said that their mastery 
 of style is largely due to their 
 perfect familiarity with the English 
 Bible. 
 
 Complaints of the Bible as 
 archaic and luicouth in its literary 
 form have not, indeed^ been want- 
 ing ; and some of the most amusing 
 books in the language are those 
 which have undertaken to remedy 
 this defect. A translation of the 
 New Testament published in New 
 England in 1833^ by an Episcopal 
 
THE CHILD. US 
 
 clergyman^ exhibits in its intro- 
 duction the need of such a recon- 
 structed Bible. *^' While various 
 other works/' says the translator^ 
 ^^ and especially those of the most 
 trivial attainment^ are diligently 
 adorned with a splendid and sweetly 
 flowing diction, why should the 
 mere uninteresting identity and 
 paucity of language be so exclu- 
 sively employed in rendering the 
 Word of God ? Why should the 
 Christian Scriptures be divested 
 even of decent ornament? Why 
 should not an edition of the 
 heavenly institutes be furnished 
 for the reading-room^ saloon and 
 toilet^ as well as for the churchy 
 school and nursery ; for the literary 
 and accomplished gentleman as 
 well as for the plain and unlettered 
 citizen?" This is what this fine 
 writer essays to do, and a few 
 samples of the way he does it may 
 be instructive : 
 
 When thou art beneficent, let not thy 
 
 8 
 
114 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 left hand know what thy right hand 
 performs. 
 
 Contemplate the lilies of the field, 
 how they advance. 
 
 At that time Jesus took occasion to 
 say, I entirely concur with Thee, O 
 Father, Lord of heaven and earth. 
 
 Every plantation which My heavenly 
 Father has not cultivated shall be extir- 
 pated. 
 
 Salt is salutary; but if the salt 
 has become vapid, how can it be re- 
 stored ? 
 
 Be not surprised that I announced to 
 Thee, Ye must be reproducfed. 
 
 For this the Father loves Me, because 
 I gave up My life to be afterwards re- 
 sumed. No one divests Me of it, but I 
 personally resign it. I have authority 
 to resign it, and I have authority to re- 
 sume it. 
 
 There are numerous apartments in My 
 Father's temple ; if not, I would have 
 informed you. 
 
 This will serve as an illustration 
 of the kind of writing to which^ 
 for long periods^ we might have 
 been delivered^ if it had not been 
 for the better models always in the 
 hands of the common people^ of 
 
THE CHILD. 115 
 
 the strong and simple Saxon of our 
 English Bible. 
 
 Most true is the contention of 
 Matthew Arnold^ that although 
 the Bible is the book of religion 
 and the book of conduct^ we can- 
 not draw from it the religious and 
 the moral truth of which it is the 
 treasuiy unless we treat it as litera- 
 ture. Literature it is^ beyond all 
 controversy, and not science nor 
 philosophy nor theology. Grievously 
 do we abuse it when we take its 
 phrases as theological formulas, 
 and undertake to piece them 
 together in what we call systematic 
 theology. ''^To understand that 
 the language of the Bible is fluid, 
 passing and literary, not rigid, 
 fixed and scientific,' is the first 
 step," says Arnold, '^'^ towards a 
 right understanding of the Bible." 
 It is a step which many theologians 
 have never taken. If our Sunday- 
 school teachers could get posses- 
 sion of this truth, a good founda- 
 tion would be laid for a spiritual 
 
116 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 and vital theology. And then it 
 would be well to go a little deeper 
 and try to comprehend the fact 
 that all language is an instrument 
 which man has devised for himself 
 — a tool which he has fashioned^ 
 and is all the while reshaping for 
 his uses ; that it is necessarily im- 
 perfect and fallible — never^ at its 
 best estate, an instrument of pre- 
 cision ; and that the best we can 
 hope for is an approximation to 
 the perfect utterance in words of 
 spiritual realities. That profound 
 discussion of the nature of lan- 
 guage in the introduction to Dr. 
 BushnelPs ^^God in Christ" should 
 be carefully studied by every one 
 who tries to interpret the Bible. 
 In the application of what are 
 called the exact sciences — as, for 
 example^ in engineering — it is often 
 necessary to repeat measurements 
 or tests a great many times, and 
 take the average of results that 
 greatly vary. And in the expres- 
 sion of highest truth by means of 
 
THE CHILD. 117 
 
 human language the same method 
 must be employed. The thing has 
 to be said over many times^ in 
 many ways ; one analogy after 
 another must be suggested^ one 
 aspect after another considered, 
 luitil, by comparison and combina- 
 tion of all these impressions^ the 
 mind reaches something like a 
 complete apprehension. 
 
 If we find the writer (says Dr. Bush- 
 nell) moving with a free motion and 
 tied to no one symbol, unless in some 
 popular effort or for some single occa- 
 sion ; if we find him multiplying anta- 
 gonisms, offering cross-views, and bring- 
 ing us round the field to see how it looks 
 from different points, then we are to 
 presume that he has some truth in hand 
 which it becomes us to know. We are 
 to pass round accordingly with him, 
 take up all his symbols, catch a view 
 with him here and another there, use 
 one thing to qualify another, and the 
 other to shed light upon that, and by a 
 process of this kind endeavour to com- 
 prehend his antagonisms, and settle 
 into a complete view of his meaning. 
 
 This is an excellent statement 
 
118 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 of what is meant wlien it is said 
 that the Bible is literature, and 
 that it must be studied as litera- 
 ture in order to understand it. 
 
 But while the spiritual and 
 moral content of the Bible is 
 always the main subject of our 
 studj^ it is well worthy of our 
 attention also on account of its 
 literary form. It was the archi- 
 tectural splendour of his capital^ 
 no doubt^ that the poet was think- 
 ing of when he wrote : " Out of 
 Zion^ the perfection of beauty, 
 God hath shined forth." If the 
 beauty of architecture is one 
 medium by which He may be 
 manifested, the beauty of the 
 moving epic, the rhythmic ode, 
 the stately oration, the sparkling* 
 epigram, is another and a far 
 more perfect medium. The liter- 
 ary beauty of the Scriptures is not 
 an accident ; beauty is an essential 
 element of all Divine revelation^ 
 and as such deserves our most 
 reverent study. 
 
THE CHILD. 119 
 
 What Professor Moulton de- 
 scribes as '^ literary morphology " 
 is a matter of interest^ and the 
 attempt which he has made^ in his 
 recent volume entitled '^ The Lit- 
 erary Study of the Bible/' to give 
 us some account of the leading* 
 forms of literature preserved for 
 us in the Scriptures — to show us 
 
 how to distinguish one Hterary compo- 
 sition from another, to say exactly 
 where each begins and ends ; to recog- 
 nise epic, lyric, and other forms as they 
 appear in their Biblical dress, as well as 
 to distinguish literary forms special to 
 the sacred writers, 
 
 is one to which the attention of 
 all students of the English Bible 
 may well be called. But more 
 important than these technical 
 distinctions is the recognition of 
 the grace and loveliness with 
 which the language of the Bible is 
 often clothed. The power to dis- 
 cern this beauty needs to be cul- 
 tivated. '^ Consider the lilies/' 
 said the Master. The word seems 
 
120 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 to mean that we are to sit down 
 among them and study them^ to 
 pore over their loveliness until it 
 enters into our souls and takes 
 possession. I know not why so 
 many of the fair flowers of speech 
 are strewn upon the pages of the 
 Book of books, unless it be that 
 their beauty is meant to appeal to 
 our thought and to give us a 
 high and pure pleasure. Consider 
 these blossoms also. This is an 
 integral part of the Gospel of 
 Ood — the revelation of beauty. 
 He saves from that which is low 
 and base by offering us pleasure 
 in that which is high and pure. 
 '' Let each one of us/' says the 
 Apostle, ''please his neighbour for 
 that which is good^ unto edifying." 
 It is thus that we become the 
 children of our Father in heaven. 
 And the Book which above all 
 other books reveals Him offers to 
 our minds abundant pleasure in 
 the graces of beautiful speech. 
 It may be supposed that such a 
 
THE CHILD. 121 
 
 message as the Bible contains 
 could have been delivered to men 
 in language as tame and unimagi- 
 native as that of the Westminster 
 Confession or the Thirty-nine Ar- 
 ticles — that God's Bible might 
 have contained no poetry^ no 
 music^ no kindling eloquence. 
 But such a supposition could not 
 long be entertained by a tho- 
 roughly sane mind. The tnith 
 about God's love for man and 
 man's life in God cannot be told 
 in cold logical formularies ! the 
 words into which it is poured will 
 glow and burn; the sentences 
 which are charged with it fall into 
 rhythmic beat and reverberation. 
 The hope and joy and glory of it 
 are the best of it^ and these cannot 
 be put into logical propositions. 
 The creeds are not the Gospel^, any 
 more than the skeleton is the man. 
 The Gospel is not the Gospel when 
 it is separated from the forms of 
 beauty with which it came forth 
 from the heart of God. 
 
122 
 
 THE BIBLE AIS^D 
 
 The question how the children 
 who are studying the Bible can be 
 made to discern and enjoy this 
 beauty is one to which I am not 
 inclined to propose any definite 
 solution. The main thing is that 
 those who teach the Book shall 
 themsel^res be filled with a sense 
 of its beauty; out of the abun- 
 dance of the heart the mouth will 
 speak. It would be well for all 
 teachers to study Mr. Moulton's 
 book; but it would not be well 
 for them to burden the minds of 
 their pupils with the technical 
 distinctions of literary form. 
 
 To read the Bible with the 
 pupils — if one can read well — 
 selecting those narratives which 
 are most dramatic and those poems 
 which are most beautiful^ is the 
 best way of conveying to their 
 minds the sense of its beauty. We 
 read so much by chapters, and 
 study so much by scraps and sen- 
 tences that the sense of literary 
 unities is scarcely awakened at all. 
 
THE CHILD. 123 
 
 To read through^ at one sitting, or 
 continuously, with judicious omis- 
 sions, the story of Abraham, or the 
 story of Joseph, or the story of 
 EKjah, or the story of David, 
 or the story of Euth — not stop- 
 ping to make many expository 
 comments, and only pointing out 
 the defective ethical standards 
 which the stories often imply, 
 when they are judged by Christ's 
 perfect rule — would be a most 
 valuable exercise in a Sunday- 
 school class. The narratives can 
 be trusted to make their own 
 impression, and it would be diffi- 
 cult to find language more pictur- 
 esque or attractive than that in 
 which the Bible clothes them. A 
 little maid of seven, after listening 
 with interest to the reading of a 
 book of Bible stories paraphrased 
 for children, said, with a sigh, 
 ^^ Yes, that is good ; but I like the 
 real Bible better." 
 
 The readmg of the lyrical j)or- 
 tions of the Bible with young 
 
124 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 people a little more mature might 
 also be profitable. Such magnifi- 
 cent odes as the Song of Moses and 
 Miriam, the Song of Deborah^ the 
 Song of David^ should be read 
 through with the pupils^ and not 
 marred or belittled by a word of 
 passing comment. To return^ 
 after the readings and call atten- 
 tion to the music of the phrases^ 
 the march of the rhetoric^ and the 
 splendour of the imagery^ would be 
 judicious. But the principal 
 qualification of the teacher is the 
 ability to feel^ and to express in 
 his own reading the lyrical beauty 
 of the poetry. Many of the Psalms 
 and the Prophecies^ not a few of 
 the discourses of our Lord, and 
 notable passages in the Epistles 
 and in the Apocalypse^ can be 
 treated in the same way. The 
 arrangement of these poetic ma- 
 terials which Mr. Moulton has 
 given us^ in strophe and anti- 
 strophe, and in what he calls 
 lower and higher parallelisms^ 
 
THE CHILD. 125 
 
 while sometimes fanciful, is^ on the 
 whole^ very helpful to the appre- 
 ciation of the poetry, and would 
 greatly assist the teacher who 
 sought^ by such a method, to 
 convey to his pupils the beauty of 
 the forms in which the saving* 
 truth of the Bible is expressed. 
 
VII. 
 By 
 
 Frank C. Porter, Ph.D., 
 
 PEOFESSOR IN THE YALE DIVINITY 
 SCHOOL. 
 
VII. 
 
 The question liow far the results 
 of the historical criticism of the 
 Bible should be used in the instruc- 
 tion of children is^ for those who 
 accept these results, in part a ques- 
 tion of truth, and in part of expe- 
 diency ; but it is also in part a 
 question of profit, and in this 
 aspect I wish to consider it. The 
 historical criticism of the Bible 
 means the use of its books as 
 historical sources ; and this means 
 that the student does not value 
 the book simply as a book, but is 
 looking for something that lies 
 behind the book. The question, 
 not indeed of the right — let this 
 be taken for granted — ^but of the 
 worth of criticism, resolves itself^ 
 therefore, into the question, Which 
 is of gi'eater value, the book as a 
 
 9 
 
130 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 book^ or the historical facts 
 and persons behind the book? 
 Does critical study take us from 
 the less to the greater^ or from the 
 greater to the less ? If it leads to 
 the less^ we need not trouble 
 children and the world at large 
 with it ; if to the greater we must 
 offer the new treasure to all. We 
 cannot accept the historian's 
 natural answer to the question, 
 for his common thought is an over- 
 valuation of his work. To be 
 sure, the movement from fiction to 
 fact is a movement up^ but the 
 movement from truth to fact is a 
 movement down. It does not much 
 matter whence Shakespeare got 
 his stories^ and how much fact, 
 how much fiction they contain; 
 and the critic^ who must ask these 
 questions, should not suppose that 
 he is doing the greater thing in 
 answering them. Scholars wiU 
 analyse and excavate in the effort 
 to go back to Homer, and decide 
 whether he was one or many, and 
 
THE CHILD. 131 
 
 what was f act^ wliat fiction^ about 
 Troy and its fall. But the story is 
 worth more than the fact behind it. 
 It is the universal and the eternal 
 in Shakespeare and Horner^ not the 
 local and temporal, that we wish 
 the child to gain and to love. On 
 the other hand, there are great 
 events in human history, whose 
 significance far surpasses that of 
 their records, so that to make our 
 way through records to the facts 
 is to go from the less to the 
 greater. 
 
 Is the virtue of the Bible, then, 
 like that of Homer and Shakespeare 
 in that it lies in the book as books, 
 or is the virtue in the facts behind 
 the books ? It is in neither alone, 
 but is both in very different 
 degrees ; and upon the recognition 
 of this fact the solution of our 
 problem turns. It is worth while 
 to let children accompany the 
 historian as fast and as far as they 
 can, when the events and person- 
 alities of which a book tells are 
 
132 THE BIBLE ANI> 
 
 more profitable than the book 
 itself for teachmg^ for reproof^ for 
 correction^ for instruction in 
 righteousness. But the discovery 
 that every book in the Bible has 
 interest and value as a historical 
 source should not lead us to sup- 
 pose that this is the chief interest 
 and value of all alike. The his- 
 torical interest is^ indeed, now some- 
 what domineering. It threatens to 
 deprive us of the free and happy 
 appreciation of story as story, of 
 poetry as poetry, in its anxiety to 
 know facts. In an age of science 
 we must fight on every hand for 
 our aesthetic enjoyment, our spiri- 
 tual appreciation of things as they 
 are, because we are so possessed 
 by the passion to get back to things 
 as they were and as they came to be. 
 There is in the Bible much story 
 and poetry which is of value for 
 the spirit that is in it more than 
 for the facts that are behind it. 
 The Hebrew mind expressed its 
 religious sentiments and ideals by 
 
THE CHILD. 133 
 
 preference in imagery and narra- 
 tive. The Grospels teach us how 
 effective the parable may be as the 
 language of religion. And the 
 parable^ in a large senee^ is much 
 more extensively used in the Bible 
 than our prosaic minds readily 
 perceive. There will be, it is true^ 
 much diversity of opinion regard- 
 ing the question where the story^ 
 where the fact, is of greater reli- 
 gious value. Religion may demand 
 the actual where art would be 
 contented mth the ideal. But the 
 case is often clear. It is of far 
 more use for us to know the mind 
 of the writer of Job than the facts 
 or traditions with which he deals. 
 It is in the book that these get 
 their value. Of other poetical 
 books of the Old Testament the 
 same is time ; of Proverbs, of Ec- 
 clesiastes and of the Psalms. His- - 
 torical questions in the case of 
 these books are peculiarly hard, 
 for the very reason that their 
 connection with history is so 
 
134 
 
 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 slight. But books in the historical 
 form^ also^ may be more important 
 as books than as histories. This 
 is especially true when they are 
 not the work of individuals, but 
 are formed in a national tradition 
 and take into themselves the spirit 
 of a people's life. The stories of 
 the beginnings of Israel's history 
 are such products of the Israelitish 
 genius. This is the source of their 
 perennial charm. These products 
 of the youthful spirit of Israel are, 
 indeed, in our Bible, mixed with 
 the work of a later age and a dif- 
 ferent spirit. One must read the 
 prophetic apart from the priestly 
 narratives if he would feel the 
 breath of the dawn of the nation's 
 life. For this distinction we are de- 
 pendent upon the historical critic. 
 Let us by all means give to chil- 
 dren the advantage of this distinc- 
 tion in their reading of the Bible, 
 and let us explain it to them when 
 they ask for the explanation or 
 need it. But let not the critic 
 
THE CHILD. 135 
 
 spoil for us, young or old, the 
 chaiiii of these stories because he 
 does not know how much in them 
 is history and how much legend. 
 Let children read them as they 
 are, but see that they seize upon 
 their spirit, so that if questions of 
 fact afterward arise they may feel 
 that their treasure in the story 
 does not depend upon the answer. 
 But, on the other hand^ the 
 Bible records events that are in 
 themselves of the greatest reli- 
 gious significance, great as evi- 
 dences of the hand of Grod in 
 human history, great as causes of 
 progress and achievement in the 
 religious life of humanity. Such 
 events were the exodus from Egypt, 
 the establishment of the kingdom 
 of Israel, its division, the fall of 
 Samaria, the captivity and the 
 return of Judah. In and through 
 these events great movements of 
 life and thought were initiated in 
 which we are still borne onward — 
 movements significant not only in 
 
136 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 their ideal contents^ but in their 
 historical actuality. Whatever the 
 charm of the record^ the facts are 
 more impressive^ and we are more 
 concerned to know the facts as 
 they were than to keep the records 
 as they are. Here historical science^ 
 in passing through the records to 
 the facts, contributes to a larger 
 and truer faith in God. When 
 criticism pushes aside the over- 
 growth and brings to light some 
 hidden flower of rare beauty, its 
 work is of far greater value to the 
 spirit of man than when it proceeds 
 to pull the flower to pieces. Chil- 
 dren should be shown the flower, 
 for they cannot find it by them- 
 selves; but to the deeper know- 
 ledge of it loving contemplation is 
 a better way than analysis. 
 
 In the events just mentioned 
 certain actors appear — the prophets 
 — in regard to whom one hesitates 
 to say whether they disclosed the 
 significance of the events, or gave 
 the events their significance. 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 137 
 
 whether the events of these per- 
 sonalities were the more immediate 
 work of God. They were certainly 
 the supreme flower of IsraeFs reli- 
 gious lif e^ and it is one of the chief 
 contributions of historical science 
 to religious faith that it has given 
 us a closer view of these men. Yet^ 
 just here where the religious value 
 of historical methods is most evi- 
 dent, it is perhaps hardest to know 
 how to make use of them for im- 
 mature minds. 
 
 Behind the Book of Isaiah^ for 
 example^ stands the prophet Isaiah^ 
 who is greater than the book. Not 
 only for history^ but for religion^ 
 we value the book chiefly as a 
 means of acquainting us with one 
 of the greatest of the men of faith ; 
 and we are ready to do with the 
 book whatever will help us to reach 
 the man. But between us and 
 Isaiah stands the copyist, and back 
 of him the scribe. The Revisers 
 in their preface let us know what 
 hard work the copyists have made 
 
138 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 iis^ and how far textual criticism is 
 from having undone all their errors 
 in the Old Testament. But the 
 scribes have left us a still harder 
 task. Our Book of Isaiah is their 
 work, not his. They were wrong 
 in ascribing all this material to 
 him. Not only chapters 40 — 66, 
 but parts of chapters 1 — 39 cannot 
 be from Isaiah, nor from Isaiah's 
 age. If we would know him, we 
 must set these parts aside — ^not 
 that they are of less value for 
 history or for religion than the 
 rest, but that they are not of value 
 in the search for Isaiah. Further, 
 the events with reference to which 
 Isaiah spoke must be known, the 
 background of his time, and even 
 what came before and after, the 
 sources and effects of his hf e, if we 
 would know him. And, finally, 
 after all this preparation, there is 
 needed that sympathetic inward 
 response of soul to soul, by which 
 alone one man knows another. So 
 that our knowledge of Isaiah is 
 
THE CHILD. 139 
 
 conditioned on the one side by 
 much difficult scientific research^ 
 and on the other side by our spiri- 
 tual capacity^ our inner relation- 
 ship to him. 
 
 Of these two conditions of the 
 right understanding and good use 
 of a book of Scripture^ either one 
 may be over-estimated. If the 
 condition of scholarship is em- 
 phasized, we may be forced to 
 some such position as this. Chil- 
 dren and untrained persons cannot 
 follow the hard path just described, 
 even if they have a guide ; while 
 the uncritical reading of the book 
 mil surely lead them astray from 
 the true path. It is, therefore^ 
 better that they should not read 
 the book at all, but should receive 
 its treasures at second hand. Let 
 the historical expert, through a 
 highly special kind of skilled 
 labour, make his way into the 
 presence of the great personalities 
 of Biblical history, and get from 
 the vision and contact fresh moral 
 
140 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 and religious impulses whicli shall 
 become a part of his own personal 
 life. Then let him impart this 
 possession to others^ not as he 
 gained it^ but directly^ in the 
 language of to-day^ and by the 
 heightened power of his own per- 
 sonality. This result has actually 
 been reached of late by a young 
 German critic. But such inter- 
 vention of the scholar between the 
 Christian and his Bible is as in- 
 tolerable as the Roman Catholic 
 intervention of the priest. The 
 learned have^ as a matter of expe- 
 rience^ no such advantage over the 
 unlearned in gaining from the 
 Scriptures eternal life. Children 
 and childlike men are not less 
 fitted than others to apprehend 
 and appropriate the Christian re- 
 ligion^ but^ according to the testi- 
 mony of its founder^ they are 
 better fitted than the wise. 
 
 This brings us to the other 
 condition for the right use of the 
 Bible. If childlike himiihty and 
 
THE CHILD. 141 
 
 trust alone are needed^ the ques- 
 tion may arise whether historical 
 science is at all worth while, 
 whether it does not rather lead 
 one aside from the best uses of the 
 book. This, too^ has been recently 
 maintained in Germany.^ It has 
 been asserted that what the Bible, 
 as it is, offers to the simple and 
 true-hearted reader is everywhere 
 of far greater value than anything 
 that historical science, with all its 
 uncertainties, can discover behind 
 the book ; and that the search for 
 the less is a positive hindrance to 
 the finding of the greater. 
 
 I believe that in both of these 
 extreme views the difficulties of 
 the historical process are exag- 
 gerated. To be sure, path-breakers 
 in the historical field must be 
 rarely equipped, but less gifted 
 minds can pursue the path when 
 it has once been made, and can 
 recognise the truth of conclusions 
 which they could never have 
 * By Professor Kahler, of Halle. 
 
142 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 reached alone. The main concki- 
 sions of the critical school rest,, 
 not on matters of philological or 
 archaeological detail, but upon 
 considerations which appeal to the 
 common reason of men ; and in 
 proportion to their importance and 
 security are their grounds broad 
 and general and capable of popu- 
 larisation. The common mind is 
 more and more accessible to scien- 
 tific truths in their large outlines, 
 and its need is measured by its 
 capacity. 
 
 On the other hand, it is true 
 that the scientific study of the 
 Bible is only preparatory, even 
 when the preparation is quite 
 essential, to that inward apprecia- 
 tion, that sympathetic insight, 
 that response of feeling and will, 
 which is a matter of character, 
 not of learning. In the reading 
 of no other book does this factor 
 play so large a part. One will 
 find in the Bible what he has the 
 moral and spiritual capacity to 
 
THE CHILD. , 143 
 
 find. Yet the preparation is 
 essential. Historical criticism is 
 only the effort to answer the 
 characteristic intellectual questions 
 of our age. We cannot and would 
 not silence the questions. To 
 children they will be even more 
 natural and inevitable than they 
 are to us, and children have a 
 right to the best answer we can 
 give. It is not in point to say 
 that the past found the spiritual 
 treasure of the Bible without 
 asking such questions. For our 
 age they are vital questions^ and 
 they must have our attention^ 
 whether we are glad or sorry to 
 give it^ if the book is to keep its 
 old power and gain new power 
 over the heart and will of meit. 
 
 I would have the child study the 
 Book of Isaiah in such a way as to 
 find the man, beheving that the 
 sight of the man will call forth 
 admiration and love, and will be a 
 greater power in the child's life, 
 making for faith and righteous- 
 
144 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 ness, than the book as it is could 
 be. The heart of the Bible is the 
 Grospels^ and here our problem 
 centres. Here are books of match- 
 less beauty and power^ yet behind 
 them stands a person who is 
 greater than the books. His- 
 torical students cannot but try to 
 go back of the books to the 
 person. By a comparison of the 
 Gospels with each other^ they will 
 look for the actual deeds and 
 w^ords of Jesus ; by a comparison 
 of these with each other they will 
 search for His ruling thoughts 
 and purposes ; by a study of 
 His race and age they will seek 
 for the influences that deter- 
 mined the outward course of His 
 life, and the direction and form of 
 His teaching, that they may dis- 
 tinguish the new from the old, the 
 inward from the outward, the 
 spirit from the form. Yet, after 
 all their efforts to unveil behind 
 the Gospels the features of Christ, 
 what they see will depend upon 
 
THE CHILD. 145 
 
 what they are, the sight of Christ 
 being still, as it was when He was 
 on earth, the testing and the mak- 
 ing of character. And yet the his- 
 torical work is a help. The 
 clearer our outward vision of 
 Jesus, the easier is the inward 
 approach to Him, for it is often,er 
 true that intellectual difficulties 
 put obstacles in the way of the 
 impulse of the heart toward 
 Christ, than that the intellectual 
 view satisfies the mind and stills 
 the heart's impulse. 
 
 Children, then, should not be 
 deprived of the help that criticism 
 can give in the study of the Christ 
 of the Gospels. Indeed, the 
 teacher who reads the Gospels in 
 their relations to one another, and 
 who puts the life-work of Jesus 
 in its historical setting, will not 
 be able to teach the youngest 
 person without using, directly or 
 indirectly, the light derived from 
 these studies. At an early age 
 the life and words of Jesus should 
 
 10 
 
146 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 be studied by the comparison of 
 parallel accounts in the different 
 Gospels. The study of the Gospels 
 in their individuality should come 
 afterwards. The first search is for 
 Christ Himself. Let the peculiar- 
 ities of each Gospel be left aside at 
 firsts and let attention be given to 
 the material common to two or 
 more Gospels. The use of Stevens 
 and Burton's "Harmony of the 
 Gospels for Historical Study/' or 
 of Waddy's ^' Harmony of the 
 Four Gospels ""^ in Sunday-schools 
 is^ I believe^ advisable. The advan- 
 tages of such comparative study of 
 the Gospels are many. Most ob- 
 viously it brings us nearer to the 
 very words and deeds of Jesus. It 
 suggests the answer to many ques- 
 tions that perplex the child's 
 mind as well as the man's. It im- 
 
 * The Revised Version is used in both ; 
 the former gives important parallels in 
 footnotes which do not fall into aharmon- 
 istic scheme ; the latter gives aid to the 
 oomparison of the text in detail. 
 
THE CHILD. 147 
 
 parts the right view of Scripture 
 as a whole^ freeing the child at the 
 outset from that bondage to the 
 letter from which many have 
 broken away only to lose^ with the 
 letter^ the spiritual treasure which 
 is nowhere else to be found. 
 
 Further, the child should be 
 taught the outward and inward 
 conditions of the life of Christ. 
 He could early read such a book 
 as Morrison's '^ Jews Under Roman 
 Eule " with interest. And the habit 
 of viewing the life of Jesus in its 
 historical connections could easily 
 be formed. By such a view one's 
 sense of the uniqueness of Christ is 
 heightened, and, on the other hand, 
 the distinction between the form 
 and the spirit, between the temporal 
 and the eternal, in the earthly life 
 of Jesus is more readily perceived. 
 
 These two things the child 
 should learn — to find Christ in the 
 Gospels, and to find the Eternal in 
 Christ. When he has done this 
 he has solved in essence the 
 
148 
 
 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 problem of his religious life^ and 
 he has solved also^, in principle, 
 the lesser problem of the Bible and 
 its use. 
 
 The vision of the person of 
 Christ is the end of all Biblical 
 study, and by its relation to the 
 end all else is to be understood ; 
 the vision of Christ within^ but 
 behind and above the Gospels ; 
 within, so that He may be found 
 by one who reads the Gospels as 
 they are with a childlike heart; 
 but behind, so that if the veil of 
 writing be somewhat pushed apart. 
 His form will be more fully dis- 
 closed; and yet again above, so 
 that when we see Him and hear 
 Him as He was, we still need to 
 translate His words and deeds out 
 of a language of a certain age and 
 race into the universal language of 
 the spirit, that we may hear Him 
 speaking not to others but to us. 
 
 It is the great service of the 
 historical criticism of the Bible, 
 that of the Old Testament as well as 
 
THE CHILD. 149 
 
 that of the New^ that it gives help^ 
 which is to the modern mind 
 indispensable^ to the more direct 
 vision and deeper apprehension of 
 Christ. One to whom it renders 
 this service will not withhold it 
 from children^ and will not do 
 harm by its misuse. 
 
vin. 
 
 By the Rev. 
 
 Lyman Abbott, d.d* 
 
 ^ ^ OF THK '^J-^ 
 
 UKTVP/DOTT-.^ 
 
VIII. 
 
 I IMAGINE before me a class of 
 intelligent boys and girls from 
 twelve years of age and upwards. 
 They have studied something of 
 ancient history^ and know some- 
 thing of the growth of nations. 
 To this class of boys and girls I 
 address myself in this article^ en- 
 deavouring to tell them^ as far as 
 it is possible so to do within the 
 compass of so brief an article, 
 what the modern scholar thinks 
 about the construction and growth 
 of the Old Testament."^ 
 
 More than three thousand years 
 ago, before Virgil or Horace had 
 written their poems, or Cicero or 
 Demosthenes had delivered their 
 
 * Of course all scholars are not agreed. 
 The views here embodied may be defined 
 perhaps as those of the more conservative 
 of the modern school. 
 
154 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 orations ; before Csesar had crossed 
 the Eubicon^ or Alexander had 
 ridden Bucephalus^ or the Greeks 
 had met the Persians at the battle 
 of Marathon; yes, before Homer 
 had sung the songs which bear his 
 name, or Trojan and Greek had 
 met in battle about the walls of 
 Troy; when everywhere govern- 
 ment was despotism and religion 
 was superstition — there dwelt, in 
 most horrible form of slavery, a 
 singular people in a province of 
 Egypt. By a series of remarkable 
 deliverances they were set free 
 from bondage, and, crossing a 
 northern arm of the Eed Sea and 
 traversing the wilderness of Ara- 
 bia, encamped in a great plain at 
 the foot of one of the majestic and 
 awful mountains in the south of 
 the Arabian Peninsula. Here 
 their great leader and prophet 
 gave them their constitution. It 
 was at once political and religious. 
 It was very simple and yet it was 
 very radical. The Egyptians, from 
 
THE CHILD. 155 
 
 whose land this people had come 
 f orth^ worshipped a great multi- 
 tude of gods. Their learned men^ 
 indeed^ said to one another that 
 there really is bi^t one God^ and 
 that the deities whom the people 
 worshipped were but manifesta- 
 tions of Him^ if they were not 
 merely imaginations of the people. 
 This belief^ however^ they kept to 
 themselves. Moses^ by his declara- 
 tions^ made it the common faith 
 of the children of Israel. ^' Hear, 
 O Israel^' ^ he said, '^'^ Jehovah your 
 Grod is one God." He told them 
 further that this God was a 
 righteous God ; that He demanded 
 righteousness of His children, and 
 that He demanded nothing else. 
 This seems very simple to us now, 
 but it was very strange and very 
 radical doctrine in the world then. 
 Founded on this simple principle 
 he gave this people their religious 
 and political constitution. It is 
 known in Hebrew history as the 
 Book of the Covenant, and is con- 
 
156 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 tained in the 20th^ 21st^ 22nd and 
 23rd chapters of the Book of 
 Exodus."^ This^ with the possible 
 exception of a few odes and songs^ 
 is probably the most ancient 
 writing in the Bible ; it is cer- 
 tainly its most ancient teaching. 
 It contains the famous Ten Com- 
 mandments^ which declare that 
 the people should reverence God, 
 honour their parents, respect each 
 other's rights of person^ the family^ 
 property and reputation. These 
 simple principles it elaborates and 
 applies with a number of specific 
 illustrations. It contains no di- 
 rections to perform sacrifices, no 
 instruction respecting ritualism, 
 and makes no provision for a 
 priesthood. 
 
 The Israelites^ after spending a 
 number of years in the wilderness, 
 entered upon a campaign against 
 the inhabitants of Canaan and 
 
 * By some believed to begin with xx. 
 23, and not to include the Ten Command- 
 ments. 
 
THE CHILD. 157 
 
 took possession of their land. The 
 story of this campaign is written 
 in the Book of Joshua. There 
 followed a period of nearly three 
 centuries^ which we may describe 
 as colonial days, the story of which 
 is contained in the Book of Judges 
 and the first part of the Book of 
 Samuel. During this time there 
 was no true capital, indeed no true 
 nation. There were a variety of 
 separate provinces, having almost 
 as little common life as that of the 
 American colonies before the for- 
 mation of the Constitution of the 
 United States. In war these co- 
 lonies united, in peace they separ- 
 ated from each other again. At 
 length, weary of perpetual jealousy 
 and strife, and desirous to emu- 
 late the example of other na- 
 tions about them, they estab- 
 lished a monarchy, and David 
 came as the second king to the 
 throne. In many respects David 
 resembles King Alfred the Great 
 of England. He had a profoundly 
 
158 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 religious nature^ and it found ex- 
 pression in odes and psalms so 
 striking^ if not so numerous^ that 
 they have given his name to the 
 Hebrew hymn-book. He was a 
 great warrior, and in his early life 
 the leader of an irresponsible band 
 of outlaws, though always an in- 
 tense patriot. He had a pro- 
 foundly religious spirit, and a 
 capacity for statesmanship, and 
 a power of organisation very 
 remarkable. Under his forty 
 years of administration the co- 
 lonies were welded into one 
 measurably harmonious nation. 
 How this nation grew in wealth 
 and splendour, but not in real 
 prosperity, under Solomon, the 
 foolish wise king ; how it split 
 in sunder under his son ; how its 
 divided life was subsequently car- 
 ried on in two separate historical 
 currents, as the life of Israel and 
 the life of Judah; how the land 
 became the battle-ground of con- 
 tending nations — Egypt on the 
 
THE CHILD. 159 
 
 south, Assyria^ Persia, Babylon 
 and Chaldea on the east ; how at 
 last the Israelites were carried 
 away captive, dispersed, and have 
 disappeared from human history ; 
 how a little later the Jews, or 
 inhabitants of Judea, were also 
 carried away captive, but retained 
 their religious faith and their dis- 
 tinctive characteristics in the land 
 of their captivity, is told in the 
 Books of Kings and Chronicles. 
 And how of the latter there 
 returned, after seventy years of 
 exile, a number of immigrants to 
 rebuild Jerusalem and take up 
 again the story of national life, 
 the mere remnant of a nation, and 
 under adverse circumstances, is 
 told in the Books of Ezra and 
 Nehemiah. 
 
 During the progress of this 
 history there were two religious 
 forces at work among this people, 
 very much as during later history 
 in Europe. These two forces may 
 be characterised as the ecclesias- 
 
160 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 tical and the non-ecclesiastical^ the 
 priestly and the prophetic. In 
 European history the priestly ten- 
 dency was largely represented by 
 the Roman Catholic Churchy the 
 prophetic by the Eeformed or 
 Protestant Churches ; in England 
 the priestly by the High Church 
 party in the Established Church, 
 the prophetic by the Puritan and 
 Wesleyan movements ; in New 
 England the priestly or ecclesias- 
 tical by the Puritan Established 
 Churchy and the prophetical or 
 non-ecclesiastical by the Baptists^ 
 the Quakers^ and the Indepen- 
 dents. But in every church and 
 in every community both elements 
 are more or less to be seen— some- 
 times sharply separated^ some- 
 times closely commingled. 
 
 During the period of Jewish 
 history both these elements grew 
 up together. Moses had probably 
 at the close of his life delivered a 
 farewell address analogous in some 
 respects to the famous farewell 
 
THE CHILD. 161 
 
 address of Washington. Tradi- 
 tions of this address had been 
 preserved^ possibly in documents^ 
 more probably in oral reports. In 
 that age of the world oral tradition 
 was far more enduring and trust- 
 worthy than it is in our time^ when 
 we trust to written and printed 
 records in place of verbal memory. 
 In one of the great reformations 
 which occurred in the Jewish 
 history an unknown prophet^ de- 
 sirous to revive the moral . law and 
 re-establish its sanctity^ gathered 
 together these traditions and recast 
 them in a book which he called 
 " The Second Giving of the Law." 
 It was dramatically represented as 
 being Moses's farewell address, 
 though the author did not intend 
 to deceive, nor, in fact, did deceive, 
 the people of the age in which the 
 book appeared. This is the Book 
 of Deuteronomy, supposed to have 
 been written about eight hundred ' 
 years after the death of Moses. 
 It has very little to say about 
 
 11 
 
162 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 church observances and a great 
 deal to say about practical right- 
 eousness. It embodies the pro- 
 phetic ornon-ecclesiastical religious 
 teaching which had descended from 
 Moses and had been kept alive in 
 the nation by his successors. 
 
 Meanwhile^ a very different re- 
 ligious life had been developed in 
 this nation — the priestly or eccle- 
 siastical. From a very early period 
 in human history^ so remote that 
 scholars do not know when the 
 practice began^ it has been the 
 custom among pagan people to 
 express their religious sentiments, 
 whether of gratitude for the good- 
 ness of the gods, of penitence for 
 sin against the gods, of desire for 
 the forgiveness of the gods, or of 
 consecration to the service of the 
 gods, by sacrifices. Sometimes 
 these have been of great magni- 
 tude, hundreds of cattle being 
 slain at once. Not infrequently 
 human sacrifices have been offered 
 to appease the wrath or win the 
 
THE CHILD. 163 
 
 favour of supposed deities. The 
 Jewish ecclesiastical law accepted 
 this custom and embodied it in the 
 Jewish ritual^ but it made two 
 radical changes ; it declared that 
 the value of the sacrifice depended^ 
 not on the value of the article 
 sacrificed^ but on the spirit of the 
 person offering it^ and it laid stress 
 upon the truth that there was no 
 legal obligation to offer such ser- 
 vices^ that to be of any value they 
 must be the free-will offering of 
 the worshipper, and must express 
 his real and sincere sentiment. 
 ^'^He shall offer it of his own 
 voluntary will at the door of the 
 tabernacle of the congregation 
 before the Lord," was the funda- 
 mental provision of the ecclesias- 
 tical code. But as time went on 
 these sacrifices, which at first were 
 very simple, grew more and more 
 elaborate. A temple was con- 
 structed where they were to be 
 offered. Probably at first custom, 
 eventually law, forbade offering 
 
164 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 them anywhere else. ^ At first a 
 father might offer for his family, 
 or a king for his people, but later 
 the priesthood took the whole con- 
 trol of the sacrificial system, and 
 no offerings were counted legiti- 
 mate except those which passed 
 through the hands of the priest- 
 hood. This code, which was nearly 
 a thousand years in growing up^ 
 was finally embodied in a series of 
 written regulations, most of which 
 were contained in the Book of 
 Leviticus, but some also in Exodus 
 and some in Numbers. This code, 
 so strangely different from the 
 simple moral law of the Book of 
 the Covenant and the second giving* 
 of the law — the Book of Deutero- 
 nomy — embodies the priestly or 
 ecclesiastical life of the nation as 
 it had grown up in and around the 
 Temple in Jerusalem during a 
 thousand years. 
 
 While this growth was taking 
 place in the prophetic and in the 
 ecclesiastical life of the kingdom. 
 
THE CHILD. 
 
 16^ 
 
 there was also growing up among 
 them a literature. The most 
 notable portion of this literature 
 consisted of sermons or addresses 
 delivered by men who were at once 
 preachers^ reformers and states- 
 men. They fulfilled this threefold 
 f luiction much as John Calvin did 
 in Geneva^ as Knox did in Scotland^ 
 and as the Puritan preachers did 
 in New England. The preacher in 
 a theocracy is the public counsellor 
 both of the ofiicers and of the 
 people. These sermons or addresses 
 — sometimes they were songs sung 
 to the accompaniment of a harp, 
 and often were poetic in their form 
 — were^ in the course of time^ 
 collected under the names of the 
 principal preachers. The book, 
 however^ not infrequently bore the 
 name of one preacher^ while it 
 contained utterances of several. 
 This is especially the case with the 
 Book of Isaiah and with that of 
 Zechariah. In such a case the 
 principal author gave his name 
 
166 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 to the entire collection. Many 
 of these prophecies are unintel- 
 ligible^ or -almost unintelligible^ 
 to the reader of our ordinary 
 English Bible^ because he does not 
 know the historical conditions 
 under which they were uttered. 
 His state of mind in respect to 
 them is like that of one who should 
 read Daniel Webster's reply to 
 Hayne without knowing that there 
 was a United States of America 
 and a threatened movement to 
 nullify the national laws, if not to 
 secede from the nation. 
 
 The hymns of the Jewish nation 
 which grew up through the long 
 period of its history from the time 
 of David, if not from the time of 
 Moses, down almost to the time of 
 Christ, were gathered together, 
 as in our day hymns in common 
 use are gathered together in hymn- 
 books. This Hebrew hymn-book 
 is known as the Book of Psalms . 
 I have no doubt that David con- 
 tributed some of the most beautiful 
 
THE CHILD. 167 
 
 ^^^^^opth:;^^?)^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY" 
 
 of these Psalms to the collection, 
 though this is doubted by some 
 scholars. But it is quite certain 
 that a majority of them were 
 written at a much later date, and 
 many of them while the Jews were 
 captives in Babylon, or after their 
 return to the Holy Land. The 
 other books of the Old Testament 
 would be classified in ordinary 
 literature, probably as helles-lettres. 
 How far those which are histori- 
 cal in their form have a historical 
 basis of truth we cannot now 
 judge. They are to be regarded, 
 however, as literature, not as his- 
 tory. Such is the Book of Euth— 
 a beautiful idyll of the colonial 
 days, illustrating the sincerity 
 and simplicity of woman's love ; 
 the Book of Esther — a dra- 
 matic story, illustrating woman's 
 courage and glowing with splen- 
 did patriotism; the Book of 
 Job, which has been well called 
 an *^^epic of the inner life," and 
 which some eminent critics have 
 
 J>^ 
 
168 
 
 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 characterised as the noblest poem 
 in literature ; the Book of Eccle- 
 siastes — in appearance a mono- 
 logue^ but in reality a dialogue^ in 
 which " The Two Voices " in man, 
 as Tennyson calls them^ the voice 
 of cynicism and that of spiritual 
 hope^ struggle for victory ; and the 
 Song of Solomon — a love drama in 
 which a maiden resists all the 
 flatteries and blandishments of the 
 king who would make her queen of 
 his harem, and remains faithful to 
 her peasant lover, to whom at last 
 she returns in purity and happi- 
 ness. To these must be added 
 the Book of Proverbs, a col- 
 lection of the wise sayings and 
 apophthegms which grew up in 
 the nation during the thousand 
 years of its history, and which took 
 the name of Solomon because of his 
 historic reputation for wordly wis- 
 dom. Had it been written by one 
 man, we might have described him 
 as the Benjamin Franklin of his 
 age and community. Finally, we 
 
THE CHILD. 169 
 
 must add^ last of all^ though the 
 date of its composition is uncer- 
 tain^ the Book of Genesis — that is^ 
 the Book of Origins. This was 
 written late in Hebrew history^ as 
 a kind of introduction to the his- 
 torical books. In it the author 
 takes the legends of a prehistoric 
 time as he finds them floating in 
 tradition of his own and other 
 nations^ and rewrites them^ writing 
 God and Divine truth into them, 
 somewhat as Tennyson took the 
 Arthurian legends and rewrote 
 them in " The Idylls of the King/' 
 sometimes interpreting moral 
 beauty which he discovered in 
 them, sometimes imparting to 
 them moral beauty which they did 
 not before possess. 
 
 This is the Old Testament. It 
 is a collection of Hebrew litera- 
 ture; it includes law, history, 
 hymjiody, drama, fiction, poetry 
 and moral and religious teaching ; 
 perhaps I might say sermons. Its 
 earliest important writing is the 
 
 12 
 
170 THE BIBLE AND 
 
 Book of the Covenant ; its latest 
 probably some of the Psalms. Its 
 Book of Deuteronomy is an elabora- 
 tion and amplification of the 
 political and religious instruction of 
 the founder of the commonwealth. 
 Its Book of Leviticus is an elabora- 
 tion of the liturgical code which 
 grew up during eight hundred 
 years or more of Church life. Its 
 literature is as various and as 
 splendid as can be found in that 
 of any other nation in an equal 
 length of time^ though not as 
 voluminous. And the whole col- 
 lection is pervaded by the great, 
 simple, inspiring, religious ideas 
 that there is one God, that He is 
 a righteous Grod, that He demands 
 righteousness of His children, and 
 that if they desire righteousness 
 He will forgive their sins and help 
 them to become worthy to be 
 called His children. This message 
 to Israel by its prophets, this 
 message of Israel to the world, 
 this revelation of God and His 
 
THE CHILD. 171 
 
 righteousness and His redeeming 
 love, constitutes the value of a 
 book which has not only no peer, 
 but nothing parallel or analogous 
 to it in this respect in the litera- 
 ture of the world, and makes it a 
 fitting preparation for the New 
 Testament, in which this revela- 
 tion reaches its climax in the life 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
LONDON : 
 
 W. SPEAIGHT AND SONS, PRINTERS, 
 
 FETTER LANE. 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 
 
 
 
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