The Chvistian Taith 
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THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
Theology of the Old Testament. 
 By C. Piepenbring. (^I'75) 
 
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 with brevity and without exaggeration." 
 
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 The litigious Value of the Old Testament, 
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 — Biblical World. 
 
 The Bible as Literature, 
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 The Prophets and the Promise, 
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 A study of Chapters I-XII. 
 
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THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 AND THE 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN M. THOMAS 
 
 PRESIDENT OF MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE 
 
 i 3 3 • » , 
 
 ' ' ' > » 1' 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
^'S 
 
 Copyright, 1908, 
 
 By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 Published, April, 1908. 
 
V. 
 
 ^0 
 
 THE CONGREGATION OF THE ARLINGTON 
 
 AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
 
 East Orange, N.J. 
 
 IN SINCERE GRATITUDE FOR INCREASING LIBERTY 
 
 OF PULPIT UTTERANCE 
 
 AND 
 
 TO THE FRIENDS OF MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE 
 
 IN EARNEST HOPE 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface ix 
 
 I. The Christian Faith and the Old Testa- 
 ment ....... I 
 
 Jesus the Man of Faith .... 2 
 
 The Old Testament the First Scriptures 
 of the Religion of Jesus ... 7 
 
 The Advantage to Christianity from its 
 Connection with the Old Testament . 12 
 
 The Injury to Christianity from its Adop- 
 tion of the Old Testament ... 26 
 
 The Old Testament and the Faith of 
 To-day 42 
 
 II. The Difficulty of Understanding the Old 
 
 Testament 51 
 
 III. The Five Points of Old Testament Criticism 66 
 The Trustworthiness of the Historical 
 
 Books 70 
 
 The Origin of Deuteronomy in the Time 
 
 of Josiah 77 
 
 The Four Sources of the Hexateuch . 82 
 The Gradual Growth of Hebrew Legisla- 
 tion 87 
 
 The Work of the Prophets in the Religion 
 
 of Israel 90 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IV. A Sketch of the Development of the Religion 
 
 of Israel to the Time of Amos . . 95 
 
 V. The Heightening of Tradition in the Old 
 
 Testament 120 
 
PREFACE 
 
 So long as Christianity remains a vital 
 religion, the Old Testament will be a book 
 of living interest and importance. The 
 Scriptures of the Hebrew people permeate 
 too deeply the distinctively Christian writ- 
 ings, and have affected too seriously the 
 fortunes of Christianity and the standards of 
 Christian conduct, for the adherents of the 
 religion of Jesus ever to put them aside as 
 none of their concern. The following pages 
 are an endeavor to set forth some of the 
 more important consequences, both for good 
 and evil, of the inclusion of Hebrew writings 
 in the Christian Bible, and to illustrate a few 
 of the practical consequences of the newer 
 views concerning the Old Testament. No 
 opinion could be more mistaken than that 
 which regards the criticism of the older books 
 of the Bible as an affair of antiquarians and 
 pedants, without influence upon practical 
 life. The truth is that the researches of 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 students on these subjects are bound to exert 
 serious influence upon current piety. The 
 author believes that this influence, on the 
 whole, will be found to be for good, and he 
 trusts that his pages will not only increase 
 information on topics of intrinsic interest, but 
 also open the way for the achievement of 
 larger rehgious good. Attempt is made to 
 show why many readers find it difficult to 
 grasp the message of the Old Testament, 
 and to present the salient facts of the modern 
 understanding of the book, which has opened 
 anew the eyes of many to its beauty and its 
 power. 
 
 Students will note the indebtedness of the 
 author to many recent writers, especially to 
 Harnack's " History of Dogma " in Chapter I, 
 and to Wellhausen's " Israelitische und Jii- 
 dische Geschichte" in Chapter IV. The 
 editors of The Independent and The Homiletic 
 Review have kindly granted permission to 
 make use of material which has appeared in 
 their columns. 
 
 MiDDLEBURY, VERMONT, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT 
 
 The subject of the following essay is the 
 relation of the faith which came into the world 
 through the life and teaching of Jesus of Naza- 
 reth to the Old Testament, not in its origin, 
 but in its subsequent history. The attempt 
 is made to show how the Galilean faith has 
 been affected by the literature with which from 
 the first it has had an intimate connection ; how 
 it has been protected, guarded, and preserved 
 in life by it, and yet on the other hand modified 
 and transformed by its union with that litera- 
 ture, misunderstood, and misapplied through 
 the influence of Hebrew writings, hindered 
 
2 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 in its free course, diminished in its might, be- 
 cause of the handicap thus imposed; and 
 finally how the understanding of the Old Tes- 
 tament, which is open to modern men, sets 
 free the faith of the Nazarene for larger power 
 and even more beneficent work than it has ac- 
 complished hitherto. The Bible of the Chris- 
 tian religion consists of the Old and New 
 Testaments ; how has the New been influenced 
 by the presence of the Old alongside it ? Has it 
 been an advantage or an injury? If partly 
 gain, and in some respects loss, what has been 
 the service ? and what the damage ? Through 
 the marvellous new light that has been shed in 
 recent days upon the Old Testament, are men 
 in better position to receive only good from it, 
 and to appreciate more worthily the newer rev- 
 elation and the faith which it enshrines ? These 
 are the questions proposed for discussion. 
 
 JESUS THE MAN OF FAITH 
 
 If one were asked to describe in a single 
 phrase the founder of the Christian religion, 
 one would do well to call him a man of faith. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 3 
 
 His tender, beautiful love is not to be forgotten, 
 nor his loyal devotion to truth and to his friends. 
 His gentle kindness and sympathy, his magnifi- 
 cent courage, his marvellous insight into the 
 things of God and the secrets of the human 
 heart, enter into the might he has won over 
 our lives. But the source of these, and of 
 every quality for which we honor him, was his 
 quiet, unassuming, but unconquerable faith 
 in God as his heavenly Father, his Friend and 
 Helper every step of his way. He loved im- 
 partially and to the uttermost because of his 
 faith in the God who maketh His sun to rise 
 on the evil and on the good. He was a friend 
 to the publicans because he felt deeply in his 
 soul that God pitied them. He looked out 
 upon the fields, and they spoke to him, not 
 of agriculture, although he noticed its processes, 
 nor of beauty merely, though he was not in- 
 different to the lilies' fairness, but of God, 
 God's loving care for all his creatures. He 
 watched the fisher at his nets, the woman with 
 the household measure, the children in the 
 marketplace, and they were to him but sym- 
 
4 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 bols of his Father's truth. The whole world 
 was eloquent to him of God. The pure and 
 loving Father was to him the first reality of life, 
 more obtrusive in his thought than the hills 
 about his native village. His home was in the 
 spiritual realm. He was quickly done with 
 the things of Caesar, that again he might ren- 
 der to God the things that are God's. He trod 
 the wretched highway from Jerusalem to Jeri- 
 cho, and gave not a thought to its betterment. 
 He saw the miserable sewage disposal in the 
 valley of Hinnom, but made no plans for its 
 abatement. He was not a social reformer. 
 There is no evidence that the oppression of the 
 Roman angered him in the least. The cruelty 
 of Pilate in his murder of Galileans came into 
 his mind, but he employed the incident to en- 
 force the responsibility of the individual, not 
 to increase national feeling. Judas Macca- 
 baeus was a more earnest patriot than Jesus of 
 Nazareth. Patriotism was not his field, nor 
 sanitary engineering, nor road building, nor 
 political or social science, nor any other hu- 
 man interest, however important and excellent, 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 5 
 
 save the relation of the soul of a man to the 
 spirit of love that is over all things. 
 
 The religion of Jesus was faith, the personal 
 attachment of the heart to God. Among a 
 people burdened with religion as a system of 
 endless laws and regulations, or conceiving it 
 now and then under the summons of some enthu- 
 siast as a means of political enfranchisement 
 and material prosperity, he preached a mes- 
 sage to the soul of the individual. He gave 
 forth no doctrine as a rule and standard of 
 faith; he enunciated no laws as the binding 
 statutes of a new society. His teaching was 
 vital and inspirational, not dogmatic. His 
 commandments were such only in form; in 
 essence they were principles and truths of the 
 spiritual life. He was neither a lawgiver nor 
 a teacher of laws, but a messenger of life. He 
 taught the religion of the heart. He brought 
 men out into the open, out into the clear, free 
 air of personal responsibility, and the right and 
 duty of a man to make his own laws, and form 
 his own ideals, and live his own life in the fear 
 of God alone. ''Why judge ye not of your- 
 
6 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 selves that which is right?" is a neglected text 
 of the Gospels, but surely one of the greatest. 
 Doubtless the Master would hurl it at some of 
 his modern disciples, sometimes, when they ap- 
 peal to him for dictation on every little matter 
 of conduct and opinion, and lean cowardly on 
 him for all their views of truth and right. In 
 the lonely wilderness he fought with the powers 
 of darkness for his own truth ; why should not 
 we follow him there? Jesus would have no 
 man a slave, not even in thought. He sought 
 to make men free, and his religion is a religion 
 of freedom, no system of laws, no system of 
 ceremonies, not even Apostolic ceremonies, 
 coming between the free spirit of man and the 
 God whom alone he worships. 
 
 This was the truth of Jesus Christ, and his 
 gift to the world. It was founded on his faith 
 in his Father, the faith which was the mystery 
 of his being. His companions were dull to 
 his truth; the populace did not at all under- 
 stand it ; the learned and influential of his na- 
 tion scouted it ; the Roman would not take the 
 trouble to inquire into it: but he had seen it, 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 7 
 
 caught the vision of it a thousand times each 
 day, and built his manhood upon it, — " and the 
 rain descended, and the floods came, and the 
 winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it 
 fell not, for it was founded on a rock." ^ 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT THE FIRST SCRIPTURES 
 OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS 
 
 Jesus was a Jew, and was faithful unto death 
 to the religious system of his fathers. Within 
 the circle of Judaism he was remarkably free 
 and bold, criticising the practices and doctrines 
 of the leaders of his nation with great severity, 
 and with his magnificent "I say unto you" 
 practically supplanting many of the teachings 
 which had been received by them of old time ; 
 and yet beyond the circle of the Jewish system 
 he was unwilling to go. "Think not that I 
 came to destroy the law or the prophets," 
 he said to the fiery spirits who interpreted him 
 
 ^ Many of the parables take on new meaning when 
 studied as revelations of the Master's own personal life, 
 rather than as predictions of the distant future or teaching 
 for the Church. 
 
8 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 as a revolutionary innovator, "I came not to 
 destroy, but to fulfil." He had a sublime con- 
 ception of the worth of the truth which God 
 had vouchsafed to him, and not even his gentle 
 meekness prevented him from declaring that a 
 greater than Jonah had been sent to his genera- 
 tion, and that the children of his kingdom 
 excelled in privilege the last and most favored 
 of the prophets ; and he saw Satan fall as light- 
 ning from heaven when his disciples grasped 
 his message. Yet he said of his Golden Rule, 
 an utterance which declared his very heart, 
 ''This is the law and the prophets." He was 
 not consciously founding a new religion; he 
 was interpreting and enforcing the religion of 
 his fathers. To the last he was a pious ad- 
 herent in his own thought of the God of Abra- 
 ham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. "O Jerusalem! 
 Jerusalem ! how often would I have gathered 
 thee together!" tells the pathetic endeavor 
 of his life. "Go not into any way of the 
 Gentiles" was his instruction and his practice. 
 He read in the Scriptures of his people a far 
 nobler and more spiritual faith than was taught 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 9 
 
 by the scribes, and he gave his life in the interest 
 of that faith, which we call Christianity, but 
 which he called ''the law and the prophets." 
 In the exercise of that sovereign freedom 
 which our Master has bequeathed to us we 
 may declare him more of a revolutionary than 
 he pronounced himself. To us the Golden 
 Rule is not the law and the prophets, but some- 
 thing very much more and better. To us the 
 Sermon on the Mount is not the mere comple- 
 ment and interpretation of the teaching of 
 Moses ; it is the charter of a new religion. But 
 this is a truth which came only gradually to 
 light. The first disciples had no inkling of it, 
 for they went piously to the temple and per- 
 formed scrupulously all their obligations as 
 members of the Jewish commonwealth. In 
 reality they differed from their brother Jews 
 by tenets radically new and by a spirit as novel 
 as it was beautiful, but in their thought their 
 sole divergence was in their acceptance of Jesus 
 as the Messiah. Our Lord's evangel first 
 proved itself something new by the men it 
 made and the joy it created, and only afterwards 
 
10 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 was it recognized and declared a new religious 
 system. 
 
 In Paul the old and the new are strangely 
 blended. The pride of the Jew still lingers 
 in his accents, and his racial consciousness is 
 never lost. He argues as a Pharisee with the 
 Galatian disciples, while he seeks to impress 
 them with a faith utterly diverse from Phari- 
 saism. He declares that old things are passed 
 away, that all things are become new ; and yet 
 he reasons of God in terms of the clay and the 
 potter, as if Jesus had never taught the Father- 
 hood. '*We are the true Israel," he says to his 
 fellow-Christians, asserting with all possible 
 vehemence the newness of life through Christ, 
 yet calling it by the name of the narrow faith 
 of his youth. No one can be blind to the fact 
 that Paul was undermining the religious sys- 
 tem of his fathers, that he was the most violent 
 and effective of radicals; yet we must credit 
 his assertion that he felt himself the truest con- 
 servator of the old. 
 
 Christianity did not come to full self-con- 
 sciousness as a detached organism until after 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT II 
 
 the days of Paul. It is only in the Fourth 
 Gospel, in the New Testament, that we read 
 of ^'the Jews" as a detached, separate, and 
 hostile body. Long before that the Old Testa- 
 ment had become fixed and established as the 
 Bible of the disciples of Jesus. The Master 
 himself had nourished his soul upon the Scrip- 
 tures of his fathers, and his reverent attitude 
 toward them and practical, vital use of them, 
 taught his friends to treasure them. The 
 earliest preaching of the Church was based upon 
 the Old Testament. Paul is but an example 
 of the entire company of believers in his con- 
 stant appeal to the law and the prophets. The 
 proof from the Scriptures that Jesus was the 
 Christ was the first apologetic, and in the meet- 
 ing-places of the Christians the writings of 
 Moses and David were not less honored nor 
 less faithfully studied than in the synagogues 
 of the strictest Jews. 
 
 Thus the Old Testament became a Christian 
 book, and a full century before there was a 
 Christian canon to place beside it the conviction 
 was established that the Hebrew Scriptures 
 
12 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 testified of Jesus Christ.^ Looking back upon 
 the history, we cannot see how it could have 
 been otherwise. Old things do not pass away 
 and all things become new by the decision of one 
 individual or the resolution of a council. Al- 
 ways men take over their old furniture into their 
 new home. Our religion was the response of 
 men to the stirrings of the spirit of God, and 
 those to whom it was intrusted, being Jewish 
 men, could not do other than take Isaiah and 
 David with them into their new home of faith. 
 Necessary though this action was, it had 
 important consequences for the new religion, 
 which we are now to examine. 
 
 THE ADVANTAGE TO CHRISTIANITY FROM ITS 
 CONNECTION WITH THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 There was certainly one treasure of price- 
 less value which the early Christians secured in 
 their appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures, 
 and that was the moral law, the Old Testa- 
 ment's clear, emphatic enunciation of the fun- 
 damental requirements of right, together with 
 
 ^ John 5 39. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 13 
 
 enthusiasm and elevation of spirit in all mat- 
 ters pertaining to morals. To be sure, the Jews 
 at the opening of our era were not all paragons 
 of virtue. The thief and the robber, the ex- 
 tortioner and the woman that had had five 
 husbands, meet us on the pages of the New 
 Testament. The sins of the chosen people in 
 Christ's time were not exclusively the religious 
 vices of the "unco guid," but also the common, 
 dirty sins of the flesh and the evils that fasten 
 invariably to the greed of gain. Neverthe- 
 less the Jew had the advantage over the heathen 
 in the possession of the oracles of God, and he 
 was liable at every turn of his evil way to be 
 met by stern rebuke, by the precept of his fathers 
 which he had grossly violated, by a word of in- 
 tense moral enthusiasm from some old-time 
 prophet, in which the right was made as com- 
 manding as it is possible to be in human speech. 
 This storehouse of moral precept, this battery 
 of ethical force, the Christian disciples made 
 their own. They took seriously the idea that 
 they were the true Israel, and they applied to 
 themselves every commandment and every 
 
14 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 summons to holy living which they found in the 
 Old Covenant. 
 
 Toward the close of the primitive era Aris- 
 tides the Apologist made the following defence 
 of his Christian brothers to the Roman em- 
 peror. "The Christians," he said, ''have re- 
 ceived the commandments, which they have 
 engraved on their minds and keep in the hope 
 and expectation of the world to come : where- 
 fore, they do not commit adultery or fornica- 
 tion, they do not bear false witness, they do not 
 deny a deposit, nor covet what is not theirs. 
 They honor father and mother: they do good 
 to their neighbors, and when they are judges 
 they judge uprightly. They do not worship 
 idols made in the form of man : and whatever 
 they do not wish that others should do to them, 
 they do not practise toward others." ^ One 
 recognizes the Golden Rule, but equally clear 
 is the influence in clause after clause of the 
 Old Testament law ; and it is not too much to 
 say that the basis of the moral excellence by 
 
 ^ Quoted in Dobschiitz, " Christian Life in the Primi- 
 tive Church," p. XXV. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 15 
 
 which Aristides thinks to defend the Chris- 
 tians is the ethical teaching of the Old Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 When we remember that despite all its apol- 
 ogies and philosophies and purely religious 
 benefits Christianity has succeeded chiefly, 
 and been of principal use, through the honest 
 men and pure women it has produced, and when 
 we remember also that much of the moral in- 
 struction of the New Testament is but the ethics 
 of the Old transferred to the New, we shall ad- 
 mit that we are not likely to overestimate the 
 service of the Hebrew Scriptures to Christian- 
 ity in this particular. 
 
 The new faith had also many a spiritual, 
 purely religious, good from the older teaching. 
 It comforted the troubled and consoled the sor- 
 rowing with the words of the God of Israel to 
 his ancient people. It declared the help and 
 guidance of the Almighty in all the affairs of life, 
 his loving kindness and tender mercy toward 
 all who put their trust in him, in the same old- 
 time accents. The music of the Psalter accom- 
 panied the gracious words of Jesus in instilling 
 
l6 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 courage and hope into the Christians of the days 
 of Nero, and, taught not less by the Twenty- 
 Third Psalm than by the Master's own words, 
 they chiselled in the catacombs the rude figure 
 of the shepherd and the lamb. From the 
 earliest Christian times the pleading lines — 
 
 "Cast me not away from thy presence, 
 And take not thy Holy Spirit from me" 
 
 have wrought with the petition, "Forgive us 
 our debts, as we forgive our debtors," and with 
 the parable of the publican smiting his breast 
 in the far corner of the temple, in the produc- 
 tion of the humble and contrite Christian heart. 
 Through the Old Testament the new reli- 
 gion received also a noble and exalted doctrine 
 of God as the Father and Creator of the uni- 
 verse. In lofty eloquence the Christian proph- 
 ets and teachers proclaimed the monotheism 
 of the Old Testament, the God who appoints 
 the day and the night, at whose command sun, 
 moon, and stars roll on in harmony without the 
 slightest deviation.^ It was new doctrine to a 
 
 ^ "First Epistle of Clement," Ch. 22. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 17 
 
 populace nourished on the classic mythology ; 
 and not a little of the elevating influence of 
 early Christianity must in fairness be credited 
 to the monotheistic interpretation of the world, 
 which Christian teachers claimed as their own 
 truth, but which in reality was as old as Amos. 
 By its adoption of the Hebrew Scriptures the 
 religion of Jesus secured further the inestimable 
 advantage of the union of the sense of age and 
 permanence with the enthusiasm of a new reve- 
 lation. Any one can feel the mighty seething 
 of the revolutionary spirit as he reads the pages 
 of the New Testament, and catch the pervading 
 consciousness of living in the day of the world's 
 new birth ; but scarcely less obtrusive in early 
 Christian life is the feeling of union and co- 
 operation with the world-old processes of the 
 Creator of the heavens and the earth. The 
 men of the early Church grew great with the 
 faith that the whole drama of creation and of 
 history to their time was but the prologue to the 
 movement of which they were the leaders. 
 Their Master was the "lamb slain from before 
 the foundation of the world"; he was the force 
 
l8 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 spiritually effective at the time of the exodus 
 from Egypt ;^ he was "before Abraham," 
 and the literal descendants of the patriarch 
 were looked down upon as a modern people 
 by men who regarded their own ancestry as 
 going back to the time when the morning stars 
 sang together for joy. The Greeks were but 
 infants in their sight. Thus the Christians 
 walked the earth with a sense of the nobility 
 of their inheritance, with conviction of its 
 permanence as the oldest established institu- 
 tion of the world ; and they united this feeling 
 of stability and grandeur with the passion of 
 a new day of revelation which was burning in 
 their soul. 
 
 We may feel that the early Christians pur- 
 sued the subject of their antiquity with the zeal 
 that is commonly and humanly characteristic 
 of all searchers of pedigree, but it is beyond 
 question that the Old Testament gave them an 
 invaluable sense of continuity with the life of 
 the past. It bound them to God's long process 
 in the making of upright men, and tied them 
 
 1 I Cor. lo 4. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAiMENT 19 
 
 to the realities of the common earth. The 
 latter is a matter of greatest importance. The 
 Old Testament is a plain man's book, and it 
 deals with topics of everyday importance in 
 the common life of this planet. The burdens 
 of the poor and the oppressed are its burden, 
 the cry of the orphan is its cry, and the prayer 
 of the ordinary mortal, who knows his trans- 
 gression and whose sin is ever before him, is its 
 prayer. What we have called its history con- 
 sists largely of the stories of fireside and hearth. 
 Its prophecy is but the straight speech of men 
 fused to white heat by moral passion to men 
 who were their neighbors and companions in 
 business and toil. Its philosophy, if such we 
 may call Job and the Proverbs, is the non- 
 technical observation of common men, in the 
 forms and language of the family living room, 
 on the questions which rise up from the simplest 
 life; and the solutions are not philosophical 
 explanations, but simple, sometimes illogical, 
 conclusions of men of tact and good sense. 
 
 Revolutions always threaten to destroy them- 
 selves, and especially revolutions coupled with 
 
20 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 the flaming of religious zeal. Our old world 
 refuses to be reformed in a minute, and they 
 who undertake the task are usually consumed 
 in the fruitless fire they have kindled. Subse- 
 quent generations look back upon their efforts, 
 marvel at the amount of truth they perceived, 
 and wonder how so much of real insight, as 
 later recognized by the world, could have 
 failed of success. This is to forget that 
 enthusiasm can serve only as it yields itself to 
 die, while the truth which lives to bless continued 
 generations must fit itself in humble patience 
 into the life in whose modest rise it will be 
 content. 
 
 Few movements the world has seen have 
 run greater peril of dissolution in the wild 
 exuberance of fanatical enthusiasm than the 
 evangel which startled Galilee with the cry, 
 "Repent ye, the kingdom of God is at hand." 
 The ambition of the sons of Zebedee to sit on 
 thrones and judge the tribes of Israel will be 
 remembered. Nothing is more certain than 
 that after the death of Jesus the disciples watched 
 daily for his return to earth, in splendor and 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 21 
 
 great magnificence, and an ensuing dramatic 
 assize of all nations and peoples, together with 
 a new heaven and a new earth, the old creation 
 melting away in fervent heat. Even Paul was 
 not indifferent to such doctrine, was himself 
 caught up into the third heaven, and could 
 reason at times of heights and depths, prin- 
 cipalities and powers, the familiar objects of 
 current mystical enthusiasm. It is not to be 
 forgotten that the early Christians placed 
 alongside the parables of Jesus and the moral 
 precepts of Paul the grotesque imaginings of the 
 Apocalypse, with its horses and dragons and 
 weird and terrifying spectacles. In some sec- 
 tions of the Church the white and red horses 
 of the Revelation enjoyed greater vogue than 
 the parable of the prodigal son or Paul's poem 
 on love. We children of the modern world 
 pass over the spectacular and apocalyptic and 
 fix upon the moral and quietly religious ; but the 
 tendency of our brothers in the initial centuries 
 was just the reverse. 
 
 It was here that the Old Testament rendered 
 stupendous service. It was the Bible of the 
 
22 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 Church, the only infallible rule of faith and 
 practice for Christian lives until at least the 
 middle of the second century ; and while it con- 
 tained the Apocalypse of Daniel, it contained 
 also, and made much more emphatic and prom- 
 inent, the law of the Tables of Stone, the 
 spiritual and moral ardor of the Psalter, and 
 the stern, intense ethical insistence of Israel's 
 prophets of righteousness. A company of men 
 with such a handbook of rational and honest 
 living could not lose themselves entirely in 
 vapid speculations, and that they did not do so 
 is the lasting honor of the Hebrew Scriptures. 
 
 Proof of this statement is written clearly in 
 the fortunes of the Gnostics, who rejected the 
 Old Testament in the supposed interest of 
 Christianity itself, thinking if they could set the 
 religion entirely free from Judaism they would 
 enhance its power and worth. That their 
 schools went to pieces largely because of the 
 immorality that attached to them evidences 
 the steadying and purifying influence which 
 the main body of the Church received from the 
 Hebrew writings. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 23 
 
 The example of Marcion, who was not strictly 
 a Gnostic, but who like them sought to purge 
 Christianity of every Hebrew element, is simi- 
 larly instructive. One cannot refrain admira- 
 tion, in many respects, from the arch-heretic 
 of the second century, despite the blackness in 
 which Tertullian draws his portrait. He was 
 a layman, a wealthy ship-owner of Pontus, and 
 at the first was an orthodox Christian, recog- 
 nized as such by the Church at Rome. Of- 
 fended at the legal and ceremonial character 
 of current Christianity, and convinced by Paul's 
 letters that the Old Testament was not the 
 gospel, but "weak and beggarly rudiments," 
 he sought to reform the Church on the basis 
 of what he conceived to be Paul's teaching. 
 He held that faith, reliance on the unmerited 
 grace of God revealed in Christ, is the essence 
 of the gospel, and believing that the Old Testa- 
 ment was a stumbling-block in the way of this 
 truth, he threw it overboard, and taught that 
 the God of Jesus was a distinct and different 
 being from the God of Abraham and Moses. 
 Failing to persuade his fellow-Christians of this 
 
24 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 view, he toiled unselfishly and devotedly to build 
 up communities who shared his doctrine, spend- 
 ing time and money freely in the effort ; and de- 
 spite all calumny never till the day of his death 
 despairing of the ambition to win the Church as 
 a whole to what he conceived to be the pure 
 Christian doctrine. To his followers he taught 
 brotherly equality, freedom from all ceremonies, 
 and strict evangelical discipline. Redemption 
 through Christ, and that alone the gospel, was 
 his watchword ; and men converted by his teach- 
 ing were among the noblest martyrs whose blood 
 was the seed of the Church. 
 
 Had Christianity been able to take some of 
 the truth of Marcion, and to keep it to the 
 fore, how much of the barrenness of ritualism 
 and the corruption of materialistic dogma would 
 have been spared her ! But unfortunately she 
 could not discern the wheat, since the mass of 
 chaff was so great. Marcion gave over mono- 
 theism, the highest achievement of the reli- 
 gious spirit before Jesus, and taught two Gods : 
 the Jewish deity, the creator of the world, 
 jealous, stern, and cruel; and the Christian 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 25 
 
 God, the Father of Jesus, merciful, kind, and 
 gentle. He threw away the right of Chris- 
 tianity to a place in God's long process in the 
 establishment of His kingdom, and committed 
 the fatal error of dissociating his disciples 
 from the great God who rules the world and 
 holds all things and forces in the hollow of His 
 hand. For him there was no fellowship with 
 the God of creation, with the maker of the stars 
 and the king of kings. His Church was not 
 overthrown by the invective of Tertullian, but 
 by its essential weakness and its religious pov- 
 erty. A man must meet the Master of all 
 things and forces in the universe in his religion, 
 or his faith is vain. 
 
 The overthrow of Marcion is a testimony, 
 sufficient unto all time, that the law and the 
 prophets, from which Jesus drew the nourish- 
 ment of his soul, are an integral part of the 
 faith that redeems in his name. It is evidence 
 also of the incalculable service to Christianity 
 of the Old Testament, the book of one God, 
 the Maker of heaven and earth, the book of 
 common life and of plain men and women, 
 
26 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 the book of stern commandments unto right, 
 whose reverent acceptance is the beginning of 
 piety. 
 
 THE INJURY TO CHRISTIANITY FROM ITS 
 ADOPTION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 The faith of Jesus did not secure the Scrip- 
 tures of the Jews without payment of a price. 
 In appropriating inestimable advantages the 
 Church also received to herself much which 
 has done great harm in the long course of the 
 Christian centuries. It is not honest to recog- 
 nize the good which the Old Testament has 
 wrought in Christianity's behalf without at 
 the same time confessing in equal candor that 
 the Jewish portion of our Bible has been at 
 many points a stumbling-block to full accept- 
 ance of the gospel, an obstacle in the way of its 
 comprehension, and a hindrance to its largest 
 and most beneficent power. 
 
 The early Christians made the Old Testa- 
 ment in its entirety a Christian book. They 
 did not select here and there a Christian text, 
 a bit of a Psalm or prophecy, as one is inclined 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 2^ 
 
 to do to-day ; but they adopted the entire vol- 
 ume, law, history, and prophecy, as description 
 and enforcement of that which had occurred 
 in Galilee and Jerusalem. They found the life 
 of Jesus, and every truth which their souls had 
 received through Jesus, on each page from 
 Genesis to Malachi. They read in Samuel 
 and Kings, not the record of a preparation for 
 the coming of the Saviour, but the deeds and 
 teachings of the Saviour who had already come. 
 As Paul transformed the humane precept of 
 Deuteronomy, ''Thou shalt not muzzle the 
 ox when he treadeth out the corn," into a pre- 
 scription for the adequate payment of pastors 
 and teachers in Christian churches, denying 
 that it had any other reference, so every law 
 and institution was made to bear a Christian 
 sense. ''For us God saith it," ^ they declared, 
 not merely applying to their situation that 
 which had been said to them of old time, but 
 claiming it as primarily and exclusively their 
 own. " These are they which testify of Christ," 
 was their conviction, and while the words before 
 
 * I Cor. 9 lo. 
 
28 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 them were of Abraham and Isaac, Samson and 
 Saul, their minds were fixed on the Master who 
 had given his life in holy love. 
 
 For example, they read in the book of Zecha- 
 riah the prophet's vision of the high priest of 
 Israel standing before the Lord, and Satan 
 standing at his right hand to be his adversary.^ 
 The priest was clothed with filthy garments, 
 but the order came, " Take the filthy garments 
 from off him, for behold, I have caused thine 
 iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe 
 thee with rich apparel." It was an earnest 
 man's encouragement in righteousness to the 
 people of his own time, but the Church fathers 
 made it a declaration exclusively of the humilia- 
 tion and subsequent glory of Jesus of Naza- 
 reth.2 
 
 ''They have moved me to jealousy with that which is 
 not God; 
 They have provoked me to anger with their vanities," 
 
 said an old-time poet of the sins of Israel, but 
 Origen sees in the verse only a prediction of the 
 
 ^ Zech. 3 I ff. 
 
 ^TertulHan, "Against Marcion," III, 7. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 29 
 
 calling of the Gentiles/ Similarly the two 
 goats spoken of in the rubric for the day of 
 atonement are made to declare before the time 
 the divine and human natures of Christ.^ 
 
 A few examples give no adequate conception 
 of the completeness in which every verse was 
 made to bear a Christian sense. The fathers 
 found no narrative so simple, no text so tied 
 to particular circumstances, no chapter ap- 
 parently so far removed from all possible refer- 
 ence to Jesus, that it was not made to refer to 
 some portion of the Christian message. " Christ 
 always spoke in the prophets," ^ Tertullian 
 declared, and this indeed was the feeling of all. 
 Augustine even said, " God so accounted of the 
 Patriarchs, and at that time made them such 
 heralds of His Son, that not only in what they 
 said, but in what they did, or what happened 
 to them, Christ is sought, Christ is found." ^ 
 
 The Old Testament was to them a revela- 
 tion of past, present, and future.^ It was their 
 
 * "Against Celsus," II, 78. 
 2 Tertullian, ibid., Ill, 7. 
 
 ^ "Against Marcion," III, 6. 
 
 * "Sermon on the Temptation of Abraham," sec. 7. 
 ^ Harnack, "Dogmengeschichte," I, p. 166. 
 
30 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 book of devotion and practical guidance, as 
 well as their arsenal of texts against unbe- 
 lievers. They found in it what they wished 
 to find, for all conceivable purposes ; and every 
 question of doctrine and conduct was deter- 
 mined by appeal to a passage from the proph- 
 ets, turned to a Christian purpose by allegory. 
 Teachers were highly prized who had the 
 ability to force some new and pertinent appli- 
 cation to a case in hand from Moses or Isaiah. 
 
 One can but admire the enthusiasm and 
 strength of Christian conviction which enabled 
 these early servants of Jesus to find their truth 
 in the most unlikely places, and to wring from 
 the stubbornest language testimony to the life 
 which was their joy and strength. A new and 
 mighty power had reached into their lives, and 
 they were so transformed and uplifted by it, 
 that the dullest page put into their hands was 
 suffused with the truth and the glory their souls 
 had caught from Jesus Christ. 
 
 There were many, however, who could not 
 follow this method of scriptural interpretation. 
 Marcion was one of these, and it was because 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 31 
 
 he could not allegorize the Old Testament that 
 he determined to discard it. His followers 
 were numerous, a large company of earnest 
 folk to whom the Hebrew Scriptures, as alle- 
 gorized by the Church, were a stumbling-block. 
 The Manichaeans won St. Augustine, in part 
 at least, by asking him hard questions from 
 the Old Testament. ''Is God bounded by a 
 bodily shape, and has He hair and nails? 
 Are they to be esteemed righteous, who had 
 many wives at once, and did kill men, and 
 sacrificed living creatures?"^ After being 
 stirred to "an incredibly burning desire for an 
 immortality of wisdom" by perusal of Cicero's 
 "Hortensius," the Scriptures appeared to him 
 "unworthy to be compared with the stateliness 
 of Tully," since his "sharp wit could not pierce 
 to the interior thereof," ^ i.e. could not discern 
 the figurative sense. Augustine was per- 
 suaded later of the truth of the allegorical 
 method of interpretation and was thereby recon- 
 ciled to Moses and the Prophets ; but no man 
 
 * "Confessions," Bk. Ill, 12. 
 2 Ibid., Bk. Ill, 7, 9. 
 
32 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 knows how many were not so persuaded, who 
 refused to let their imaginations run wild in the 
 fantasies of allegory, and who were therefore 
 lost to the Church through the Old Testament. 
 Almost as serious, however, were the conse- 
 quences to those who adopted the allegorical 
 method of interpretation and were loyal to the 
 Church. Their imaginations were encouraged 
 to all manner of eccentricities, and they cor- 
 rupted their minds by learning to extract petty 
 pious lessons from the six wings of the sera- 
 phim and the frogs that fouled the waters of 
 Egypt. The zeal of the prophets was largely 
 lost upon them, for they were persuaded, in the 
 words of Origen, "that those prophecies which 
 were delivered either concerning Egypt and the 
 Egyptians, or Babylonia and the Babylonians, 
 and Sidon and the Sidonians, are not to be 
 understood as spoken of that Egypt which is 
 situated on the earth, or of the earthly Babylon, 
 Tyre, or Sidon." ^ It matters little to the 
 present purpose how they understood the 
 words of Jeremiah and Ezekiel; the essential 
 
 1 "De Principiis," IV, i, 22. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 33 
 
 fact is that the great acts of God in the days of 
 their fathers, and the exalted and heroic truth 
 of mighty men who threw all their soul into the 
 terrible battles of their time, were utterly un- 
 noticed, and the prophets' burning words dis- 
 solved into patterns and shadows. They lost 
 Isaiah for the sake of a flimsy argument for the 
 Trinity. 
 
 They lost also the ethical force of many com- 
 mandments and the spiritual impetus from 
 many of the sublimest passages of the New 
 Testament as well as of the Old. Whatever 
 was not found true or useful in its natural sense 
 in either Old or New was effeminated into a 
 spiritual sense. "Salute no man by the way," 
 said Jesus. "There are simple individuals," 
 exclaims Origen, "who think that our Saviour 
 gave this command to his apostles!"^ The 
 learned father continues that the Master can- 
 not have intended the order to have neither 
 two coats nor shoes, since there are countries 
 of rigorous winter, where such a commandment 
 would be cruel : and likewise he explains away 
 
 1 "De Principiis," IV, i, 18. 
 
34 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 all force from the precept to turn the left cheek 
 also by the observation that one is naturally 
 struck on the left cheek first, since the other 
 fellow is pretty apt to be right-handed. As to 
 offence through the right eye, he declares it 
 impossible that, when there are two eyes that 
 see, the responsibility for the offence should be 
 transferred to one eye, and that the right one. 
 Thus the dangerous practice of deriving from 
 texts that which may edify, despite their real 
 meaning, which arose from the resolution to 
 make the Old Testament a Christian book, 
 resulted in blindness to large elements of the 
 truth and spirit of Jesus Christ. 
 
 It is a pitiable thing when one is trivial in 
 the presence of the sublime. To pass through 
 halls and chambers eloquent of the deeds of 
 mighty dead, and to give one's energy to work- 
 ing out a puzzle in a decoration or in the pattern 
 of a bit of embroidery, is a sad lapse from man- 
 hood. It was a tragedy when the early Church 
 forsook the strictly literal interpretation of the 
 records of the heroes of faith, and for the plain, 
 historical picture of their lives and testimonies 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 35 
 
 exchanged a puzzle of miraculous prediction 
 and of history before the time. Such a step 
 may have been necessary to the adoption of the 
 Old Testament by the Church; it may have 
 been good defensive tactics at the moment. 
 But in this generation there is no reason 
 why the errors involved in the procedure 
 should not be exposed, and repented of and 
 forsaken by all who have light to see them. 
 To this day minds naturally alert and pene- 
 trating are befogged and confused by their en- 
 deavors to read the whole New Testament into 
 the Old, and then out of it. Men's reasoning 
 faculties are perverted by the imagination 
 that the grace which God created new and glo- 
 rious in the soul of Jesus Christ, that the truth 
 which the Nazarene struggled for with demons, 
 and which he drew in from the nestling love 
 of little babes, — that this grace which was 
 vitally achieved by the Son of God can be 
 worked out through the fringes and colors of 
 the curtains, and the silver and gold of the orna- 
 ments, of a Hebrew priest's prescription for a 
 shrine. 
 
36 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 For nearly twenty centuries the Church has 
 been trying to make a book mean what it does 
 not mean, and to turn the law which was a 
 schoolmaster to lead to Christ into the very 
 portrait of his glory. The damage from the 
 endeavor has been great. When one considers 
 how much has been wrought in the name of 
 the Nazarene which is utterly foreign to his 
 spirit, — the persecutions, the liturgies, the 
 relics, the images, the philosophies, — who 
 shall say what measure of the responsibility 
 lies at the door of the allegorical method of the 
 interpretation of Scripture which the adoption 
 of the Old Testament introduced into the Chris- 
 tian Church ? 
 
 If Christian disciples had always made it their 
 practice to turn first to Jesus' own words, and 
 to those passages of the Epistles which reflect 
 his spirit most accurately, and had interpreted 
 remaining Scriptures by the light thus gained, 
 the injury would have been much less than has 
 actually been the case. But the allegorical 
 method made possible the tenet that both Old 
 and New, and all portions of both, were on the 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 37 
 
 same level of authority. The result has been 
 that much in the Old which is decidedly on a 
 lower plane than the parables and the Logia 
 of Jesus has been received as Christian teach- 
 ing, and carried out in life as though it were the 
 good and acceptable and perfect will of God. 
 Christianity has suffered ethically all through 
 its history, and receives moral injury to-day, 
 from the inclusion of the Old Testament in its 
 rule of faith. Many the men whose hearts 
 have been won by Christ Jesus, whose sincere 
 desire has been to follow his more perfect way, 
 who have descended to acts unworthy of their 
 faith, not in yielding to the lusts of the flesh, 
 but in loyalty to what they had received from 
 the Old Testament, and the idea that it was 
 God's final teaching. Some of the noblest 
 men God ever made have been less than their 
 best because they made Moses the equal of 
 Christ, and Abraham the equal of Paul. 
 
 The most serious blot on the character of 
 Martin Luther, perhaps the largest Christian 
 since Paul, was his consent to the bigamy of 
 Philip, the Landgrave of Hesse. Philip the 
 
38 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 Magnanimous, a man of courage and power, 
 invaluable to the Reformation in matters of 
 State, had contracted in early life a marriage 
 which proved unhappy. After sixteen years 
 of distress, in which, notwithstanding, his 
 wife bore him seven children, he resolved to 
 take to himself another consort. As a meas- 
 ure of defence against popular disapproval 
 he sought from Luther a public statement 
 that his act was justifiable, or, in case that were 
 impossible, a personal letter, as of a father con- 
 fessor, which might be used in case the storm 
 of popular anger rose too high. Luther had 
 no joy over the matter; the whole affair was 
 distasteful to him. Nevertheless he put his 
 name to the letter, and Melancthon signed it 
 also ; and their action to this day furnishes oc- 
 casion for taunt and sneer. But note the rea- 
 soning by which the fatal blunder was made. 
 The patriarchs, said Luther, as indeed Philip 
 reminded him,^ were bigamists. They took 
 
 ^Rockwell, "Die Doppelehe des Landgrafen Philipp 
 von Hessen," p. 24. Other theologians less honorable than 
 Luther advised Philip to deny his second marriage alto- 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 39 
 
 their plural wives, according to the record, with 
 the consent of God. Nowhere in the Bible is 
 there disapproval of their conduct, nor annul- 
 ment of the apparent precedent that in special 
 cases a man useful to God may have more than 
 one wife. So with his sound heart protesting, 
 but held to the deed by a false view of Old 
 Testament Scripture, he put the name of a 
 Christian prophet to consent to a prince's lust. 
 A man must of course be judged by the stand- 
 ards of his time, and it is doubtless true that the 
 question in the mind both of Philip and Luther 
 was not between bigamy and monogamy, but 
 between bigamy and something very much 
 worse. A second lawful wife in an age when 
 loathsome disease ran like an epidemic among 
 the princes of the Church ^ is comparatively 
 venial. But despite all extenuation, the blot 
 remains, a witness to the moral injury received 
 by a noble soul through a mistaken notion of 
 the authority of the Old Testament. 
 
 gether in public, on the ground that Abraham had denied 
 his wife before Pharaoh. Ibid., p. 74. 
 
 ^ Bloch, "DerUrsprung der Syphilis," p. 168. Quoted 
 by Rockwell, p. 3. 
 
40 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 All that we might wish otherwise in the char- 
 acter of Oliver Cromwell is described and de- 
 fended, in the Protector's own words, by texts 
 from the Hebrew Scriptures. With the curses 
 of the imprecatory Psalms upon his lips he 
 sought to do his duty as a Christian soldier, 
 and in the name of him who did not strive, nor 
 cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets, 
 he pursued his enemies relentlessly, giving no 
 quarter, sparing neither soldier, priest, nor citi- 
 zen. When the Scottish army of twenty- 
 three thousand was at last defeated, and the 
 ''chase and execution" had lasted for eight 
 miles until scarcely a fragment remained, he 
 declared, "This is the Lord's doing : it is mar- 
 vellous in our eyes." ^ No doubt he was a hero, 
 and served nobly the cause of liberty, but there 
 must be remembered also the massacres of 
 Drogheda and Wexford, and the bigotry of 
 Ireland, and the religious partisanship of Eng- 
 land, which to this day feed and fatten on his 
 name. In the guide-books there is scarcely 
 a cathedral or parish church in England in 
 
 ^ Prothero, "The Psalms in Human Life," p. 256. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 41 
 
 which Cromwell did not stable his horses and 
 defile the sanctuary, a warning to all saints that 
 if they would not have their piety unjustly cele- 
 brated, they must not fashion it too exclu- 
 sively upon the Old Testament. 
 
 It may be questioned whether the iron in the 
 Puritan had a Hebrew source. It would seem 
 that their strength lay rather in their conviction 
 of immutable redemption through Christ their 
 Saviour. But the failings of the Puritan were 
 Jewish limitations imposed upon their con- 
 sciences by imperfect views of Scripture. The 
 gallows in Salem, for which we still hang our 
 heads in shame, was erected by a text from 
 Exodus — "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to 
 live." 
 
 What Christian king going out to war, to 
 settle a matter of right by the murder of men, 
 has not appealed to Gideon's sword of the 
 Lord ! What stronger nation crushing a weaker 
 people has not salved its conscience by mention 
 of Joshua and the Canaanites ! Black men 
 writhe under the lash in Africa to-day in the 
 name of the curse of Ham ! Women of en- 
 
42 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 lightened countries are forbidden respite from 
 anaesthetics in their hour of agony because of 
 the doom of Eve. Parents excuse angry beat- 
 ings of their children by a text from Solomon. 
 It is not all advantage which the world and 
 the Christian Church have received from the 
 adoption of the Old Testament as authoritative 
 Scripture, and it remains to inquire whether 
 we are in position to-day, through better under- 
 standing of the Hebrew writings and their rela- 
 tion to Christian faith, to avoid the evils which 
 the fathers have suffered, while not forfeiting 
 our hold upon the good. 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE FAITH OF TO-DAY 
 
 It is impossible longer to regard the thirty-nine 
 books from Genesis to Malachi as a harmonious 
 revelation of religious truth and a uniform law 
 of moral conduct. In no literature which the 
 world possesses is evidence of development and 
 advance more clear and convincing than in the 
 literature of the Hebrews. The Old Testa- 
 ment is a report of progress, a faithful register 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 43 
 
 of the upward strivings of an earnest folk from 
 a very crude faith and a very rude ethic to views 
 concerning God and moral obligation which the 
 world still reckons among its chiefest treasures. 
 Both the crude beginnings, the fierce struggles 
 upward, and the exalted attainments are frankly 
 and honestly recorded. They do not follow 
 page after page; some of the noblest concep- 
 tions are to be found in the first chapter, as the 
 Bible is at present printed, and many of the 
 latest sections represent the creed and life of 
 narrow and petty days, far inferior to the glories 
 which had preceded them. Yet it is not diffi- 
 cult, with the means at present at command, 
 to unravel the story, and to trace the long, up- 
 ward journey by which a marvellously patient 
 God led His servants to the best it was in them 
 to conceive concerning the truths of the spirit. 
 It is not correct, therefore, to speak of the Old 
 Testament as if it were a unified system of 
 religious truth, or a consistent collection of 
 moral precepts. All manner of religious no- 
 tions and all grades of ethical teaching are in- 
 cluded in its pages. 
 
44 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 Once the eyes are open to this diversity and 
 unevenness in the perception of truth and right, 
 the power of the Old Testament for evil is 
 undermined. The crimes and blunders com- 
 mitted by appeal to its authority are no longer 
 justifiable to a Christian conscience. Mr. 
 Rowland E. Prothero tells of a British soldier 
 called ironically ''Quaker Wallace," of his 
 Majesty's Indian forces, who plunged into the 
 Secundrabagh like one of the Furies, and at 
 every shot from his rifle, and at each thrust 
 of his bayonet, repeated a line : — 
 
 "I'll of salvation take the cup, 
 On God's name will I call : 
 I'll pay my vows now to the Lord 
 Before his people all." ^ 
 
 Doubtless one should be grateful that " Quaker 
 Wallace" was supported in his duty, but sup- 
 port in that sort of duty is no longer afforded 
 by Scripture, nor by paraphrase from Scripture, 
 according to intelligent Christian understand- 
 ing. General sentiment has felt its way to dis- 
 criminative use of the Bible, and further grad- 
 
 ^ "The Psalms in Human Life," p. 364 f. 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 45 
 
 ual improvement of the same nature is to be 
 confidently expected. 
 
 When the modern view of the Old Testament 
 as a register of progress has its full effect, much 
 in our common morals that is below the best 
 enlightenment, and still more in the prevailing 
 religious conceptions, will find its correction. 
 Criticism bears no sword which can wreak 
 the slightest injury upon any truth which is 
 really true, nor diminish aught the force of any 
 law or precept which finds the conscience of its 
 own might. But criticism is full of destructive 
 power against the opinions of those who would 
 oppress their brothers in the name of God, 
 who would pray selfishly, who would worship 
 or keep the Sabbath for their own mean advan- 
 tage, or who think to confine the grace of the 
 Almighty in the puny channels of their own creed 
 or sect. Support of evils of which humanity 
 would well be free is removed by critical and 
 historical study of the ancient records, and thus 
 the injuries which have been received hitherto 
 through improper methods of interpretation 
 will be avoided in the future in proportion as 
 
46 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 the modern view of the Old Testament pre- 
 vails. 
 
 On the other hand, whatever of good the 
 fathers have gathered from the law and the 
 prophets is as open to us as it was to them. 
 "Thou shalt not steal" is not less authoritative 
 because Moses did not write it. "The Lord is 
 my shepherd" is not less persuasive of gentle 
 comfort for that David's piety was of a much 
 ruder sort. Both the commandments and the 
 consolations have a force of their own, inde- 
 pendent of all questions of authorship and time 
 of composition. Their compelling power is 
 due to the eternal truth and right embodied in 
 them, and as long as men live who need them, 
 they will speak with authority. 
 
 But it is not sufficient to say that in certain of 
 its truths and precepts the Old Testament is as 
 useful to-day as it was formerly, for the facts 
 are that the book as a whole is more useful, 
 that the men of to-day are in better position to 
 receive high spiritual benefit from it than the 
 members of any former generation. Through 
 our modern view of the book we may attain 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 47 
 
 sympathetic understanding of some of the 
 world's noblest spiritual achievements to a 
 degree impossible to them of old time. Being 
 a register of religious progress, the Old Testa- 
 ment allows us to stand by while the Almighty 
 forges the truth by which humanity has been 
 uplifted. We see the forces He brings on the 
 field, hear their awful crash, and watch some 
 hero as he takes the stand which men will 
 ever look back upon as one of the permanent 
 victories of the spirit. It were one thing to 
 receive a leaf of some heavenly Bible, fluttering 
 from the skies : but it is far grander to watch a 
 man, even to step as a brother at his side, while 
 he works out on this confused and stubborn 
 earth the truth writ into this human Bible, 
 which for its humanity is the more precious 
 word of God. That we may do in Elijah, who 
 selected the name of God for the forward push- 
 ing nations of the world ; in Amos,^ who placed 
 righteousness on the throne of the universe, 
 there to abide as long as men think and worship ; 
 in Jeremiah, whose accents, whose very visage, 
 
 1 Cf . Chapter IV. 
 
48 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 one discerns in the Nazarene, who after his 
 prototype was a man of sorrows acquainted 
 with grief. We have lost the arsenal of texts, 
 each of the caliber of every other, and with it 
 liability to many errors and sins ; we have gained 
 a truthful portrait of men in whose lives the 
 Almighty has fought His battles for the highest 
 spiritual truths yet discovered. 
 
 In gaining these men we have found also the 
 way to faith in these modern times. Faith is 
 not born of argument and demonstration, but 
 of life, made worthy by faith, that lifts other life 
 to its level. Men produce other men; syllo- 
 gisms and arguments are powerless to produce 
 them. Hence the great blessing of the newer 
 view of the Hebrew Scriptures, which makes 
 its men so real. Elijah is no longer a Chris- 
 tian who happened to live in the time of Ahab, 
 but the first of the prophets, his creed consist- 
 ing of one article, "The Lord ! He is God !'' 
 but that article believed with all his soul ; and 
 as we watch him in his fight, and pushing aside 
 the tradition to get at the plain truth, come into 
 contact with the man of him, the faith of his 
 
AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 49 
 
 fearless manhood takes possession also of us. 
 The Old Testament throughout is a book of 
 mighty men, mighty because of their belief, 
 and the possibility and privilege of sympathetic 
 knowledge of them, their problems and their 
 victories, is full of promise of good for the moral 
 and religious life of the generations yet to be. 
 
 The Old Testament is no longer our master. 
 One is our Master, even Christ. The Jewish 
 portion of the Bible no longer holds over us 
 the power to make us less than our best, and to 
 compel us to believe less than our highest truth. 
 The religion of faith and freedom for which 
 Jesus gave his life is no longer hampered by 
 the legalism and the petty ritualistic precepts 
 of Jewish Scriptures. The Galilean liberty 
 of the children of God stands out at last un- 
 trammelled of the encumbrances from which 
 for many centuries it could not deliver itself. 
 Prayers that were not perfect, which could 
 not be prayed to the equal Father of all men, 
 are seen to have been unworthy, although they 
 may have served as stepping-stones to the 
 prayer. Our Father. Commandments that 
 
50 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 were cruel, that were based on inadequate 
 knowledge, we cannot revere as the present will 
 of God. The miracles of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures, the stumbling-block of countless genera- 
 tions, take their place as necessary concomitants 
 of every collection of traditions of the old-time 
 world. But new miracles rise from their pages. 
 They are the men, who speak for God in accents 
 yet vital and clear. God was in those men, and 
 the book which enshrines their lives, no longer 
 a weight upon our morals or our piety, is our 
 servant, to teach us how God's truth came to be, 
 and it is the servant also of Jesus Christ, not 
 an obstacle in the way to him, revealing the steps 
 by which we may approach him in whom alone 
 dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead bodily. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE DIFFICULTY OF UNDERSTANDING 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 An unconyentional brother once enlivened 
 a church prayer-meeting with the truthful ob- 
 servation that if an ordinary Christian found 
 himself in a comfortable Pullman stalled on a 
 Western prairie, with reading facilities limited 
 to a last year's almanac, a Hoboken directory, 
 and a copy of the Bible, he would first exhaust 
 the almanac, next extract all possible interest 
 from the directory, and lastly, if the delay were 
 long enough, turn to the Bible. It is on record 
 that a certain African had persistence enough to 
 read the Scriptures in a jolting chariot on the 
 wretched highway from Jerusalem to Gaza, 
 but from the attention the matter attracted it 
 is evident that such conduct was as unusual in 
 antiquity as manifestation of like zeal would be 
 to-day. The Ethiopian, however, found the 
 book somewhat hard to understand, and in 
 51 
 
52 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 that respect his experience is duplicated all too 
 often in our own times. With something like 
 300,000 sermons on biblical texts preached every 
 week in the churches of the United States, 
 with over a million people teaching Sunday- 
 school classes, with books and pamphlets by 
 the thousand on all phases of Bible study, it 
 remains a fact that only the few have more 
 than the most general knowledge of the Bible, 
 while the great majority even of well-informed 
 people feel that their knowledge of Scripture 
 is sadly deficient. No subject is taught so 
 much and understood so little. If a tithe of 
 the pains which is now expended in endeavors 
 to imbue American youth with a knowledge of 
 Scripture were taken to obsess their minds with 
 the dramas of Shakespeare, ignorance of the 
 trap in which Shylock was caught would be 
 hard to find. Yet who does not know that 
 references to like prominent events in biblical 
 story are met with looks of questioning wonder 
 even on the faces of educated persons? 
 
 All interesting and intelligible books are 
 perused to-day with great avidity. If the 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 53 
 
 Bible is not read, and if large numbers are igno- 
 rant concerning it, the reason must be that it 
 is not found interesting, and it is safe to add 
 that the reason the book does not incite interest 
 is because it is not understood. I received a 
 confession the other day, deponent witnessing 
 about as follows: "I made up my mind I was 
 neglecting the study of the Bible, and I re- 
 solved to study it seriously ; I happened to open 
 up the book to Jeremiah, and feeling that there 
 was unexplored territory, which might offer 
 something new and agreeable, I began to read ; 
 but I was disappointed greatly; I could not 
 see what it was all about, and I soon gave up 
 the effort." 
 
 This confession declares the situation of 
 many persons, especially in relation to the 
 Old Testament. They do not read because 
 they are not interested, and they are not inter- 
 ested because they do not understand. 
 
 Now why should it be difficult for any person 
 of ordinary intelligence to understand the Old 
 Testament? Certainly not for the same rea- 
 son that it is hard to follow Kant's ''Critique 
 
54 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 of the Pure Reason" or Mr. Balfour's "Founda- 
 tions of Belief." The Old Testament is not 
 philosophical; its thought is not abstruse, its 
 conceptions are not abstract, its style is not in- 
 volved. There is not a sentence in Jeremiah 
 which is beyond the grasp of an ordinary mind 
 because of the depth or difficulty of the idea 
 which it contains. If any verse of the book 
 is unintelligible, it is not because what the 
 prophet would say is beyond ordinary compre- 
 hension, but because the reader does not com- 
 prehend what the prophet is trying to say. 
 
 For example, one reads that Jeremiah said: 
 "I see a boiling caldron, and the face thereof 
 is from the north." ^ Every one can picture to 
 himself a seething pot with spout pointing away 
 from the north, and the image is readily called 
 forth by the prophet's language ; but what he 
 means by it is not clear, and is not made clear 
 by his explanation, "out of the north shall 
 evil break forth upon all the inhabitants of 
 the land." Why this evil? Why from the 
 north? Why such uncanny imagery? It is 
 
 ^ Jeremiah i^^^- 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 55 
 
 not very easy even for the studious reader to 
 find an answer. Yet until one enters by sym- 
 pathy into the life of Jeremiah's day, and feels 
 with him the terrible army of the Babylonians 
 and their resistless march southward toward 
 Jerusalem, it is as idle to think to understand 
 his words as it would be to endeavor to extract 
 meaning from Lincoln's second inaugural if 
 one did not know that America was ever en- 
 gaged in a civil war. 
 
 Doubtless the dedicatory address at Gettys- 
 burg, to one as far away from the events of 
 1861-1865 as the men of to-day are removed 
 from the equally portentous times of Jeremiah, 
 would be as sounding brass or a tinkling cym- 
 bal. But given like knowledge of the Hebrew 
 patriot, and his words will be not less eloquent, 
 not less pathetic, not less inspired, than the 
 words of the modern martyr. Indeed when you 
 know them, there is a strange likeness between 
 these two — lonely men, pathetic men, sensitive 
 men appointed unto marked publicity, tender- 
 hearted men obligated to awful deeds. 
 
 The obscurity of Jeremiah, owing to the 
 
56 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 difficulty of arriving at a clear understanding of 
 the situation to which he addressed himself, 
 is a fair example of the obstacles one meets 
 on almost every page of the Old Testament. 
 There are gems of utterance, like the Gettys- 
 burg address, but no explanation of the occa- 
 sion on which they were delivered. There are 
 orations on public policy, whose elevation one 
 cannot mistake, and from whose moral fervor 
 the soul catches fire, yet their full force is missed 
 because sometimes their parts are disconnected, 
 while irrelevant and neutralizing sections are 
 thrown in, and the orderly thought of the whole 
 and the goal the speaker had in mind are not 
 brought into the clear. The mighty men of the 
 Old Testament were prophets, and they were 
 the makers of Israel's religion ; but their works 
 have come down to us in such fragmentary 
 manner, with such frequent breaches of chrono- 
 logical sequence, that the ordinary reader is 
 bewildered and confused, and no clear concep- 
 tion of the prophet's work results. The conse- 
 quence is that the only popular use of the most 
 essential books of the Old Testament is to 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 57 
 
 furnish a few texts by which it is thought to 
 establish the fulfilment of prediction, an argu- 
 ment for faith which is weak in itself, and be- 
 comes weaker the more one studies it, and which 
 has the disastrous consequence of blinding its 
 devotees to the true historical meaning of the 
 texts which it thus perverts. 
 
 If the statement that the prophetical writ- 
 ings are fragmentary, interpolated, and without 
 chronological sequence smacks too much of 
 subjective criticism, the difficulty of deriving 
 from them any idea of the orderly growth of 
 Israel's piety may be substantiated as forcibly 
 from the order in which book follows book. 
 Taking the minor prophets, one goes from 
 Hosea, a teacher in the great days of Jeroboam 
 II of Israel to Joel, who was one of the last of 
 the prophets, and who quotes from many of 
 them; thence back to Amos, who was the first 
 of all, preceding even Isaiah; thence to Oba- 
 diah, who had somewhat to say concerning 
 Edom in the days of the exile ; thence to Jonah, 
 who was not a prophet at all, but a literary 
 artist of the first magnitude and a teacher of 
 
58 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 toleration and of the equal Father of all men in 
 the late times of Israel's bigotry; thence to 
 Micah, a younger contemporary of Isaiah : and 
 thus from Isaiah to Malachi the reader is 
 snatched hither and yon, dragged forward and 
 backward over centuries, and confronted with 
 situations the most diverse. It is instructive to 
 note the dates of the several prophets, major 
 and minor, as their books stand in the Bible, 
 taking in each case the earliest probable date 
 of the predominant portion of the prophecy. 
 Beginning with Isaiah, the years before Christ 
 are as follows: 740, 626, 592, 168, 745, 400, 
 760, 450, 450, 700, 650, 600, 630, 520, 520, 540. 
 It is patent that from a book thus put together 
 it is impossible for the general reader to derive 
 anything like a consistent picture of the relation 
 of mind to mind and of the development of re- 
 ligious truth and practice. 
 
 The suggestion is near at hand that, since 
 many of the prophetical writings are equipped 
 with a brief introduction relating them to times 
 of particular kings, one has but to turn to 
 the historical books and secure from thence the 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 59 
 
 necessary background for the knowledge of the 
 prophets. It might seem providential that 
 the Old Testament offers both the original 
 documents of its growing truth in the form of 
 prophetic discourses, and also historical sum- 
 maries of the problems and events of each corre- 
 sponding period. One has not to proceed far 
 on this theory before discovering that the books 
 of Kings and Chronicles are utterly disappoint- 
 ing if one seeks to gain from them any real 
 knowledge of the situations to which the makers 
 of Israel's faith applied themselves. To be 
 sure, the historians have preserved a large 
 number of important facts, without which our 
 knowledge would be far smaller than it is ; but 
 as guide-posts on the way to correct apprecia- 
 tion of the means and the steps by which Israel 
 travelled her long road upward toward her 
 worthiest faith, these books of history are alto- 
 gether misleading. It is not too much to say 
 that Israel's historians have prevented true 
 understanding of their nation's greatness in the 
 case of countless thousands. With their monot- 
 onous comment on the ''sin of Jeroboam, the 
 
60 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 son of Nebat, wherewith he made Israel to 
 sin,'' they have estimated each generation for 
 over two hundred years according to its devo- 
 tion to one particular sanctuary, condemning 
 each king who did not worship at the prescribed 
 altar and according to the proper ritual. Such 
 a history no more gives a faithful account of the 
 real condition of things in Israel than would a 
 similar account of the history of New York 
 City since the days of Peter Stuyvesant, which 
 made chiefly prominent the sort of ritual prac- 
 tised in Trinity Church, and the measure of ad- 
 herence to it on the part of the various mayors. 
 The hopelessness of deriving a sufficient con- 
 ception of the character of Israel's kings, the 
 true nature of their piety, and the progress of 
 their people toward nobler life and worthier 
 ideas of God, from a history of this character, 
 must be evident to all. 
 
 The Old Testament as it stands to-day is 
 dominated by the priestly notions which pre- 
 vailed in the time of Israel's decay, two cen- 
 turies after the ages of its strongest life and its 
 clearest vision of the things of God. In the 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 6 1 
 
 year 458 B.C. Ezra the scribe came from 
 Babylonia to Palestine, and brought with him 
 the law of God. A reformation was enacted 
 in Jerusalem, in accordance with its terms, 
 and from the character of this reformation and 
 the dependence of the law upon Ezekiel, it 
 can be shown that the code for which Ezra 
 the scribe was so zealous had been composed 
 not long before in Babylon. This is the code 
 which shows least the influence of the prophets, 
 which is monotonously tiresome in ritualistic 
 prescriptions, which makes religion a matter 
 of altar measurements and curtain hangings, 
 and which teaches by certain implication that 
 to sacrifice is better than to obey, and that the 
 sacrifices of God are not a broken and a con- 
 trite heart, but the blood of bulls and of goats. 
 Leviticus is simply the priestcraft against which 
 Amos and Isaiah hurled invective, transformed 
 into law, and entitled with the name of Moses. 
 Yet it is precisely this legal and priestly 
 portion of the Old Testament which constitutes 
 its framework, which has fixed its chronology, 
 which has thrust its general scheme of the his- 
 
62 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 tory of the Hebrews and the origin and growth 
 of their religion into general acceptance and 
 belief. The popular notion of the Old Testa- 
 ment is the priestly notion, which Amos would 
 have resisted as strenuously as he opposed 
 Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, and which is as 
 far below the noblest piety of Israel as 2 Peter 
 is below the Gospel of St. John. It is due to 
 the code which Ezra brought from Babylon 
 that we think of Israel in the desert as a great 
 Church on a pilgrimage, with a shrine outrival- 
 ing in splendor the tomb of a mediaeval saint, 
 and a system of worship more complex and 
 costly than the most elaborate Roman Catholic 
 ritual. It is this priestly document which has 
 supplied Christian defenders of the faith with 
 the hopeless task of finding moral justification 
 for the slaughter of the Canaanites, for only in 
 the later writings are they exterminated ; in the 
 earlier accounts Hebrews and Canaanites live on 
 together in the same land many years. After 
 the teaching of the priests of Israel we conceive 
 that sacrifices and offerings were the most im- 
 portant matters God had to convey to His chil- 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 63 
 
 dren for well-nigh two thousand years, and we 
 naively suppose that this elaborate system of 
 ritual and ceremony, with the entire moral law, 
 sprang into existence almost in a day at the 
 beginning of the national life. Thus it has 
 been impossible to conceive of any develop- 
 ment of Old Testament religion, since accord- 
 ing to the theory the whole was present at the 
 beginning, and succeeding generations had no 
 need to struggle their way up into the truth, 
 but merely to obey a law which had come down 
 from Heaven. 
 
 Herein lies the chief difficulty of under- 
 standing the Old Testament. It is not the 
 largeness of the book, nor the remoteness of 
 its life, nor the oriental character of its imagery, 
 nor the obscurity of its ideas. It is unintelligible, 
 and therefore uninteresting, because one can- 
 not follow the development of its thought and 
 its religious conceptions. Its first rude be- 
 ginnings of belief in God and crude endeavors 
 to do His will are hidden in fragmentary 
 narratives in Judges and Samuel and in por- 
 tions of the Pentateuch. Its early days of 
 
64 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 strength and its magnificent rise to spiritual 
 religion are covered up in the obscure and diffi- 
 cult orations of the prophets. But in the times 
 of its decay, when the prophet had given way 
 to the priest, the records of its rise were taken 
 in hand by small-minded men who judged all 
 things by the petty ritualistic standards of their 
 time, and thus the priestly stamp was impressed 
 upon the whole. 
 
 The way to an understanding of the Old 
 Testament lies through criticism. The Old 
 Testament will ever remain an enigma and a 
 riddle until it is understood as a growth. It 
 will hold men back from their best estate in 
 piety and morals so long as they yield it hom- 
 age as alike the word of God in every part. 
 The common man must be taught to discern 
 between the diverse sorts of religious docu- 
 ments, which vary in historical trustworthi- 
 ness, and mislead often as to their origin and 
 their true position in the growth of piety. The 
 criticism which is now the exercise of the schools 
 must become the practice of the private student 
 who turns to the Bible for moral encourage- 
 
OLD TESTAMENT DIFFICULTIES 6$ 
 
 ment and religious illumination. The Church 
 must teach the Old Testament as the critics 
 interpret it, if her more progressive members 
 are to preserve their regard for Scripture. The 
 modern man understands only that in which 
 he can trace cause and effect, and knows his- 
 tory and biography only as progress and de- 
 velopment. Without criticism no history of 
 Old Testament faith is possible, and widespread 
 popular interest in the Scriptures, which above 
 others were written for our learning, waits 
 for fearless and earnest presentation, from the 
 pulpit as well as from the lecturer's chair, 
 of the methods and principles by which knowl- 
 edge of the growth of Israel's faith has been 
 attained. Critical use of the Old Testament 
 alone makes it intelligible, spares one the harm 
 which results from promiscuous adoption of its 
 precepts, and renders possible the benefit which 
 is theirs who work their way close to the creators 
 of the world's highest religious truths. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FIVE POINTS OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 CRITICISM 
 
 Despite all that has been said and written 
 concerning the newer knowledge of the Old 
 Testament, it is doubtful whether any large 
 number of intelligent readers of the Bible possess 
 a clear and accurate notion of just how the views 
 urged by modern scholars differ from those 
 which have formerly obtained. It is imagined 
 in some quarters that the sponsors of the newer 
 theories desire to secure relaxation for them- 
 selves and others from the strict requirements 
 which the men of old time deduced from the 
 Scriptures, and that the higher criticism is part 
 of a general movement in the direction of moral 
 laxity and religious indifference. It is doubt- 
 less true that motives of this sort have had 
 weight with some, but the movement as a 
 whole is too large, is too intimately mingled 
 with the intellectual currents of the time, and 
 66 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM ^-J 
 
 includes among its followers too many devoted 
 men of earnest godliness, to be attributed to 
 such unworthy impulses. Neither is it true 
 that there has arisen a company of men who de- 
 sire to pick and choose from the Bible that which 
 is in accord with their fancy and taste, setting 
 the rest aside as unacceptable. No scholar 
 has attempted to draw any line between that 
 which is inspired and that which is uninspired, 
 and certainly no one has any desire to make the 
 Bible any smaller, to remove from it any book 
 or portion of a book, or to alter its text and 
 change its meaning. On the contrary, there is 
 persistent and strenuous effort, especially on 
 the part of advanced students, to secure the pur- 
 est text and the most accurate interpretation ; 
 and the discovery of any additional sources of 
 information, like the Moabite Stone, the Tell-el- 
 Amarna tablets, or the Aramaic papyri of Ele- 
 phantine, is hailed with greatest delight. While 
 the idea of the supernatural which prevails 
 among progressive modern students differs from 
 that most widely prevalent in former genera- 
 tions, it cannot fairly be maintained that a new 
 
6S THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 attitude toward miracle has brought about the 
 remarkable revision of opinion as to the litera- 
 ture and history of the ancient Hebrews which 
 recent times have witnessed. It is more cor- 
 rect to say that men's ideas of the action 
 of God in the affairs of men have changed 
 through new insight into the Biblical history, 
 than it is to contend that a philosophical 
 opinion of the supernatural has reconstructed 
 the history. 
 
 All talk, therefore, about ''tearing the Bible 
 to pieces," "cutting it all out but the covers," 
 about "hostile critics," "enemies of the Bible," 
 etc., is beside the mark. We have to do in this 
 matter with a particular application of methods 
 which are prevailing in all historical investiga- 
 tion, with a specific instance of the broaden- 
 ing of knowledge in the entire field of the past, 
 with truer appreciation of how great movements 
 had their rise and great truths came to their 
 might. Given a history of Rome like that of 
 Mommsen, and students could no more help 
 working out a similar history of ancient Israel, 
 than American steel-makers could refuse to 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 69 
 
 change the methods of their industry after the 
 discoveries of Sir Henry Bessemer in England. 
 New principles of investigation are bound to 
 flow over from one province into another, and 
 what von Ranke called "going back of the 
 documents" has become so fixed a habit with 
 all investigators of the past that the ancient 
 records of our religion cannot possibly resist 
 their application. 
 
 It ought to be possible to summarize in brief 
 compass the results of the application of the 
 principles of historical science to the books of 
 the Old Testament, and to state with clearness 
 the leading facts in which modern students are 
 substantially agreed. John Calvin's doctrine, 
 radical in its time, won speedy vogue, in part 
 at least, because his system could be reduced 
 to the famous "Five Points of Calvinism." 
 An attempt to formulate five points of Old 
 Testament criticism may therefore be worth 
 while. We will take them up in logical order, 
 and attempt a brief consideration of their 
 outlines. 
 
70 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 I. THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE HISTORICAL 
 BOOKS 
 
 Criticism is so generally supposed to be 
 dominated by the spirit of negation and denial 
 that it may come with a bit of surprise to some 
 to have its first point headed "The Trustworthi- 
 ness of the Historical Books." Yet unless it 
 is clearly perceived that the starting-point of 
 the new construction of Israel's history is the 
 reliability of the records, the real character 
 of the movement will be misunderstood. No 
 one pretends to have any wiser information as 
 to what occurred in the times of Moses and 
 David than is furnished by the Bible itself, and 
 no one imagines that any recent discoveries 
 of monuments or manuscripts can do anything 
 more than supplement the sources of informa- 
 tion which have been available to all for centu- 
 ries. Some students have a way of writing 
 about "our sources" as if private avenues of 
 information were open to the elect ; such, how- 
 ever, is not the case, for even the archaeological 
 finds are speedily made available for general 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 71 
 
 use, and for the most part the newer theories 
 are founded upon passages which are perfectly 
 familiar, but whose real significance has been 
 unobserved. 
 
 It is a question of interpretation, of the force 
 and credence one thinks should be given to 
 passages which appear to be mutually contra- 
 dictory. Every careful reader must realize 
 that the Old Testament is a broadly tolerant 
 book, that it includes varying types of piety 
 and divergent conceptions of the history which 
 it recites. Leviticus is certainly not like the 
 Psalms, nor Joshua like Hosea, nor Isaiah like 
 Haggai. The older view of Hebrew religion is 
 based upon that type of piety which is most 
 prominent in the Old Testament, which is most 
 easily read from the surface; the newer view 
 is founded upon conceptions which do not 
 thrust themselves out so plainly, which are 
 hidden away in the historical books and in ob- 
 scure references in the prophets. The issue 
 is whether we shall take the latter at their face 
 value and interpret the views more emphatically 
 enunciated as a later understanding of the 
 
72 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 events, or whether we shall accept the construc- 
 tion of the history that lies on the surface of 
 the documents as entirely reliable, and explain 
 the passages which appear to imply another 
 order of events as best we may. The modern 
 view maintains that the references to religious 
 practices in the books of Judges, Samuel, and 
 Kings are perfectly frank and reliable accounts 
 of the religious customs and beliefs that pre- 
 vailed in Israel at that time, the best that men 
 knew in those days, and therefore that we must 
 frame our history of the religious development 
 of the Hebrew people accordingly, no matter 
 how radically it may force us to change our 
 views of the date and authorship of many of the 
 ancient documents and institutions. 
 
 One reads in the book of Judges of Gideon, 
 the leader of the three hundred who vanquished 
 the hordes of Midianites and made the "day 
 of Midian" proverbial.^ It is recorded that 
 Gideon made request of his soldiers for the 
 golden ear-rings they had taken in spoil, and 
 that he made an ephod, a molten image, of the 
 ^ Isaiah 9 4. 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 73 
 
 gold, and set it up as an idol in Ophrah, the 
 city of his fathers.^ There can be no doubt of 
 the loyalty to Israel's God of the man who fought 
 to the cry, '' The sword of the Lord and of 
 Gideon!" Not the slightest question is raised 
 as to his piety and good faith in making an 
 image in honor of his victory and for a religious 
 use. Gideon was the first man in Israel in his 
 day, and the conclusion would seem to be in- 
 evitable that the piety of the nation as a whole 
 was not at this time on a higher plane than that 
 implied by this ephod before which men wor- 
 shipped to determine the will of God. 
 
 One of the most enlightening narratives of 
 the Old Testament for the determination of early 
 Hebrew religion is the account of the idol 
 of Micah and the migration of the Danites.^ 
 The story is delightfully simple and naive, and 
 one cannot refuse the conviction that it reflects 
 in utmost fidelity social and religious condi- 
 tions in the period following the settlement in 
 Canaan. A party of five Danite soldiers, in 
 
 * Judges 8 24, 27. 
 ^ Judges 17 and 18. 
 
74 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 search of a new home for their clan, light upon 
 the abode of a certain Micah, in the hill country 
 of Ephraim. This Micah had a shrine in his 
 house, a graven image and a molten image, 
 sacred to Jehovah, God of Israel, and he had 
 also a Levite as priest. The five wandering 
 Danites seek the benefits of divination at the 
 hand of this priest, and are encouraged in their 
 journey, which, indeed, has a prosperous issue. 
 When they come Micah's way again, this time 
 leading the entire tribe, with six hundred 
 fighting men, to the new home they had pros- 
 pected, they return evil for hospitality, and 
 carry off with them both Micah's images and 
 his priest, and reply tauntingly as the outraged 
 owner of the idols undertakes to recover his 
 property, ''What aileth thee?" — the ancient 
 equivalent of, "What is the matter with you?" 
 The Danites are too strong for Micah, and they 
 set up his idols and establish his priest in their 
 new home in the extreme north of Israel, and 
 thus was founded the city we know from the 
 proverb, "From Dan to Beersheba." 
 It is clear as day from this story that in those 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 75 
 
 days any one who could afford it, and was pious 
 enough, could have a shrine in his house, sup- 
 port his own priest, and make use of images 
 and idols, without the slightest fear of offend- 
 ing the God of Israel. Religion was a private 
 matter, it was governed by custom rather than 
 by law, and it was exceedingly crude in both 
 doctrine and ritual. 
 
 One desiring to study thoroughly the religion 
 of the Old Testament could not do better than 
 to take the entire book of Judges, or the books 
 of Samuel, and make a study of the religious 
 beliefs and usages implied in their narratives, 
 not reading into them what is not there, nor 
 supposing that beliefs which are unexpressed 
 are to be taken for granted, but simply formu- 
 lating the system of religion to which those 
 books alone bear witness. The result would be 
 a very simple and crude form of piety, entirely 
 different from the fully developed religion of 
 Israel. It is the first point of Old Testament 
 criticism that this result is historically correct; 
 that Israel did come into Canaan with very 
 crude notions about God and His command- 
 
76 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 ments, and that the ideas of the nation for a 
 long time continued crude, only after centuries 
 emerging in the high faith of the nobler Psalms 
 and prophecies. Gideon did not lapse from 
 a nobler religion existent in his time when he 
 melted the ear-rings into an ephod; Jephthah 
 did not transgress any known law when he 
 sacrificed his daughter because of his vow to 
 the Lord; Samuel was not doing anything in 
 the least out of the way when he led a village 
 feast with a sacrifice in the high place near his 
 home ; Saul was preventing sin, not committing 
 it, when he had a great stone rolled before him 
 on the battlefield that he might himself make 
 sacrifices upon it. These men were doing the 
 best they knew ; they were serving God accord- 
 ing to the best light of their time: and the 
 inevitable conclusion is that Israel's religion 
 had a feeble beginning, and that the represen- 
 tation of the priestly writings and the later 
 historical books, which picture it as perfect 
 at the time of the entrance into Canaan, is the 
 idealization of a later time. 
 The early historical books, especially Judges 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM jy 
 
 and Samuel, are the true point of departure 
 for the understanding of Israel's political and 
 social life, as well as of her religion. It is 
 there we meet with documents most nearly con- 
 temporary ; and it is perhaps the greatest differ- 
 ence between the older and newer methods of 
 looking at the Old Testament that according 
 to the older view this period was a sort of inter- 
 regnum, a time of barbarism between two ages 
 of piety; while according to the newer view 
 these books are faithful witnesses of the early 
 life of Israel, and the period they describe was 
 the day of small things out of which the true 
 Israel came to be. 
 
 II. THE ORIGIN OF DEUTERONOMY IN THE TIME 
 OF JO SI AH ^ 
 
 If one admit this first point of Old Testament 
 criticism, the second inevitably follows. The 
 book of Deuteronomy prohibits all such altars 
 as those upon which Samuel sacrificed in his 
 native village and which Saul built upon the 
 
 ^ Cir. 621 B.C. 
 
yS THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 battlefield, and enjoins that all places of offering 
 outside Jerusalem shall be destroyed and defiled. 
 "Ye shall break down their altars, and dash in 
 pieces their pillars, and burn their Asherim with 
 fire." "But unto the place which the Lord 
 your God shall choose out of all your tribes, to 
 put his name there, even unto his habitation 
 shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come : and 
 thither ye shall bring your burnt offerings, and 
 your sacrifices, and your tithes." ^ A central 
 sanctuary, for all Israel, and that alone legal, 
 is the burden of the book so far as it bears upon 
 ceremonial practices. 
 
 But how could good men like Gideon and 
 Samuel have constructed images for the wor- 
 ship of Jehovah, and sacrificed on high places 
 where they pleased, had they been familiar 
 with any such positive prohibition of these 
 practices as that enunciated by Deuteronomy ? 
 The mighty agony of Elijah, the zealot for the 
 pure and undefiled religion of the fathers, was 
 because they had broken down the altars of 
 Jehovah and slain the prophets who ministered 
 
 *Deut. i2 3ff. 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 79 
 
 at them,^ — the very thing which Deuteronomy 
 commands. With Elijah's own hand the high 
 place on Carmel was restored, and there is 
 not the slightest evidence that he had any spe- 
 cial direction to build again this particular 
 sanctuary. On the contrary, the act was the 
 initiation of a reformation in which he hoped 
 to carry the entire nation. The argument has 
 the greatest weight that in the time of Elijah 
 the requirements of Deuteronomy had not 
 been conceived. 
 
 But in 2 Kings ^ there is a careful account 
 of a religious reformation which occurred in the 
 reign of Josiah, 621 B.C., which was brought 
 about by the discovery of a "Book of the Law" 
 in the precincts of the temple. It was long 
 ago observed ^ that the reformation which was 
 then enacted was precisely in accord with cer- 
 tain portions of the book of Deuteronomy, 
 and that only in that book are precepts to be 
 found similar to those which Josiah enacted. 
 
 * I Kings 19 10. ^ Ch. 22. 
 
 ' By Hobbes ; cf . Cornill, " Introduction to the Canonical 
 Books of the Old Testament," p. 50. 
 
80 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 The high places are destroyed, as Deuteronomy 
 enacts, and the pillars and the asherim are 
 burned and broken. The passover is kept, 
 precisely according to the book, and the very 
 temper and spirit of the reformation is that 
 enjoined in the Deuteronomic law. Since, 
 therefore, there is good evidence that this law 
 was unknown in former ages, even by political 
 and religious leaders like Samuel and Elijah, 
 Saul and David, and since it is very clear that 
 the law came into force at this time, and the 
 very prominence of Jerusalem is witness that 
 it never fully lost its force, the conclusion would 
 seem entirely justified that Deuteronomy had 
 its origin not long before the reformation under 
 Josiah, the king who made it effective. 
 
 This conclusion is measurably strengthened 
 by the Aramaic papyri recently discovered on 
 the island of Elephantine in the Upper Nile.* 
 These documents make clear mention of a 
 Jewish temple, with an altar to Jehovah for 
 meal-offerings and burnt-offerings, served by 
 devout and regularly constituted priests, in the 
 
 * Translated in The Independent^ Dec. s, 1907, p. 1385 f. 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 8 1 
 
 fifth century B.C. So far from this altar and its 
 sacrifices being in contravention to current 
 Hebrew piety, these Egyptian Jews wrote to 
 "Jehohanan the high priest, and his compan- 
 ions the priests in Jerusalem," in earnest hope 
 that he would help them repair the altar after 
 it had been broken down. Because of its 
 destruction these pious men put on sackcloth 
 and fasted and prayed to Jehovah, and their 
 wives became as widows. In no portion of the 
 Old Testament does there breathe a spirit of 
 more loyal attachment to the God of Israel 
 and sincere desire to obey His commandments 
 perfectly, and this goes to show that the law 
 of the central sanctuary had by no means the 
 force in ancient Hebrew piety which the book 
 of Deuteronomy would lead us to imagine. 
 
 This point is very important for the under- 
 standing of Hebrew history. The authors and 
 editors of the historical books judge the kings 
 and princes of their narratives by Deuteronomic 
 standards of moral and religious right. This 
 applies to the framework of the Judges, to 
 many of the narratives in Samuel, and especially 
 
82 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 to the books of Kings. It is owing to the Deu- 
 teronomic point of view that we learned in our 
 childhood of the "good kings" and the "bad 
 kings," each ruler being positively one or the 
 other, the standard in each case being obedience 
 to the commandment to worship at Jerusalem 
 only. It is only when one is aware of this point 
 of view of the historians, and judges their 
 work accordingly, that he is able to arrive at a 
 clear conception of the real course of Hebrew 
 history. Because so much of the biblical narra- 
 tive has been colored by Deuteronomic convic- 
 tion, the origin of the code in the time of Josiah 
 deserves to be called the second point in mod- 
 ern Old Testament criticism. 
 
 III. THE FOUR SOURCES OF THE HEXATEUCH 
 
 Deuteronomy is one of a collection of six 
 books which give the Hebrew account of the 
 beginning of the world and of the Jewish na- 
 tion, and trace the national history down to 
 the settlement of Canaan. The third point of 
 Old Testament criticism is that this collection 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 83 
 
 of books was composed from four different 
 documents, or collections of narratives, which 
 may be separated one from the other and in part 
 restored, though with serious omissions in the 
 restorations, especially in the earlier docu- 
 ments. 
 
 Every one has noticed that the early books 
 of the Bible are full of repetitions, and that 
 passages of different point of view and of di- 
 verse religious quality lie side by side. It re- 
 quires no expert knowledge to discern that there 
 is great divergence between the story of Joseph, 
 with its marvellous eloquence and its exceed- 
 ing human interest, and the sacerdotal enthu- 
 siasm of the minute instructions for the con- 
 struction of the tabernacle. The analysis of 
 the Pentateuch is founded upon just such large 
 and vital facts. It is not a question of vocabu- 
 lary and syntax, although students employ 
 observations in these fields as tests for minute 
 divisions. The real basis of the division into 
 documents is divergence in historical and reli- 
 gious point of view. Proceeding by these 
 criteria, scholars resolve the Hexateuch into a 
 
84 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 document composed by a Judaean historian (J) 
 about 850 B.C., an Ephraimitic history (E) writ- 
 ten about a century later, the code of Deuteron- 
 omy (D) about 621, and the priestly documents 
 (P), which were not completed until 500 B.C. 
 
 It has been the fashion with some who have 
 accepted this theory to say that it is of no great 
 importance whether one man or four men wrote 
 a book, since the book remains the same. It 
 may be urged that in a generation which for 
 the most part cannot tell whether Elijah came 
 before Joshua, or Isaiah before David, it is 
 of no sensational importance whether a writing 
 was composed 850 B.C. or 1200 B.C. It is a 
 mistake, however, to underestimate the prac- 
 tical consequences of modern views concerning 
 the Old Testament. The subject in hand is 
 not a trifling matter of the date and name of 
 a particular author; it affects unquestionably 
 one's idea of the character of some of the most 
 important books of the Bible, and therefore 
 one's belief as to how God accomplishes His 
 purposes in the world in which we live. 
 
 It is the modern view, not merely that four 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 85 
 
 documents were employed in the composition 
 of the Hexateuch, but also that the principal 
 document, which was used as a framework 
 and which impresses its views upon our ideas 
 of the entire history, is the product of the 
 priestly school of writers, and is therefore 
 dominated by the ideas which obtained in the 
 narrow and poverty-stricken days of Israel's 
 faith. This document had its origin a century 
 farther from the time to which it imputes the 
 laws it records than we are distant from the 
 days of Columbus. It is concerned with the 
 lower elements of religion, laws of diet, pre- 
 scriptions about clean and unclean, regulations 
 for a just and duly constituted priesthood ; and 
 with these are mingled a somewhat superficial 
 and mechanical notion of sin and forgiveness. 
 The deep piety of the Psalms and the moral 
 fervor of the prophets are on a distinctly higher 
 level than this priestly law-book, and the 
 relation of one to the other is not that of fee- 
 ble beginning and subsequent strength, but of 
 retrograde from a worthier life and thought. 
 Yet owing to its prominence in the Hexa- 
 
S6 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 teuch, and to the zeal and skill with which it 
 reiterates its views, it is precisely this writing 
 which most influences the ordinary reader. 
 The popular notions, as existent at this day, of 
 the origin of the Jewish race, the establishment 
 of the Hebrew religion, the beginnings of faith 
 in God and of His worship and service, spring 
 from this product of decadent Hebrew piety. 
 Convictions widely prevalent and of large influ- 
 ence on some of the vital questions of morals 
 and religion have the same source. The fresher 
 and more vital narratives of the Judasan and 
 Ephraimitic historians, from which one mJght 
 set out for a sympathetic study of the develop- 
 ment of religious thought and practice, are 
 passed over lightly; but the concise and sys- 
 tematic scheme of the priestly histories lingers 
 in the memory and forms the basis of religious 
 judgments, some of which do not contribute 
 to spiritual growth. The students who have 
 disentangled the narratives have done more 
 than work out a puzzle; they have enabled 
 those who will learn from them to find their 
 way through the latest and least vital stratum 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 8/ 
 
 of Hebrew belief to the more vigorous and 
 truthful convictions of earlier writers, which 
 have lain for centuries almost unnoticed. 
 
 IV. THE GRADUAL GROWTH OF HEBREW LEGIS- 
 LATION 
 
 Study of the law of ancient Israel reveals the 
 fact that the legislation of the Old Testament 
 w^as reached only through many enactments 
 extending over a long period of time. The 
 traditional view is that Hebrew law had no 
 history, that the entire body of law was miracu- 
 lously revealed through Moses on the summit 
 of Sinai. This is certainly contrary to expe- 
 rience, since law is invariably a growth, spring- 
 ing out of particular cases as they arise in 
 human affairs, and gradually systematized and 
 brought into a code. We think our Constitu- 
 tion was long in the making, when we read the 
 debates on its adoption; and yet Gladstone, 
 mindful of the generations which have labored 
 to produce other systems of fundamental law, 
 spoke of the American Constitution as springing 
 in a moment from the minds of its framers. 
 
88 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 There are plentiful indications in the Old 
 Testament laws that they too were long in the 
 making. A legislation given entire and at once 
 would be orderly and systematic, laws on sim- 
 ilar subjects being found together, and it would 
 be a unity, without duplicates. But we find in 
 the Old Testament a large number of dupli- 
 cates, as, for example, the Ten Commandments 
 both in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and we 
 have codes in different stages, showing difference 
 in moral and religious standard.^ Moreover, 
 since the discovery of the Code of Hammurabi, 
 the Babylonian king who lived about 2000 B.C., 
 it can be proved that the laws of the Hebrews 
 were many of them simply adopted from legis- 
 lation which had been the common property of 
 civilized peoples in the East for many centuries. 
 Out of forty-five judgments in the Book of the 
 Covenant,^ thirty-five have points of contact 
 with the laws which the French excavators dug 
 up at Susa some five years ago. The conclusion 
 is, not that Hebrew legislators slavishly copied 
 
 * Exodus 20 22-23 19, and 34 10-27. 
 ' Exodus 20 22-23 ^^' 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 89 
 
 Babylonian laws, but that Babylonian insti- 
 tutions had written themselves into the civiliza- 
 tion of the world, and that they were taken up 
 by the Hebrews from time to time in a free 
 spirit. 
 
 It were a trifling matter whether a few books 
 of law were written by one man or by twenty 
 men, at one time or during a long period, as 
 far as mere fact and information are concerned. 
 But study of Hebrew legislation in its origin 
 and growth reveals the fact that whatever is 
 unfavorable in our impression of Jewish law, 
 whatever breathes a spirit of narrowness and 
 exclusiveness and of smallness in the affairs of 
 God, comes from the later strata, when priests 
 were the only legislators. These narrow views, 
 these small prescriptions of acts required of 
 God, are projected back into the Mosaic period, 
 enunciated as if Moses were their author ; and 
 the result is that, with such notions of early 
 Hebrew life in our minds, a true understanding 
 of the growth and development of Hebrew law 
 and religion is impossible. The spirit of the 
 Hebrew legislation is misconceived when it is 
 
90 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 not understood as a growth. One is tempted to 
 regard it as largely petty trifles of ritual and 
 ceremony, whereas a careful and comparative 
 study of its development reveals a humane and 
 uplifting system of equal justice and moral 
 right, with passion for the rights of the poor 
 and persistent recognition of the higher moral 
 obligations. Thus again the teaching of mod- 
 ern criticism issues in worthier ethical ideals 
 and nobler religious principles. 
 
 V. THE WORK OF THE PROPHETS IN THE RELI- 
 GION OF ISRAEL 
 
 The fifth point is perhaps the most important, 
 and is the truth in which all recent study of the 
 Old Testament has its culmination. With the 
 old dating of books and documents, and espe- 
 cially of the law, the religion of Israel was con- 
 ceived as an utterly marvellous projection of 
 divine truth upon the earth, without endeavor 
 or worth on the part of its human recipients, 
 save the humility which enabled them to accept 
 it. The Almighty thundered, and his servants 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 91 
 
 recorded His speech, and the religion stood forth 
 entire and perfect. This view has made an 
 "act of God" in current thought something 
 strange to ordinary life, and has removed the 
 history of the Bible from sympathetic and in- 
 structive appreciation. 
 
 According to the modern view, the law did 
 not precede the prophets, but the prophets 
 came before the law, and were indeed the 
 creators of the moral convictions and religious 
 insights embodied in the law. The legal 
 enactments were but the registration of the 
 spiritual convictions of determined men, whose 
 eyes God had opened. Elijah was very zealous 
 for the cause of his God, and very true and single- 
 eyed in his vision, and the work of his great 
 manhood engraved the law, *'Thou shalt have 
 no other Gods before me." We cannot in all 
 cases name the particular prophet who is 
 responsible for a moral principle or a religious 
 precept, since the habit was to impute each 
 advance, as it came upon the horizon, to the 
 great founder of Israel's piety. That Moses is 
 credited with more than he is entitled to seems 
 
92 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 evident from the fact that the law, "Thou shalt 
 not make unto thee any graven image," is 
 recorded in his name, while actually Moses 
 employed religiously a brazen serpent, which 
 a king instructed by a later prophet called a 
 piece of brass and destroyed from the temple.* 
 A glorious company of unremembered prophets 
 gave their lives to the construction of Israel's 
 piety which now stands in the name of Moses. 
 The more one studies the Old Testament, 
 the clearer it becomes that the faith of Israel 
 was wrought out in the souls of men. Hebrew 
 faith was vitally achieved in deeds of daring 
 courage, in the struggles of men of heroic 
 mould. On this earth the great fundamental 
 principles of spiritual religion were forged, 
 and in the hearts of men of like passion with 
 ourselves. It was the prophets who made pos- 
 sible the moral elevation of the law, the purity 
 of the ancient stories, the sweet peace and ma- 
 jestic trustfulness of the Psalms, and the 
 very course of the history itself. Without her 
 prophets, Israel would have had no message 
 1 2 Kings 1 8 4. 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 93 
 
 for the world. With them, she has a message 
 which the world can never forget. They were 
 the men who stood for right when all advan- 
 tage — personal, social, political — lay the 
 other way. They were the men who contended 
 for righteousness still, though their nation was 
 on the very verge of doom. They were the 
 men who taught that God is served only in the 
 heart, and who preserved morals and piety from 
 dissolution in zeal for bloody offerings. The 
 scholarship which finds its way to their side 
 and enables one to feel the pulse of their heart- 
 beat is no zeal for technicalities, no ambition 
 for knowledge of an antiquarian's trifles, — 
 it is rather the medium by which one finds 
 his way to spiritual truth on which manhood 
 sufficient to stand the shock of this modern day 
 is nourished and made strong. By means of 
 this modern knowledge one is delivered from 
 a thousand inconsistencies and confusions 
 which prevent clear discernment in matters of 
 morals and faith, and the true character and 
 real worth of religious conviction come into the 
 clear. 
 
94 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 Appreciation of the criticism of the Old 
 Testament as outlined briefly in these five points 
 is therefore an intensely practical matter. It 
 does not destroy the value of the ancient rec- 
 ords, but it enables one to distinguish between 
 them, to free his mind and spirit from unworthy 
 views of God and His service, and to put first 
 things first, as did the prophet, who declared 
 in immortal words truth which Christianity 
 does not transcend, but only enforces and makes 
 clear : — 
 
 " Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow 
 myself before the high God? shall I come before him 
 with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old? will the 
 Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten 
 thousands of rivers of oil ? shall I give my first-bom 
 for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin 
 of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is 
 good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
 do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
 God?»» 
 
 * Micah 6 fr-8. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A SKETCH OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
 RELIGION OF ISRAEL TO THE TIME OF 
 AMOS 
 
 Some thirteen hundred years before the Chris- 
 tian era there lived in Egyptian territory, on the 
 border of the Arabian desert, a loose collection 
 of nomad Semites, who had driven their flocks 
 of sheep and goats thither from out the wilder- 
 ness, attracted by the better pasturage. Some- 
 where about 1250 B.C. this unorganized mass of 
 herdsmen, with their families and flocks, threat- 
 ened by Egyptian oppression, and stirred by 
 religious impulse, turned their faces back to the 
 desert from which their fathers came. Tyranny 
 behind them, scarcity and want around them, 
 they pressed their way northward toward the 
 dreamland of the Bedouin, the narrow strip 
 of rolling valley and mountain which the Great 
 Sea fashions by her mists and showers into a 
 canvas of perfect beauty, to hide from her sight 
 the glare and the wastes of the hot sands beyond. 
 95 
 
96 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 On the southerly border of Canaan, where 
 garden and desert contend and each achieves 
 partial victory, they found for a time their 
 habitation. Here in turn they were found,^ in 
 the waste howling wilderness, by the wilder- 
 ness God, and they swore a compact with Him, 
 and he became their God, Jahveh, God of 
 Sinai, God of storms and God of war.^ The 
 covenant with the desert God pierced deep into 
 the soul of this desert folk, and wrought in- 
 eradicably there the conviction that they be- 
 longed to the God of Sinai's storms, and that 
 He belonged to them, for might and victory. 
 They found Him a God of war, of the tight- 
 gripped spear, of the wails of a doomed city, 
 of the sword that returns not empty. Strength 
 and dominion were even then in his sanctuary, 
 and with the might of their God in their heart, 
 the men of the desert, uncultured, unorganized, 
 uncivilized, set out on their way in history. 
 Stirred by a threat of dispossession of their 
 holdings in the Judaean wilderness, they rallied 
 for war with the king who threatened them. 
 
 ^ Deut. 32 10^ Hos. 9 10. ^ Jud. 5 s, Deut. ^^ 2. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 97 
 
 Under the lead of their God they subdued the 
 Amorite, whose height was like the height of ce- 
 dars/ and planted themselves firmly in the king- 
 dom of Sihon, from which they looked across 
 to the alluring hills of Judaea, and caught the 
 breath of her honey-filled forests and her vine- 
 laden hillsides. Not as a united people,^ — for 
 Israel was not yet a nation — but clan by clan, 
 tribe sometimes helping tribe, but more often 
 singly and alone, they pressed for a foothold 
 on the other side of the Jordan. Simeon and 
 Levi went down in the attack and disappear 
 from history. The tribes of Joseph were more 
 successful, and Ephraim became a people of 
 might. 
 
 The conquest was not the campaign of a na- 
 tion, by one army and under one leader. It 
 was the gradual immigration of tribes and clans. 
 It was partly a peaceful settlement of unoccu- 
 pied territory, and in part was accompanied by 
 treaties with the former dwellers and oaths of 
 brotherhood. The Canaanites remained in the 
 cities and in the broad valleys ; the new dwellers 
 ^ Amos 2 9. 2 Judges i. 
 
98 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 sought the hillsides with their flocks, and cen- 
 turies later their God was known as a God of 
 the hills.^ There was assimilation between the 
 two peoples: the shepherds learned agricul- 
 ture and settled ways of life ; they adopted the 
 sacred places which had been long established 
 in the land, and affixed to them names honored 
 in their own tradition. They waxed fat and 
 kicked against the austere, meagre cultus of 
 their God of storms and war : they served the 
 gods of Canaan. 
 
 But fortunately the relations were not all 
 friendly. In the broad valleys the Canaanites 
 had mighty cities, and the men of the cities 
 oppressed the newly come peasants of the 
 heights. They spoiled their harvests; they 
 made slaves of their sons and daughters. There 
 was no king to whom to make appeal, no ruler 
 to whom all could look for deliverance. A clan 
 here, a tribe there, but the highways between 
 the worshippers of the storm God ceased for 
 lack of travellers, and no spear nor sword 
 was seen among the forty thousand of Israel.^ 
 * I Kings 20 23. 2 Judges 5 6, 8. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 99 
 
 Then was witnessed a thing we call inspiration 
 among this herdsmen folk. A woman felt the 
 stirring, and in a mighty eloquence of which 
 the world has scarcely known the like, she called 
 the mountain people from the holes and caves 
 of the rocks, summoned a clansman to leader- 
 ship, infused into all passion for victory in the 
 name of the desert God; and her wild cry 
 of frenzy for her people and her people's God 
 sounds quivering and thrilling down to this 
 day, — the Song of Deborah, the earliest monu- 
 ment of Hebrew literature, and one of the most 
 intense and creative outflashes of genius that 
 ever wrought in the making of men.^ 
 
 Gilead abode beyond the Jordan, Dan re- 
 mained in his ships, and Asher sat still at the 
 haven of the sea.^ There was no compulsion 
 among the tribes, no obligation to a central 
 power. They rallied — those who did rally — 
 at the beacon fire of prophecy, not at the order 
 of a government or king. The nation Israel 
 was not yet. There was only a scattering of 
 distantly related tribes, who believed in a com- 
 
 ^ Judges 5. 2 Vs. 17. 
 
100 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 mon God. Israel was only a feeling of unity 
 in the soul of a woman, and that sense of unity 
 was based on the one God whom all worshipped. 
 But as the torrents of Jahveh swept them on to 
 victory, and as for a second time the people of 
 the desert found their God, and from their 
 foothold in Canaan took heed to the faith that 
 was in them, they found Him not merely the 
 storm God of the wilderness, rising up in light 
 from Mount Seir and glancing from Mount 
 Paran ; ^ not merely the God who helped in 
 flight, who led a successful panic from before 
 the gods of Egypt: He was now a God who 
 faced an army with chariots and horse- 
 men, and who could lead his mountaineers 
 against a people of long cilivization ; but more 
 than that. He was a rally cry for a scattered 
 folk, the hope of union for a people who had 
 journeyed clan by clan, and fought for their 
 homes tribe by tribe ; in His name went forth 
 the summons to united action; in His name 
 the hosts assembled; by His command the 
 Kishon swept them on to victory ; and in Him 
 the tribes of the desert were fused into a nation. 
 * Deut. 32 2. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL lOI 
 
 Beginning far back, when much of our Old 
 Testament was written, the history of these 
 early days was idealized, and the events were 
 colored by the imaginations of later times far 
 other than they were in reality. The temple 
 services and institutions, in which five hundred 
 years later Israel found its life and unity, when 
 Assyria and Babylonia had taken away political 
 independence, were written back into the far- 
 away days, and the historical writings of the 
 Old Testament have been revised and edited, 
 in the form in which they now stand, on the 
 theory that the highly developed religion, which 
 only the prophets made possible, existed and 
 flourished at the very beginning of Hebrew 
 history. 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, the religion of 
 the early days was of a very primitive type. 
 In the time of David, Israel's God was not a 
 world God, not a Master of all nations and 
 peoples ; far less was He the creator of heaven 
 and earth; He was the God of Israel, and of 
 Israel's land, brought to that land from 
 the desert. He could not be worshipped 
 
102 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 outside the land He had hallowed to him- 
 self by his people's conquests. The men who 
 forced David out of Israel's territory drove him 
 absolutely away, in his conviction, from the 
 presence of his God, and said to him, "Go, 
 serve other gods." ^ The man to whom tradi- 
 tion imputes the noblest utterances of the uni- 
 versal sway of God which the world contains 
 (Psalm 139) himself believed in a God whose 
 dominion ended with the bounds of a petty 
 state. His religion had place for a household 
 idol, the teraphim, an image in human form.^ 
 He practiced throughout his life a species of 
 divination by the ephod,^ and ascertained the 
 will of the Almighty by a priest's manipulation 
 of a sacred lot. There came famine upon the 
 land.'* They inquired of God the cause, and 
 the answer came, It is for Saul and his bloody 
 house, and his violated covenant with the 
 Gibeonites. They asked the men of Gibeon 
 what should be the atonement. Blood must pay 
 for blood, and they hanged seven of the sons of 
 
 ^ I Sam. 26 19 f. 3 I Sam. 23 2, 6-13^ 2 Sam. 21 i S. 
 
 2 I Sam. 19 13' * 2 Sam. 21 1-14. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 103 
 
 Saul before the Lord at Gibeah, among them the 
 two sons of Rizpah the concubine. And Riz- 
 pah the daughter of Aiah spread sackcloth on 
 the rock at Gibeah, and against vultures of the 
 air by day and beasts of the field in the lonely 
 night she guarded the bodies of her dead, as 
 week after week the corpses hung on their 
 crosses before David's God, till the merciful 
 heaven poured out its rain. "Then was God 
 propitiated for His land." 
 
 Such was the God of Israel, and such was 
 Israel's religion, at the establishment of the 
 monarchy one thousand years before the Chris- 
 tian era ; — a provincial deity, served by tera- 
 phim and ephod, declaring his will to diviners, 
 and rendered kindly by the vigil of Rizpah 
 the daughter of Aiah over the bodies of her 
 sons. 
 
 It was this primitive faith that entered upon 
 a struggle for a foothold in Palestine with the 
 established religion of the land, a religion in- 
 wrought into the customs and life which the 
 new people were forced to adopt, which had its 
 sanctuary on every high hill and under every 
 
104 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 green tree, which professed to control the fer- 
 tility of the field and the increase of the flock. 
 The conquerors received from the conquered 
 their culture and civilization, even their lan- 
 guage — for Hebrew is the language of Canaan, 
 not the Aramcean of the desert. Israel left 
 off the manner of nomads, dwelt in cities like 
 the Canaanites, tilled the fields, held vintage 
 feasts, and threatened in all things to become 
 but Canaanites of another blood. Canaanite 
 religion also impressed itself upon the wor- 
 shippers of the God of Sinai in more than one 
 particular. The great Jewish feasts are of 
 Canaanite origin. The sacred places of He- 
 brew tradition, from Hebron and Jerusalem 
 down, were old-time sanctuaries of Canaanite 
 divinities. And when they built the temple 
 of the desert God in Jerusalem, they included 
 in the structure the houses of the sodomite, 
 and the apartments of the women who made 
 coverings for the Asherah, the most loathsome 
 abominations of the Canaanitic cultus.^ 
 A primitive faith of a rude, untutored people, 
 
 ^ I Kings IS 12^ 2 2 46. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 105 
 
 devotion to a God of storm and war, a blending 
 in life and institutions with a people of foul 
 and ignoble worship, — how came there from 
 this beginning the faith of righteousness, of the 
 God of all nations and of the earth and heaven, 
 which we know as the religion of Israel ? And 
 how came this purer faith to have such strength 
 and penetration to the heart of Israel that it 
 had to be thought back into the life of the early 
 times, and those times interpreted according 
 to its standards, so that the story of the reality 
 of the primitive religion of Israel is left but 
 faintly in the record, unseen by popular reading 
 even to this day, and only spread to open view 
 by patient research and careful reconstruction ? 
 The faith of Israel, the religion of the God 
 of righteousness, was the outcome of Israel's 
 history and Israel's men, the reaction in the 
 souls of mighty men from the happenings of 
 a stirring and dreadful time. Without the 
 deeds, the marching of great armies, the flam- 
 ing of captured cities, the deportations of peo- 
 ples, the souls of the men would never have 
 stirred to the grip of the eternal truth ; without 
 
I06 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 the men, the history would have gone by and 
 left a waste like Charchemish and Heshbon, 
 voiceless to this day and still, sending forth no 
 lesson and adding no item of knowledge of the 
 ways of God upon the earth. 
 
 Some three centuries after Israel had brought 
 its war God into the mountain range of Syria, 
 and Israel and Canaan learned to go friendly 
 together to the high altars of Baal, there ap- 
 peared on the horizon a new enemy, boding 
 fearful peril to the little people long devastated 
 by internal strife and by combat with petty 
 nations like itself. The new foe was the 
 Assyrian, from his mighty empire in the two- 
 river country to the east. He was not like the 
 Midianite, who raided a few cattle, sacked 
 a village or two, and disappeared with his 
 plunder into the desert. He resembled not the 
 Moabite, nor the children of Ammon, whose 
 ambition was satisfied in the wresting of border 
 towns. His home was not like that of the Phil- 
 istines, a short narrow line of sea-coast. From 
 his river capital he dominated the most exten- 
 sive and wealthy territory of the world, the seat 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 107 
 
 of its oldest civilizations; the ambition of 
 a world empire was in his heart, and he set 
 about world conquest, with patience equal to 
 his cruelty, with deliberation equal to his 
 might. The home of Israel was in the way 
 between him and the sea. He would be master 
 of the coast, and destroy the outposts of Egypt 
 to the south. Relentlessly he fell upon the 
 kingdoms of northern Syria. Hamath, Seph- 
 arvaim, Damascus, crumbled before his ar- 
 mies. He was the mightiest fighter known to 
 ancient times, and the scythed chariot, mowing 
 across a field of infantry, is his fitting symbol. 
 
 ''None is weary, none stumble among them: 
 the girdle of their loins is never loosed, nor the 
 latchet of their shoes broken: their horses' 
 hoofs are like flint, and their wheels like a whirl- 
 wind; and they roar like young lions, and 
 lay hold of prey, and carry it away safe, and 
 there is none to deliver." ^ 
 
 The Assyrians were the extirpators of peoples. 
 They carried them away captive, men, women, 
 and children, and "planted them" — to use 
 ^Is. 5 27ff. 
 
I08 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 their own phrase — in far-away cities, scattering 
 and mixing people of all races and languages 
 and religions, and utterly blotting out nations 
 and gods. They blotted out gods, because for 
 these peoples home and country and god were 
 inextricably wrought together. They fought 
 for god and native land, and if they lost their 
 land, they lost with it their god. We may not 
 understand this feeling, but in western Asia, 
 in the centuries of Assyria's rise, there was no 
 other conception of deity than that of a being 
 attached to a particular people in its particular 
 home, whose very existence was bound up with 
 that nation and that land. To these tribal, lo- 
 calized divinities, the petty Syrian states prayed 
 passionately for deliverance from the Assyrian. 
 But the gods of Hamath did not save Hamath, 
 and the men of Hamath threw them to the 
 rubbish heap. The gods of Sepharvaim did 
 not save Sepharvaim, and there arose there- 
 after none to do them honor. Now Israel 
 went down before the Assyrian, in the Assyrian's 
 good time, and the jackals ran in the streets of 
 Samaria. But what saved Samaria's God from 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 109 
 
 the rubbish heap, along with the gods of Ha- 
 math and Sepharvaim? 
 
 It was the work of the spirit of righteousness 
 in the hearts of a few men, whose labors for 
 their own time seemed an absolute failure, 
 but whose mighty speech, glowing in the clear 
 light of truth, changed utterly the character 
 of the God whom Israel worshipped. A herds- 
 man of Tekoa left his flocks and cast aside his 
 pruning shears, and made his way to the altar 
 of Israel's God at Bethel, the ancient sanctuary 
 of Jacob. How careful was the ritual there! 
 The feasts at the turning of the moon, and the 
 well-appointed sacrifices ! How clear rose the 
 voice of song to heaven, and the melody of 
 viols ! Sacrifices every morning, and tithes 
 every three days ! But they sold the righteous 
 for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes ! 
 they trampled upon the poor, and with exac- 
 tions built houses of hewn stone ! they turned 
 justice into gall, and the cry of the oppressed 
 into wormwood ! they practised harlotry in the 
 temple, father and son together, in the honor 
 of their God !^ 
 
 * Amos 2 6. 7, s 7. ". 
 
no THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 They were princes and mighty men, but 
 against them stood the Tekoan herdsman, alone 
 with righteousness, and proclaimed against 
 their altar, and cursed their solemn assemblies. 
 It was not the raving and ranting of the pro- 
 fessional prophet.* There was clear-held con- 
 viction behind the utterance of Amos. He had 
 found God anew in righteousness. He saw 
 the doom of Samaria and her altars as clearly 
 as if the Assyrian's work were already done. 
 And what then? Should Jehovah die? 
 Should one say — where are the Gods of Sa- 
 maria ? Jehovah lived — lived in the burning 
 feeling of right in the prophet's own soul! 
 That was God; Israel's God! the right that 
 enabled him to stand forth without precedent 
 and without authority and declare the religion 
 of the king unholy, and the altars polluted upon 
 which men spread the garments of the poor. 
 There was a spirit in his soul, there was a truth 
 that came resistless to his lips ; and he believed it 
 for God, though his fathers went to an ephod for 
 God, and sought Him in teraphim and asherah. 
 
 ^ Amos 7 14. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL in 
 
 To this God Amos applied all the greatness 
 which the history of his time brought into view. 
 The idea of a world empire, a world power, 
 was in the heart of the Assyrian. For Israel 
 it was something new. There had been Moab, 
 and Ammon, and petty state after petty state. 
 Each had its god, and the dominion of each 
 god ceased at the national border. There was 
 no outlook for thought, no elevation for the 
 spirit, no fair, far lands for the imagination. 
 The horizon's limit was a wall unto the souls 
 of men, and within its narrow confines they 
 lived their narrow life. 
 
 The Assyrian world idea made possible new 
 visions. First to catch them was the herdsman 
 prophet. The God of his people's cultus was 
 to go into captivity with his people. If, then, 
 the God of his fathers was dead, who was 
 the God who spoke within him? The herds- 
 man prophet took the world idea, and fused it 
 with the righteousness that burned in his heart, 
 and Jehovah, God of Israel, whom men served 
 with sodomites in the temple at Jerusalem, 
 whom David feared he would lose if he went 
 
112 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 ten miles over the border into Philistia, came 
 forth in Amos the God of all the earth,^ the 
 right that is over all peoples, and whose domin- 
 ion is from sea to sea. 
 
 We tell our children the greatness of Colum- 
 bus, who, despite the scorn of kings and the 
 ridicule of the wise, wrought his faith into deed 
 and discovered a new world. We call James 
 Watt a great benefactor, in that he invented the 
 condensing steam-engine, and opened up the 
 era of modern transportation. We have high 
 praise for Franklin, who called down lightning 
 from the clouds, and started the electrical de- 
 velopment by which thought flashes across 
 empires and under leagues of sea. But man- 
 hood is more than engines and wires and dyna- 
 mos, and it is the story of a greater day when 
 one describes the prophet Amos before the altar 
 of Bethel,^ commanding to strike the chapiter 
 of the god of a tiny district of the earth, who 
 had become a god of oppression and falsehood, 
 that on the ruins of his desecrated altar, and 
 from the wreck of an immoral nation, there 
 
 ^ Amos 58. 2 Amos 9 i. 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 113 
 
 might arise the God of the poor and the God 
 of the right, who maketh the Pleiades and 
 Orion/ and turneth the shadow of death into 
 the morning, and maketh the day dark with 
 night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, 
 and poureth them out upon the face of the earth : 
 the Lord is His name ! 
 
 The name is the same as that of the deity 
 before whom Jephthah murdered his daughter, 
 and Rizpah watched her dead ; but in the char- 
 acter of the deity what resemblance can you 
 discover? The difference was wrought chiefly 
 in the soul of Amos of Tekoa, who took heed 
 to the righteousness that thrilled irresistible 
 within him, and who put that righteousness 
 on the world throne the great Assyrian enabled 
 him to conceive. Amos did not discover the 
 rightness of single deeds, for that knowledge is 
 far older: but he was the first to make clear 
 the rightness that sitteth upon the circle of the 
 earth, the power that commands unto good, 
 who administers the universe, unto whom men 
 feebly reach in all idols and liturgies. 
 
 ^ Amos 5 8. 
 
114 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 Thus our sketch of the history of Israel's 
 religion in its earlier and obscurer years has 
 led us to the truth which lies at the foundation 
 of all worthy religious belief, the doctrine of 
 ethical monotheism. The story enables us, not 
 merely to do justice to the herdsman prophet, 
 and to explain how one of the world's greatest 
 spiritual achievements was wrought, but also 
 to grasp the essential nature of religion itself. 
 
 It was a saying of Renan that Christianity 
 has always appeared decadent to the eyes of 
 its contemporaries. He might have said that 
 religion itself has seemed continually to face 
 its dying day. Yet religion lives, and men still 
 have place in their lives for thoughts of God. 
 Why the ineradicableness of what Heraclitus 
 called the noble disease? It is because of the 
 indestructibleness of the feeling of right in the 
 human breast, as Amos experienced it ; in other 
 words, because of the inevitableness of duty, 
 and because given duty, God and His worship 
 are inevitable. 
 
 Obligation is a force that holds. It comes 
 not with self-interest ; it ceases not when pleas- 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 1 15 
 
 ure is on the other side. It frames command- 
 ments that will not budge, which logic cannot 
 stir, and entreaties cannot change. Duty and 
 conscience are the shadow of ourself, dogging 
 our every moment while there is still an atom 
 of manhood left within us. 
 
 In the soul life deep within, the right is the 
 power over everything, the might beyond all 
 mights. Duty comes without our consent, pro- 
 claims no theory of its origin, refuses often to 
 answer why, or what for, but majestic like a 
 king it rises to confront us, to press its claims 
 of kingship untiring till we die. It wakeneth 
 us morning by morning, and, crowned and 
 sceptred, calls us to its service. The will unto 
 good, the will that strives in our own life for 
 good, is the strongest reality of which we have 
 any knowledge. And when we show ourselves 
 strong enough to disobey, and place our life 
 against the mandate of the king of spirits, then 
 in His seeming failure does He show himself 
 most a king, and in the smitings of conscience, 
 the shame of a manhood that is less than itself, 
 there is the tribute of sorrow to a disobeyed 
 
Il6 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 monarch who is monarch still. Though I 
 make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there. 
 
 One passes without notice to the language of 
 religion. Morals lead to religion.^ In the right 
 which commands us we have to do with a being 
 who seems almighty. Duty presses home like 
 the will of the Might over all. The right asks 
 not permission of a superior, seeks not else- 
 where consent as to what shall be its word and 
 how it shall enforce it, takes no heed to pleas 
 of other interests and other claimants to one's 
 allegiance. The right is first, and abides first, 
 the one eternal fixed reality of our spiritual 
 manhood. And what is that but God? 
 
 In the summer of 1904 they brought up rotten 
 cork from the waters of the East River around 
 the bodies of greed-murdered children, and 
 fire-hose flimsy as muslin from the ship of a 
 thousand dead. A few months before, Chicago 
 mourned over the holocaust of children at the 
 burning of the Iroquois Theatre, children mur- 
 
 * " Die Moral fiihrt unausbleiblich zur Religion." Kant: 
 " Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Ver- 
 nunft," p. 7 (Kirchmann). For an excellent statement in 
 English cf. Felix Adler: " The Religion of Duty." 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 117 
 
 dered by broken laws, fire-protections that 
 would not work, doors that opened in. That 
 rotten cork was wrong ; it was fraud and deceit. 
 That kind of thing has no justification; the 
 command against it has resistless authority: 
 that is, there is some sort of a power felt in 
 men's souls that commands the good and con- 
 demns the wrong; and that is, there is a God 
 in the right and behind the right, a God with 
 whom we and all men have to do, and who has 
 something to do with us every time we put forth 
 our hand to the slightest deed. 
 
 The man of Tekoa declared God upon no 
 other authority than the truth that burned in 
 his soul. There need be no other. What are 
 authorities and arguments beside Him who calls 
 for righteousness as a flood of waters and justice 
 as a mighty stream? God is not the God of 
 the dead, but of the living, of the living word 
 unto good, of the living men in whom the strug- 
 gle of the right never ceases. They find Him 
 now whose life is earnest, though not in the 
 petty questions which men try, nor in the labored 
 proofs of another age, but in the living world of 
 
Il8 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 action, where right is might, the heart's one 
 might, and where conscience declares the glory 
 of God and righteous men show forth His 
 handiwork. 
 
 There is ignorance both wide and deep in the 
 present day, even on the part of the young men 
 and women of our colleges, of the history and 
 the literature of the sacred Scriptures. The 
 incalculable loss in culture and character goes 
 without saying. If there shall be revival of 
 Biblical knowledge among educated youth, it 
 must be that of Biblical science, equal in schol- 
 arship and scientific thoroughness with the 
 painstaking thoroughness which now honors 
 the natural sciences. We cannot have man- 
 hood in the laboratory and gush in the Young 
 Men's Christian Association. Or if we do, the 
 men will take the laboratory, to their honor, 
 and we shall have men in the laboratory worthy 
 of the most thorough respect for their devotion 
 to truth, their regard for fact, but who are in- 
 competent and helpless in some of the deeper 
 and finer things of life. 
 
 "There is a spirit in man^ and the breath of 
 
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL 119 
 
 the Almighty giveth him understanding." That 
 spirit is worthy of investigation : its workings 
 in the past deserve to be traced ; and if traced 
 at all for men of the student soul, they must be 
 traced by methods to which students are accus- 
 tomed. Never did the spirit in man work 
 more grandly, nor to better purpose, than in the 
 old Hebrew days. Then let the young men 
 know how a trolley car runs, if they want to, 
 and the superiorities of a turbine wheel; 
 let them by all means learn — 
 
 " the glory that was Greece 
 And the grandeur that was Rome "; 
 
 but let them also, in the name of the manhood 
 that is more than meat, in the name of charac- 
 ter, honor, and worth of spirit — let them also 
 thrill with Amos and Isaiah at the deeds of the 
 God of the Pleiades, and let them grow quiet 
 and reverent, and clothe themselves with dig- 
 nity and worth, under the gentle instruction of 
 that history that was lived more than any other 
 in the secret place of the Most High, and which 
 drew in its inspiration while under the very 
 shadow of the Almighty. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION IN 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 It may carelessly be imagined that zeal in 
 writing is quite a modern disease, and that only 
 since the printing-press, and especially since the 
 great improvements in it and in the manu- 
 facture of paper, has there occurred anything 
 like a Noachic deluge of literature. It is 
 from the Old Testament, however, that the 
 proverb comes to us : "Of making many books 
 there is no end." ^ Receipts and contracts were 
 as prevalent in Babylonia in the time of Moses 
 as drafts and checks are with us to-day, 
 and the correspondence unearthed at Tell-el- 
 Amarna demonstrates that stylus was put to clay 
 in Old Testament times with as little provoca- 
 tion as we now put pen to paper. It would be 
 most remarkable, therefore, if the great events 
 of Hebrew history had found but one narrator 
 
 » ECC. 12 ". 
 
 1 20 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 121 
 
 in each period, and if all testimony to important 
 happenings had perished, save that of one man 
 at each crisis, Moses at the exodus, Joshua at 
 the conquest, and so on. The reasonable 
 expectation is that many took in hand to write 
 the deeds that were fulfilled among them, and 
 that, as in the case of the New Testament, 
 they were men of different points of view. 
 
 If, in fact, there were several authors who 
 recorded the mighty deeds of Israel's early his- 
 tory, and if their works have been preserved, 
 the conclusion must be that they have been 
 joined together and united under common 
 titles in our present Bible. We are not at all 
 accustomed to such literary procedure. The 
 lives of Washington have not been pieced to- 
 gether, and doubtless never will be. Herodo- 
 tus and Xenophon, Horace and Juvenal, 
 Chaucer and Piers Plowman, are as separate 
 and distinct as Longfellow and Whittier. We 
 are not to blame, therefore, for a little natural 
 incredulity when we are told, for example, that 
 Exodus 14, which narrates the deliverance at 
 the Red Sea, was at one time pieced together 
 
122 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 from three different documents, one written in 
 Judaea about 850 B.C., another in Ephraim a 
 century later, and the third not until about 500 
 B.C., some six hundred years after the events 
 it describes. 
 
 But Arabic historians compose their works 
 in precisely that fashion, adopting large sec- 
 tions of previous writings and treating their 
 sources with great freedom. The instance of 
 Tatian, whose piecework " Diatessaron " came 
 to be the only Gospel the churches of entire dis- 
 tricts possessed, proves that the documentary 
 theory of the origin of large portions of the 
 Old Testament is by no means improbable. 
 
 If it be admitted that several authors had to 
 do with the composition of these narratives, 
 and that their works can be disentangled, a 
 striking difference of religious conception comes 
 to light. The divergences are not merely in 
 vocabulary and style, but more especially in 
 the views that are taken of the manner of God's 
 influence upon human life, and of that which 
 should be first and emphatic in the relation of 
 man to God. Particularly do the later writings 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 123 
 
 have a tendency to make unique and dramatic 
 the acts of God, and so to increase the religious 
 element and to heighten the tradition. 
 
 Thus, in the story of the deliverance at the 
 Red Sea,^ the earliest writer records that the 
 Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east 
 wind all the night. Considering the locality, 
 which was an arm of the Red Sea, since quite 
 filled in with sand, and also the mention of the 
 east wind, we may say that this narrative has in 
 mind an unusual event, in the feeling of the 
 writer a most providential event, wrought of 
 God for His people, but not a non-natural occur- 
 rence. A parallel might be the freezing of the 
 North River in an exceptionally cold winter, 
 which would be unusual, and might be hailed 
 by some in certain circumstances as providen- 
 tial, but would not imply departure from the 
 usual order of things. 
 
 In the account next later, Moses is said to 
 lift up his staff and divide the waters. No men- 
 tion is made of the wind, and the act is entirely 
 non-natural, but there is no effort to heighten 
 
 ^ Exodus 14. 
 
124 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 the miracle beyond the crossing of the Israelites 
 and the discomfiture of the Egyptians. 
 
 In the narrative latest of all the wonder is 
 performed by Moses stretching out his hand 
 over the sea, and the waters are piled up like 
 a wall on either side, the water losing its natural 
 property until the Hebrews pass through, when 
 again at the extension of Moses' hand the sea 
 returns over the Egyptians. According to this 
 writer both Pharaoh and all his chariots and 
 all his horsemen are destroyed, while in the 
 earlier accounts a small division of the army of 
 that vast empire would satisfy the terms of the 
 narrative. 
 
 The ordinary procedure in picturing to one's 
 self what actually took place is to combine the 
 features of all three accounts, precisely as we 
 find them in the Bible : to think of the east wind 
 blowing and Moses holding out his staff, and 
 also his hand ; the waters going back by force 
 of the wind, and yet forming a perpendicular 
 wall on both sides of a narrow passage. Popu- 
 lar imagination unites also the six hundred 
 chariots of one clause with all Pharaoh's char- 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 125 
 
 iots in the next, without realizing the difficulty 
 of supposing that a world empire had only six 
 hundred chariots, and that it assembled all its 
 forces to pursue escaping slaves. 
 
 It should seem very clear, however, that we 
 have here a case of heightening of tradition, 
 and that it should be our privilege — indeed, 
 that it is our duty — to make choice of the ear- 
 liest and simplest narrative, and to interpret the 
 others as the understanding of the same occur- 
 rence which prevailed in later years. One 
 should have the right to stand by the under- 
 standing of the matter which obtained when the 
 event was freshest in men's memories, and that 
 without the slightest implication of an evil heart 
 of unbelief. 
 
 Similar discretion should be exercised in the 
 interpretation of the stories of the plagues of 
 Egypt. ^ If one read by itself the earliest narra- 
 tive, he is in the presence of natural phenomena, 
 such as occur with more or less frequency in 
 that land. It is not an unheard-of thing for 
 the water of the Nile to become foul, and of a 
 * Exodus 7 Q. 
 
126 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 reddish tinge, so that fish die and frogs and flies 
 swarm everywhere, and these disasters are fol- 
 lowed, naturally, by pestilence among animals 
 and men. It is in the latest narrative that we 
 read that not only the Nile, but the waters of 
 Egypt, the rivers, the canals, the pools and all 
 their reservoirs, became blood, so that there 
 was blood throughout all the land of Egypt, 
 both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone. 
 It is the same late account which testifies that 
 Aaron smote with his staff the dust of the earth, 
 and the dust of the earth became lice through- 
 out all the land of Egypt; also that Aaron 
 took handfuls of furnace soot, sprinkled it 
 toward heaven, and it became boils, breaking 
 forth with blisters upon both man and beast. 
 Of course it is possible to combine the narra- 
 tives, or, rather, not to admit that there are two, 
 and think of the Nile becoming red, and also of 
 reservoirs and vessels filled with blood; to 
 imagine a very severe pest upon cattle, and also 
 that dust from the hands of a man caused boils 
 on man and beast in all the great empire of 
 Egypt. But it is certainly one's right to choose 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 127 
 
 the simpler story, and interpret the history 
 accordingly, and this only can save the credi- 
 bility of the narrative for the modern man. 
 
 An instance of the heightening of Old Testa- 
 ment tradition, where the untrained reader can 
 distinguish the documents for himself, is the 
 celebrated account of the sun standing still 
 by command of Joshua (Joshua 10 ^^ff.). We 
 read that Joshua said in the sight of Israel : — 
 
 "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; 
 And thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon. 
 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, 
 Until the nation had avenged themselves of their 
 
 "Is not this written," the writer adds, "in 
 the book of Jashar?" It was an old poetic 
 fragment, which he took from a book far older 
 than his time, which, of course, has long since 
 perished. In enthusiastic transport the poet 
 commands the sun and gives orders to the moon, 
 and in the thrill of victory he feels that his 
 commandments are obeyed. No more than 
 in the case of the stars fighting against Sisera 
 
128 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 (Judges 5) do we need to suppose departure 
 of the heavenly bodies from their orbits. But 
 the less enthusiastic prose narrator of Joshua 
 12 does not understand the poetic exuberance 
 of the book of Jashar, and he interprets the 
 matter thus : — 
 
 "And the sun stayed in the midst of the heaven, 
 and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And 
 there was no day like that before it or after it, that 
 Jehovah hearkened unto the voice of a man." 
 
 This writer makes a statement on the basis 
 of the book of Jashar, and appeals to a quo- 
 tation from the book as his authority ; but most 
 people to-day would understand his quotation 
 very differently, and they certainly should have 
 the privilege. 
 
 These three instances must serve as exam- 
 ples of a process which the historical books of 
 the Old Testament witness repeatedly, that of 
 heightening the tradition, increasing the spec- 
 tacular and marvellous elements in it, in the 
 progress of the years. The things in the Bible 
 that bother people, which they do not like to 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 129 
 
 have their children ask about, are mostly ele- 
 ments of the later biblical tradition. Writers 
 whose very words have been preserved do not 
 present awkward questions. When we catch 
 the mighty spirit of Amos denouncing the injus- 
 tice and oppression of his time, when we hear 
 him call for justice because they have sold the 
 righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of 
 shoes, there is no question of how much we can 
 manage to believe; the God of the right is 
 speaking in words we know we must believe. 
 The world implied by the direct words of the 
 prophets is our own world of to-day, and yet 
 it is a world in which keen-visioned men see 
 the hand of God ordering events for His chil- 
 dren and commanding His servants in the way 
 of duty. The nearer we approach to eye- 
 witness testimony as to what happened in the 
 history of Israel, the more closely does the rec- 
 ord conform to laws and usages of the present 
 world ; but despite the naturalness of events the 
 hand of God is seen in them. 
 
 The less imaginative writers, whose chapters 
 are less colored by the marvellous and the sen- 
 
130 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 sational, yet who are alive to the will of God 
 in the acts they record, are in reality the most 
 pious. There are some men who can see no 
 act of God in the blowing of the east wind all 
 night ; you must pile the waters perpendicularly 
 on either side before they will admit that God 
 has passed that way. There are those who see 
 no action of the spirit in the foulness of a river 
 through decaying vegetation, and in resulting 
 plague and pestilence, even though the disaster 
 cooperate in the freeing of a people, but they 
 must heighten the story and make it very mar- 
 vellous before they find divinity in it. The poet 
 of the flower in the crannied wall was more 
 truly devout than these. 
 
 The faith of the earlier writers, who told the 
 story in its simplest form and yet told it as the 
 record of the acts of God, is the more useful 
 type of piety. Faith that can believe when it 
 sees crutches in piles by a holy spring is not 
 much needed. In the first place, there are not 
 many cities like Lourdes: and in the second 
 place, those who go to them, even those who 
 are healed, do not seem to be greatly benefited 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 131 
 
 in the manhood and womanhood which the 
 world chiefly needs. The faith we want is the 
 faith that will pray, and yet send for the doctor, 
 and be very careful to follow the doctor's or- 
 ders, and, when the cure is accomplished, while 
 thanking God for His deliverance, pay the doc- 
 tor's bill promptly and in full. Doubtless 
 there were Israelites, when the Egyptians were 
 dead upon the seashore, who said, " It was only 
 an east wind ! How lucky that it should have 
 come up just when we wanted to cross, and 
 died down when we were safely over!" 
 
 The most useful man is neither he who denies 
 the wind, or forgets to mention it, and invents 
 a marvellous story, nor, on the other hand, 
 he who says it was only the wind and nothing 
 more; but the man of insight on the deeper 
 side of life, who exclaims in reverence, "The 
 Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east 
 wind ! " 
 
 Discrimination between earlier and later 
 narratives is thus a matter of supreme impor- 
 tance for religious belief. Read without criti- 
 cism, the Scriptures encourage the notion that 
 
132 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 God cannot do anything in this world except 
 in an extraordinary manner, that every real act 
 of God constitutes such a spectacle as we are 
 never likely to see. The heightening of tradi- 
 tion, especially in the Old Testament, has 
 blinded the eyes of men to the God who works 
 by east winds and through changes in the flow 
 of a river, and has implanted in many minds the 
 very vicious notion that God is not in the com- 
 mon happenings of the world, and that the 
 monotony of everyday life is without benefit 
 from His presence. 
 
 That is the most terrible unbelief, in practical 
 consequences, of which one can be guilty. 
 How trifling is unbelief in the acts of God in the 
 time of Moses compared with inability to dis- 
 cern His present commandments ! How can 
 one learn anything at all of the Man of Naza- 
 reth, who drew his every breath in the living 
 presence of God, if his underlying thought be 
 that God is not in our common world ! 
 
 One has only to consider these practical 
 consequences of the discovery of the heighten- 
 ing of Old Testament tradition to perceive that 
 
HEIGHTENING OF TRADITION 133 
 
 the newer knowledge of the Scripture is not 
 merely a theory for scholars, but rather that it 
 is a gift of God to all earnest and fearless men, 
 to teach them how God really worked in olden 
 days, that they may thus know that He is at 
 work to-day, and be privileged to join in His 
 work with all their strength. 
 
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