The Right Ethical and Spiritual Use of the Bible.
"From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus."—2 Timothy, iii. 15.
The right use of the Bible is admirably stated by St. Paul. These books do not make one learned in any knowledge—they make one wise in life. The Jewish tradition concerning Solomon's choice expressed a deep truth. Wisdom is the supreme benediction to be sought in life. Invaluable as is knowledge, it is as a means to an end. Knowledge provides for man the material out of which Wisdom, using "the best means to attain the best ends," builds a noble life. To have the mind clear, the judgment just, the conscience true, the will strong, so that we may sight the goal of life, may learn the laws by which it is to be won, and may firmly seek it, steadfast amid all seductions—this is wisdom.
Would that for one single day, we may have lived in this world as we ought.
Thus prays the author of the Imitation of Christ; and in so praying he is sighing after wisdom.
This culture of wisdom is the aim of the books which together form the Bible. They reveal to our vision the best ends in life, and point us to the best means of winning those high aims. They clear the atmosphere of mists, disclose to us our bearings, and fill our souls with the afflatus which wafts us toward "the haven where we would be." These books are rightly called by Paul, the "Holy Scriptures," the scriptures of holiness, the writings whose genius is goodness. Their charm is "the beauty of holiness," the graciousness of Goodness as she unveils herself therein. And this genius of gracious Goodness which irradiates the inner court of this temple, lays such a spell upon the souls of men inasmuch as she is seen to be the very daughter of God; according to the soliloquy overheard by mortal ears, wherein Wisdom sings:
The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
Before His work of old.
Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,
And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.
Religion becomes the worship of the God who is the source and standard of goodness, the love of the Eternal who loveth righteousness, the child's crying out into the dark—O righteous Father.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.
The Bible is the choicest extant literature of the people of religion, the record and embodiment of the evolution of ethical worship, through its varied moods and tenses, into its perfect type in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Bible-books form, therefore, the classics of the soul, in which we are to study the nature and secret of goodness; the manual which every earnest man and woman, intent on building character, should use habitually for ethical culture, and for the ethical worship which is its inspiration. This is the truest use of the Bible.
The intellectual use of the Bible, in critical and historical studies, is legitimate and needful. Reason should lay the bases for faith. Knowledge must rear the altar on which worship is to be lighted. Theology shapes religion. It is all important, therefore, that the books which the intellect chiefly uses to found and form its thoughts of God should be rightly used, so as to give man right conceptions of the Divine Being, and to waken right feelings toward Him. This intellectual use of the Bible is not for scholars alone. There is no longer any isolated class of scholars. All educated people are now taken into the confidence of the learned, in every sphere of knowledge. The average man will reason about the great mysteries quite as much as the scholar; perhaps more than the true scholar, and with more insistent dogmatism. To the issue of that simpler, nobler Religion of Christ which is struggling to the birth within the womb of Christianity, in the travail throes that are upon our age, it is of vital moment that all intelligent people should learn to use their Bibles intelligently in a knowledge of the nature of its writings, and in reasonable reasonings therefrom. Therefore I have spoken concerning the critical and the historical uses of these sacred writings.
But, when this knowledge is won and duly employed in our theologizings, the truest use of the Bible remains for us to make, to our highest pleasure and profit. It is the book of religion, not of theology; save as it records the one authoritative Epistle of Theology, the Word of God, the Christ. It is not a body of divinity, it is the soul of divinity. To use the Bible critically and historically for our theologizings, is, after all, to use it, however rightly, for its secondary and not its primary purpose. Religion—as the awed sense of the Eternal Power and Order revealed in nature, the Infinite Goodness and Righteousness revealed in man—is the art of the soul; its finest feelings, its loftiest imaginations, its noblest enthusiasms its profoundest tragedies thrown out into the cry of the human after God.
There is a science in the sculptor's art. It is doubtless needful that this art should be studied for the sake of its science. Artists, however, may be glad that Winckelmann has analyzed the Apollo Belvedere, and has given them the laws of proportion deduced from this human form divine; leaving them free to feast upon its beauty. For in the scientific study of art, art itself may be lost. Some great figure-painters have been unwilling that their pupils should study anatomy; fearing that the bones would stick through the flesh in their paintings.
This danger shows itself plainly in all critical and historical uses of the Bible, in the old-fashioned as in the new-fashioned study of the Bible.
The international series of Sunday-school lessons burden the brief hours of the Lord's Day with a mass of matter, which may or may not be true knowledge about the Bible, but which certainly is not the true religion of the Bible. A child may learn the tables of the Israelitish Kings, the geography of the Holy Land, and the architect's plans of the temple of Jerusalem, and may be learning nothing whatever of the real religion which is shrined within the Bible. That is very simple:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: And thy neighbor as thyself.
The time spent on these more or less interesting matters may rob the child of his one weekly opportunity of learning to use the Holy Scriptures so as to become wise unto salvation. To use their words of wise men, and their tales of holy men, to inspire the love of goodness as the love of God, this and this alone is to teach religion from the Bible. Bread that consists of two-thirds bran and one-third white flour is eminently laxative; but it is generally supposed that this age is lax enough in its hold of truth. A little more wheat and a little less bran, ye good doctors, might strengthen the constitutions of our children.
The new study of the Bible is perhaps even more in danger of missing its real secret. An interest in the literature and history of Israel may divert the mind from that which is, after all, the heart of these "letters," and the core of this history.
Fear God and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.
Of this danger I think that I see signs, in some of the great masters to whom we owe our new criticism, in some of the manuals which are popularizing it, and in some of the gifted preachers who are reconstructing theology around it. The science of religion is absorbing too much of the life that should go into the art of religion; and we have fine forms of thought, mantled with flabby flesh of feeling, in which no red blood of holy passion pulses.
To read Homer with a view of understanding the fables of superstition, and of interpreting the mythology of the ancients, may have been needful for the later Greeks, who would preserve religion from the death that was stealing over it, in the divorce of the educated and the popular thought of the Grecian Bible. Such a use of Homer, however, must have missed the essential charm of Homer—the immortal poetry of these heroic legends; the breath of fresh, simple, wholesome human life which animates them, and which through them inspired men to brave and noble being. Socrates saw this in his day.
"I beseech you to tell me, Socrates," said Phaedrus, "do you believe this tale?" "The wise are doubtful," answered Socrates, "and I should not be singular if, like them, I also doubted. I might have a rational explanation.... Now I have certainly not time for such inquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says. To be curious about that which is not my business while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."[54]
Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:
No one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to enjoy the Bible; and he who takes legend for history, and who imagines Moses, or Isaiah, or David, or Paul, or Peter, or John, to have written Bible-books which they did not write, but who knows how to enjoy the Bible deeply, is nearer the truth about the Bible than the man who can pick it all to pieces but who cannot enjoy it.... His work is to learn to enjoy and turn to his benefit the Bible, as the Word of the Eternal,[55]
The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.
Coleridge said:
Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and the habits of reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ours Ives and in nature.[56]
The use of the Bible then is to ennoble our ideals, to quicken our aspirations, to clear the illusions of the senses, to dissipate the glamor of the world, to purify our passions, to bring our powers well in hand to a firm will; and, through the mystic laws of nature and of conscience which we thus endeavor to obey, to breathe within our souls a sacred sense of the Presence of a Power, infinite and eternal and loving righteousness—whom to know "is life eternal."
De Quincey classified all writings as belonging either to the literature of knowledge, or the literature of power. There are books to which we go for information. They give us facts and ideas. They constitute the literature of knowledge. They teach us. There are books to which we go for inspiration; to which we turn for joy and pleasure, for strength and courage, for patience and endurance, for purity and peace. They constitute the literature of power. They move us. Herbert Spencer's books belong to the literature of knowledge The "Imitation of Christ" belongs to the literature of power.
The literature of knowledge needs to be reissued every century or generation or decade, corrected up to date. The literature of power is immortal; fresh to-day though born milleniums ago. The problems of character and conduct face us much as they faced the Romans and Greeks, the Egyptians and Hindus. The invisible in nature and in man touches us with the same feelings that it stirred in Persians, Chaldeans and Akkadians Even though the Spirit's voice spake once in a language of the intellect which has now become obsolete, its utterances are not therefore obsolete. How archaic is much of the thought of the "Imitation of Christ;" shot through and through as it is with the tissue of mediæval Catholicism! But we forget these archaisms in the spell of a holy soul, in love with wisdom, "intoxicated with God." No archaisms in Biblical thought destroy its spiritual power over us. Nay, rather do they strengthen that power: as in our devotions we naturally seek old and quaint forms, buildings unlike other structures, music which sounds from out the past, words that are mellow with the rich hues of age; as the archaisms of the language of our English Bible hold a power that is lost in the raw correctness of the revised version.
In the literature of power the Bible ranks first. Whatever in Christian literature has most searching ethical and spiritual energy radiates the reflected light of the Bible. Augustine's Confessions, The Imitation of Christ, Fenelon's Spiritual Letters, The Saints' Rest, The Pilgrim's Progress, in their most appealing tones echo the voices of the Bible. The hymns that feed the inner life are aromatic with the rich thoughts and feelings of this holy book. Our poets betray, in the passages which are the favorites of earnest minds, the influence of these Scriptures. From Paradise Lost to In Memoriam, from The Temple to the Christian Year, the poems which the devout delight in are either Biblical paraphrases or Biblical distillations. Our masters of fiction could not have written the scenes which most rouse our moral nature, could not have conceived the characters which most inspire our devotional nature, without the Bible. Take the Bible out of Adam Bede and Dinah Morris, out of Robert Falconer and M. Myriel the blessed Bishop of D., and what would be left of them? The vibratory quality which most thrills our souls in the strains of Christian literature is due to the Bible material in it. The Bible holds stored the ethical electricity on which Christendom has drawn, through centuries, exhaustless energy.
Outside of Christendom, while there are many books which we can thankfully and reverently place by the side of the Bible, as ethical and spiritual motors, there are none which any of us would think of substituting for it. The Discourses and the Manual of Epictetus, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the Dialogues of Plato, and the kindred words of wisdom of the ancients, are indeed full of inspiration to earnest natures. To dip into these writings for a few minutes, amid the duties of the day, is a soul bath, most cleansing and invigorating. The Sacred Books of the East may well be sacred to us Westerns. A sense of grateful awe steals over me as, looking on these volumes, I think of the generations which they have fed with spiritual sustenance and have guided in the way of life. The light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world shines through these pages. The All-Father has drawn nigh to the souls of His children, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It is an inestimable privilege to have these Bibles of Humanity ranged along our shelves, and to have their choicest words at hand upon our tables, in some apt anthology. It would be well if their great sayings could be read in our churches, in connection with our Old Testament lessons, as the voices of the ethnic prophets of the Son of Man. But if we have allowed the thought that any of these sacred books might become a substitute for our fathers' Bible, we may correct our crude enthusiasms by the authority of the greatest living master in Comparative Religion. In the preface to the edition of the Sacred Books of the East that noble monument of our generation's scholarship Max Müller, writes:
Readers who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient Brahmans, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or the Koran of Mohammed are books full of primeval wisdom and religious enthusiasm or at least of sound and simple moral teaching, will be disappointed on consulting these volumes.... I cannot help calling attention to the real mischief that has been done, and is still being done, by the enthusiasm of those pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering forest of the sacred literature of the East. They have raised expectations that cannot be fulfilled, fears also that, as will be easily seen, are unfounded.... I confess it has been for many years a problem to me, aye, and to a great extent is so still, how the Sacred Books of the East should, by the side of so much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful and true, contain so much that is not only unmeaning, artificial and silly, but even hideous and repellant.[57]
Our own Bible, as I have frankly owned, holds the truth as the gold is held in the ore. Truth nowhere exists "native" in human writings; but the proportions of the "mineralizer" are vastly greater in all other Bibles than in our own. There is no book known that can take its place on the lecterns in our churches, or on the tables by which, in quiet hours, we seat ourselves, a-hungered for the bread of life.
The pre-eminent excellence of Israel's writings in the literature of power, is natural and necessary. Israel had little originality in any science or art save the science and art of the soul, the knowledge and the love of God. Nature is economic in her dowries. She does not shower all the gifts of the fairies on any one race. She dowered Israel with the highest of human powers, conscience, in an unequalled measure. Providence nurtured and trained this faculty. This little nation became as pre-eminently the people of ethical and spiritual religion as the states of Greece became the people of art. Because of the natural aptitudes of Israel, and of her providential education, we should turn to her literature for our highest inspirations in ethical culture and religion.