The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

Our imaginations may make an easy test. Let an authoritative edict go forth that after the approaching midnight the home would be banished, and that each community must adjust itself to some other form of social life. What would such an edict mean? The homes from which students have come are no more responsible for them. They constitute no longer the bases of supplies on which they can draw, nor the alluring hearthstones to which they can return. The workman turns no more his eager feet toward the lights of his cottage. The prince finds his palace removed and all its splendor ceases to invite him. Little children are herded into impersonal surroundings and become public rather than domestic charges. The scene of disaster could be described without merciful stint. These suggestions are enough to show that society could scarcely escape chaos if the home were to be destroyed. How much do the words father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, son, daughter mean? Empty out their closer significance, and you vacate much of life’s meaning.

Nor is this the narrow word of an ecclesiastic or theologian. Drummond in The Ascent of Man claims that the evolution of a father and mother was the final effort of nature. John Fiske, as scientist and historian, points out the helplessness of infant life as binding parents into unity that grows out of responsibility. Soon after its birth the wee animal runs and leaps, while the wee bird does not wait long ere it flies from limb to limb; but the human babe in the ancient forest lies helpless in its log cradle for many months. Both Drummond and Fiske agree that by this program the God of nature was introducing patience, devotion, and sacrifice into the world and was making ready for the kingdom of heaven. It is plain that Drummond does not state it too strongly when he says that “the goal of the whole plant and animal life seems to have been the creation of a family which the very naturalist had to call Mammals,” or Mothers.

This represents somewhat the divine history of the home. The prophecy of the home likewise does some convincing work. The truth is that the home as an institution plants itself squarely in the path of some modern social theories. Some of those theories have begun by boldly demanding that the home be abolished because it has been made a buttress of private life and property. Not only has this suggestion been met with a horror that in itself expresses the instinctive conviction of the sacredness of the home, but it has been met with the insistence that the prophets should name their substitute for the hearthstone. This insistence has received nothing more than hazy and vague replies. The prophet stammers out some dark saying about “something better” or about the home as having fulfilled its mission in “the evolution of society”; and by the very helplessness of his speech he really becomes an advocate of closer domestic relations! It is interesting to note how these reformers seek to find a good path back from their social desert! They soon declare that the new regime must keep the home intact, and that only sporadic and irresponsible voices from their camp are lifted against the home’s sanctity! The antihome prophet always has a hard task. He collides with one of the granite convictions of humanity. If he would save the rest of his theory he must save the home from the proposed destruction. God has set the solitary in families. Men look in vain for a better setting for the jewel of life. From all their seeking they come back in due season to the truth that, imperfect as the home may often be, it is still rooted and grounded in outer life and in inner instinct, and that it is futile to try to make better what God has made best.

All this will serve for emphasizing the importance of the home, though much more might be added. When the man awakes in the morning, becomes aware of himself, and then hears the voices of his wife and children, he is immediately related to one of the fundamental institutions of society. If the Bible be, as we have claimed, preeminently the Book of Life, it must relate itself vitally to the home. Our inquiry, therefore, is, What bearing does the Book have upon the home? The answer must necessarily be sketchy and incomplete; but we can soon gather an answer that will establish the biblical drift of teaching.

The Bible begins with an impressive lesson of monogamy. In the Eden life one man and one woman join hands as partners in joy and work. Let the account be poetry, allegory, parable, the lesson is the same. In that intimate communion with God that found him in the garden in the cool of the day, bigamy and polygamy are not represented as being at home. Even the Fall is not described as quickly dropping man low enough to reach the dreadful level of promiscuity or of any of the approaches to so-called free love. It required time ere that downward journey could be made. Humanity in its innocence is not described as starting from the dens of polygamy.

But in season the Bible gives us some disconcerting facts. Bigamy and polygamy confront us in the lives of some worthies. Let it be allowed that sometimes the motive is the perpetuation of the home itself. Provision is sought against the curse of barrenness. Let it be allowed, also, that the Bible does not represent bigamy as working well. It brought discord into Abraham’s tent. The peevish wife drives her own wretched substitute from the door, until the desolate Hagar stands in her loneliness and repeats the comforting ritual of the seeing God. The son of bigamy goes off into his wild life, with his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. The admirable thing about the second patriarch is his devotion to one woman. Neutral and characterless as Isaac seems to be, he still won a mention in the marriage service of the ages by his faithfulness to Rebecca alone. Upon the third patriarch bigamy was forced by a cruel deception. In truth a review of the Old Testament will show that any departure from the unity of the home made for trouble. It filled the moving tabernacles of the patriarchs with quarrels. It led David on to murder. It drenched Solomon in debauchery. It degraded the successive kings until it destroyed their power and ruined the nation. Its inevitable end was the loss of the land and the sadness of captivity.

The Old Testament records polygamy, but it does not applaud polygamy. When once a polygamist stood in the halls of Congress and defended his right to a seat by quoting the examples of the patriarchs, his plea did not avail. Not only was the conviction of the nineteenth century against his contention, but the mood of the very Book from which he quoted was his enemy. So far as we can judge, monogamy was the general rule among the Jewish people. The exemplars of bigamy and polygamy were mainly those whose position enabled them to flaunt the public sentiment of their day. The history of Old Testament polygamy is so sorrowful that the Hebrew people have reacted from it into a stanch defense for the monogamic home. The seduction of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, the unfilial licentiousness of Absalom, the sordid road of impurity trod by the later monarchs of Israel, and the despair of the Babylonish captivity, make a piercing case against polygamy. On the other hand, the unwavering faithfulness of the maid in the Song of Solomon, the patience of Hosea with his prodigal wife, the idyllic story of Ruth, all these became persuasive pleas for a home wherein one man and one woman should live together in loyal love even until death. When Jesus came to give his message contemporaneous polygamy had all but ceased in Palestine. But easy divorce, sometimes called “consecutive polygamy,” had become prevalent. The world was waiting for the voice of authority, and it heard that voice when Christ began to teach.

The teaching of Jesus in reference to marriage is unmistakable. It may impress many as severe; it cannot impress any as doubtful. If we accept him as the Supreme Teacher we receive a decision given with no equivocal terms. It is often said that the method of the Lord was to offer general principles and to leave his followers to carry out these principles in the spirit of loving discipleship. Thus he declined to give detailed rules for the observance of the Sabbath, explicit instructions for the division of estates, definite laws for prayer and worship and almsgiving. Yet when he discussed marriage he gave both general principles and specific rules. If this was not the only case where he became sponsor for a rule it was surely the most emphatic case. He seemed to feel that concerning marriage and the home he must give a mass of distinct precepts. It was as if he deemed the home so sacred and its enemies so subtle and powerful as to make necessary some particular instruction.

Perhaps we shall not err in saying that Jesus found in his time urgent reasons for specific and strong teaching about marriage. The Jews, who went to a mechanical extreme in their observance of the Sabbath law, had gone to an opposite extreme in their attitude toward the law of the home. In this regard the period was worse than our own, but it was not unlike our own. The domestic conscience of the Jews had been more or less weakened. Mere trifles were made excuses for the breaking up of home. Doubtless the influence of the Romans was making itself felt among the Hebrews. Professor Sheldon quotes Dorner as showing the reckless ease of divorce among leading Romans. One man divorced his wife because she went unveiled on the street; another because she spoke familiarly to a freedwoman; another because she went to a play without his knowledge. Even Cicero, proclaimed a very noble Roman, divorced his first wife that he might marry a wealthier woman, and his second wife because she did not seem to be sufficiently afflicted over the death of his daughter! “In fine,” says Professor Sheldon, “it was not altogether hyperbole when Seneca spoke of noble women as reckoning their years by their successive husbands rather than by the Consuls” (History of the Early Church, pages 29, 30).

The records of this same period among the Romans will rout the claim that easy divorce tends to purity. Faithlessness to marriage vows was not seriously regarded, and there were instances of so-called noble women registering as public prostitutes in order that they might thus avoid the penalties of the laws! Easy divorce seemed to be accompanied by easy virtue, as if, indeed, both evils grew naturally out of the same soil. The Roman fashions were having their influence on the Jews. The sacred law was searched and was explained away with evil subtlety in order that men might be religiously released from the marriage bond.