* James Cotter Morison, The Service of Man, p. 178.
Well, if we once fully recognise the Bible as an oriental book, we are on the road to its complete comprehension. Its grossness of speech, its gratuitous reference to animal functions, its designation of males by their sexual attributes even on the most serious occasions, its religious observances in connection with pregnancy and birth, its very rite of circumcision; all this, and much more, becomes perfectly intelligible. It is in keeping with all we know of the ideas, practices, and language of the East. Moreover, we perceive why it is that similarities to the theology, the poetry, and the ethics of the Bible have been so liberally disclosed by the progress of oriental studies. The Bible, being brought from the East, has to be carried back there to be properly understood. It is true that Christian divines have offered their own explanation of these similarities. At first they declared them to be Satanic anticipations, devilish pre-mockeries, of God's own truth. Then they declared them to be confused echoes of the oracles of Jehovah. Finally, they declare them to be evidences of the fact that, although God chose the Jewish race as the medium of his special revelation, he also revealed himself partially to other nations. But these explanations are alike fantastic. They rest upon no ground of history or evolution. The real explanation is that the Bible is one of the many sacred books of the East. Its differences from the rest are not of kind, but of degree; and any superiority that may be claimed for it must henceforth be argued upon this basis.
This oriental Bible is at utter variance with the vital beliefs, the political and social tendencies, and the ethical aspirations, of the present age. Science has destroyed its naive supernaturalism; reason has placed its personal God—the magnified, non-natural man—in his own niche in the world's Pantheon; philosophy has carried us far beyond its primitive conceptions of human society; our morality has outgrown its hardness and insularity, however we may still appreciate its finer ejaculations; even the most pious Christians, with the exception of a few "peculiar" people, only pay a hypocritical homage to its clearest injunctions; and the higher development of decency and propriety makes us turn from its crude expressions with a growing sense of disgust, while the progress of humanity fills us more and more with a loathing of its frightful wars and ruthless massacres, its tales of barbaric cruelty, and its crowning infamy of an everlasting hell.
XII. FICTITIOUS SUPREMACY
There are two remarkable characteristics of present-day apologies for Christianity: one is extravagant laudation of Jesus as man and teacher, the other is extravagant laudation of the Bible as ethics and literature. Both these characteristics are really signs of the decadence of positive faith. Anyone who sincerely believed in the deity of Jesus would shrink from praising his human virtues. To such a person it would savor strongly of impertinence. Nor would anyone who really believed the Bible to be the Word of God make it the subject of meaner panegyrics. It seems ridiculous to argue that God wrote with unusual power and sublimity, and is actually the very first of known authors. But this is what Dr. Farrar does, essentially, in the last six chapters of his volume. No wonder, therefore, that all the vices of his style are displayed in the accomplishment of this extraordinary task. He has to make several quotations from great or distinguished writers, but he catches no literary infection from them. One of these quotations is from brave old George Fox. "I saw," the great Quaker wrote, "that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of Light and Love flowed over the ocean of Darkness; and in that I saw the infinite love of God." This is magnificent writing. It has vision, force, and simplicity. In its way it could hardly be beaten. And how poor in comparison is the turgid pulpit rhetoric of Dr. Farrar!
We are told by this wordy defender of the faith that the Christian Scriptures are "the Supreme Bible of Humanity"—as though, if it be the Word of God, it could be anything less. Our attention is called to its "unique transcendence"—which is a penny-a-lining pleonasm. We are informed that it has "triumphed with ease over the assaults of its enemies"—which is a remarkably modest assertion, especially in view of the fact that the "enemies" of the Bible were, for fifteen hundred years, generally subdued by persecution, imprisonment, torture, assassination, and the burning of their writings. We are further informed that the Bible commands the reverence, guides the thoughts, educates the souls, and kindles the moral aspirations of men "through all the world"—which is an extremely sober statement in view of the fact that all the nominal Christians, not to be too precise about the real ones, do not amount to more than a fourth of the world's inhabitants. So wonderful a book is the Bible that "the Lord Jesus Christ himself did not disdain to quote from the Old Testament"—which was his own word, in the sense that it was (professedly) written under divine inspiration. This is absurd enough, but it is nothing to the rapturous eulogy of the Bible which follows it. "All the best and brightest English verse [not some, mark, but all!], from the poems of Chaucer to the plays of Shakespeare in their noblest parts, are echoes of its lessons; and from Cowper to Wordsworth," Dr. Farrar says, "from Coleridge to Tennyson, the greatest of our poets have drawn from its pages their loftiest wisdom." Really, one is tempted to ask whether such stuff as this is possible in any other country than England, or perhaps America; and whether, even in England or America, it is possible outside churches, chapels, and Sunday-schools. Sixty pages later—Dr. Farrar could not sober down in that long interval—he declares that "It was the Bible which created the prose literature of England." Now if this were true it would not serve Dr. Farrar's ostensible purpose. It would not prove that the Bible is a divine revelation. It would only prove the historical—that is to say, the largely accidental—importance of the Authorised Version of the Bible in the development of English literature. But this declaration of Dr. Farrar's is not true. The Authorised Version did not initiate, it rather closed, a period of our literary history. The English of the translators in their Preface is vastly different from the English of their translation. Indeed, they were rather collators than translators. They took the older versions as the basis of their work, they altered as little as possible, and the alterations they did make were strictly in harmony with the time-honored style of those older versions, a style which was even then very archaic. Dr. Marsh, himself a devout Christian, contends that "the dialect of this translation was not, at the time of the revision, or, indeed, at any other period, the actual current book-language nor the colloquial speech of the English people." He maintains that it was "a consecrated diction" which had been "gradually built up" from the time of Wycliffe.* Its language was not the language of Chaucer's prose, nor even of Wycliffe's own prose, any more than it was the language of Bacon's or Shakespeare's, or even that of divines like Hooker. The Authorised Version is indeed a monument of English, but of special English. It has always stood aside from the main development of English prose. Of course it has exercised a considerable influence, but that influence has been chiefly indirect. From the young naive prose of Malory to the mature and calculated prose of Swift—not to come farther—there is a clear stream of development, to which the language and style of the English Bible have contributed infinitely less than is generally assumed. With the single exception of Bunyan's masterpiece, which stands apart and alone, it is difficult to name a first-class prose competition that was greatly indebted to our Authorised Version. Even the divines disregarded it as a literary model, and perhaps most conspicuously so in the seventeenth century, immediately after its publication.
* George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language
(Murray), pp. 441, 445.
Dr. Farrar is entirely wrong in declaring that the Bible created the prose literature of England. Even if he only means that English prose was vastly profited by the religious literature which followed upon the heels of the Reformation, it is easy to reply that this literature was mainly controversial and never remarkable for the higher graces and dexterities. For those virtues, prior to the time of Taylor and South, we must turn to secular and even to "profane" compositions; a fact which is well known to every real student of English literature.