John Ruskin thanks his mother for daily reading the Bible with him in his childhood, and daily making him learn a part of it by heart. This is seized upon by Dr. Farrar, who places it in his list of testimonies. But it might have been wise—it would certainly have been honest—to tell the reader how Ruskin views the Bible. This great writer has formulated four theories of the Bible, the third of which he has declared to be "for the last half-century the theory of the soundest scholars and thinkers in Europe." And what is this theory? Here it is in Ruskin's own words:—
"That the mass of religious Scripture contains merely the best efforts which we hitherto know to have been made by any of the races of men towards the discovery of some relations with the spiritual world; that they are only trustworthy as expressions of the enthusiastic visions or beliefs of earnest men oppressed by the world's darkness, and have no more authoritative claim on our faith than the religious speculations and histories of the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Indians; but are, in common with all these, to be reverently studied, as containing a portion, divinely appointed, of the best wisdom which the human intellect, earnestly seeking for help from God, has hitherto been able to gather between birth and death."*
* Time and Tide, pp. 48, 49. It should be noted that the
Letters in this pregnant little volume were written by
Ruskin as far back as 1867.
Surely this is a very different view of the Bible from the one which is presented by Dr. Farrar. Setting aside a little religious phraseology, a Freethinker might endorse Ruskin's theory of the Bible. Everything is substantially granted to the Freethinker when it is admitted that the Bible has "no authoritative claim on our faith." Whatever truth and beauty it contains may then be thankfully accepted.
Professor Huxley's famous eulogy of the Bible, as a book to be read in Board Schools, is made the most of by Dr. Farrar. He must have winced, however, at Huxley's reference to what a sensible teacher would "eliminate" as "not desirable for children to occupy themselves with." He was not sensitive enough to wince at the statement that "even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child"—which is virtually a testimonial in his favor for grown-up men and women. Dr. Farrar crows lustily over what he calls "Professor Huxley's testimony to the unique glory of the Scriptures." It is perhaps well for him that Huxley is incapable of resenting this misrepresentation. Still, it must be admitted that on this occasion, as on one or two others, Huxley did gratuitously play into the hands of the enemy. He might have known the kind of use they would make of his "graceful concessions."
Dr. Farrar had not the honesty to tell his readers that Huxley had the most sovereign contempt for his theory of the Bible. The great Agnostic held, for instance, that "belief in a demonic world" is inculcated throughout the New Testament, and that this belief is "totally devoid of foundation." He declared that Inspiration, in the school of the Higher Criticism, is "deprived of its old intelligible sense," and is "watered down into a mystification." He laughed at the miracles of the Gospels, and made great fun of the story of the bedevilled Gadarean swine. He held that religion and morality have really no necessary connection, and sneered at the "supernaturalists"—gentlemen like Dr. Farrar—who took to patronising morality when they saw its importance, and "have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of supernaturalism."*
To accept a testimonial from such a writer is abject on the part of a clergyman defending the inspiration of the Bible; and to parade it is simply contemptible. More than fifty years ago, when this petty trick of Christian apologetics was coming into vogue, it was rebuked by Newman, who disdained as "unworthy" the practice of "boasting of the admissions of infidels concerning the beauty or utility of the Christian system, as though," he added with fine sarcasm, "it were a great thing for a divine gift to obtain praise for human excellence."**
* Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition, pp. xv., 25, 54,
etc.
** John Henry Newman, University Sermons, p. 71.
Dr. Farrar's citation of Matthew Arnold is open to the same kind of criticism. "He retained but little faith in the miraculous," we are told, and "his creed was anything but orthodox." But is it fair to suggest that Arnold had any creed at all? He rejected the idea of a personal God, he regarded Jesus as a merely human teacher, and it is evident from his books and his published correspondence that he had no belief in personal immortality. As for his "faith in the miraculous," it was not "little," with or without the "but"; it was a minus quantity. He positively disbelieved in the miraculous. It was a part of his plain message to the Churches that the reign of the Bible miracles was doomed, that they were all fairy tales, and that, if the fate of the Bible was bound up with theirs, the Bible was doomed too. Arnold said all this when he was living, and it is useless for Dr. Farrar to disguise the fact, or to minimise it by artful phrases. We commend to his attention—would that we could commend it to the attention of his readers!—the following passage from a letter of Arnold's to Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, dated July 22, 1882:—
"The central fact of the situation always remains to me this: that whereas the basis of things amidst all chance and change has even in Europe generally been for ever so long supernatural Christianity, and far more so in England than in Europe generally, this basis is certainly going—going amidst the full consciousness of the continentals that it is going, and amidst the provincial unconsciousness of the English that it is going."*