III.
It is a wrong use of the Bible to construct a theology out of it, by the mechanical system of proof texts in vogue in the churches.
With a preconceived system of thought in their minds, drawn from the most highly evolved speculations of the New Testament, men have gone through both Testaments; and whenever they have lighted upon a sentence which seemed to coincide with this system, it has been torn bleeding from its place in a living texture of thought, impaled on some one of the "Five Points," and set up in the Theological Cabinet, duly labelled "Proof-Text of Original Sin," or "Proof Text of Future Punishment."
What a monstrosity an ordinary Sunday School Scripture Catechism is, with its statements of received doctrines, to which are appended proof-texts drawn from Genesis and Isaiah and Paul; i.e., from some pre-historic tradition, from a Hebrew states, man's oration and from a Christian apostle's letter. It makes no difference what the character of the writing from which the sentence is taken. Everything is grist for this mill. A "judgment" or "doom" of the nomadic Hebrews, a burning metaphor from a late poet and a metaphysical proposition from an Alexandrian philosopher are jumbled together side by side, as co-equal proofs of the most awful doctrines.
An ancient historian, gathering up the traditions of his primitive fore-fathers, records the legend of the Flood, in which it is told that
"God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,
And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
Was only evil continually."
The poet who wrote, out of the deep of some experience of shameful sin, the pathetic penitential hymn, known as the Fifty-first Psalm, said, in the course of his self-condemnings:—
"Behold I was shapen in wickedness,
And in sin hath my mother conceived me."
The poet who wrote his unrivaled prophecies amid the humiliation of the national exile in Babylonia, cried out in one place:—
"We are all as an unclean thing,
And all our righteousness are as filthy rags."