The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible

by Richard Heber Newton

The general picture we must fashion in our minds of this period is of a polytheistic, idolatrous people, slightly distinguishable from the surrounding Semites, save as they held, in their recognition of Jehovah and his Ten Words, the germ of a higher thought and life.

III.

The period of the monarchy, down to the epoch of the great prophets: B. C. 1100-800.

The story of the making of England may interpret to us the development that ensued in this third period of Israel's history. We know how the petty realms of the Angles-land, under pressure from a common foe, learned to act momentarily together, came for a summer under some commanding leader, drew thus into closer affiliations grouped gradually around the more powerful realms, and at length crystallized into England. In some such way the Hebrew tribes were slowly knit together by the necessity of war, until to organize a lasting victory they were forced into consolidation and out of the loose confederation of tribes arose a nation, Israel. Social tendencies generally throw a leader to the front. The man is not wanting for the hour. The king-maker of Israel was Samuel. A man combining in that simple state of society several functions—priest and judge and leader—he had the prescience to divine the need of the age, and the wisdom to point out the man to meet it. Saul was chosen King, in free gathering of the hardy yeomanry, and proved his human election a divine selection by rousing the nation to new efforts, which his genius led to victory. Saul was followed by a brief period of national unity under David and Solomon, in which the rapid and brilliant progress made in the spread of the kingdom, in wealth and civilization, revealed the latent powers of this gifted race.

The progress of political and commercial greatness was stayed by the rending of the kingdom after Solomon. No great advances were possible amid the chronic jealousies and frequent strife of the sister kingdoms, which were unable to come together again in a unity that would have restored their prestige, and were unable, apart, to achieve any signal success in diplomacy or war.

The social state of the people underwent the changes usual in this stage of a people's history. With peace came wealth, with wealth came luxury, with luxury new social vices, fed from the court which grew around the monarchy. But that the heart of the people continued sound amid these organic changes we may see from several hints preserved by tradition.

The institution, or revival, of the Order of the Nazarites was a religio-moral movement. It was a protest against the vice of drunkenness that was increasing in the land, as, relieved from war's alarms and waxing fat upon their fertile fields, the people gave themselves to pleasure. The first Prohibition Society, of which we have record, was this Order of the Nazarites. This Order appears also to have had a still deeper moral aim, little noticed of old. It was a reaction from the social changes that were going on in Israel, a protest against the new-fashioned ways of wealth, an earnest effort to hold to the simplicities of earlier days, to the good old plain living and high thinking. It was a counter-movement of Old Israel, essaying to stem the mad rush for riches. A still more convincing token of the healthy moral tone of the nation is to be found in the earliest considerable work of literature preserved to us, the Song of Songs. It holds up to scorn the licentiousness that Solomon had made fashionable, and of which, in a just retribution, he had become the abhorred type. The great king fails to corrupt the virtue of a simple country maiden, despite of all his blandishments. Ewald assigns this poem to the northern kingdom, which had separated itself from Judah chiefly in reaction from the Solomonic innovations. It leads us into the homes of the sturdy peasantry of the hill country, where burned the fires on the altars of pure wedded love.

From a people thus sound at heart, amid the mellowing richness of civilization, we may well expect great things in religion. Whatever the outward forms of religion, its roots ran deep down into the moral law, and must needs have borne in due time a noble fruitage. There was in fact a striking development of religion in this period. It was coincident with the secular development of the nation. This indeed is the general rule of religious revival. Religion advances with the advancing life of man, each new and true step forward opening a higher possibility of thought and feeling concerning God. As Moses the Emancipator was the father of true religion in Israel, so Samuel the king-maker was its early master. We cannot now trace clearly his work, but we can see that he was a fresh ethical and spiritual force, shaping religious life anew.

Prophets there had doubtless been before him, in Israel as out of it, but they were unethical and unspiritual influences in religion; the frenzied dervishes, the oracular seers, the wizards and necromancers who long afterward claimed this name, and were denounced by the higher prophets. Samuel's masterful work was to turn this semi-religious force into a higher channel, and to direct it toward a moral aim. He was the creator of the type which drew after him "the goodly fellowship of the prophets." The traditions of Israel present him in the rôle of fearless censor and truthful mentor to the infant State; the rôle which the great prophets later on assumed toward the maturer nation. He criticized the King, guided the people, and held the nation loyal to Jehovah. However little perception the mass of the people had of the spiritual significance of the State religion, however many gross forms of popular religion existed around and within the tolerant institutions of Jehovahism, it was a vital matter to preserve that State religion, and keep it well ahead of the people's growth. Thus we can perceive the historic significance of the work of the next great prophet after Samuel, Elijah; through the legendary nimbus that gathered round his striking personality and dramatic action In a critical hour, when the Jehovah-worship had well nigh disappeared, he stood alone against the powers of the realm, and rallied the people once more beneath the name of the god of their father. He plucked a victory from defeat which decided the course of history. What if Jehovah was but a name to the mass of the people? What if they continued to worship much as before, only no longer at the altars of Baal? There are long periods in the history of man when the future depends upon allegiance to an institution little understood by those who shout most lustily for it. The future may lie seeded down in a name which stores within it the forces of a new and higher unfolding when the times come ripe. Thus it proved through the crawling centuries in which Israel held hard by a name of God which then meant little to it, but which ultimately evolved its ethical significance and manifested unto men, The Eternal who loveth righteousness. Thus may it prove with the child of Judaism. Liberals, who are in such haste to drop the name of Christ, should pause long enough to ask themselves the question whether, since it roots religion in a life of such perfect goodness that it became to men the manifestation of God, this sacred name may not in its turn hold the secret of our progress; whether, from the treasured forces of the past that it gathers into itself, when the spring time now setting in shall have fully come, it may not blossom into the religion of the future? A civilization should not be cut off from the historic seed which lies at the roots of its religion, if it is to grow unto the harvest.

That in this fidelity to the tradition of their race the religion of the people of Israel was in the vital processes of growth, through this long period, we know assuredly from one conclusive fact. Out of this tedious winter came, suddenly as it seems to us, a rich and beautiful spring. The epoch of the great prophets, with a new life of thought and aspiration, breaks in abruptly on this commingling of all sorts of religion within the precincts of Jehovahism. Even in February the sap is softening and warming in the veins which show no greening on the tips of the patient trees. Israel was swelling toward the day that was sure to come, when, lo! the spring!