Idolatry.—It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's (Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols—utterly wide of any real imperfection, but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship Apollo, i.e., a god to be in some sense false—belonging to a system connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.
I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere archæologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the dimensions of Nineveh, how should that make him a true prophet? Or supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them, they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.
The sun stands still. I am persuaded that this means no such incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs. And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle, would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people never reflect on the το positive of their reading? If they did, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event, as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters (through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the final-cause day.
The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or comment, or—which, in fact, is the meaning—any impulse or bias to the reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz., the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception. Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses, already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.
Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of Araunah?[33] Of that mystery, of that local circumscription—in what sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts—yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years. Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended. Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptred potentate for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 b. c. complete the period. But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost. The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next think of the temptation to mythus. And, finally, of God's plan unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire; 2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with the purposes now became necessary to God in order to remedy abnormous shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish fit[34] as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we have the same identically. And when a language labours under an infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language—I know its secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high abstractions—far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.
The power lies in the spirit—the animating principle; and verily such a power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness, goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in reaching man ex-abundantibus in so transcendent a way that mere excess of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered, uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[35] down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses—there was the labour hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men treating such a case as a simple original problem as to God. But far otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power to receive, to sustain, to comprehend—not in the Divine power to radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act, and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and remains wholly uninfluenced by it).
These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against which they had been warned—in believing that they only were concerned in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of favour with God, but only a means of favour.
What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such as would not have been (objectively would not have been, but still less could it subjectively have been) for the conception of man that dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the absolute, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure—even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and body.