IV.
We cannot but accept the very general suggestion of our critics that we ought to have attempted a separate treatment of the problem of sin. Some such treatment is now offered in the second appendix, and offered in the form of a republication of what has previously seen the light, so that it may be plain that the absence of it from earlier editions was not due to lack of conviction or unwillingness to deal with the subject. The appendix is not in fact more than a drawing out of what is involved in some passages of the essays taken together[9]. Thus the fifth essay takes up a very clear position as to the practical aspect which sin bears in human life. The fact is emphasized that sin, as our moral consciousness knows it and Christianity has successfully dealt with it, is a phenomenon unique in the world:—it is what nothing else is, violation of law. Now this is the essence of the Christian doctrine of sin, as S. John states it: 'Sin is lawlessness[10].' Sin and lawlessness are coincident terms. This view of sin is primarily practical; it may be represented in fact as a postulate required for successfully dealing with sin, a postulate justified and verified by its results. But because it is thus verified and justified, it passes like any other hypothesis which explains facts, in proportion to the range and thoroughness of the experience which tests it, out of the region of mere working hypotheses into that of accepted truths. Thus it is to the Christian consciousness an accepted truth, that sin, all down the long history of humanity, has been a violation of the divine order, a refusal of obedience, a corruption of man's true nature. Sin, as such, has always been a source of confusion, not of progress. We can indeed recognise how the movement and development in humanity has frequently[11] been in fact conditioned by sin; but we should still contend that it has never been the sin in itself which has been the spring of force and progress, but the faculties of will and intellect which sin was using. Always the will and intellect would have worked better and more fruitfully in the result if they had been free from the taint of selfishness and rebellion against God. Always sin, as such, has been a lowering and not a raising of human life: a fall and not a rise. Thus sin at the beginning of human life must have been not merely the awakening of moral consciousness, but the obscuring and tainting of it by lawlessness and disobedience. Sin, as all down its history, so in its origin, is a fall; a fall, moreover, entailing consequences on those who come after, in virtue of the inviolable solidarity of the human race. To this view of sin original and actual, Christianity appears to be bound; and it is a view that, as we have now endeavoured to show[12], brings us into no conflict with scientific discovery. For science never attempts to prove that man might not have developed otherwise than as in fact he has, or that the actual development has been the best possible: nor has Christianity ever in its best representatives, certainly not in its patristic representatives, been identified with a denial that human history as a whole has been a development upwards from below[13]. The Old Testament is in fact among ancient literatures, the literature of development, of progress[14].
V.
The criticisms on our treatment of Inspiration have been so abundant, and have gone into such detail, that it will be obvious that any attempt to reply to them must be a more individual effort than the attempt to reply to the criticisms on the general aim and spirit of the book. For while the writers in this volume are at one as to the general attitude which they would wish the Church to assume towards the critical treatment of the Old Testament, as they are at one in the general line of treatment adopted throughout this volume, they cannot pretend to be at one on all the details of a complicated subject. The writer of the particular essay alone can be responsible for these: and with reference to them he must be understood to speak simply in his own person.
1. The passage about Inspiration was written under the conviction that recent criticism of the Old Testament represents a real advance in analytical method as applied to literature, and thus a most serious movement of thought. As such it has been estimated by the Bishop of Oxford in his recent Charge. He says, 'The Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament are now going through a process of analytical criticism which has, as we believe, had no parallel, for acuteness of investigation, carefulness of method, and completeness of apparatus, since the days in which they began to be regarded as a code of inspired literature, and certainly not since the days of our blessed Lord's life on earth; at which period we understand that to all intents and purposes the books which we receive, as the Canonical Old Testament Scriptures, had taken their existing form[15].' But like the scientific movement of our time, the critical movement has been accompanied by all the arbitrariness and tendency to push things to extremes which appears to be an almost inseparable attendant upon living and vigorous movements, ecclesiastical and secular. Further than this, its representatives have been—and here again the conditions of the scientific movement are reproduced—very frequently men personally opposed to the Christian faith, and even thoroughly rationalistic in temper and tone. But it does not follow in the case of criticism, any more than in the case of science, that we are not to learn a great deal from a movement characterized even predominantly by 'extremeness' and unbelief. And in fact, in the past fifty years there appears to have been a solid critical advance, underneath a great deal of controversial arbitrariness and irreligious insolence. Now I thought that I should best serve the purpose with which I was writing, if I went as far as I could in ungrudging recognition of the claims of criticism, and involved myself as little as possible in doubtful discussions; but I did also intend to express, and believed myself to have expressed with sufficient clearness[16], my own conviction that it was with the more conservative among the recent critics, and not with the more extreme, that the victory would lie. Thus when I said, in a sentence which has been specially criticized (partly because its wording was somewhat ambiguous), that criticism is reaching 'results as sure as scientific enquiry,' what I intended so to characterize was not the extreme conclusions of Wellhausen, but substantially the conclusions shared in common by Wellhausen and Dillmann, by critics theologically more conservative, like König and Riehm, by Delitzsch in his last position, by the French Catholic orientalist, F. Lenormant, as well as by an increasing body of English scholars[17]. Nor is there a single line of what I wrote which would be affected, so far as I see, even if Professor Margoliouth were satisfactorily to make out his case for throwing back the period of the 'Middle Hebrew[18].' As to the grounds on which we have been asked to date the bulk of the Psalms below the Captivity, and even in the Maccabean period, they may appear indeed quite unconvincing; but it would have been utterly beside my purpose, as it would also have been out of my power, to give them adequate discussion[19], nor would it seem as if even so improbably late a date as that suggested would really affect their Messianic or spiritual character. Let us affirm then without any hesitation that there is a good deal of arbitrariness and extremeness in current criticism as applied to the Old Testament. But surely we should be the victims of a dangerous delusion if we were to imagine that because there is a good deal that is unsubstantial in recent criticism, therefore there is no substantial force in what really represents the successive labours of many generations of students. I do not think that we can conceal from ourselves that if we are to defend a purely conservative attitude in regard to Old Testament literature, we shall require quite different canons of evidence from those which we are able so successfully to use in vindicating the historical character of the New Testament: or again, in vindicating the claims of the apostolic ministry and the sacramental system to be part of the original fabric of the Christian Church. In other words, the critical principles of historical enquiry which do so amply justify us in retaining substantially the traditional position in regard as well to the New Testament documents as to our Church principles, do not carry us to the same point in the field of the Old Testament. No doubt there the vastness of the field is a permanent obstacle to uniformly certain results. A great deal must remain, and probably for ever, more or less an open question. But this necessary uncertainty, if it imposes on critics an obligation of caution, imposes also on us churchmen an obligation of reserve in dogmatic requirement. We do not wish to run the risk of making a claim on men's minds for the acceptance of positions for which we have only this to urge, that they cannot be absolutely disproved.
2. The changed view of the development of Old Testament literature, such as can be truly said to be proposed for our acceptance by modern critics with a great deal of unanimity, if it be granted for the moment that it is compatible with the real inspiration of the books, involves no important change in our spiritual use of the Old Testament; in the use of it for the purposes of 'faith and morals.' This latter use of Scripture depends simply on our rightly interpreting the meaning of the books as they exist.
There is a great principle enunciated by S. Augustine in regard to the Old Testament which requires to be kept constantly in view. It is that as the Old Testament is manifested in the New, so the New Testament is latent in the Old[20]. In order to recognize this there is no discussion necessary of the method by which our 'Old Testament' received its present shape. The evidence of it lies in the Old Testament considered as a finished product. As such, we cannot study that 'divine library' without being struck both by its unity, so far greater than belongs to any other literature[21], and by the fact that like no other literature it looks forward to an end not yet attained, a divine event in which is to be its justification and its interpretation. The Old Testament demands the New to bring out its true meaning: the New appeals back to the Old to bear witness to the continuity of the divine purpose of which it is the outcome. It is from this point of view that we understand the appeal which, in the New Testament, is so constantly made to the older Scriptures. Whether they are appealed to, as in the Sermon on the Mount, as containing the record of a moral education, divine though imperfect, which the Christ was to complete[22]; or as by St. Paul, as the record of a preparatory and temporary discipline by means of external enactments of God, calculated to awaken the dull conscience of men to the reality and holiness of the divine will, and so to make men conscious of sin against God, and ready to welcome the dispensation of pardon and grace[23]; or, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as a system of ritual and ceremonial observances, in which were shadowed forth by the inspiring Spirit[24] the deep truths of the still-needed sacrifice, and the access to God not yet won for man; or finally, as by almost all the New Testament writers, as a prophetic dispensation in which the Messianic hope found gradual expression in fuller and exacter lineaments, and produced an anticipation which Christ only could satisfy[25]:—from any of these points of view, or from all taken together, we are concerned only with the Old Testament as it finally appears, not with the method by which it came into being. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that when we seek reassurance in regard to the inspiration of those books of the Old Testament, to which our Lord and His Church refer us, we find it primarily in the substance of the books as they are given to us, not in any considerations of the manner in which they came into existence[26].
And if this is so, it needs to be borne in mind that the responsibility for bringing it home to the consciences of men, the responsibility for thus preventing that breach in religious continuity which the change in critical and literary conceptions of the Old Testament might otherwise occasion, lies in a preeminent degree upon those of us who are most impressed with the valid elements of the recent criticism. It belongs to us to see to it that, so far as lies with us, the Bible shall not be less prized by the generations that are coming, as the divine, the inspired volume, than it has been by the generations that are gone. It belongs to us to attend to the double admonition of the De Imitatione: 'Every scripture must be read in the same spirit in which it was written:' and 'Do not enquire who said this, but pay heed to what is said.'