The Puritan dwelt on "binding their kings in chains and their nobles with links of iron." The Calvinist sees the dreadful image of wrath flaming over all its pages, and says to his enemies, "Our God is a consuming fire." The Universalist only sees the loving heavenly Father, and explains the most awful forebodings as Oriental tropes and pictorial rhetoric. The Mormon picks out phrases to bolster up his polygamy; the Monogamist cries out even against divorce; the Shaker and his congeners in all ages forbid or disparage all wedded unions whatever. The American of the Northern States loaded his gun with texts and went out to fight for freedom; the Southerner quoted the curse of Ham, and the Epistle to Philemon, declared that slavery was a divine institution, and that it was impious unbelief to regard it as a crime.' 'In the mirror of the Bible, each partisan will practically see nothing but his own face. Each declares, more or less emphatically, "All good and honest people see it as I do;" and many add," a different opinion means wilful blindness and a bad heart." Each sect is tempted to treat its own enemies as the Lord's enemies; and when any one sect or branch of the Church is absolutely dominant, as was the Church of Rome in the Dark Ages, it has usually given its opponents a terrific foretaste of "uncovenanted mercies" by burning them alive in this world, and handing them over to endless torments in the next.' Even as to the most obvious and elementary conceptions of how we may obtain salvation there are-though there ought not to be-the most striking differences. One man is convinced that faith alone saves us, and that 'works are deadly;' another can quote passages from Genesis to Revelation to show that the only way to please God is to do the thing that is right. One man attaches a notion of BIBLE COMMENTARIES 157 saintliness to exaggerated asceticism; another looks upon it as a faithless will-worship, a sin against the body, due to false and semi-Manichean conceptions of the God of love, and tending only to destroy the body and daze the soul. Truly, if over the whole extent of what we call 'religion' men have an infallible guide, they have-and that to all appearance inevitably-rendered it worse than useless by fallible expositions. Of seven great systems of interpretation which have been dominant since there ever was a collected Bible, the bare rules and à priori conceptions on which six were based have been definitely abandoned, and have been, in their applications at any rate, demonstrably wrong.1 Whole libraries are filled with commentaries on the Bible, in all languages, which are now regarded as entirely obsolete. Yet they were laborious and honest attempts on the part of their authors to explain the true meaning of the Holy Scriptures. They were only vitiated by partial knowledge, false religious systems, or à priori prejudices which failed to see the significance of Scripture because they looked at it through blinding mists of traditional misconception. 1 See the writer's Bampton Lectures on the History of Interpretation, p. 12. Who can say that the Rabbinic, the Kabbalistic, the Alexandrian, the Allegorical, the Mystic, the Inferential, the Scholastic system of Exegesis are not, as systems, dead and buried? Any commentary which adopted these methods would in these days be laughed out of court, or flung aside as obsolete, and almost as an insult to the understanding. CHAPTER XII DANGEROUS RESULTS OF THE SUPERNATURAL 'Ecclesia non facit Verbum, sed fit Verbo.'-LUTHER. Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And plant our evils there?'-WHITTIER. DOCTRINES may be tested and disproved not only by demonstrating the falsity of the assumptions on which they profess to be founded, but also by showing the pernicious or dangerous character of their invariable results. This method is sanctioned by Christ Himself. 'By their fruits,' He said, 'ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" What have been the fruits of this doctrine of Biblical infallibility? Let us begin by testing it in one domain only-the domain of science. It is now generally recognised, except among the halfeducated, that on scientific subjects the Bible neither is, nor professes to be, nor in accordance with the whole economy of God's dealing with the human race ever could have been, any authority at all on subjects which do not fall under its proper object. 'The Scriptures,' said Arch BATTLES AGAINST SCIENCE 159 bishop Sumner, 'have never revealed a single scientific truth.' They do not concern themselves with the problems of which the solution belongs to experimental investigation. The knowledge of the writers of Scripture on the subject of exact science was simply the human and individual knowledge of those writers, and that was the knowledge, or rather the ignorance, of the most unscientific of all nations in the most unscientific of all ages. To the Hebrews by whom the greater part of the Bible was written science was unknown; their immemorial habits of thought were wholly alien from the scientific spirit. Men cling so obstinately to religious hypotheses long exploded and originally without foundation, that some perhaps may regard these statements as heterodox novelties, whereas they were orthodox truisms long before anything that could be called science was established. They are practically admitted even by St. Augustine in the fourth century, and distinctly laid down by the famous schoolman Peter Lombard, 'the Master of the Sentences.'1 No one has expressed them more clearly than Galileo, who was persecuted and forced to recant because he had dispelled an infallible ignorance and discovered some of the most splendid certainties which had yet been made known to the race of man. 'I believe,' he says, 'that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary to salvation, such as neither science nor other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of those 1 Sentent. ii. dist. 23. sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in Scripture.' There is scarcely a modern science which has not been brought into deplorable conflict with the Bible by theologians who misunderstood its scope and misapplied its expressions. The history of most modern sciences has been as follows. Their discoverers have been proscribed, anathematised, and, in every possible instance, silenced or persecuted; yet before a generation has passed, the champions of a spurious orthodoxy have had to confess that their interpretations were erroneous; and-for the most part without an apology and without a blush-have complacently invented some new line of exposition by which the phrases of Scripture can be squared into semblable accordance with the now acknowledged facts. Mr. J. S. Mill was right in his keen analysis when he said that the reception accorded to each new truth passed through three phases. First it was declared to be dangerous and false; next it was acknowledged that there was something to be said for it; and, lastly, men turn round and declare, 'We said so all along.' 2 So, with reference to each new scientific discovery, religious teachers begin by saying, 'It is blasphemous and contrary to Scripture;' they soon maintain 'there is nothing in Scripture which absolutely contradicts it;' and they generally end by declaring that it is distinctly revealed in Scripture itself. Men build the tombs of the prophets whom their fathers slew, and in every way possible to them continue to 1 Letter to Castelli, 1613. Compare the remarks made by Columbus at Salamanca in 1486. 2 'Lorsque Colomb avait promis un nouvel hémisphère, on lui avait soutenu que cet hémisphère ne pouvait exister; et quand il l'eut découvert, qu'il avait été connu depuis longtemps.'-Voltaire. |
