EARLY CHRISTIANS 181 is abundant evidence that even to the generality of the clergy alike its spirit and its letter were unknown. Great indeed was their loss, and glorious the awakenment at the renascence, when 'Greece rose from the dead with the New Testament in her hand; ' but their loss was not such as wholly to cripple the religious life. So that, to quote from a sermon by John Wallis, one of the clerks of the Westminster Assembly, and part-author of the Shorter Catechism, 'The Scriptures in themselves are rather a Lanthorn than a Light; they shine indeed, but it is alieno lumine; it is not their own but a borrowed light. It is God which is the true light, that shines to us in the Scriptures; and they have no other light in them, but as they represent to us something of God, and as they exhibit and hold forth God to us, Who is the true light that "enlighteneth every man that comes into the world." It is a light then, as it represents God unto us, who is the origi nal light. It transmits some rays, some beams of the Divine nature; but they are refracted, or else we should not be able to behold them. They lose much of their original lustre by passing through this medium, and appear not so glorious to us as they are in themselves. They represent God's simplicity obliquated and refracted by reason of many inadequate conceptions; God condescending to the weakness of our capacity to speak to us in our own dialect.' 1 The Bible, when our spirits bear witness to its divinest teachings, is our chief guide to the truths of which religion is composed; but to speak of it as being itself 'a religion' is a loose form of speech, and to say that it is 'the only religion' of any body of Christians is not true in any intelligible sense. 1 Quoted by Briggs, The Bible, the Church, and Reason. CHAPTER XIV MISINTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE. 'He that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man.'-1 Cor. ii. 15. 'Lacte gypsum male miscetur.'-IRENÆUS. 'It is the province of reason to judge of the morality of Scripture.'-BUTLER, Analogy, II. iii. 26. "Legimus scripturam omnem ædificationi habilem divinitus inspirari.'-TERT. De Cult. Fem. ii. 3. NOTHING but blessing has ever sprung from the right use and true understanding of the Bible; nothing but disaster from those superstitious and perverted uses of it which spring from false methods of regarding it. Let us take a few instances, of which neither can the truth be denied nor the significance overlooked by any fair-minded inquirer. 1. I have already alluded to the wars of extermination enjoined upon the Israelites by Moses, by Joshua, by Samuel, and by other great Prophets; and the principle which underlies them is recognised in the Psalms, the Book of Jeremiah, the Book of Esther, and other passages of the Old Testament.1 1 See ante, p. 82. Deut. xx. 16: 'Thou shalt save nothing alive that breatheth.' 1 Sam. xv. 3: 'Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass,’ WARS OF EXTERMINATION 183 Yet the unsophisticated conscience of mankind revolts with horror from the cold-blooded massacre of innocent men and women and children-the sick, the aged, the harmless, and the miserable-which a war of extermination involves. The Israelites never thoroughly obeyed these commands; the instances were very few in which they even attempted to do so. So far were the Canaanites from being exterminated that they long continued to be the recognised traders of Palestine, so that 'Canaanite' became the equivalent of 'merchant.' The Canaanites even possessed a recognised mercantile quarter of their own in Jerusalem itself, known as Maktesh or 'the Mortar.' 2 The sense of pity is deeply implanted by God in human nature. Any king or general who should act in these days as we are told that Moses and Samuel ordered the Israelites to act in the name of God, would be overwhelmed by the execration of mankind. i. But it has been urged that the moral standard of the Jews was so low as not to be shocked by commands to commit savage deeds, and that the aborigines of Canaan were so abnormally wicked that their extermination was morally necessary. Is there any proof that they were more wicked than multitudes of nations have been-even nations professedly Christian, and even in modern times? 1 'We should feel it impossible that God would really command us to do such acts now, whatever commands He may have given in former ages' (Mozley, Lectures on the Old Testament, p. 85). 'The acts to which we refer are not only contrary to the law of love, but also to our idea of justice' (Id. p. 85). 2 See Hos. xii. 7; Zeph. i. 11 (Heb.); Job xli. 6; Prov. xxxi. 24. 3 This sophistry is found in St. Augustine. 'Digni ergo erant et isti quibus talia juberentur et illi qui talia paterentur' (Aug. c. Faust. xxii. 72). It is thus that Dante defends his faithlessness to Friar Alberigo. E cortesia fu lui esser villano' (Inf. xxxiii. 150). Were they in any appreciable sense more wicked or even (circumstances considered) so wicked as Rome was for centuries together in the days of the medieval Papacy, or London amid the orgies of the Restoration? I have always been astonished that the masculine intelligence of such a man as Dr. Arnold should have been deluded by this untenable pretence. "The Israelites' sword,' he says, 'in the bloodiest executions wrought a work of mercy for all the countries of the earth to the very end of the world. They preserved unhurt the seed of eternal life.'1 The statement is hardly true to fact; but in any case are we justified in doing evil that good may come? ii. Again, men have urged the sophistic plea that as God might have employed the whirlwind or the famine to destroy idolaters, so He might have seen fit to order their destruction by human agency. But man in no way resembles those vast, dull, inanimate forces, 'stern as fate, inexorable as tyranny, merciless as death, which have no ear to hear, no heart for pity, no arm to save.' The agencies of nature are irresponsible and mechanical; the whirlwind and the pestilence have no conscience; but God Himself has created in the soul of man the sense of pity and love, which are likest Himself of all the elements which He has implanted. Dead agencies cannot be a model or exemplar to man. Man could not, without inconceivable wickedness, take upon him to imitate the destruction wrought by the hurricane, or excuse himself for deeds of ravin and brutality by pleading that they might have been accomplished by the tiger or the ape. In what sense, then, can God ever have commanded men 1 Arnold, Sermons, ii. 390. WARS OF EXTERMINATION 185 to commit acts which the human conscience, expressly because it is illuminated by the Holy Spirit of God, justly brands as revolting and horrible? It is no answer to say that this is a mystery beyond our ken; that we must not be wise above what is written. It is true that whatever answer we give must touch upon a mystery. All things,' said the old aphorism of theology, 'end in a mystery,' and that mystery is the existence of evil. We are not, however, peering into mysteries, but are seeking for practical guidance as to the eternal and unchangeable will of God. Can God-Who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and with Whom is no variableness-ever have commanded man to commit crimes which are hateful to the enlightened conscience, and which we now know to be abhorrent from His own nature? Are we to regard the laws of right and wrong as Eternal Facts or as arbitrary mandates? Or at the best only as flexible rules which, like the leaden measure of Lesbos, can be bent and unbent at will? Have we not reached a point of moral elevation as high as even Plato had reached nearly two millenniums and a half ago? The poems of Homer were the Bible of the Greeks, yet Plato said that 'God is simple and true both in word and deed, neither is He changed Himself, nor does He deceive others, neither by visions nor discourses nor the pomp of signs. Therefore,' he continues, 'when any 1 Canon Mozley pleads that 'these commands had no resistance from the moral sense; they did not look unnatural to the ancient Jew,' &c. (l.c. p. 63). Neither did they to the Thugs, who likewise regarded it as a religious duty to commit murder. But does this account for a positive command? God may condescend to man's imperfections, but can we conceive of Him as ordering immoral acts? |