Chapter II

O error lives unless it rests upon some

element of truth, And the Higher Criticism owes its vitality to the fact that the Bible is a human book. The written Word is the counterpart of the Living Word. And the ancient controversies about the Christ have in modern times their counterpart in controversies about the Scriptures. Human nature being what it is, men in their eagerness to escape from one error are prone to rush into another. The old Gnostic heresy, in that development of it which maintained that everything material was evil, tended to the denial of the humanity of Christ. This led to an assertion of His humanity in a way which encroached upon the doctrine of His Divine nature. In the swinging of the pendulum of opinion the mean of truth was lost, and the two extremes were manifested in the

To

Casikt THE BIBLE A HUMAN BOOK It

practical denial that He was man and the practical denial that He was God.

So has it been with the Bible. The rationalism of the post-Reformation age asserted or assumed that the Bible was only and altogether a human book. An unintelligent orthodoxy maintained that it was only and altogether Divine. And both these extremes find advocates in England to-day. The sympathies of the Christian are naturally with those who give an exclusive prominence to the Divine side of Scripture. But our sympathies must not betray us into a participation in their error. Christ was not half man and half God; He was absolutely human, and yet absolutely Divine. And so is it also with the Bible. While it is absolutely the Word of God, it is also the most thoroughly human book in the world. Hence its amazing power over the hearts and minds of men. And our condemnation of the Higher Critics must not blind us to the fact that if they have not actually rescued this truth, they have brought it into prominence and made it real. But on the other hand our debt to them in this regard cannot be allowed to outweigh, or even to palliate, the evil of their system.

We owe a debt to the red revolutionists of a century ago. But what lives in our memory is not the good which has resulted from their work, but the excesses they committed in achieving it. The German rationalists and their imitators and disciples of the Excyclopedia Biblica are in their own sphere on a par with the men of the Reign of Terror in France. To teach us that a queen is but a woman, we do not need the shameful spectacle of the blood-stained guillotine, the debasing lesson that, as Edmund Burke expressed it, ‘“‘a woman is but an animal, and not the highest kind of animal either.” And we can know, and rejoice in the knowledge, that the Bible is thoroughly, exquisitely human, without having to suffer the ordeal of seeing our adorable Lord thus patronised and blasphemed, and the holy writings which testify to Him perverted and degraded.

If a surgeon thinks only of his patient’s dignity and rank, a trembling hand perchance may unfit him for his task. But the man who plunges his knife into a living human body as though it were the carcase of a brute, is no better than a butcher. And so we can criticise the Bible on its human side without ever allowing ourselves to forget that it is “the living

Ca Liy DEAN ALFORD’S ESTIMATE 13

and eternally abiding Word of God”; but we search in vain the writings of the critics for any indication of the reverence which is its due.

How different the spirit which animates them from that which characterised that great expositor and divine, Dean Alford! Here are the closing words of his New Testament Commentary : —

“‘] have now only to commend to my gracious God and Father this feeble attempt to explain the most mysterious and glorious portion of His revealed Scriptures: and with it, this my labour of now eighteen years, herewith completed. I do so with humble thankfulness, but with a sense of utter weakness before the power of His Word, and inability to sound the depths even of its simplest sentence. May He spare the hand which has been put forward to touch His Ark.” If the critics know anything of the spirit of these words they are consummate masters of the art of concealing their emotions.

It will be said, perhaps, that the book I have cited does not fairly represent the teaching of the Critical School. If the objection refers to those who belong to the Church of England, it is well founded. It is happily unusual for English gentlemen to give solemn pledges in entering upon positions of influence and trust, and then to flout and violate those pledges.! But the Lucyclopedia Biblica is in this sphere what the enfant terrible is in the family circle — it gives out unblushingly what many of the critics themselves would deprecate.

The difference between the work in question and the more conservative and cautious Dzctionary of the Bible edited by Dr. Hastings, to which Professor Driver, of Oxford, has lent his name, is that the one represents the Bible as error and romance mingled with truth, and the other as truth mingled with romance and error. For certain purposes the distinction is a real one, but here it is immaterial. For the question I have raised is whether the old-fashioned belief in the inspiration of Scripture can be maintained; and the main purpose of every work emanating from these writers is, as they would say, to remove the difficulties and dangers which the historic view of inspiration is supposed to create.

The one set of writers hand me a purse of coins, with an assurance that most of them are genuine. The other set of writers hand

t Ordination in the Church of England is conditioned on an unequivocal reply to the question, “Do you unfeignedly believe all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament?”

Cu. II] ARE THE GOSPELS INSPIRED? 15

me a purse of coins, with a warning that most of them are counterfeit. But as I am unable to distinguish between the base coins and the gold, honesty forbids my trading with any of them, and therefore all my seeming wealth is practically useless. In either case the Bible is like a lottery bag, from which blanks and prizes must be drawn at random. If the one section of the critics may be trusted, the prizes abound; if the other section be right, the blanks predominate. But in either case, I repeat, faith is impossible, and therefore Christianity is destroyed.

I am not prejudging the question raised in my opening sentences: I am merely seeking to state it clearly and intelligently, and to énter a protest against levity in dealing with it. Let me put it in a concrete form: Are the Gospels, as the critics of every section tell us, merely human documents, based in part upon the memory of the writers, in part upon earlier records, in part upon oral traditions of the great Teacher’s acts and words? Or are they, as Christians have heretofore believed, God-breathed Scriptures — the Word of God, by which the sinner may be born again, and the disciple may “grow in grace” and be “throughly furnished unto all good works”?

For example, may I trust the record contained in the third chapter of John? Not one of the disciples, we may be sure, was with the Lord when Nicodemus ‘“‘came to Him by night.” But, ‘waiving that, what reason have we for supposing the interview is reported accurately? Very many people bear testimony that the words of the 14th, 15th, and 16th verses have been the means of producing in them that change of heart and life which the Bible calls being born again and being converted. But this implies that the words are not a mere fallible human record of a conversation alleged to have occurred between Christ and a Pharisee; but an infallibly inspired proclamation of Divine love to the lost, bringing everlasting life to all who believe in the Son of God. Now these two views stand entirely apart. One or other of them must be false. And which is it?

Take another case. Who vouches for the record of the scene enacted, and the words. spoken by our Divine Lord, in Gethsemane? The three disciples who alone were present lay sleeping, wholly unconscious of the solemnity and significance of that awful hour. And the critics. tell us that when at last they awoke they were so utterly dazed and stupid that they mistook the shimmer of the moonlight for an angelic appa-Cu. II.] POLICE OFFICERS v. THE SAINTS 17

rition. Either the record is in the strictest sense inspired, or else it is no better than a fairy tale.

I have often wondered at the definiteness with which some police officers could repeat the identical language used by a prisoner on arrest, or in the course of a railway journey. In these men habit and training have developed a natural aptitude for accuracy. Eliminate, as the critics do, the work of the Spirit of God, and I have no hesitation in saying that if I had on one side the testimony of the police inspectors of the department I recently controlled, and on the other side that of all the apostles and evangelists, I should trust to the memory of the officers rather than to that of the saints. But an officer’s duty requires that as soon as practicable after hearing any important statement he shall record it in writing; and if some months after the event I found that he had neglected that duty, and yet that he professed to repeat the exact words used in a prolonged conversation, I should lose all confidence both in his judgment and in his truthfulness.

And now to explain my parable. What importance am I to attach to the record of prolonged discourses supposed to have been spoken by the Lord; such, for example, as “the Sermon on the Mount,”! “the Second Sermon on the Mount,” 2 or the Lord’s last words before the Passion,3 recorded more than forty years after they were uttered? If the Gospels are not inspired in the strictest sense in which theologians speak of inspiration, these records are worthless. Indeed if the critics are right, the Evangelists belonged to the class of ‘“chatty” and imaginative people whose presence is oftem welcome in social life, but always dreaded in the: witness chair of a Court of Justice. It avails. nothing to plead that the apostles were very holy men. Experience teaches us that very holy men, and very learned men, too, may be very silly. And if some of the critics are to be believed, silliness was as marked a characteristic of the Evangelists as holiness.4

In all this, I repeat, I am not “laying down the law,” but only “stating the case.” Neither am I specially addressing those who sympathise with my conclusions. I appeal to all intelligent and fair-minded thinkers. The only kind of

t Matt. v., vi., and vii.? Ibid. xxiv. and xxv..

3 John xiv., xv., xvi., and xvii.

‘ Indeed the patronising tone of their criticisms implies that if men of their own type had been employed to write the Gospels, the record would have been free from the defects and errors. which now mar it.

Cu. II.] GOLDWIN SMITH’S TESTIMONY 19

person I wish to ignore is the fool. We all know the sort of morbidly active-brained child who will pull a valuable watch to pieces, and then tell us with a smile that “there was nothing in it but wheels and things.” He has his counterpart in the foreign infidel type of scholar, who, albeit as ignorant of man and his needs as a monk, and as ignorant of God and His ways as a monkey, sets himself with a light heart to tear the Bible to pieces. If the Bible must be given up, it is a disaster unparalleled in the history of Christendom.

“The Reformation was a tremendous earthquake; it shook down the fabric of medieval religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance in the religious sphere, filled the world with revolutions and wars. But it left the authority of the Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the destructive process had its limit, and that adamant was still beneath their feet. But a world which is intellectual and keenly alive to the significance of these questions, reading all that is written about them with almost passionate avidity, finds itself brought to a crisis the character of which any one may realise by distinctly presenting to himself the idea of existence without

ac rOd.”

These are the words of one! whose thorough sympathy with “science and criticism” could not blind him to the gravity of the crisis they have caused. Fresh and vigorous minds will press on where these teachers now timidly shrink back. And while a religious agnosticism may afford a doubtful refuge to the cultured classes, agnosticism with no element whatever of religion will engulf the unthinking multitude. Men may well start back at sight of such a goal.

Hear another witness, a veritable apostle of unfaith, In answer to the infidel taunt that Christianity was ‘“‘an awful plague,” because its success involved the ruin of Roman civilisation, Matthew Arnold writes: ‘It was worth while to have that civilisation ruined fifty times over, for the sake of planting Christianity through Europe in the only form in which it could then be planted there.” 2 And surely some feeling of deep regret, if not of misgiving about his own position and influence, must have touched his heart as he penned the lines :- —

“The sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

* Professor Goldwin Smith.
? God and the Bible (Preface).

Cx. IT] THE THESIS RESTATED 21

But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

I have already restated my thesis: let me do so once again. We shall gain nothing by dealing with generalities. Let us open the Gospels at the last of the test passages I have cited, and take the well-known words : —

“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

“In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

May we still use such words as these to comfort us in sorrow, and to cheer and strengthen us when life is failing, and its supreme crisis is drawing near? May we still trust them, as our fathers did, as a message from the heart and lips of our Saviour and Lord, ministered to us by the Divine Spirit who inspired His servant to record them? May we read the Gospels thus? Or is all this but an exquisite dream from which we must awake to the clear, cold light of nineteenth-century criticism?