The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible Part 18

Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

But this n.o.ble conception of the unity of ethical and spiritual life has many aspects in the Bible. The Bible turns upon us every phase in which Wisdom reveals herself to the sons of men, so that no ray of her light is lost, and that every one, however he may stand related to her, receives her heavenly beams.

1. _We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and cla.s.ses._

The maxims of a Poor Richard are antic.i.p.ated here, as quaint, as terse, and as sagacious in the ancient Jew as in the modern American. Our scientific teachers would replace eloquent declamation concerning vices, such as drunkenness and debauchery, by ill.u.s.trated lectures upon the physiological effects of violations of nature's laws. They would teach men that the laws of health are found in the laws of temperance and purity.

The Hebrew sages had this vision of Wisdom. Their proverbial sayings abound with graphic pen-pictures of the folly of vice. No ill.u.s.tration of the physical consequences of debauchery could be more impressive than the vivid sketch of the foolish young man, going after the strange woman as an "ox goeth to the slaughter," knowing not that

Her house is the way to h.e.l.l, Going down to the chambers of death.

The favorite name for sin in these proverbs is Folly. Wisdom crieth to the sons of men, in that n.o.blest writing of the sages:

Blessed is the man that heareth me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at the posts of my doors.

For whoso findeth me findeth life, And shall obtain favor of the Lord.

But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul.

All they that hate me love death.

2. _These laws of life that work for our health and wealth loom, however, into mystic and sacred forms, as of the laws heavenly and eternal, whose "seat is the bosom of G.o.d."_

When Crito urges his beloved master to escape from the death that had been unjustly decreed for him, Socrates replies in a n.o.ble personification of the Laws, as rebuking him for the thought of such an attempt to evade them; and he must be dim-sighted, indeed, who does not see in the forms of the State Laws, the shadows of the Eternal Laws, august and awful, whose constraint was round about his will. That is the vision which we catch through every form of law, sanitary, social, or ecclesiastical, in the Bible. In the earliest code of the Hebrew statutes known to us, a collection of tribal "Judgments" or "dooms," this high and mystic sense of obligation steals over us. Amid the quaint enactments recorded in the Book of Covenants, whose language carries us back to times of extreme simplicity, we hear the words

Ye shall be holy men unto me.[59]

Our new critics may tell you that the late poet, who wrote that long-drawn sigh of desire for the Law which is bodied in the One hundred and nineteenth Psalm, was thinking of the "Thorah"--the ritual law of the temple and the counsels of the priests. They are doubtless right, if so be that they do not lead you to infer that this devout soul was thinking _only_ of the ecclesiastical law. Through it, there was rising upon his spirit the vision of the Law Eternal and Heavenly, the norm and pattern of the law that on earth binds men to purity and righteousness.

Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way, Who walk in the law of the Lord.

Make me to understand the way of thy commandments; And so shall I talk of thy wondrous works.

Thy statutes have been my songs In the house of my pilgrimage.

The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy: O teach me thy statutes!

Thy hands have made me and fas.h.i.+oned me: O give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.

Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.

They continue this day, according to thy ordinances.

Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, And thy law is the truth.

Shew the light of thy countenance upon thy servant, And teach me thy statutes.

This is none other than that law of which a far later ecclesiastic, writing also of ecclesiastical law, discoursed in this wise:

There can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of G.o.d, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all, with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.[60]

This law is none other than that holy form which a modern poet thus apostrophizes:

Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The G.o.dhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face.

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

3. _The Law thus mystic and sacred is seen to be both the law of nature and the law of the human soul._

The Bible recognizes no duality of natural law and revealed law. All divine law is natural, and, as such, is a revelation. Physical and moral laws are but different forms of one and the same order. The same Power is working in the world around man and in the world within man. The lower forms of Its action are to be interpreted by Its higher forms. Nature is to be resolved by Man. The Ten Words were given as the statutes of Jehovah himself the personification of some form of nature's force. Out of this simple germ grew, the n.o.ble thought which antic.i.p.ated the knowledge of our _savans_ and the intuitions of our seers; who unite in showing us one order in the starry heavens and in the mysteries of mind. Thus it is that the Bible feeds so richly, when read aright, that awe which steals upon us as we face nature and see ourselves mirrored there in shadowy outline; and realize the One in all things--G.o.d.

There is a beautiful ill.u.s.tration of this in a n.o.ble poem that our later critics have handled with a strange lack of perceptiveness. The Nineteenth Psalm opens with a lofty apostrophe to Nature, commencing:

The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d, And the firmament sheweth His handywork.

At the seventh verse the Psalm abruptly pa.s.ses to a eulogy of "The Law"--the moral law shrined in the priestly Thorah:

The law of the Lord is an undefiled law, Converting the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, And giveth wisdom unto the simple.

Here we have, say our learned critics, two psalms welded into one, a song of nature and a song of the soul. As though nature and man did not form one divine poem in two cantos! As though the system of the world around us did not type the world within us! As though it were not always the most instinctive action to pa.s.s from the sense of an Order in the starry heavens, and the awe thus awakened, to the sense of an Order in the soul of man, and the deeper awe thus roused!

We know that the Hindus and Egyptians made use, each, of one word to express the law of nature and the law of conscience. The physical order interpreted the sense of a moral order.

The Egyptian _maat_, derived like the Sanskrit _rita_, from merely sensuous impressions, became the name for moral order and righteousness.[61]

The Nineteenth Psalm is only the expression among the Hebrews of this wide-spread instinct; an instinct which learned critics may lack, but which the poet still inherits; as the Sphynx whispers to him of the double life of nature and of man, that yet are

By one music enchanted, One Deity stirred.

4. _The Bible leads us on to that sense of sin, in the presence of this "Law," which no lower thought of law can quicken._

Violations of physiological law Nature stamps as folly. Offences against social laws the State brands as crime. Transgressions of Ideal and Eternal Law become sin. It is not only foolish or disgraceful to break the moral law, it is wrong. This is the sense of guilt in disobedience that is roused in each of us by the Bible, as by no other book; that has been quickened in Europe, historically, by these sacred Scriptures, as by no other writings. The Bible has given to humanity a new and intense ethical perception of evil.

The strenuous moral earnestness of the Puritan and the Methodist is vitalized from these books. The very type of saints.h.i.+p in Christendom is unique. It is no mere ceremonial correctness for which the priestly Ezekiel pleads with tender pathos:

Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions whereby ye have transgressed, and make you a clean heart and a new spirit; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?

It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry:

O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death.

How vividly this sense of sin expresses itself in the Fifty-first Psalm!

There is here a plaint infinitely deeper than the chagrin and remorse of the man who has committed an "indiscretion," or become entangled in an "intrigue;" there is the cry of a soul that has betrayed its highest, holiest fidelities, and lies low in the dust before the Heavenly purity:

Wash me throughly from my wickedness, And cleanse me from my sin.

Cast me not away from Thy presence, And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.

To enter into the spirit of this sigh of penitence is a new knowledge of the human heart. The Bible thus leads men to live as in the presence of an awful Power of Holiness, which is searching through and through our beings. We cannot understand the Biblical "salvation" unless we have fathomed, at least, the shoaler experiences of these saintly souls of old, and know some little of the depths of sin.