The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible Part 19

5. _The Bible wakens in the breast of man an ethical pa.s.sion for the ideal and eternal law, which, apart from early Buddhism, has no parallel in history._

The prophets are aflame with the ardors of this sacred enthusiasm. The ordinary pa.s.sions of mankind are rivaled in intensity by the mystic pa.s.sion of their souls for the Heavenly Wisdom. They stand amid the wild whirl of selfish strife in the society of their day, and lift on high the holy forms of Justice and Brotherhood, as though expecting their commonplace cotemporaries to turn aside from practical affairs, and seek for them; and, so subtle and searching are the appeals of these heavenly visions, men do actually turn from mammon to wors.h.i.+p these impoveris.h.i.+ng divinities; and a great movement arises, looking to the bringing down of these ideals upon the earth, as the ruling powers in the court and the exchange. The regenerating force of Christendom has lain in the coming of these prophets, generation after generation, to the children of men, to lead them upon the mount where they should clearly see those lofty shapes, commanding instant loyalty from honest souls. The ominous travail-throes of society to-day await one stimulus to free the new order that is struggling to the birth--the pa.s.sion for ethical and social ideals, which the Bible, rightly administered, would inspire.

The prophetic spirit is the vital force of the Bible. Its insistent power reappears in Paul; a man consuming in the fires of this holy pa.s.sion, and kindling its ardors in the souls of untold myriads. His great letter to the Romans, so strangely misread as a mere dogmatic treatise, breathes and burns with this lofty enthusiasm. Its central thought, its threading _motif_, heard anew in every critical movement of the argument, is--Righteousness. The Master in whom the Bible centres, enriches earth with a new benediction:

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.

This highest pa.s.sion of mankind is wakened by the Bible as by no other book. Through it, the mystic Forerunners reveal themselves to the human soul most alluringly; enthralling it with their pure charms, dispelling the illusions of the senses and the glamor of the world, in the light of their holy loveliness. The Eternal Wisdom calls from out these pages to the sons of men:

Hearken unto me ye that follow after righteousness.

6. _The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions, but as the substantial realities of being._

Men say to those who speak of these high conceptions--"They are the dreams of sentimentalists, the will-'o-the-wisp lights that beguile men away from the _terra firma_; to be trusted and followed by no practical man."

"Idealist" is a term of reproach. And justly, from any other point of view than that which the Bible, true to the most penetrating discernment of humanity, opens to us. These ideal forms are not the empty conceits of man's brain, bred from the fumes of his boundless egotism. They are not the clouds that gather and form and break into airy unreality in the atmosphere of earth. They are the shadows falling upon the soul of man from the unseen Realities, which alone have substantial and abiding being.

The laws of nature are surely not the baseless fabric of a dream. These ideals are simply those laws, transfigured into their spiritual substances. Whatever in our blindness we may persuade ourselves elsewhere, over the Bible we recognize the true character of the visions which so strangely stir us. This is the power of the Bible. Christian seemed to Mr. Worldly Wiseman a fool. But he saw the heavenly city, and trudged along, sure that time would prove him in the right. Christian carried in his hand this Book. With this Book in our hands, we, too, are sure that the visions of Purity and Justice, which we dimly see afar, are substantial and real, and that man will win at the last to the land where they are the light thereof.

Whereupon I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

7. _The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the fresh forces of all n.o.ble life._

No poet is needed to tell us that

Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.

We know it in our own experience. We notice it in every great revival of religion. We trace it through the history of Christianity. The story of the early days of Jesus is, as Renan called it, "a delightful pastoral."

In the person of humanity's greatest idealist, the highest joy of the soul was set in the framing of one of nature's brightest scenes. Even from the shadows of the garden of Gethsemane, He bequeaths to his little flock the legacy of his free spirit: My joy I leave with you. The Christian Society entered into that bequest, and in its first exhilaration overflowed the hard coast lines of property, and realized a happy brotherhood.

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as any man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread at home did take their food with gladness.

The prophets were filled with a buoyancy of spirit that scarce would let them keep down to the plodding steps of social progress; that constantly rapt them away into the future, whence their voices echo back the gladness of their visions. The good time is coming on the earth. The longings of man's soul are to be realized. Crushed by no disappointments, wearied out by no delays, the prophets maintain an indomitable hopefulness; their voices the carollings of the birds that greet the dawn of day:

Sing, O Heavens; and be joyful, O earth; And break forth into singing, O mountains.

For the Lord hath comforted his people; And will have mercy upon his afflicted.

One treads here the upper zones, where the air is rare and every draught an inspiration; where the Laws are seen majestically sweeping every force into the measured movement which is making all things work together for good to them that love G.o.d.

With a tact truer than any theory, our canon of scripture has been closed in the Book of the Revelation; whose visions look beyond the break-up of Jerusalem and shadow on the far horizon, where earth and heaven melt in one, the fair form of the City of G.o.d, coming down from out the skies upon the new world wherein dwelleth righteousness.

In these days, when "joy is withered from the sons of men," it is like drinking from the Castalian springs to draw within our souls from the Bible the sense of that kingdom of G.o.d which is joy in the Holy Ghost; into which men are to come

With everlasting joy upon their heads: They shall obtain joy and gladness And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

You learn the power of the Bible as you find how the joy of the Lord is your strength.

8. _The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein "Conscious Law is King of kings."_

The Laws appear substantial and real inasmuch as they are seen to be but phases of the Infinite and Eternal Being, the Righteous Lord who loveth righteousness. It is a conscious, intelligent, holy Being, whom Israel wors.h.i.+ps through these ideal forms of goodness. However He transcended their poor personalities, as transcend them they knew He must, G.o.d was yet best expressed in the form of the human, conscious personality. Man, the highest creature, must be, they said, most nearly in the form of G.o.d. As man takes up the n.o.blest characteristics of the life below him, so his own n.o.blest characteristics must be taken up into the Lord of Life. G.o.d cannot be less than personal, however much more than personal He may be. He is to be thought of by us, in lack of n.o.bler imagination, as personal. Israel thus grew into the conception of the Infinite Power, manifest in the order of nature and in the order of conscience as conscious Power; One in whose image man was made, the Father of the mystic "I"; whose nature is the law of creation, whose purpose is its plan, whose will is its exhaustless energy.

This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.

Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into the dreamy pantheism of its cultured cla.s.ses, and the poetic polytheisms of its people. Of this lapse, Renouf writes:

All G.o.ds were in fact but names of the One who resided in them all. But this G.o.d is no other than Nature. Both individuals and entire nations may long continue to hold this view, without drawing the inevitable conclusion, that if there is no other G.o.d than this, the world is really without a G.o.d. But the fate of a religion which involves such a conclusion, and with that conclusion the loss of faith in immortality, and even in the distinction of Right and Wrong, except so far as they are connected with ritual prescriptions, is inevitably sealed.[62]

Neither Judaism, nor Mohammedanism, nor Christianity, the religions fed directly or indirectly from the Bible, have run, or can well run into this fatal error. The Divine Being who is mirrored in the Bible is the Conscious Intelligence to whom alone of right belongs that ineffable name--G.o.d. This is the thought and this is the word which hold the spell of the Bible power over the human soul. Nowhere else is the sense of G.o.d so alive, nowhere else does it so thrill the whole being of man. It was this living G.o.d whom these holy men of old were seeking; not simply the august ideals of the soul, but the Eternal Being who casts them as his shadows upon man:

Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes, O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.

My soul truly waiteth still upon G.o.d, For of Him cometh my salvation.

Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, So longeth my soul after Thee, O G.o.d.

My soul is athirst for G.o.d, yea, even for the Living G.o.d; When shall I come to appear before the presence of G.o.d?

It is G.o.d whom these holy men find. The Ineffable Presence rejoices their souls, and as we keep company with them rejoices our souls also:

Lord, Thou hast been our home From one generation to another.

Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me.

Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.

Thou art about my path and about my bed, And spiest out all my ways.

For lo, there is not a word in my tongue But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.

The inspirations which we feel from the Bible-words are the breathings of the Eternal Spirit. The Divine whispers, which are too often inarticulate in nature and even in our souls, are articulate in the great Bible-words--the words proceeding from out of the mouth of G.o.d, on which man liveth. The power of the Bible is that the deafest souls can therein hear--G.o.d.

9. _G.o.d speaks in A MAN._