Part 8

THE religion of the Bible is well said to be _revealed_, because the great natural truth, that ‘righteousness tendeth to life’, is seized and exhibited there with such incomparable force and efficacy. All, or very nearly all, the nations of mankind have recognized the importance of conduct, and have attributed to it a natural obligation. They, however, looked at conduct, not as something full of happiness and joy, but as something one could not manage to do without. But ‘Zion heard of it and rejoiced, and the daughters of Judah were _glad_, because of thy judgements, O Eternal!’ Happiness is our being’s end and aim, and no one has ever come near Israel in feeling, and in making others feel, that to righteousness belongs happiness! As long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest.

This does truly constitute for Israel a most extra-ordinary distinction. ‘God hath given commandment to bless, and He hath blessed, and we cannot reverse it; He hath not seen iniquity in Jacob, and He hath not seen perverseness in Israel; the Eternal, his God, is with him.’

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1875.

ISRAEL, GREECE, AND ROME[38]

FOR a philosophic mind there are not more than three histories of real interest in the past of humanity: Greek history, the history of Israel, and Roman history.

Greece has an exceptional past. Our science, our arts, our literature, our philosophy, our political code, our maritime law, are of Greek origin. The framework of human culture created by Greece is susceptible of indefinite enlargement. Greece had only one thing wanting in the circle of her moral and intellectual activity, but this was an important void; she despised the humble and did not feel the need of a just God. Her philosophers, while dreaming of the immortality of the soul, were tolerant towards the iniquities of this world. Her religions were merely elegant municipal playthings.

... Israel’s sages burned with anger over the abuses of the world. The prophets were fanatics in the cause of social justice, and loudly proclaimed that if the world was not just, or capable of becoming so, it had better be destroyed――a view which, if utterly wrong, led to deeds of heroism and brought about a grand awakening of the forces of humanity.

One other great humanizing force had to be created――a force powerful enough to beat down the obstacles which local patriotism offered to the idealistic propaganda of Greece and Judea. Rome fulfilled this extraordinary function. Force is not a pleasant thing to contemplate, and the recollections of Rome will never have the powerful attraction of the affairs of Greece and of Israel; but Roman history is none the less part and parcel of these histories, which are the pivot of all the rest, and which we may call providential.

ERNEST RENAN, 1887.

* * * * *

NONE of the resplendent names in history――Egypt, Athens, Rome――can compare in eternal grandeur with Jerusalem. For Israel has given to mankind the category of holiness. Israel alone has known the thirst for social justice, and that inner saintliness which is the source of justice.

CHARLES WAGNER, 1918.

* * * * *

AMONG the theocratic nations of the ancient East, the Hebrews seem to us as sober men in a world of intoxicated beings. Antiquity, however, held _them_ to be the dreamers among waking folk.

H. LOTZE, 1864.

WHAT IS A JEW?

WHAT is a Jew? This question is not at all so odd as it seems. Let us see what kind of peculiar creature the Jew is, which all the rulers and all nations have together and separately abused and molested, oppressed and persecuted, trampled and butchered, burned and hanged――and in spite of all this is yet alive! What is a Jew, who has never allowed himself to be led astray by all the earthly possessions which his oppressors and persecutors constantly offered him in order that he should change his faith and forsake his own Jewish religion?

_The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions._

_The Jew is the pioneer of liberty._ Even in those olden days, when the people were divided into but two distinct classes, slaves and masters――even so long ago had the law of Moses prohibited the practice of keeping a person in bondage for more than six years.

_The Jew is the pioneer of civilization._ Ignorance was condemned in olden Palestine more even than it is to-day in civilized Europe. Moreover, in those wild and barbarous days, when neither life nor the death of any one counted for anything at all, Rabbi Akiba[39] did not refrain from expressing himself openly against capital punishment, a practice which is recognized to-day as a highly civilized way of punishment.

_The Jew is the emblem of civil and religious toleration._ ‘Love the stranger and the sojourner’, Moses commands, ‘because you have been strangers in the land of Egypt.’ And this was said in those remote and savage times when the principal ambition of the races and nations consisted in crushing and enslaving one another. As concerns religious toleration, the Jewish faith is not only far from the missionary spirit of converting people of other denominations, but on the contrary the Talmud commands the Rabbis to inform and explain to every one who willingly comes to accept the Jewish religion, all the difficulties involved in its acceptance, and to point out to the would-be proselyte that the righteous of all nations have a share in immortality. Of such a lofty and ideal religious toleration not even the moralists of our present day can boast.

_The Jew is the emblem of eternity._ He whom neither slaughter nor torture of thousands of years could destroy, he whom neither fire nor sword nor inquisition was able to wipe off from the face of the earth, he who was the first to produce the oracles of God, he who has been for so long the guardian of prophecy, and who transmitted it to the rest of the world――such a nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is everlasting as is eternity itself.

LEO TOLSTOY.

THE BOOK OF THE AGES[40]

THE Bible is the book of the ancient world, the book of the Middle Ages, and the book of modern times. Where does Homer stand compared with the Bible? Where the Vedas or the Koran? The Bible is inexhaustible.

A. HARNACK.

* * * * *

WITHIN this awful volume lies The mystery of mysteries: Happiest he of human race To whom God has given grace To read, to fear, to hope, to pray, To lift the latch, and learn the way; And better had he ne’er been born Who reads to doubt, or reads to scorn.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

* * * * *

HOW many ages and generations have brooded and wept and agonized over this book! What untellable joys and ecstasies, what support to martyrs at the stake, from it! To what myriads has it been the shore and rock of safety――the refuge from driving tempest and wreck! Translated into all languages, how it has united this diverse world! Of its thousands there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human emotion.

WALT WHITMAN.

THE BIBLE, THE EPIC OF THE WORLD[41]

APART from all questions of religious and historical import, the Bible is the epic of the world. It unrolls a vast panorama in which the ages move before us in a long train of solemn imagery from the creation of the world onward. Against this gorgeous background we see mankind strutting, playing their little part on the stage of history. We see them taken from the dust and returning to the dust. We see the rise and fall of empires, we see great cities, now the hive of busy industry, now silent and desolate――a den of wild beasts. All life’s fever is there, its hopes and joys, its suffering and sin and sorrow.

J. G. FRAZER, 1895.

* * * * *

WRITTEN in the East, these characters live for ever in the West; written in one province, they pervade the world; penned in rude times, they are prized more and more as civilization advances; product of antiquity, they come home to the business and bosoms of men, women, and children in modern days.

R. L. STEVENSON.

* * * * *

THE Bible thoroughly known is a literature in itself――the rarest and the richest in all departments of thought or imagination which exists.

J. A. FROUDE, 1886.

THE BIBLE IN EDUCATION[42]

CONSIDER the great historical fact that for three centuries this Book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of a merely literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil?

T. H. HUXLEY, 1870.

* * * * *

THE greater the intellectual progress of the ages, the more fully will it be possible to employ the Bible not only as the foundation, but as the instrument, of education.

J. W. GOETHE.

THE BIBLE AND DEMOCRACY

THIS Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

JOHN WYCLIF, _in Preface to first English Translation of the Bible_, 1384.

* * * * *

THROUGHOUT the history of the Western world the Scriptures have been the great instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties so much more than the privileges of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid down.... The Bible is the most democratic book in the world.

T. H. HUXLEY, 1892.

* * * * *

WHERE there is no reverence for the Bible, there can be no true refinement of manners.

F. NIETZSCHE.

THE HEBREW LANGUAGE

A QUIVER full of steel arrows, a cable with strong coils, a trumpet of brass crashing through the air with two or three sharp notes――such is the Hebrew language. The letters of its books are not to be many, but they are to be letters of fire. A language of this sort is not destined to say much, but what it does is beaten out upon an anvil. It is to pour floods of anger and utter cries of rage against the abuses of the world, calling the four winds of heaven to the assault of the citadels of evil. Like the jubilee horn of the sanctuary it will be put to no profane use; but it will sound the notes of the holy war against injustice and the call of the great assemblies; it will have accents of rejoicing, and accents of terror; it will become the trumpet of judgement.

ERNEST RENAN, 1887.

REBECCA’S HYMN

WHEN Israel, of the Lord beloved, Out from the land of bondage came, Her fathers’ God before her moved, An awful guide in smoke and flame. By day, along the astonished lands, The cloudy pillar glided slow; By night, Arabia’s crimsoned sands Returned the fiery column’s glow.

There rose the choral hymn of praise, And trump and timbrel answered keen, And Zion’s daughters poured their lays, With priest’s and warrior’s voice between. No portents now our foes amaze, Forsaken Israel wanders lone; Our fathers would not know Thy ways, And Thou hast left them to their own.

But present still, though now unseen! When brightly shines the prosperous day. Be thoughts of Thee a cloudy screen To temper the deceitful ray. And oh, when stoops on Judah’s path In shade and storm the frequent night, Be Thou, long-suffering, slow to wrath, A burning and a shining light!

Our harps we left by Babel’s streams, The tyrant’s jest, the Gentile’s scorn; No censer round our altar beams, And mute are timbrel, harp, and horn. But Thou hast said, ‘The blood of goat, The flesh of rams, I will not prize; A contrite heart, a humble thought, Are Mine accepted sacrifice’.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1820.

MOSES[43]

TO lead into freedom a people long crushed by tyranny; to discipline and order such a mighty host; to harden them into fighting men, before whom warlike tribes quailed and walled cities went down; to repress discontent and jealousy and mutiny; to combat reactions and reversions; to turn the quick, fierce flame of enthusiasm to the service of a steady purpose, require some towering character――a character blending in highest expression the qualities of politician, patriot, philosopher, and statesman――the union of the wisdom of the Egyptians with the unselfish devotion of the meekest of men.

The striking differences between Egyptian and Hebrew polity are not of form, but of essence. The tendency of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other, to individual freedom. Strangest of recorded birth! From the strongest and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant proclamation of the rights of man.

The Hebrew commonwealth was based upon the individual――a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid; a commonwealth in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave there should be hope; in which, for even the beast of burden there should be rest. It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest his fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our homely phrase――‘Live and let live.’

That there is one day in the week that the working man may call his own, one day in the week on which the hammer is silent and the loom stands idle, is due, through Christianity, to Judaism――to the code promulgated in the Sinaitic wilderness. And who that considers the waste of productive forces can doubt that modern society would be not merely happier, but richer, had we received as well as the Sabbath day the grand idea of the Sabbath year, or, adapting its spirit to our changed conditions, secured in another way an equivalent reduction of working hours.

It is in these characteristics of the Mosaic institutions that, as in the fragments of a Colossus, we may read the greatness of the mind whose impress they bear――of a mind in advance of its surroundings, in advance of its age; of one of those star souls that dwindle not with distance, but, glowing with the radiance of essential truth, hold their light while institutions and languages and creeds change and pass.

Leader and servant of men! Law-giver and benefactor! Toiler towards the Promised Land seen only by the eye of faith! Type of the high souls who in every age have given to earth its heroes and its martyrs, whose deeds are the precious possession of the race, whose memories are its sacred heritage! With whom among the founders of Empire shall we compare him?

To dispute about the inspiration of such a man were to dispute about words. From the depths of the Unseen such characters must draw their strength; from fountains that flow only from the pure in heart must come their wisdom. Of something more real than matter; of something higher than the stars; of a light that will endure when suns are dead and dark; of a purpose of which the physical universe is but a passing phrase, such lives tell.

HENRY GEORGE, 1884.

THE BURIAL OF MOSES

BY Nebo’s lonely mountain, On this side Jordan’s wave, In a vale in the land of Moab, There lies a lonely grave. But no man built that sepulchre, And no man saw it e’er; For the angels of God upturned the sod And laid the dead man there.

That was the grandest funeral That ever passed on earth; Yet no man heard the trampling, Or saw the train go forth: Noiselessly as the daylight Comes when the night is done, And the crimson streak on ocean’s cheek Grows into the great sun.

Perchance the bald old eagle On grey Beth-peor’s height Out of his rocky eyrie Looked on the wondrous sight; Perchance the lion stalking Still shuns that hallowed spot; For beast and bird have seen and heard That which man knoweth not.

This was the bravest warrior That ever buckled sword; This the most gifted poet That ever breathed a word; And never earth’s philosopher Traced with his golden pen On the deathless page truths half so sage As he wrote down for men.

C. F. ALEXANDER.

ISRAEL’S PSALTER

AT no period throughout the whole range of Jewish history has the poetic voice been mute. Every great fact throughout its entire course, right down to modern times, has left its impress on the Synagogue liturgy. Jewish poetry is the mirror of Jewish national life, and poetic utterance a divine instinct of the Jewish mind. For to the Hebrew, poetry was both prayer and praise, and alike in mercy and affliction the poet’s words became for the Hebrew the medium of direct communion with the Divine. Adoration can rise no higher than we find it in the Psalter.

JOHN E. DOW, 1890.

* * * * *

THE ancient psalm still keeps its music, and this is but the outer sign of its spiritual power, which remains as near and intimate to our needs, human and divine, as in David’s day. So, indeed, it seems to have remained through all the centuries――the one body of poetry which has gone on, apart from the change of races and languages, speaking with a voice of power to the hearts of men.

ERNEST RHYS, 1895.

* * * * *

THE Psalms resound, and will continue to resound, as long as there shall be men created in the image of God, in whose hearts the sacred fire of religion shines and glows; for they are religion itself put into speech.

C. H. CORNILL, 1897.

THE PSALMS IN HUMAN LIFE

ABOVE the couch of David, according to Rabbinical tradition, there hung a harp. The midnight breeze, as it rippled over the strings, made such music that the poet king was constrained to rise from his bed, and till the dawn flushed the eastern skies he wedded words to the strains. The poetry of that tradition is condensed in the saying that the Book of Psalms contains the whole music of the heart of man, swept by the hand of his Maker. In it are gathered the lyrical burst of his tenderness, the moan of his penitence, the pathos of his sorrow, the triumph of his victory, the despair of his defeat, the firmness of his confidence, the rapture of his assured hope.

The Psalms express in exquisite words the kinship which every thoughtful human heart craves to find with a supreme, unchanging, loving God, who will be to him a protector, guardian, and friend. They translate into speech the spiritual passion of the loftiest genius; they also utter, with the beauty born of truth and simplicity, the inarticulate and humble longings of the unlettered peasant. They alone have known no limitations to a particular age, country, or form of faith. In the Psalms the vast hosts of suffering humanity have found the deepest expression of their hopes and fears.

R. E. PROTHERO, 1903.

THE SPACIOUS FIRMAMENT ON HIGH (PSALM 19)

The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. Th’ unwearied sun from day to day Does his Creator’s power display, And publishes to every land The work of an Almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale; And nightly to the list’ning earth, Repeats the story of her birth: Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all Move round the dark terrestrial ball? What though nor real voice nor sound Amid their radiant orbs be found? In reason’s ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice; For ever singing as they shine, ‘The hand that made us is divine.’

JOSEPH ADDISON, 1719.

‘O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST’ (PSALM 90)

O GOD, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home;

Beneath the shadow of Thy Throne Thy saints have dwelt secure; Sufficient is Thine arm alone, And our defence is sure.

Before the hills in order stood, Or earth received her frame, From everlasting Thou art God, To endless years the same.

A thousand ages in Thy sight Are like an evening gone; Short as the watch that ends the night Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly, forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Be Thou our guard while troubles last, And our eternal home.

ISAAC WATTS, 1719.

THE LIVING POWER OF THE JEWISH PROPHETS[44]