Chapter VI.

Calvin's Belief In The Plenary Inspiration Of The Bible.

I cannot attempt to follow him in his vast work, to discuss his interpretations of gospel facts and words, and his deductions from them. Calvin's books, his life, and the Church established by him, show that the system which he founded was both strong and compact, wanting neither in logical accuracy nor in practical and available power. For more than three centuries it has embodied the faith and regulated the lives of many millions of Christians in France, Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, England, and America. In spite of its imperfections it is, on the whole, one of the noblest edifices ever erected by the mind of man, and one of the mightiest codes of moral law which has ever guided him. I will only pause here to notice two of Calvin's doctrines, which I look upon as grave errors, opposed, in my opinion, to the true spirit of Christianity, and at the present time out of harmony with the intellectual and social progress of the human race.

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The earliest complaints and attacks made by the reformers were called forth by assertions of the authority and infallibility of the pope. Luther was the first and mightiest, as he was also the most impetuous leader of the assault. Calvin followed in the same path; but he looked upon the work of demolition as almost completed, and his own special work was to replace the authority and infallibility of the Church by the authority and infallibility of the sacred monument of divine revelation--that is, to put the Bible in the place of the Pope: everything in the name and in virtue of the Bible, nothing in opposition to or without the Bible. This was Calvin's fixed idea, and the supreme law of the Church which he established.

The extent and success of his work sufficiently prove that he discerned the needs and religious instincts of his age. Calvin's reformed Church at once took up an important position which it has now occupied for three centuries. Catholicism and Protestantism may continue their long struggle, but they cannot underrate each other's strength; they have both survived many reverses; they live on in spite of many faults, and at the present time they are both face to face with the same enemies. Both are now impelled by reason and commanded by necessity to acknowledge their faults and to recognise the cause of their reverses. In so far as the future is in the hands of man, their future depends on the extent to which they have attained the clearness of vision which belongs to long life and experience.

I am a Protestant, and for that very reason I intend to speak exclusively of Calvin's errors and faults as a Protestant reformer.

When he proclaimed the absolute infallibility and universal authority of the Holy Scriptures, he failed to recognise the true object and meaning of the divine revelation which they contain. It is a revelation, which refers to the relation between man and God, the duties of man towards God and towards his fellow-men. {183} This is indicated from the very beginning by the nature of the subjects treated of, and it is confirmed by the Decalogue and the Gospel. I may quote here some of the reflections which I have already published on this subject, for day by day I find that they represent my thoughts more accurately. Like Calvin, 'many pious and learned men uphold the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures; they assert that not only the thoughts but the words in which they are clothed are divinely inspired--every word on every subject, the language as well as the doctrine. This assertion seems to me to indicate a deplorable confusion, giving rise to profound misconceptions as to the meaning and aim of the sacred volume, and causing its authority to be very seriously compromised. God never intended to teach men grammar by a supernatural process, and he no more intended to teach them geology, astronomy, geography, and chronology than grammar. Not on these do the rays of divine light fall, but on the relation of man to his Creator, and on the laws of his faith and life. God dictated to Moses the laws which regulate the duties of man towards God and towards his fellow-man; he left it to Newton to discover the laws which govern the universe. The inspiration of the Sacred Volume relates not only to religion and morality, but to religion and morality alone, and apart from any mere human science.

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'I have read the Bible over and over again, with the greatest care, with no intention either of criticizing it or apologizing for it, but with the single aim of learning to understand its character and meaning aright. The more I have advanced in this study, and have been able to live as it were in the Bible, the more clearly have I apprehended two contemporaneous facts, a divine fact and a human fact, which are at the same time entirely distinct and closely connected. In every part of the Bible I find God and man: God, a real and personal being, not affected by any external incident, and in whom there is no change, always the same and immoveable though the centre of universal movement, and Himself giving this unprecedented definition of Himself, "I am that I am;" and man, an incomplete, imperfect being, subject to change, full of flaws and contradictions, of lofty instincts and degrading tendencies, inquiring and yet ignorant, capable of good and evil, and able to attain perfection in spite of his imperfection. Throughout the whole Bible we see God and man, their union and their antagonism: God watching over man and guiding him; man sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting the influence of God. If I might be allowed to use such an expression, I would say that the Divine person and the human person are brought face to face with each other; we see them acting on each other, and influencing events. We see the education of man after his creation, the education of a religious and moral being, neither more nor less. At the same time, whilst God elevates he does not transform mankind; he created man intelligent and free; he illuminates the laws of his spiritual and moral life with a Divine light; but he leaves him to struggle with great dangers and much peril, until he learns the right use of his intellect and will. And at every period, in all circumstances, even whilst he still continues to influence him, God takes man just as he finds him, with all his passions, vices, weakness, error, and ignorance, just what he has made himself, and is making himself every day, by the good or evil use of his intellect and his will. This, I say, is the Bible, and its history of the relations between God and man.

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'What a striking contrast is brought out in this history, and yet what a close and strong bond between those whom I scarcely dare to call the two performers! In no tradition or poetical invention, in no religious mythology does God appear so exalted, so pure, so free from all the imperfection and disquietude of human nature, so immutable and serene, so truly God as in the Bible. On the other hand, among no people, in no historical narrative or document is man portrayed as more violent, more barbarous, more brutal, more cruel, more prone to ingratitude and rebellion against God, than among the Hebrews. Nowhere else, and in no other history does the distance seem so great between the divine sphere and the human region--between the sovereign and his subjects. And yet the Israelites never separate themselves from God. In spite of their vices and evil passions they always turn again to the Lord, and always acknowledge his law and his government, even at the very time that they violate the one and rebel against the other. God is, however, nowhere manifested as so solicitous with regard to man--at the same time so exacting and so sympathetic; he does not change a man at one stroke, and by a single act of his sovereign will; he watches all his short-comings, his weakness and his errors, but never forsakes him; he holds the torch of Divine light always before his eyes, and never loses his interest in the destiny of mankind. {186} Religion and morality are the subjects which not only predominate, but which are exclusively presented in the sacred volume: nowhere else have the aspirations and labours of human science held so insignificant a position in human thought and society; God, and the relation between man and God,--this, and this only, occupies every page of the Bible.

'I do not hesitate to affirm that science, with its special and manifold subjects, astronomy, geology, geography, chronology, physical science, historical criticism, all are foreign to the plan and design of the Holy Scriptures. The study of science is the work of the human intellect, and of the human intellect alone: science is a fruit that ripens slowly, and is only brought to perfection by the intellectual labour of many generations. If then, in addition to those facts which are expressly declared to be miraculous, you find statements and assertions in the Bible which are in opposition to the established truths of science, do not be astonished or dismayed; it is not the word of God on these subjects; it is the language of the men of that age, and it accords with the measure of their knowledge, or rather of their ignorance; it is the language which they spoke, and in which it was necessary to speak to them if they were to understand what was said.

'The fact is so simple that I am astonished that it should be necessary to assert it: in all times and places, among all nations and in every age, there are spontaneous instincts, and common aspirations and ideas in matters of religion and morality, which not only clothe themselves, as it were, in the same language, but have the power of making their language intelligible to all those to whom it is addressed, in spite of the difference which there may be in their several degrees of education and civilization. {187} But we meet with nothing similar in purely scientific matters; the majority of men see and speak, not in accordance with the facts of science, but according to appearances; and they understand, or do not understand, they listen, or do not listen, just in so far as they have any knowledge of science, or are ignorant of it. What would the Hebrews in the desert have said, or the Jews who gathered round the Apostles, or the savages of Polynesia addressed by the first Christian missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which revolves round the sun, and that the earth is a spheroid, inhabitable and inhabited at the opposite points of its circumference? What more natural and inevitable than the agreement of the language of Scripture with the imperfect knowledge which men possessed of scientific subjects, even although the light of Divine inspiration was, at the same time, shed upon the laws which govern the spiritual and moral nature of human beings?

'No one admires and honours science more than I do: the study of science is one of man's highest vocations, but it has nothing to do with the relation between man and God, and the influence of God upon man. God is not a lofty philosopher who reveals scientific truths to men in order that they may have the noble pleasure of contemplating and disseminating them; the search for these truths is a purely human labour. The divine work is grander and more complicated, and it is essentially practical. {188} That which all men and every man needs and craves, the most ignorant as well as the most learned, that which humanity demands from God is the knowledge of those religious and moral truths which ought to influence the soul and life, and in accordance with which the life of the future will be regulated. God meets this requirement of the whole human race; and the Bible is addressed to all that they may be saved by leading a new life, not that they may be well taught in matters of science.' [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: _Meditations sur la Religion chrétienne,_ vol. i. p. 151; vol. iii. p. 27.]

If Calvin had lived in the nineteenth century I am inclined to believe that his clear and vigorous intellect would have preserved him from falling into this error of attributing universal infallibility to every word contained in the Bible, and that he would have recognised the aim and the true tendency of those Divine revelations of which the Bible is so noble a monument. Even a hundred years after his death the labours of the great critics of the seventeenth century, of Richard Simon, Bayle, and John Leclerc, would have helped him, by the clear light which they threw on this question, and would have shown him how to shield the Christian faith effectually both from improper attacks and from the legitimate discoveries of human science. The domain of science is not the same as that of Christian faith, nor are they equal; the very aim of revelation has been to enunciate truths, and to shed a light into the soul which no amount of scientific labour would have sufficed to procure. This is the real and true character of the Bible; it is from this that all its authority proceeds, and by this, at the same time, that the limits of its sphere are defined.

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