Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

and written thousands of years ago, as plainly as to-day you can see their plight and status in the streets of any modern city.

In this photographically exact forecasting of the future of which history, as the days go, becomes but the more and more precise fulfillment, and which is so evidently utterly above any human ken or guess, in this large prophetic area of the Scripture, how plainly does this divine element appear.

So also, does the divine element appear in all those disclosures concerning that other world to which we hasten. It is divine light which shines down into our dark world. from the New Jerusalem. Forevermore the tomb has been too awfully opaque for man's poor vision to descry beyond it.

So also, does the divine element appear in all those matchless principles and precepts which make the Bible so unique a book. No merely human teacher could have ever uttered the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, a constant element in the Bible is this divine element. What the blood is to the body, is the divine element to the Scripture.

But, on the other hand, an element as real and as pervasive is the Human. Moses, Samuel, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, Ezekiel, Malachi, Paul, Matthew, Luke, Mark, James, Peter, John-these are men, and they and the other inspired writers with them, do bring into this Scripture a distinctively human element.

They bring into the Scriptures a human element, in that they so manifest diverse temperaments. Moses is never Joshua, nor Isaiah Jeremiah, nor Ezra Ezekiel, nor Paul Peter, nor the far-flashing, deep-hearted John the prosaic James.

As

They bring into the Scripture a human element, in that they reflect their different environments. the mountains and seas and pellucid airs of Greece appear

in Homer, so do these human writers of the Scripture become the mirrors of their surroundings. The thunderstorm, marshalling the squadrons of its black clouds upon those flanks of Lebanon which David could behold, flashes and crashes in David's Psalms; the figures of Ezekiel get their shape from that grotesque but powerfully significant Assyrian sculpture amid which he was exile; you can see the impress of Gamaliel's school on Paul; and if one did not know of his long imprisonments in their garrisons, one would easily suspect that Paul must have been thrust into the closest contact with soldiers from his constant military figures.

These writers bring into the Scripture a human element, in that they constantly manifest their own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of style. They are never in the least, like puppets, compelled. They are always like free men, freely disporting according to their natural make and inclination. He only sings and soars à poet in the Scripture who, like David or Isaiah, is naturally a poet. The logical Paul argues. The deep, mystical John, without argument, announces.

Further, there is a human element wrought into the Scripture, in that entirely natural and usual human conditions are made use of. The prophetic vision is flashed into a dream as the prophet sleeps; and even trances and transports frequently take their rise and borrow their meaning from the then surroundings of the subject of them. It is to the hungry Peter who would have eaten, that the revelation of the obliteration of the vast distinction between Jew and Gentile in the Christian Church is made, under the form of food for which his hunger was then calling.

There is also a human element brought into the Scripture, in that the mightiest and most far-reaching instruction for all the ages is made to hang on entirely human and natural events. They were the worldliness and de

filement and clashings of the little church at Corinth that called out, and, on the human side, were the causes of the Epistles to the Corinthians.

There is, in addition, a human element carried into the Scripture, in that so large a portion of it is but a record historical and biographical. For this, no disclosure from God was needful; there need be nothing more than a transcription of the archives of the kingdom of Judah or of the kingdom of Israel,-as simply human an operation as can be well conceived of.

Here are evidences, and many others might be mentioned too, of a human element at work in the Scripture, an element as really human as-to put it no lower--Plato was human when he discoursed concerning his republic.

I do not know a finer phrase which at once condenses and expresses all that I have been saying of these evidently present and different elements in Scripture, than that of Professor Murphy, the author of what seems to me the most wonderfully luminous commentary extant on the Genesis: "The Bible is the Word of God, with all the peculiarities of man, and all the authority of God."

I have read of an amateur painter who one day, having finished a landscape sketch, found that he had gotten the rocks in the foreground of it altogether wrongly placed and painted. Rather than paint out his rocks and paint them in again aright, he would change the rocks. So, with spade and crowbar, and digging and tugging, he falls to and forces the rocks into some poor accordance with his picture. It is not infrequently that thus, holders of pet theories treat facts. They will not adjust their theory to the facts. They will misplace facts to their theory.

I suppose, concerning no doctrine has a bad theory wrought more mischief than with this of Inspiration, because the reaction has been so often and so quick to the denial of Inspiration altogether. I do not suppose that

many in these days hold the bald and distorting mechanical theory; but the results, in a kind of weakening hold of the doctrine of Inspiration, on the public mind, show plainly enough, the evil of its ever having been holden. While there is about this theory of the method of Inspiration great show of reverence, there is really no reverence in it at all, because it so plainly dashes itself athwart God's facts. When even so great a man as the judicious Hooker says: "The sacred writers, as often as God engaged them in this heavenly work, neither spoke nor wrote anything of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouths"; when he thus degrades the sacred writers from penmen into pens, he only makes most injudicious mischief by a statement so already at variance with the plain facts; and all who thus in their thought and theory and speech deny or tend toward the denying of the plain human element in Scripture, help on and perpetuate the mischief.

And it is to be said that it was with precisely this mechanical notion of Inspiration that Coleridge broke, when enunciating his criterion of Inspiration as that which finds him, he goes on to protest against "the doctrine which requires me to believe that not only what finds me, but all that exists in the sacred volume, and which I am bound to find therein, was not only inspired by, that is, composed by men under the actuating influence of the Holy Spirit, but likewise dictated by an infallible Intelligence."

In attempting to state a theory of the method of Inspiration which shall seek to adjust itself with the facts and not the facts with itself; which shall humbly and reverently recognize the divine element in the Scripture, but at the same time as really the so manifestly freely acting human element in it, let certain things be remembered.

Let it be remembered that Inspiration is not necessarily dictation. I quote here the illustration, and, to a great extent, the words of another:

"When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, one of his hungriest desires was to acquire a perfect style of writing; and, as he admired Addison more than any other author, he was accustomed to take an essay of the 'Spectator,' and make very full notes of all its thoughts, images, sentiments, and of some few of its phrases. Ie would then place his manuscript in his drawer, wait several weeks, or until he had forgotten the language of the original, and then would take his memoranda and write out an essay including every idea, emotion, flash of imagination he had transferred from Addison to his notes, and would seek thus to make his coarser and rougher style something like Addison's smooth and quietly flowing one. Franklin's essay was in such a case not dictated, but was inspired by Addison.

"Orthodoxy believes the Bible to be inspired, and her definition of inspiration is the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious truth. But, by inspiration thus defined, orthodoxy does not mean dictation. She means that the Bible is as full of God as Franklin's echoed

essay was of Addison. As in his essay there were both an Addisonian and a Franklinian element, so, speaking roundly, there are in the Bible a divine and a human element, but the latter is swallowed up in the former even more completely than the Franklinian was in the Addisonian. All the thought in Franklin's essay is, by supposition, Addison's, and some of the phrases are his, but Franklin's words are there. All the moral and religious thought of the Bible is, according to the definition of inspiration, divine, and so are some of the phrases, but human words are there."

Let it be further remembered that Inspiration is not necessarily Revelation. Indeed, it seems to me quite possible to make out from the Scripture the distinction which Archdeacon Lee insists on-that Revelation and

« ÎnapoiContinuă »