It forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations, and of a great past
stretching
back to the farthest limits of the oldest nations of the world.
Universal Anthology - v04
'We are, I think, justified in meeting the question with a most decided negative.
Judging by all the data open to us, we may safely assert that Infidelity has not increased.
It is much less prevalent than it seems to have been in the days of the French ^Revolution ; nor have we in modern society any phenomenon which resembles the state of things in the eighteenth century, when we are told that "wits" and men of the world openly repudiated all religion, and when, as Bishop Butler tells us at the beginning of his " Analogy," the essential truths of Christianity were often scoffed at as though they were exploded absurdities not worth discussion.
" It is come," he says, " I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of enquiry, but that it now at length, discovered to be fictitious.
And accordingly, they treat as in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people discernment and nothing remained but set
up as a principal subject mirth and ridicule. " No one would say that such broad and coarse infidelity now at all common. It sometimes supposed that there are many infidels among our working men. can only say that when was the Bector of London Parish, and was familiar with the condition of a large number of working men of various grades, found many who were addicted to drink, and many who rarely ever set foot inside church, but cannot recall even one of them who had the smallest leaning towards infidel opinions.
Infidelity sometimes confused with Agnosticism, but they
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xvi THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
are wide as the poles asunder. " Agnosticism " is a word of recent birth. It has as yet hardly found its way into our dictionaries. It does not occur either in Latham's edition of Johnson's Dictionary, or in Littre^s French Dictionary. 1 It was, I believe, first suggested by the late Professor Huxley in a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869. But as one who had the privilege of knowing Professor Huxley for many years, and of frequently meeting him, I can say that, so far from being an infidel, he was a man of a reverent and even of a religious mind. Never in his life did he, or Darwin, or Tyndall, dream of denying the existence of God. Their scientific enquiries had no doubt deepened in their minds the sense of the uncertainties of all human belief ; the con viction that the limits of truth are vaster and more vague than is allowed for in many systems; the feeling that if the curtain which hangs between us and the unseen world be but " thin as a spider's web," it is yet " dense as midnight. " But a reverent and limited Agnosticism is by no means an unmitigated evil Even the ancient Jewish Eabbis, whom none can accuseI of a spirit of
"as though He were a man in the next room," or writes scholastic folios of minute dogmatism which have about as much stability as a pyramid built upon its apex. " Agnosticism " may be no more than a strengthened conviction that " what we know is little, what we are ignorant of is immense. " In the most solemn parts of Scripture we are warned of this truth. In Exodus we are told that " the people stood afar off," and only Moses " drew near into the thick darkness, where God was. " " Canst thou by search ing find out God ? " asks Zophar in the Book of Job.
Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection 1 It is as high as Heaven, what canst thou do ? Deeper than Sheol : what canst thou know t
" Verily thou art a God that hidest Thyself," says Isaiah. " How
1 It U fully handled in Dr. Murray's New English Dictionary. An Agnostic is one who holds " that God is unknown and unknowable. "
incredulity, had the apothegm "Learn to say,
do not know. " A sense of our human limitations may serve as a counterpoise to the easy familiarity which, as it has been said, talks of God
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xvii
unsearchable are God's judgments," says St. Paul, " and His ways past finding out ! " 1 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, and who hath been his counsellor? But the greatest and best Agnostic men of science of modern days, even while with the Psalmist they would say of God that "clouds and darkness are round about Him," would nevertheless have been the first to add that "righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne. " And this gradually became the mental attitude even of J. S. Mill, in spite of the effects of his early training. If he held that we are built around by an impenetrable wall of darkness, and that " omnia exeunt in mysterium" his later writings show that he also believed that man has a lamp in his hand, and may walk safely in the little circle of its light. It may, I think, be truly said that many great Agnostics inclined to believe and did believe, even when they were unable to say that they knew. They would have sympathised with the condemned criminal, who, though he had been denying the existence of God, was heard to fling himself on his knees, a moment afterwards, in an agony of prayer; and
they would have been inclined to utter, though without its tone of despair, the wild cry which he uttered on the scaffold, " 0 God, ifthere be a God, save my soul, if Ihave a soul ! " If, with the late Sir James Stephen, they might have compared life to "a mountain pass, in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive," they would have added with him—in answer to the question " What must we do ? "—" Be strong and of a good courage. Act for the best ; hope for the best ; and take what comes. "
Next to the fundamental conviction that there is a God of Love and Bighteousness, who cares for the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hands, religious enquiry in our century has mainly turned on three subjects — the nature of Inspiration as regards the Holy Scriptures ; the character of future Eetribution ; and the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
1SeeRom. xi. 33;Jobli. 7-9;Ps. xxxvi. 6;CoLiL2,3,etc. vol. iv. —2
xviii THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
II
As to the belief in man's immortality and the doctrine of a future life, little need here be said. All that study and criticism have done for us in this direction has resulted in pure gain. The
all-but-universal belief in a future life is instinctive in human nature, and has never been shaken. It is a conviction which transcends disproof, and does not depend on logical demonstration. The heart of man cries aloud to God with perfect confidence.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust ;
Thou madest man, he knows not why ; He thinks he was not made to die ;
And Thou hast made him :—Thou art just !
As to the belief in the nature and conditions of our future life, modern thought has inclined more and more to the view that they can only be described in symbols which cannot be crudely inter preted — that Heaven does not mean a golden city in the far-off blue, but the state of a soul cleansed from the stain of sin, and enjoying the Grace and Presence of God ; and that Hell is not a crude and glaring everlasting bonfire, where those who are the creatures of God's hand writhe in the interminable anguish of torturing flames, but the misery of alienation from all that is pure and holy, which must continue until that alienation has been removed, and God has become all in all.
III
As regards the Scriptures, enough books have been written in the nineteenth century alone to stock a very large library. Has the time come in which we can form a true estimate as to their general results ?
1. Unquestionably the theoretic conception of the manner in which Scripture has been given to us has undergone a wide and permanent change. The notion of what is called " Verbal Inspir ation " in its narrowest sense, does not seem to have prevailed in the Early Church. The later forms of Judaism, after the days of Ezra, had indeed made a sort of fetish of the Old Testament, much
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xix
as the Mussulman makes of his Qu'ran. The Scribes had counted the number of letters which the book contained ; they could tell you the middle letter of the whole volume ; they could say how many verses began with this or that letter ; and that there were only three verses which began with the letter S. They observed that the word Vau ("and") occurs fourteen times in Gen. ix. 20-25 ; and that in the first and last verses of the Old Testament, such and such a letter occurred exactly the same number of times. Yet even in the midst of this stereotyped fetishism, there were occasional gleams of biblical criticism. They did not place the book of Daniel among the prophets, but in the Kethubim, or Hagiographa. It was a very long time before the book of Esther was admitted into the Canon. Great doubts were felt about Ecclesiastes ; the school of Shammai pronounced against it. 1 The final and secure admission of Ezekiel as one of the sacred books was only secured by the elaborate ingenuity of Rabbi Chananiah ben Chiskiyah. 2 It " would have been suppressed because of its contradictions to the law, but the Eabbi by the help of 300 bottles of oil prolonged his lucubrations till he succeeded in recon ciling all the discrepancies. " And biblical criticism took the form of " explaining away " all that was felt to be obsolete or undeniable even in the regulations of the Levitic law. "
By means of the ingenious shufflings known as " Urubhin or
" mixtures," the school of Hillel managed to get rid of limitations
as soon as they were found to be disagreeable. In the New Testa
ment we find absolutely nothing to sanction the utterly false,
meaningless, and fanatical dogma, that (as Dean Burgon expressed
it) " every book, every chapter, every verse, every word —what say
I—
Apostles had never been encouraged in any such doctrines by their Lord. On the contrary, He freely criticised fundamental positions of the Mosaic law. He told the Jews that Moses had given them divorce because of the hardness of their hearts, but that in the beginning it was not so ; and He not only treated as a matter of
1 Shabbath, f. 30. 2 ; Mishnah Yadaim, iii. 5. 2 Shabbath, t 13. 2.
"
? every letter of the Holy Book came direct from God ! The
XX THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
indifference, but completely abrogated, so far-reaching a regulation as that of "clean" and "unclean" meats—that law of Kashar and Tami which continues valid among Jews to this day. For when He taught that it is only that which cometh from within which defileth a man, " this He said, making all meats clean. " 1 Many of the early Christians indeed gave up, in great measure, all respect for the authority of Mosaic dispensation. So early and widely popular a book as the Epistle of Barnabas, went so far as to say that circumcision of the flesh had been enacted, not by God, but by an evil Demiurge. 2 In course of time something of the former Judaic notion of mechanical inspiration was reintroduced. Yet St. Augustine said even of the Evangelists that they wrote " ut quisque meminerat vel ut cuique cordi erat" — which is a notion widely different from that of "verbal dictation. " St. Jerome was imbued with the spirit of a critic ; and when his contemporaries raged against him as a "corruptor sanctarumscripturarum," he called them " two-footed asses " (aselli bipedes) ! There was of course no " biblical criticism " amid the sacerdotal despotism, and during the " deep slumber of decided opinions " which prevailed in the Middle Ages. But with the revival of learning came the New Testament of Erasmus, and—heedless of the outrageous clamour excited by fear less truthfulness, he rightly omitted the spurious text about the "three heavenly witnesses" in St. John's Epistles. Luther was an even audacious critic. He attached supreme authority to his own subjective views ; and unable to see the importance and glory of the Epistle of St. James, he called it "A right-down strawy
Epistle, which contained no evangelic truth. " Like many in the Reformed Churches, he also slighted the Book of Revelation as an insoluble enigma, and scarcely regarded it as a true part of canonical Scripture. Even in the Roman Church, R. Simon, in his Critical History of the Old Testament, pointed out the remarkable difference between the Jehovistic and Elohistic documents in Genesis. That difference had been noticed as far back as the thirteenth century by the Jew Kalonymus, who wrote these remarkable words : " From the beginning of Genesis up to the passage of the Sabbatic rest (il 1-3) 1 Mark vii. 19. * Ep. Barn. o. 9.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxi
only Elohim occurs, and not once Jehovah. From ii 4, 5, we find Jehovah - Elohim ; from v. -vi. 9, only Jehovah. This strange use of the names of God cannot be accidental, but gives, according to my opinion, some hidden hints which are too wonderful for me to understand. " E. Simon's Histoire Critique was suppressed in France by the influence of Bossuet, but his hint was followed up by the physician Astruc (d. 1766), who first developed in his anonymous " Conjectures " the theory of four separate documents (A. B. C. D. and A. B. ) which had been already mentioned by Simon, Le Clerc, and Fleury. In spite of the frantic screams of ignorant opposition, the labour and genius of open-minded scholars, such as Mill, Bentley, Bengel, Wetstein, and in this century of Griesbach, Lachmann, Tregelles, and Tischendorf, slowly but inevitably paved the way for the broader, yet deeply reverent views of the nature
of inspiration which have been established by the greatest biblical writers of the present day, such as Westcott, Hort, Lightfoot, Driver, and Cheyne ; and by hosts of German scholars, of whom it may now be said that there is not one of the smallest fame or distinction who does not believe (as did Bishop Colenso), that in the gift of inspiration there are human elements commingling with the divine.
The labours of several generations of eminent and holy scholars, who have loved Truth more than Tradition, have broken down the ignorant bigotry of mechanical and untenable hypotheses, and have shown that the facts which result from the criticism and history of each book and part of the Old Testament must be carefully con sidered apart from a supposed orthodoxy, which is often no better than stereotyped unprogressiveness and opinionated infallibility. God's Orthodoxy, it has been well said, " is the truth. " Hence it is now regarded as a matter of established fact, among all serious and competent scholars, that the Pentateuch is composed of com posite documents. Professor Cheyne, in a paper read before the Church Congress in 1883, did not hesitate to make the confident assertion that, if either exegesis or the church's representation of religious truth is to make any decided progress, the results of the literary analysis of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua into
xxii THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
several documents must be accepted as facts ; and that the Book of Deuteronomy was not known as a whole till the age of Josiah ; and that some of those Levitic ordinances which are not so much as alluded to in the entire Old Testament, may not have been established till after the days of the prophet Ezekiel. There is a general acceptance among scholars of the opinion that the Books of Isaiah and Zechariah, respectively, were the works of at least two writers, one of whom (in each instance) wrote at a con siderably later date than the other. It is a view which is becoming daily more widely accepted, that there are " Haggadistic " elements in the Books of Jonah and of Daniel, and that both books are of much later dates than those of the prophets whose name they bear. These opinions have long been regarded as indisputable by leading scholars. Defence after defence has been written of the authen ticity of the Book of Daniel, both before and since the elaborate volume of Dr. Pusey ; but the defenders differ from each other on the most important questions, and now even the most conservative theologians are beginning to see that the old positions are entirely untenable. Professor Stanton of Cambridge, a cautious student, yet says, in his Hulsean Lectures on the Jewish Messiah, that the Book of Daniel is assigned to the Maccabean era even by many orthodox critics ; and that " the chief difficulty which the earlier date must have, consists in the fact that the communication of such detailed information about events in a comparatively distant future would not be according to the laws of Divine Kevelation which we trace in other cases. "
I have used the word " Haggadistic " ; and a right appreciation of the meaning of the word is of the utmost importance.
There were among the Jews two schools of ancient commentary —the one called the Halacha, which consisted of minute exposition of, and inferences from, the written and oral law ; the other called Haggada, which dealt more with moral and religious teaching, and gave play to the imagination. The latter method of instruction had practically existed in all ages, and there is nothing whatever derogatory to the sacred majesty of the Bible in the beliefs that divine truths should have been sometimes conveyed in the form of
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxiii
allegory or Parable. Our Lord's parables convey the divinest lessons which God has ever communicated to man ; yet they are confessedly " Parables "—i. e. they are truths conveyed by imaginary stories. The notion that some of the biblical narratives are of this Haggadistic character goes back even to the days of the Fathers. For instance, St. Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of St. Basil of Caesarea, and a writer of learning and genius, goes so far as to apply the terms 'IovScukt) 4>\vapta, " Jewish babble " to a merely literal acceptance of the story of Babel ; and even as far back as 1782, we find Bishop Horsley (Sermon XVI. ) saying of the earliest narratives of Genesis, that they are not necessarily meant to be literally taken. " Divines of the most unimpeachable orthodoxy, says Coleridge, " and most averse to the allegorising of scripture history in general, have held without blame the allegoric explan ation. And indeed no unprejudiced man can pretend to doubt that in any other book of Eastern origin, he met with trees of life and knowledge, or talking snakes, he would want no other proofs that was an allegory that he was reading, and intended to be understood as such. " Imaginations which are not yet wholly paralysed by the arrogant infallibility of self-satisfied nescience, will soon get to see that the grandeur and value of the uniquely noble lessons conveyed by the Book of Jonah are not in the slightest degree impaired by the supposition that they are conveyed under the form of imaginary incidents. That the book was written, in whole or in part, after the Exile the view of Kleinert, Ewald, Bleek, Noldeke, Schrader, Reuss, Orelli, Hitzig, Kohler, and many others. Gesenius, De Wette, Knobel, Orelli, Cheyne, Kuenen, Dean Plumptre, and most modern critics admit the legendary element. Dr. Otto Zockler says that the book " didactic, not historic," and now generally held that the idea of the sea- monster derived from the metaphoric language in such passages
as Isa. xxvii. Jer. ii. 34. 1
Human language and must be an imperfect medium for the
conveyance of truth. " Language," has been said, " but an
For further information may refer to my little book on The Minor Prophet* ("Men of the Bible," Nisbet).
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xxiv THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
asymptote to thought. " Ages ago the wisest Eabbis said and taught that " the law speaks in the tongue of the sons of men. "
There is nothing which, in the light of history and criticism, we have learnt respecting the Bible which is not involved in the principle that in inspired utterances there is still a human element. At any rate, knowledge is knowledge. The light which comes from heaven — the light which is derived from earnest and truthful study —cannot lead us astray. The grandeur of that which is uttered to us by the voice of God has not been in the smallest degree impaired by any of the certain conclusions which study has revealed. We feel none the less the thrill and splendour of Isaiah's magnificent utterances, if we are convinced that there are two Isaiahs, of whom the second may have lived a century later than the first ; nor do we lose the large lessons of toleration, of pity, of the impossibility of flying from God, of God's abounding tenderness, of the shaming into fatuity of man's little hatreds, if advancing knowledge compels us to recognise that the book of Jonah as whole, Jewish Haggadah.
Let us turn to the New Testament. It may now be regarded as indisputable that the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by St. PauL No critic worth the name would any longer maintain that is. It may also be regarded as certain that St. Peter had any hand at all in the Second Epistle which goes by his name, yet other hands have been at work upon it. There are still unsettled problems about the Apocalypse. But on the whole the assaults of criticism on the stronghold of the New Testament have been defeated all along the line. There are arguments of overwhelming strength to prove that the thirteen Epistles which are attributed to St. Paul are the genuine expressions of his teeming intellect. The authenticity and credibility of the three
Synoptists have been fiercely attacked, but have never been shaken. Book after book has been written to prove that the Fourth Gospel was not the work of the Apostle St. John but those books have not brought conviction to the most learned and open-minded critics. If any one will read the introduction to this Gospel by Bishop Westcott in the Speaker's Commentary, he will see how
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THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM XXV
marvellously strong, how varied, how minute, and in many particulars how unexpected, is the mass of cogent evidence to convince us that in the Gospel we are reading the very words of the "Disciple whom Jesus loved"; —and, in any case, we can say with Herder, " That little book is a still, deep sea in which the heavens, with the sun and stars, are mirrored ; and if there are eternal truths — and such there are — for the human race, they are to be found in the Gospel of St. John. "
It is no longer disputable that the last sixteen verses of St. Mark are a later and dubious appendix to that Gospel ; that the narrative of the woman taken in adultery, in John viii. 1-11, — though bearing evidence of its own truth — was no part of the original Gospel : that the text about the three heavenly witnesses (1 John v. 7, 8) is spurious; that the verse about the angel troubling the water of the Pool of Bethesda (John v. 4) should have no place in the genuine text of the Fourth Gospel ; that the Eunuch's confession is an interpolation into the text of Acts viii. 37 ; and that the word " fasting " has been introduced by ascetic scribes into Matt, xvii 21, Mark ix. 29, 1 Cor. vii. 5, Acts x. 30. But although criticism has, in hundreds of instances, amended the text and elucidated the meaning of almost every page of the New Testament, it has done nothing to shake, but rather much to enhance, our conviction that throughout its treatises the witness of God standeth sure. And, as a general result, we may affirm that the Jewish race possessed an insight respecting the nature of God and His relations to men, which was a special gift to them, for the dissemination of which they were set apart ; and that by this inspired mission they have rendered higher and deeper services to mankind than it gained from the aesthetic suscepti bilities of Greece, or the strong imperialism of Bome. When we read their sacred books, we are listening to the Prophets of a prophetic race. Nor are these the mere assertions of believers; they have been stated quite as strongly by advanced sceptics. If Cardinal Newman said of the Bible that " its light is like the body of heaven in its clearness, its vastness like the bosom of the sea, its variety like scenes of nature," Eenan said with no less strength of con
xxvi THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
viction, " C'est apres tout le grand livre consolateur de l'HumaniteV' Heinrich Heine, after a day spent in the unwonted task of reading it, exclaimed with a burst of enthusiasm, " What a book ! vast and wide as the world, rooted in the abysses of creation, and towering up beyond the blue secrets of heaven ! Sunrise and sun set, promise and fulfilment, birth and death, the whole drama of humanity are all in this book ! Its eclipse would be the return of chaos ; its extinction the epitaph of history. " And to quote but one more testimony,Professor Huxley, one of the most candid-minded of men, in a speech, delivered, if I remember rightly, before the London School Board, said, " I have been seriously perplexed to know how the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of
conduct, can be kept up without the use of the Bible. For three centuries this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history.
It forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations, and of a great past stretching back to the farthest limits of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills like themselves but a momentary interspace between the two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they are also earning the payment for their work ? "
Let all humble and earnest believers rest assured that biblical criticism, so far as it is reverent, earnest, and well founded, may remove many errors, but cannot rob them of one precious and eternal truth. As Bishop Butler so wisely said a century ago, "the only question concerning the authority of Scripture is whether it be what it claims to be, not whether it be a book of such sort and so promulged as weak men are apt to fancy. " 1 He also quotes with approval the remark which Origen deduced from analogical reasoning, that " He who believes the Scripture to have proceeded from Him who is the Author of Nature may well expect to find the same sort of difficulties in it as are found in the
1 Analogy, ii. 3.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxvii
constitution of Nature. " And he adds, " He who denies the Scripture to have been from God, upon account of these difficulties, may for the very same reason deny the world to have been formed by Him. "1
IV
We now approach the central subject of our religion —our belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. With the belief in Him, the belief in Christianity must stand or fall. It is but a few months since we committed to the grave, amid a nation's tears, the fore most statesman of our century —Mr. W. E. Gladstone. He was a man of splendid intellectual power, as well as of the loftiest eloquence ; and it is one sign of the unshaken dominance of the faith in Christ that he—familiar as he was with the literature of almost every nation —could yet say from his heart, " All I write, and all I think, and all I hope, is based upon the Divinity of our Lord, the one central hope of our poor wayward race. " It is not long since we lost in Eobert Browning one of the deepest and greatest of our poets ; and Mr. Browning wrote that —
The acknowledgment of God in Christ, Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All problems in the world, and out of it.
Now the Divinity of Christ has been the subject of vehement attack in all ages. The Jews from the first represented Him as a meztth or " deceiver " ; and besides the angry and disdainful allusions to Him in Talmudic writings, which spoke of Him as a Mamzer, and as "that man," Jewish hatred in the Middle Ages concentrated itself into an amazing mixture of nonsense and blasphemy in the Toldoth Jeshu. Among Gentiles, Celsus, the Epicurean Philosopher, wrote his famous "True Discourse," to destroy all His claims for ever ; and he was effectually answered by
In the thirteenth century appeared the book now only known by its name, " De tribus imjoostoribus," which was attributed to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa II. , and ranked Christ with Moses and Mahomet. All these attacks have fallen absolutely
1 Id. Jntrod.
Origen.
xxviii THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
flat and dead, and have ceased to have a particle of significance. But in the eighteenth century in England — through the writings of Hobbes, Bolingbroke, and Hume ; in France, by those of Voltaire, Von Holbach and the Encyclopaedists ; in Germany as the gradual outcome of systems of philosophy which culminated in Hegel, and of which the sceptical elements were brought to a head by the Wolfenbiittel Fragments and the Leben Jesu of Strauss, — the belief of thousands was for a time impaired, if not finally destroyed. Out of a mass of sceptical literature two books may be selected as representing the culmination of disbelief in the Divinity of Christ, and as having been specially influential in the spread of that disbelief —the Leben Jesu of Strauss, and the Vie de Jisus of
Strauss was a pupil of Hegel, and the main position of his once famous, but already half forgotten, Life of Jesus, was that it was not history but " a myth " : in other words, that it was nothing but a series of symbols dressed up in an historic form,—con victions thrown into the form of poetry and legend. He went much farther than Hegel, or De Wette, or Schleiermacher, and instead of urging that Jesus had created round him an atmosphere of imagination and excitement, tried to show " that Christ had not founded the Church, but that the Church had invented Christ, and formed him out of the predictions of the Old Testament, and the hopes and expectations of the days founded on them. " 1 He admitted little or nothing which was truly historical in the Gospel miracles. The attempt to establish this opinion broke down under its own baselessness. It was seen in its naked absurdity when Bruno Bauer attributed Christianity to the direct invention of an individual, and Feuerbach treated all human religion as self-deception. Herder truly said that " If the fisher men of Galilee invented such a history, God be praised that they
1 See Hagenbach's German Rationalism, p. 371.
I will not add the anonymous work on
Ernest Kenan. To these
Supernatural Religion, for it was full of the grossest inaccuracies, and it ceased to have any influence when its many instances of sciolism were exposed by the learning and power of Bishop Lightfoot.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxix
invented it " ; and further, we may say that if they did invent the inventors would be as great as the hero. Strauss himself tore to shreds the old attempts of Dr. Paulus to represent the miracles as mere natural events; but how impossible was to support anything like religion on views such as his, he himself showed in his subsequent Glaubenslehre (1840), in which he expressed his belief that no reconciliation was possible between science and Christianity. Strauss's whole method vitiated by his two pre- assumptions —(1) that all miracles are impossible; and (2) that the Gospels have no pretence to historical authority. The readers of the Gospels have felt that " It the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit truth " and ordinary reasoners realise at once that the trivial and fantastic hypotheses of rationalising scepticism are shattered on the two vast facts of Christianity and Christendom. And, like all who have attacked the Divinity of our Lord, even Strauss seems almost compelled to fall down on his knees before Him. He says that "Jesus stands foremost among those who have given higher ideal to Humanity " that " It impossible to refrain from admiring and loving Him and that never at any time will be possible to rise above Him, nor to imagine any one who shall be even equal with Him. "
Eenan's Vie de Jims appeared in 1865. In many respects, its scepticism be subtracted from it, was beautiful book. The author was learned and brilliant man of genius, and was the master of an eminently fascinating style, through which breathes charming personality. Yet how utterly inefficient were the deplorable methods by which he tried to set at naught the faith of Christians! Let two instances suffice. For nearly nineteen centuries the religion, the history, and the moral progress of man kind have been profoundly affected by the Besurrection. And yet Eenan thinks sufficient to account for the Resurrection by saying, "Divine power of love! sacred moments in which the passion of an hallucinie gives to the world resuscitated God! " Such mode of treating the convictions of centuries of Christians, who have numbered in their ranks some of the keenest and most brilliant thinkers in the race of man, can only be regarded as
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it
ixx THE LITERATURE OP RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
utterly frivolous. For the sake of a subjective prejudice it seta aside all the records of the New Testament, and the nineteen centuries of splendid progress which have had their origin in the faith which those records founded. So far was " la passion d'une hallucinee," from having founded the belief in the Eesurrection that the Apostles, who had found it impossible to realise the prophecies of Eesurrection which they had heard from the lips of their Lord, were most reluctant, and most slow of heart to believe the most positive evidence. So far from being prepared beforehand to accept or to invent a Eesurrection, " they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a Spirit," when Christ Himself stood before them. When Mary of Magdala and the other women told them that they had seen Jesus, so far from being credulous enough to be carried away by hallucinations, they regarded their words as " idle talk " (krjpos " babble," a word of entire contempt) — and they disbelieved them : nay, they even rejected the witness of the two disciples to whom He had appeared on the way to Emmaus, and Thomas was dissatisfied with the affirmation of the whole Apostolic band. So far from "regarding it as the height of absurdity to suppose that Jesus could be held by death," their despairing conviction that the bridegroom had indeed been taken from them, was so all but insuperable that it required the most decisive personal eye-witness to overcome it. Again, consider the way in which Eenan treats the Resurrection of Lazarus! Although Eleazar was one of the commonest of Jewish names, he assumes that the story of the resuscitation of Lazarus rose from some confusion about the Lazarus of the Parable who was carried into Abraham's bosom ; and in some very confused sentences he more than hints that the story of his death and resurrection was the result of a collusion between Jesus, Mary, and Martha, and that Jesus in some way or other gave way to the suggestion of the sisters, because, in the impure city of Jerusalem he had lost " some thing of his original transparent clearness," 1 " Peut-etre l'ardent d^sir de fermer la bouche a ceux qui niaient outrageusement la mission divine le leur ami, entraina-t-elle ces personnes passionn^es
1 Fie de Jisut, 872.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxxi
au dela de toutea lea bornes. II faut se rappeler que, dans cette ville impure et pesante de Jerusalem, Jims n'itait pas lui-rrdme. Sa conscience, par la faute des hommes, et non par la sienne, avait perdu quelque chose de la limpiditi primordiale. " Strange that a man of even ordinary intelligence could expect any one to get rid of a miracle by the hypothesis that the Lord of truth,—He whose life and teaching have created in the world the conviction that " it is better to die than lie," —lent Himself to a coarse and vulgar make- believe! Christianity surely has nothing to fear from such reconstructions of the Gospel History as these !
Most of the books written to disprove the Divinity of the Saviour suggest some brand-new hypothesis ; one after another they have their brief vogue, are trumpeted by unbelievers as a refutation of Christianity, and then pass into oblivion, if not into contempt. They have not shaken the belief reigning in millions of hearts in every region of the habitable globe ; and the Christian world, with out the smallest misgiving, will still exclaim, in the words of the inscription on the obelisk reared by the Pope Sixtus in front of St. Peter's at Eome, on soil once wet with the blood of martyrs :—
"CHPJSTUS VINCIT, CHEISTUS EEGNAT, CHRISTUS IMPEEAT, CHEISTUS AB OMNI MALO PLEBEM SUAM DEFENDAT. "
The Christian world continues, and will for long ages hence continue, to offer up the prayer —
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove ;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; Thou madest Life in man and brute ; Thou madest Death ; and lo, Thy foot
Is on the skull which Thou hast made !
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. By EURIPIDES.
(From the " Bacchae " : translated by Arthur S. Way. )
[Ecbipidbs : The last of the three Greek tragic poets ; born on the island of Salamis in b. c. 480, according to popular tradition, on the day of the famous naval battle. He received instruction in physics from Anaxagoras, in rhetoric from Prodicus, and was on terms of intimate friendship with Socrates. He early devoted his attention to dramatic composition, and at the age of twenty-five obtained a prize for his first tragedy. After a successful career at Athens, he retired for unknown reasons to Magnesia in Thessaly, and thence proceeded to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, where he died in B. C. 405. Cf over seventy-five tragedies there have come down to us only eighteen, the best known being "Alcestis," "Medea," " Hippolytus," "Hecuba," "Andromache," "Iphigenia at Aulis," "Iphigenia among the Tauri," "Electra," "Orestes,"
" Bacchae. "]
[Aboumknt. — SemelS the daughter of Kadmua, a mortal bride of Zeus, was per suaded by Hera to pray the God to promise her with an oath to grant her what soever she would. And when he had consented, she asked that he would appear to her in all the splendor of his godhead, even as he visited Hera. Then Zeus, not of his will, but constrained by his oath, appeared to her amidst intolerable light and flashings of heaven's lightning, whereby her mortal body was con sumed. But the God snatched her unborn babe from the flames, and hid him in a cleft of his thigh, till the days were accomplished wherein he should be born. And so the child Dionysus sprang from the thigh of Zeus, and was hidden from the jealous malice of Hera till he was grown. Then did he set forth in victorious march through all the earth, bestowing upon men the gift of the vine, and planting his worship everywhere. But the sisters of SemelS scoffed at the story of the heavenly bridegroom, and mocked at the worship of Dionysus. And when Kadmus was now old, Pentheus his grandson reigned in his stead, and he too defied the Wine giver, saying that he was no god, and that none in Thebes should ever worship him. And herein is told how Dionysus came in human guise to Thebes, and filled her women with the Bacchanal possession, and how Pentheus, essaying to withstand him, was punished by strange and awful doom. — Wat. ]
Pentheus —
We must not overcome by force
The women. I will hide me midst the pines.
Dionysus —
Such hiding shall be thine as fate ordains, Who com'st with guile, a spy on Bacchanals.
vol. it. —3 33
34
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS.
Pentheus —
Methinks I see them mid the copses caught, Like birds, in toils of their sweet dalliance.
Dionysus —
To this end then art thou appointed watchman : Perchance shalt catch them — if they catch not thee.
Pentheus —
On through the midst of Thebes' town usher me, For I, I only of them, dare such deed.
Dionysus —
Alone for Thebes thou travailest, thou alone ; Wherefore for thee wait tug and strain foredoomed. Follow : all safely will I usher thee.
Another thence shall bring thee, —
Pentheus — Dionysus —
Ay, my mother. come.
0 silken ease !
Thou wouldst thrust pomp on me !
To all men manifest — Pentheus —
For this I
Dionysus —
High borne shalt thou return —
Pentheus — Dionysus —
On a mother's hands. Pentheus —
Dionysus —
Nay, 'tis but such pomp
—
Strange, strange man !
So shalt thou win renown that soars to heaven.
[Exit Pentheus. AgavS, stretch forth hands ; ye sisters, stretch,
Daughters of Kadmus ! To a mighty strife
I bring this prince. The victor I shall be And Bromius. All else shall the issue show.
Pentheus— Dionysus —
As is my desert.
Strange shall thine experience be.
Chorus—
Up, ye swift hell hounds of Madness ! Away to the mountain glens
where
Kadmus's daughters hold revel, and sting them to fury, to tear
Him who hath come woman-vestured to spy on the Bacchanals there,
Frenzy-struck fool that he is ! — for his mother shall foremost descry Him, as from waterworn scaur or from storm-riven tree he would spy That which they do, and her shout to the Maenads shall peal from
on high : —
[^etf Diohybus.
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. 35
"Who hath come hither, hath trodden the paths to the mountain that lead,
Spying on Kadmus's daughters, the maids o'er the mountains that
speed, — Bacchanal sisters ?
seed?
what mother hath brought to the birth such a
Who was it ? — who ? — for I ween he was born not of womankind's blood :
Kather he sprang from the womb of a lioness, scourge of the wood;
Haply is spawn of the Gorgons of Libya, the demon brood. "
Justice, draw nigh us, draw nigh, with the sword of avenging appear :
Slay the unrighteous, the seed of Echion the earth born, and shear Clean through his throat, for he feareth not God, neither law doth
he fear.
Lo, how in impious mood, and with lawless intent, and with spite Madness distraught, with thy rites and thy mother's he cometh to
fight,
Bacchus — to bear the invincible down by his impotent might !
Thus shall one gain him a sorrowless life, if he keepeth his soul Sober in spirit, and swift in obedience to heaven's control, Murmuring not, neither pressing beyond his mortality's goal.
No such presumptuous wisdom I covet : I seek for mine own —
Yea, in the quest is mine happiness — things that not so may be
known,
Glorious wisdom and great, from the days everlasting forth shown,
Even to fashion in pureness my life and in holiness aye, Following ends that are noble from dawn to the death of the day, Honoring Gods, and refusing to walk in injustice's way.
Justice, draw nigh us, draw nigh, with the sword of avenging appear :
Slay the unrighteous, the seed of Echion the earthborn, and shear Clean through his throat ; for he feareth not God, neither law doth
he fear.
0 Dionysus, reveal thee ! — appear as a bull to behold,
Or be thou seen as a dragon, a monster of heads manifold,
Or as a lion with splendors of flame round the limbs of him rolled.
36 THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS.
Gome to us, Bacchus, and smiling in mockery compass him round Now with the toils of destruction, and so shall the hunter be bound, Trapped mid the throng of the Maenads, the quarry his questing
hath found.
Enter Messenger.
Chorus —
What now ? — hast tidings of the Bacchanals ?
Messenger —
O house of old through Hellas prosperous
Of that Sidonian patriarch, who sowed
The earthborn serpent's dragon teeth in earth, How I bemoan thee ! What though thrall I be, Their lords' calamities touch loyal thralls.
Messenger —
Pentheus is dead : Echion's son is dead.
Chorus —
Bromius, my King ! thou hast made thy godhead plain !
Messenger —
How, what is this thou say'st ? Dost thou exult, Woman, upon my lord's calamities ?
Chorus —
An alien I, I chant glad outland strain, Who cower no more in terror of the chain.
Messenger —
Deemest thou Thebes so void of men [that ills Have left her powerless all to punish thee ? ]
Chorus —
Dionysus it 'tis the King of the Vine
That hath lordship o'er me, no Thebes of thine
Messenger
This might be pardoned, save that base Women, to joy o'er evils past recall.
Chorus —
Tell to me, tell, — by what doom died he, The villain devising villainy
Messenger —
When, from the homesteads of this Theban land Departing, we had crossed Asopus' streams,
Then we began to breast Kithairon's steep,
Pentheus and — for to my lord clave, —
And he who ushered us unto the scene.
First in grassy dell we sat us down
With footfall hushed and tongues refrained from speech. That so we might behold, all unbeheld.
a
I,
is,
? I
it is,
!
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. 87
There was a glen crag-walled, with rills o'erstreamed, Closed in with pine shade, where the Maenad girls Sat with hands busied with their blithesome toils. The faded thyrsus some with ivy sprays
Twined, till its tendril tresses waved again.
Others, like colts from carven wain yokes loosed,
Reechoed each to each the Bacchic chant.
But hapless Pentheus, seeing ill the throng
Of women, spake thus : " Stranger, where we stand,
Are these mock-maenad maids beyond my ken.
Some knoll or pine high-crested let me climb,
And I shall see the Maenads' lewdness well. "
A marvel then I saw the stranger do.
A soaring pine branch by the top he caught,
And dragged down — down — still down to the dark earth. Arched as a bow it grew, or curving wheel
That on the lathe sweeps out its circle's round :
So bowed the stranger's hands that mountain branch,
And bent to earth — a deed past mortal might !
Then Pentheus on the pine boughs seated he,
And let the branch rise, sliding through his hands
Gently, with heedful care to unseat him not.
High up into the heights of air it soared,
Bearing my master throned upon its crest,
More by the Maenads seen than seeing them.
For scarce high-lifted was he manifest,
When lo, the stranger might no more be seen ;
And fell from heaven a voice — the voice, most like,
Of Dionysus, — crying : " O ye maids,
I bring him who would mock at you and me, "
And at my rites. Take vengeance on him ye !
Even as he cried, up heavenward, down to earth,
He flashed a pillar splendor of awful flame.
Hushed was the welkin : that fair grassy glen
Held hushed its leaves ; no wild thing's cry was heard. But they, whose ears not clearly caught the sound,
Sprang up, and shot keen glances right and left.
Again he cried his hest : then Kadmus' daughters
Knew certainly the Bacchic God's command,
And darted : and the swiftness of their feet
Was as of doves in onward-straining race —
His mother Agave' and her sisters twain,
And all the Bacchanals. Through torrent gorge,
O'er bowlders, leapt they, with the God's breath mad. When seated on the pine they saw my lord,
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS.
First torrent stones with might and main they hurled, Scaling a rock, their counter bastion,
And javelined him with branches of the pine :
And others shot their thyrsi through the air
At Pentheus — woeful mark ! — yet naught availed.
For, at a height above their fury's pitch,
Trapped in despair's gin, horror-struck he sat.
Last, oak limbs from their trunks they thundered down, And heaved at the roots with levers — not of iron.
But when they won no end of toil and strain,
Agav8 cried, "Ho, stand we round the trunk,
Maenads, and grasp, that we may catch the beast Crouched there, that he may"not proclaim abroad
Our God's mysterious rites ! Their countless hands Set they unto the pine, tore from the soil : —
And he, high-seated, crashed down from his height : And earthward fell with frenzy of shriek on shriek Pentheus, for now he knew his doom at hand.
His mother first, priestlike, began the slaughter, And fell on him : but from his hair the coif
He tore, that she might know and slay him not, — Hapless Agave' ! — and he touched her cheek, Crying, "'Tis I — 0 mother! — thine own son Pentheus — thou bar'st me in Echion's halls !
Have mercy, 0 my mother ! — for my sin
Murder not thou thy son — thy very son ! "
But she, with foaming lips and eyes that rolled Wildly, and reckless madness-clouded soul, Possessed of Bacchus, gave no heed to him ;
But his left arm she clutched in both her hands, And set against the wretch's ribs her foot,
And tore his shoulder out — not by her strength, But the God made it easy to her hands.
And Ino labored on the other side,
Rending his flesh: AutonoS pressed on — all
The Bacchanal throng. One awful blended cry
Rose — the king's screams while life was yet in him, And triumph yells from them. One bare an arm, One a foot sandal-shod. His ribs were stripped
In mangled shreds : with blood-bedabbled hands Each to and fro was tossing Pentheus' flesh.
Wide-sundered lies his corse : part 'neath rough rocks, Part mid the tangled depths of forest shades : —
Hard were the search. His miserable head
Which in her hands his mother chanced to seize,
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. 39
Impaled upon her thyrsus point she bears,
Like mountain lion's, through Kithairon's mid Leaving her sisters in their Maenad dance ;
And, in her ghastly quarry exulting, comes Within these walls, to Bacchus crying aloud,
Her fellow-hunter, helper in the chase Triumphant — all its triumph-prize is tears! . . .
Enter Agave, carrying the head of Pentheus.
Agav6 —
Asian Bacchanals !
Chorus — Why dost thou challenge me ? — say. Agave —
Chorus —
Of Kadmus —
Lo, from the mountain side I bear A newly severed ivy spray
Unto our halls, a goodly prey.
Chorus —
I see — to our revels I welcome thee.
Agave —
I trapped him, I, with never a snare !
'Tis a lion — the whelp of a lion, plain to see.
up as a principal subject mirth and ridicule. " No one would say that such broad and coarse infidelity now at all common. It sometimes supposed that there are many infidels among our working men. can only say that when was the Bector of London Parish, and was familiar with the condition of a large number of working men of various grades, found many who were addicted to drink, and many who rarely ever set foot inside church, but cannot recall even one of them who had the smallest leaning towards infidel opinions.
Infidelity sometimes confused with Agnosticism, but they
I is
I
it of if,
if I
I is
aa
is
is,
it
of
;
to
xvi THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
are wide as the poles asunder. " Agnosticism " is a word of recent birth. It has as yet hardly found its way into our dictionaries. It does not occur either in Latham's edition of Johnson's Dictionary, or in Littre^s French Dictionary. 1 It was, I believe, first suggested by the late Professor Huxley in a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869. But as one who had the privilege of knowing Professor Huxley for many years, and of frequently meeting him, I can say that, so far from being an infidel, he was a man of a reverent and even of a religious mind. Never in his life did he, or Darwin, or Tyndall, dream of denying the existence of God. Their scientific enquiries had no doubt deepened in their minds the sense of the uncertainties of all human belief ; the con viction that the limits of truth are vaster and more vague than is allowed for in many systems; the feeling that if the curtain which hangs between us and the unseen world be but " thin as a spider's web," it is yet " dense as midnight. " But a reverent and limited Agnosticism is by no means an unmitigated evil Even the ancient Jewish Eabbis, whom none can accuseI of a spirit of
"as though He were a man in the next room," or writes scholastic folios of minute dogmatism which have about as much stability as a pyramid built upon its apex. " Agnosticism " may be no more than a strengthened conviction that " what we know is little, what we are ignorant of is immense. " In the most solemn parts of Scripture we are warned of this truth. In Exodus we are told that " the people stood afar off," and only Moses " drew near into the thick darkness, where God was. " " Canst thou by search ing find out God ? " asks Zophar in the Book of Job.
Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection 1 It is as high as Heaven, what canst thou do ? Deeper than Sheol : what canst thou know t
" Verily thou art a God that hidest Thyself," says Isaiah. " How
1 It U fully handled in Dr. Murray's New English Dictionary. An Agnostic is one who holds " that God is unknown and unknowable. "
incredulity, had the apothegm "Learn to say,
do not know. " A sense of our human limitations may serve as a counterpoise to the easy familiarity which, as it has been said, talks of God
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xvii
unsearchable are God's judgments," says St. Paul, " and His ways past finding out ! " 1 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, and who hath been his counsellor? But the greatest and best Agnostic men of science of modern days, even while with the Psalmist they would say of God that "clouds and darkness are round about Him," would nevertheless have been the first to add that "righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne. " And this gradually became the mental attitude even of J. S. Mill, in spite of the effects of his early training. If he held that we are built around by an impenetrable wall of darkness, and that " omnia exeunt in mysterium" his later writings show that he also believed that man has a lamp in his hand, and may walk safely in the little circle of its light. It may, I think, be truly said that many great Agnostics inclined to believe and did believe, even when they were unable to say that they knew. They would have sympathised with the condemned criminal, who, though he had been denying the existence of God, was heard to fling himself on his knees, a moment afterwards, in an agony of prayer; and
they would have been inclined to utter, though without its tone of despair, the wild cry which he uttered on the scaffold, " 0 God, ifthere be a God, save my soul, if Ihave a soul ! " If, with the late Sir James Stephen, they might have compared life to "a mountain pass, in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive," they would have added with him—in answer to the question " What must we do ? "—" Be strong and of a good courage. Act for the best ; hope for the best ; and take what comes. "
Next to the fundamental conviction that there is a God of Love and Bighteousness, who cares for the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hands, religious enquiry in our century has mainly turned on three subjects — the nature of Inspiration as regards the Holy Scriptures ; the character of future Eetribution ; and the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
1SeeRom. xi. 33;Jobli. 7-9;Ps. xxxvi. 6;CoLiL2,3,etc. vol. iv. —2
xviii THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
II
As to the belief in man's immortality and the doctrine of a future life, little need here be said. All that study and criticism have done for us in this direction has resulted in pure gain. The
all-but-universal belief in a future life is instinctive in human nature, and has never been shaken. It is a conviction which transcends disproof, and does not depend on logical demonstration. The heart of man cries aloud to God with perfect confidence.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust ;
Thou madest man, he knows not why ; He thinks he was not made to die ;
And Thou hast made him :—Thou art just !
As to the belief in the nature and conditions of our future life, modern thought has inclined more and more to the view that they can only be described in symbols which cannot be crudely inter preted — that Heaven does not mean a golden city in the far-off blue, but the state of a soul cleansed from the stain of sin, and enjoying the Grace and Presence of God ; and that Hell is not a crude and glaring everlasting bonfire, where those who are the creatures of God's hand writhe in the interminable anguish of torturing flames, but the misery of alienation from all that is pure and holy, which must continue until that alienation has been removed, and God has become all in all.
III
As regards the Scriptures, enough books have been written in the nineteenth century alone to stock a very large library. Has the time come in which we can form a true estimate as to their general results ?
1. Unquestionably the theoretic conception of the manner in which Scripture has been given to us has undergone a wide and permanent change. The notion of what is called " Verbal Inspir ation " in its narrowest sense, does not seem to have prevailed in the Early Church. The later forms of Judaism, after the days of Ezra, had indeed made a sort of fetish of the Old Testament, much
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xix
as the Mussulman makes of his Qu'ran. The Scribes had counted the number of letters which the book contained ; they could tell you the middle letter of the whole volume ; they could say how many verses began with this or that letter ; and that there were only three verses which began with the letter S. They observed that the word Vau ("and") occurs fourteen times in Gen. ix. 20-25 ; and that in the first and last verses of the Old Testament, such and such a letter occurred exactly the same number of times. Yet even in the midst of this stereotyped fetishism, there were occasional gleams of biblical criticism. They did not place the book of Daniel among the prophets, but in the Kethubim, or Hagiographa. It was a very long time before the book of Esther was admitted into the Canon. Great doubts were felt about Ecclesiastes ; the school of Shammai pronounced against it. 1 The final and secure admission of Ezekiel as one of the sacred books was only secured by the elaborate ingenuity of Rabbi Chananiah ben Chiskiyah. 2 It " would have been suppressed because of its contradictions to the law, but the Eabbi by the help of 300 bottles of oil prolonged his lucubrations till he succeeded in recon ciling all the discrepancies. " And biblical criticism took the form of " explaining away " all that was felt to be obsolete or undeniable even in the regulations of the Levitic law. "
By means of the ingenious shufflings known as " Urubhin or
" mixtures," the school of Hillel managed to get rid of limitations
as soon as they were found to be disagreeable. In the New Testa
ment we find absolutely nothing to sanction the utterly false,
meaningless, and fanatical dogma, that (as Dean Burgon expressed
it) " every book, every chapter, every verse, every word —what say
I—
Apostles had never been encouraged in any such doctrines by their Lord. On the contrary, He freely criticised fundamental positions of the Mosaic law. He told the Jews that Moses had given them divorce because of the hardness of their hearts, but that in the beginning it was not so ; and He not only treated as a matter of
1 Shabbath, f. 30. 2 ; Mishnah Yadaim, iii. 5. 2 Shabbath, t 13. 2.
"
? every letter of the Holy Book came direct from God ! The
XX THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
indifference, but completely abrogated, so far-reaching a regulation as that of "clean" and "unclean" meats—that law of Kashar and Tami which continues valid among Jews to this day. For when He taught that it is only that which cometh from within which defileth a man, " this He said, making all meats clean. " 1 Many of the early Christians indeed gave up, in great measure, all respect for the authority of Mosaic dispensation. So early and widely popular a book as the Epistle of Barnabas, went so far as to say that circumcision of the flesh had been enacted, not by God, but by an evil Demiurge. 2 In course of time something of the former Judaic notion of mechanical inspiration was reintroduced. Yet St. Augustine said even of the Evangelists that they wrote " ut quisque meminerat vel ut cuique cordi erat" — which is a notion widely different from that of "verbal dictation. " St. Jerome was imbued with the spirit of a critic ; and when his contemporaries raged against him as a "corruptor sanctarumscripturarum," he called them " two-footed asses " (aselli bipedes) ! There was of course no " biblical criticism " amid the sacerdotal despotism, and during the " deep slumber of decided opinions " which prevailed in the Middle Ages. But with the revival of learning came the New Testament of Erasmus, and—heedless of the outrageous clamour excited by fear less truthfulness, he rightly omitted the spurious text about the "three heavenly witnesses" in St. John's Epistles. Luther was an even audacious critic. He attached supreme authority to his own subjective views ; and unable to see the importance and glory of the Epistle of St. James, he called it "A right-down strawy
Epistle, which contained no evangelic truth. " Like many in the Reformed Churches, he also slighted the Book of Revelation as an insoluble enigma, and scarcely regarded it as a true part of canonical Scripture. Even in the Roman Church, R. Simon, in his Critical History of the Old Testament, pointed out the remarkable difference between the Jehovistic and Elohistic documents in Genesis. That difference had been noticed as far back as the thirteenth century by the Jew Kalonymus, who wrote these remarkable words : " From the beginning of Genesis up to the passage of the Sabbatic rest (il 1-3) 1 Mark vii. 19. * Ep. Barn. o. 9.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxi
only Elohim occurs, and not once Jehovah. From ii 4, 5, we find Jehovah - Elohim ; from v. -vi. 9, only Jehovah. This strange use of the names of God cannot be accidental, but gives, according to my opinion, some hidden hints which are too wonderful for me to understand. " E. Simon's Histoire Critique was suppressed in France by the influence of Bossuet, but his hint was followed up by the physician Astruc (d. 1766), who first developed in his anonymous " Conjectures " the theory of four separate documents (A. B. C. D. and A. B. ) which had been already mentioned by Simon, Le Clerc, and Fleury. In spite of the frantic screams of ignorant opposition, the labour and genius of open-minded scholars, such as Mill, Bentley, Bengel, Wetstein, and in this century of Griesbach, Lachmann, Tregelles, and Tischendorf, slowly but inevitably paved the way for the broader, yet deeply reverent views of the nature
of inspiration which have been established by the greatest biblical writers of the present day, such as Westcott, Hort, Lightfoot, Driver, and Cheyne ; and by hosts of German scholars, of whom it may now be said that there is not one of the smallest fame or distinction who does not believe (as did Bishop Colenso), that in the gift of inspiration there are human elements commingling with the divine.
The labours of several generations of eminent and holy scholars, who have loved Truth more than Tradition, have broken down the ignorant bigotry of mechanical and untenable hypotheses, and have shown that the facts which result from the criticism and history of each book and part of the Old Testament must be carefully con sidered apart from a supposed orthodoxy, which is often no better than stereotyped unprogressiveness and opinionated infallibility. God's Orthodoxy, it has been well said, " is the truth. " Hence it is now regarded as a matter of established fact, among all serious and competent scholars, that the Pentateuch is composed of com posite documents. Professor Cheyne, in a paper read before the Church Congress in 1883, did not hesitate to make the confident assertion that, if either exegesis or the church's representation of religious truth is to make any decided progress, the results of the literary analysis of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua into
xxii THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
several documents must be accepted as facts ; and that the Book of Deuteronomy was not known as a whole till the age of Josiah ; and that some of those Levitic ordinances which are not so much as alluded to in the entire Old Testament, may not have been established till after the days of the prophet Ezekiel. There is a general acceptance among scholars of the opinion that the Books of Isaiah and Zechariah, respectively, were the works of at least two writers, one of whom (in each instance) wrote at a con siderably later date than the other. It is a view which is becoming daily more widely accepted, that there are " Haggadistic " elements in the Books of Jonah and of Daniel, and that both books are of much later dates than those of the prophets whose name they bear. These opinions have long been regarded as indisputable by leading scholars. Defence after defence has been written of the authen ticity of the Book of Daniel, both before and since the elaborate volume of Dr. Pusey ; but the defenders differ from each other on the most important questions, and now even the most conservative theologians are beginning to see that the old positions are entirely untenable. Professor Stanton of Cambridge, a cautious student, yet says, in his Hulsean Lectures on the Jewish Messiah, that the Book of Daniel is assigned to the Maccabean era even by many orthodox critics ; and that " the chief difficulty which the earlier date must have, consists in the fact that the communication of such detailed information about events in a comparatively distant future would not be according to the laws of Divine Kevelation which we trace in other cases. "
I have used the word " Haggadistic " ; and a right appreciation of the meaning of the word is of the utmost importance.
There were among the Jews two schools of ancient commentary —the one called the Halacha, which consisted of minute exposition of, and inferences from, the written and oral law ; the other called Haggada, which dealt more with moral and religious teaching, and gave play to the imagination. The latter method of instruction had practically existed in all ages, and there is nothing whatever derogatory to the sacred majesty of the Bible in the beliefs that divine truths should have been sometimes conveyed in the form of
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxiii
allegory or Parable. Our Lord's parables convey the divinest lessons which God has ever communicated to man ; yet they are confessedly " Parables "—i. e. they are truths conveyed by imaginary stories. The notion that some of the biblical narratives are of this Haggadistic character goes back even to the days of the Fathers. For instance, St. Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of St. Basil of Caesarea, and a writer of learning and genius, goes so far as to apply the terms 'IovScukt) 4>\vapta, " Jewish babble " to a merely literal acceptance of the story of Babel ; and even as far back as 1782, we find Bishop Horsley (Sermon XVI. ) saying of the earliest narratives of Genesis, that they are not necessarily meant to be literally taken. " Divines of the most unimpeachable orthodoxy, says Coleridge, " and most averse to the allegorising of scripture history in general, have held without blame the allegoric explan ation. And indeed no unprejudiced man can pretend to doubt that in any other book of Eastern origin, he met with trees of life and knowledge, or talking snakes, he would want no other proofs that was an allegory that he was reading, and intended to be understood as such. " Imaginations which are not yet wholly paralysed by the arrogant infallibility of self-satisfied nescience, will soon get to see that the grandeur and value of the uniquely noble lessons conveyed by the Book of Jonah are not in the slightest degree impaired by the supposition that they are conveyed under the form of imaginary incidents. That the book was written, in whole or in part, after the Exile the view of Kleinert, Ewald, Bleek, Noldeke, Schrader, Reuss, Orelli, Hitzig, Kohler, and many others. Gesenius, De Wette, Knobel, Orelli, Cheyne, Kuenen, Dean Plumptre, and most modern critics admit the legendary element. Dr. Otto Zockler says that the book " didactic, not historic," and now generally held that the idea of the sea- monster derived from the metaphoric language in such passages
as Isa. xxvii. Jer. ii. 34. 1
Human language and must be an imperfect medium for the
conveyance of truth. " Language," has been said, " but an
For further information may refer to my little book on The Minor Prophet* ("Men of the Bible," Nisbet).
1
is I
it
is
is
if, it
;1
is
it
is is
xxiv THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
asymptote to thought. " Ages ago the wisest Eabbis said and taught that " the law speaks in the tongue of the sons of men. "
There is nothing which, in the light of history and criticism, we have learnt respecting the Bible which is not involved in the principle that in inspired utterances there is still a human element. At any rate, knowledge is knowledge. The light which comes from heaven — the light which is derived from earnest and truthful study —cannot lead us astray. The grandeur of that which is uttered to us by the voice of God has not been in the smallest degree impaired by any of the certain conclusions which study has revealed. We feel none the less the thrill and splendour of Isaiah's magnificent utterances, if we are convinced that there are two Isaiahs, of whom the second may have lived a century later than the first ; nor do we lose the large lessons of toleration, of pity, of the impossibility of flying from God, of God's abounding tenderness, of the shaming into fatuity of man's little hatreds, if advancing knowledge compels us to recognise that the book of Jonah as whole, Jewish Haggadah.
Let us turn to the New Testament. It may now be regarded as indisputable that the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by St. PauL No critic worth the name would any longer maintain that is. It may also be regarded as certain that St. Peter had any hand at all in the Second Epistle which goes by his name, yet other hands have been at work upon it. There are still unsettled problems about the Apocalypse. But on the whole the assaults of criticism on the stronghold of the New Testament have been defeated all along the line. There are arguments of overwhelming strength to prove that the thirteen Epistles which are attributed to St. Paul are the genuine expressions of his teeming intellect. The authenticity and credibility of the three
Synoptists have been fiercely attacked, but have never been shaken. Book after book has been written to prove that the Fourth Gospel was not the work of the Apostle St. John but those books have not brought conviction to the most learned and open-minded critics. If any one will read the introduction to this Gospel by Bishop Westcott in the Speaker's Commentary, he will see how
;
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if
2.
is,
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THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM XXV
marvellously strong, how varied, how minute, and in many particulars how unexpected, is the mass of cogent evidence to convince us that in the Gospel we are reading the very words of the "Disciple whom Jesus loved"; —and, in any case, we can say with Herder, " That little book is a still, deep sea in which the heavens, with the sun and stars, are mirrored ; and if there are eternal truths — and such there are — for the human race, they are to be found in the Gospel of St. John. "
It is no longer disputable that the last sixteen verses of St. Mark are a later and dubious appendix to that Gospel ; that the narrative of the woman taken in adultery, in John viii. 1-11, — though bearing evidence of its own truth — was no part of the original Gospel : that the text about the three heavenly witnesses (1 John v. 7, 8) is spurious; that the verse about the angel troubling the water of the Pool of Bethesda (John v. 4) should have no place in the genuine text of the Fourth Gospel ; that the Eunuch's confession is an interpolation into the text of Acts viii. 37 ; and that the word " fasting " has been introduced by ascetic scribes into Matt, xvii 21, Mark ix. 29, 1 Cor. vii. 5, Acts x. 30. But although criticism has, in hundreds of instances, amended the text and elucidated the meaning of almost every page of the New Testament, it has done nothing to shake, but rather much to enhance, our conviction that throughout its treatises the witness of God standeth sure. And, as a general result, we may affirm that the Jewish race possessed an insight respecting the nature of God and His relations to men, which was a special gift to them, for the dissemination of which they were set apart ; and that by this inspired mission they have rendered higher and deeper services to mankind than it gained from the aesthetic suscepti bilities of Greece, or the strong imperialism of Bome. When we read their sacred books, we are listening to the Prophets of a prophetic race. Nor are these the mere assertions of believers; they have been stated quite as strongly by advanced sceptics. If Cardinal Newman said of the Bible that " its light is like the body of heaven in its clearness, its vastness like the bosom of the sea, its variety like scenes of nature," Eenan said with no less strength of con
xxvi THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
viction, " C'est apres tout le grand livre consolateur de l'HumaniteV' Heinrich Heine, after a day spent in the unwonted task of reading it, exclaimed with a burst of enthusiasm, " What a book ! vast and wide as the world, rooted in the abysses of creation, and towering up beyond the blue secrets of heaven ! Sunrise and sun set, promise and fulfilment, birth and death, the whole drama of humanity are all in this book ! Its eclipse would be the return of chaos ; its extinction the epitaph of history. " And to quote but one more testimony,Professor Huxley, one of the most candid-minded of men, in a speech, delivered, if I remember rightly, before the London School Board, said, " I have been seriously perplexed to know how the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of
conduct, can be kept up without the use of the Bible. For three centuries this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history.
It forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations, and of a great past stretching back to the farthest limits of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills like themselves but a momentary interspace between the two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they are also earning the payment for their work ? "
Let all humble and earnest believers rest assured that biblical criticism, so far as it is reverent, earnest, and well founded, may remove many errors, but cannot rob them of one precious and eternal truth. As Bishop Butler so wisely said a century ago, "the only question concerning the authority of Scripture is whether it be what it claims to be, not whether it be a book of such sort and so promulged as weak men are apt to fancy. " 1 He also quotes with approval the remark which Origen deduced from analogical reasoning, that " He who believes the Scripture to have proceeded from Him who is the Author of Nature may well expect to find the same sort of difficulties in it as are found in the
1 Analogy, ii. 3.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxvii
constitution of Nature. " And he adds, " He who denies the Scripture to have been from God, upon account of these difficulties, may for the very same reason deny the world to have been formed by Him. "1
IV
We now approach the central subject of our religion —our belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. With the belief in Him, the belief in Christianity must stand or fall. It is but a few months since we committed to the grave, amid a nation's tears, the fore most statesman of our century —Mr. W. E. Gladstone. He was a man of splendid intellectual power, as well as of the loftiest eloquence ; and it is one sign of the unshaken dominance of the faith in Christ that he—familiar as he was with the literature of almost every nation —could yet say from his heart, " All I write, and all I think, and all I hope, is based upon the Divinity of our Lord, the one central hope of our poor wayward race. " It is not long since we lost in Eobert Browning one of the deepest and greatest of our poets ; and Mr. Browning wrote that —
The acknowledgment of God in Christ, Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All problems in the world, and out of it.
Now the Divinity of Christ has been the subject of vehement attack in all ages. The Jews from the first represented Him as a meztth or " deceiver " ; and besides the angry and disdainful allusions to Him in Talmudic writings, which spoke of Him as a Mamzer, and as "that man," Jewish hatred in the Middle Ages concentrated itself into an amazing mixture of nonsense and blasphemy in the Toldoth Jeshu. Among Gentiles, Celsus, the Epicurean Philosopher, wrote his famous "True Discourse," to destroy all His claims for ever ; and he was effectually answered by
In the thirteenth century appeared the book now only known by its name, " De tribus imjoostoribus," which was attributed to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa II. , and ranked Christ with Moses and Mahomet. All these attacks have fallen absolutely
1 Id. Jntrod.
Origen.
xxviii THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
flat and dead, and have ceased to have a particle of significance. But in the eighteenth century in England — through the writings of Hobbes, Bolingbroke, and Hume ; in France, by those of Voltaire, Von Holbach and the Encyclopaedists ; in Germany as the gradual outcome of systems of philosophy which culminated in Hegel, and of which the sceptical elements were brought to a head by the Wolfenbiittel Fragments and the Leben Jesu of Strauss, — the belief of thousands was for a time impaired, if not finally destroyed. Out of a mass of sceptical literature two books may be selected as representing the culmination of disbelief in the Divinity of Christ, and as having been specially influential in the spread of that disbelief —the Leben Jesu of Strauss, and the Vie de Jisus of
Strauss was a pupil of Hegel, and the main position of his once famous, but already half forgotten, Life of Jesus, was that it was not history but " a myth " : in other words, that it was nothing but a series of symbols dressed up in an historic form,—con victions thrown into the form of poetry and legend. He went much farther than Hegel, or De Wette, or Schleiermacher, and instead of urging that Jesus had created round him an atmosphere of imagination and excitement, tried to show " that Christ had not founded the Church, but that the Church had invented Christ, and formed him out of the predictions of the Old Testament, and the hopes and expectations of the days founded on them. " 1 He admitted little or nothing which was truly historical in the Gospel miracles. The attempt to establish this opinion broke down under its own baselessness. It was seen in its naked absurdity when Bruno Bauer attributed Christianity to the direct invention of an individual, and Feuerbach treated all human religion as self-deception. Herder truly said that " If the fisher men of Galilee invented such a history, God be praised that they
1 See Hagenbach's German Rationalism, p. 371.
I will not add the anonymous work on
Ernest Kenan. To these
Supernatural Religion, for it was full of the grossest inaccuracies, and it ceased to have any influence when its many instances of sciolism were exposed by the learning and power of Bishop Lightfoot.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxix
invented it " ; and further, we may say that if they did invent the inventors would be as great as the hero. Strauss himself tore to shreds the old attempts of Dr. Paulus to represent the miracles as mere natural events; but how impossible was to support anything like religion on views such as his, he himself showed in his subsequent Glaubenslehre (1840), in which he expressed his belief that no reconciliation was possible between science and Christianity. Strauss's whole method vitiated by his two pre- assumptions —(1) that all miracles are impossible; and (2) that the Gospels have no pretence to historical authority. The readers of the Gospels have felt that " It the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit truth " and ordinary reasoners realise at once that the trivial and fantastic hypotheses of rationalising scepticism are shattered on the two vast facts of Christianity and Christendom. And, like all who have attacked the Divinity of our Lord, even Strauss seems almost compelled to fall down on his knees before Him. He says that "Jesus stands foremost among those who have given higher ideal to Humanity " that " It impossible to refrain from admiring and loving Him and that never at any time will be possible to rise above Him, nor to imagine any one who shall be even equal with Him. "
Eenan's Vie de Jims appeared in 1865. In many respects, its scepticism be subtracted from it, was beautiful book. The author was learned and brilliant man of genius, and was the master of an eminently fascinating style, through which breathes charming personality. Yet how utterly inefficient were the deplorable methods by which he tried to set at naught the faith of Christians! Let two instances suffice. For nearly nineteen centuries the religion, the history, and the moral progress of man kind have been profoundly affected by the Besurrection. And yet Eenan thinks sufficient to account for the Resurrection by saying, "Divine power of love! sacred moments in which the passion of an hallucinie gives to the world resuscitated God! " Such mode of treating the convictions of centuries of Christians, who have numbered in their ranks some of the keenest and most brilliant thinkers in the race of man, can only be regarded as
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ixx THE LITERATURE OP RELIGIOUS CRITICISM
utterly frivolous. For the sake of a subjective prejudice it seta aside all the records of the New Testament, and the nineteen centuries of splendid progress which have had their origin in the faith which those records founded. So far was " la passion d'une hallucinee," from having founded the belief in the Eesurrection that the Apostles, who had found it impossible to realise the prophecies of Eesurrection which they had heard from the lips of their Lord, were most reluctant, and most slow of heart to believe the most positive evidence. So far from being prepared beforehand to accept or to invent a Eesurrection, " they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a Spirit," when Christ Himself stood before them. When Mary of Magdala and the other women told them that they had seen Jesus, so far from being credulous enough to be carried away by hallucinations, they regarded their words as " idle talk " (krjpos " babble," a word of entire contempt) — and they disbelieved them : nay, they even rejected the witness of the two disciples to whom He had appeared on the way to Emmaus, and Thomas was dissatisfied with the affirmation of the whole Apostolic band. So far from "regarding it as the height of absurdity to suppose that Jesus could be held by death," their despairing conviction that the bridegroom had indeed been taken from them, was so all but insuperable that it required the most decisive personal eye-witness to overcome it. Again, consider the way in which Eenan treats the Resurrection of Lazarus! Although Eleazar was one of the commonest of Jewish names, he assumes that the story of the resuscitation of Lazarus rose from some confusion about the Lazarus of the Parable who was carried into Abraham's bosom ; and in some very confused sentences he more than hints that the story of his death and resurrection was the result of a collusion between Jesus, Mary, and Martha, and that Jesus in some way or other gave way to the suggestion of the sisters, because, in the impure city of Jerusalem he had lost " some thing of his original transparent clearness," 1 " Peut-etre l'ardent d^sir de fermer la bouche a ceux qui niaient outrageusement la mission divine le leur ami, entraina-t-elle ces personnes passionn^es
1 Fie de Jisut, 872.
THE LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS CRITICISM xxxi
au dela de toutea lea bornes. II faut se rappeler que, dans cette ville impure et pesante de Jerusalem, Jims n'itait pas lui-rrdme. Sa conscience, par la faute des hommes, et non par la sienne, avait perdu quelque chose de la limpiditi primordiale. " Strange that a man of even ordinary intelligence could expect any one to get rid of a miracle by the hypothesis that the Lord of truth,—He whose life and teaching have created in the world the conviction that " it is better to die than lie," —lent Himself to a coarse and vulgar make- believe! Christianity surely has nothing to fear from such reconstructions of the Gospel History as these !
Most of the books written to disprove the Divinity of the Saviour suggest some brand-new hypothesis ; one after another they have their brief vogue, are trumpeted by unbelievers as a refutation of Christianity, and then pass into oblivion, if not into contempt. They have not shaken the belief reigning in millions of hearts in every region of the habitable globe ; and the Christian world, with out the smallest misgiving, will still exclaim, in the words of the inscription on the obelisk reared by the Pope Sixtus in front of St. Peter's at Eome, on soil once wet with the blood of martyrs :—
"CHPJSTUS VINCIT, CHEISTUS EEGNAT, CHRISTUS IMPEEAT, CHEISTUS AB OMNI MALO PLEBEM SUAM DEFENDAT. "
The Christian world continues, and will for long ages hence continue, to offer up the prayer —
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove ;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; Thou madest Life in man and brute ; Thou madest Death ; and lo, Thy foot
Is on the skull which Thou hast made !
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. By EURIPIDES.
(From the " Bacchae " : translated by Arthur S. Way. )
[Ecbipidbs : The last of the three Greek tragic poets ; born on the island of Salamis in b. c. 480, according to popular tradition, on the day of the famous naval battle. He received instruction in physics from Anaxagoras, in rhetoric from Prodicus, and was on terms of intimate friendship with Socrates. He early devoted his attention to dramatic composition, and at the age of twenty-five obtained a prize for his first tragedy. After a successful career at Athens, he retired for unknown reasons to Magnesia in Thessaly, and thence proceeded to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, where he died in B. C. 405. Cf over seventy-five tragedies there have come down to us only eighteen, the best known being "Alcestis," "Medea," " Hippolytus," "Hecuba," "Andromache," "Iphigenia at Aulis," "Iphigenia among the Tauri," "Electra," "Orestes,"
" Bacchae. "]
[Aboumknt. — SemelS the daughter of Kadmua, a mortal bride of Zeus, was per suaded by Hera to pray the God to promise her with an oath to grant her what soever she would. And when he had consented, she asked that he would appear to her in all the splendor of his godhead, even as he visited Hera. Then Zeus, not of his will, but constrained by his oath, appeared to her amidst intolerable light and flashings of heaven's lightning, whereby her mortal body was con sumed. But the God snatched her unborn babe from the flames, and hid him in a cleft of his thigh, till the days were accomplished wherein he should be born. And so the child Dionysus sprang from the thigh of Zeus, and was hidden from the jealous malice of Hera till he was grown. Then did he set forth in victorious march through all the earth, bestowing upon men the gift of the vine, and planting his worship everywhere. But the sisters of SemelS scoffed at the story of the heavenly bridegroom, and mocked at the worship of Dionysus. And when Kadmus was now old, Pentheus his grandson reigned in his stead, and he too defied the Wine giver, saying that he was no god, and that none in Thebes should ever worship him. And herein is told how Dionysus came in human guise to Thebes, and filled her women with the Bacchanal possession, and how Pentheus, essaying to withstand him, was punished by strange and awful doom. — Wat. ]
Pentheus —
We must not overcome by force
The women. I will hide me midst the pines.
Dionysus —
Such hiding shall be thine as fate ordains, Who com'st with guile, a spy on Bacchanals.
vol. it. —3 33
34
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS.
Pentheus —
Methinks I see them mid the copses caught, Like birds, in toils of their sweet dalliance.
Dionysus —
To this end then art thou appointed watchman : Perchance shalt catch them — if they catch not thee.
Pentheus —
On through the midst of Thebes' town usher me, For I, I only of them, dare such deed.
Dionysus —
Alone for Thebes thou travailest, thou alone ; Wherefore for thee wait tug and strain foredoomed. Follow : all safely will I usher thee.
Another thence shall bring thee, —
Pentheus — Dionysus —
Ay, my mother. come.
0 silken ease !
Thou wouldst thrust pomp on me !
To all men manifest — Pentheus —
For this I
Dionysus —
High borne shalt thou return —
Pentheus — Dionysus —
On a mother's hands. Pentheus —
Dionysus —
Nay, 'tis but such pomp
—
Strange, strange man !
So shalt thou win renown that soars to heaven.
[Exit Pentheus. AgavS, stretch forth hands ; ye sisters, stretch,
Daughters of Kadmus ! To a mighty strife
I bring this prince. The victor I shall be And Bromius. All else shall the issue show.
Pentheus— Dionysus —
As is my desert.
Strange shall thine experience be.
Chorus—
Up, ye swift hell hounds of Madness ! Away to the mountain glens
where
Kadmus's daughters hold revel, and sting them to fury, to tear
Him who hath come woman-vestured to spy on the Bacchanals there,
Frenzy-struck fool that he is ! — for his mother shall foremost descry Him, as from waterworn scaur or from storm-riven tree he would spy That which they do, and her shout to the Maenads shall peal from
on high : —
[^etf Diohybus.
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. 35
"Who hath come hither, hath trodden the paths to the mountain that lead,
Spying on Kadmus's daughters, the maids o'er the mountains that
speed, — Bacchanal sisters ?
seed?
what mother hath brought to the birth such a
Who was it ? — who ? — for I ween he was born not of womankind's blood :
Kather he sprang from the womb of a lioness, scourge of the wood;
Haply is spawn of the Gorgons of Libya, the demon brood. "
Justice, draw nigh us, draw nigh, with the sword of avenging appear :
Slay the unrighteous, the seed of Echion the earth born, and shear Clean through his throat, for he feareth not God, neither law doth
he fear.
Lo, how in impious mood, and with lawless intent, and with spite Madness distraught, with thy rites and thy mother's he cometh to
fight,
Bacchus — to bear the invincible down by his impotent might !
Thus shall one gain him a sorrowless life, if he keepeth his soul Sober in spirit, and swift in obedience to heaven's control, Murmuring not, neither pressing beyond his mortality's goal.
No such presumptuous wisdom I covet : I seek for mine own —
Yea, in the quest is mine happiness — things that not so may be
known,
Glorious wisdom and great, from the days everlasting forth shown,
Even to fashion in pureness my life and in holiness aye, Following ends that are noble from dawn to the death of the day, Honoring Gods, and refusing to walk in injustice's way.
Justice, draw nigh us, draw nigh, with the sword of avenging appear :
Slay the unrighteous, the seed of Echion the earthborn, and shear Clean through his throat ; for he feareth not God, neither law doth
he fear.
0 Dionysus, reveal thee ! — appear as a bull to behold,
Or be thou seen as a dragon, a monster of heads manifold,
Or as a lion with splendors of flame round the limbs of him rolled.
36 THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS.
Gome to us, Bacchus, and smiling in mockery compass him round Now with the toils of destruction, and so shall the hunter be bound, Trapped mid the throng of the Maenads, the quarry his questing
hath found.
Enter Messenger.
Chorus —
What now ? — hast tidings of the Bacchanals ?
Messenger —
O house of old through Hellas prosperous
Of that Sidonian patriarch, who sowed
The earthborn serpent's dragon teeth in earth, How I bemoan thee ! What though thrall I be, Their lords' calamities touch loyal thralls.
Messenger —
Pentheus is dead : Echion's son is dead.
Chorus —
Bromius, my King ! thou hast made thy godhead plain !
Messenger —
How, what is this thou say'st ? Dost thou exult, Woman, upon my lord's calamities ?
Chorus —
An alien I, I chant glad outland strain, Who cower no more in terror of the chain.
Messenger —
Deemest thou Thebes so void of men [that ills Have left her powerless all to punish thee ? ]
Chorus —
Dionysus it 'tis the King of the Vine
That hath lordship o'er me, no Thebes of thine
Messenger
This might be pardoned, save that base Women, to joy o'er evils past recall.
Chorus —
Tell to me, tell, — by what doom died he, The villain devising villainy
Messenger —
When, from the homesteads of this Theban land Departing, we had crossed Asopus' streams,
Then we began to breast Kithairon's steep,
Pentheus and — for to my lord clave, —
And he who ushered us unto the scene.
First in grassy dell we sat us down
With footfall hushed and tongues refrained from speech. That so we might behold, all unbeheld.
a
I,
is,
? I
it is,
!
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. 87
There was a glen crag-walled, with rills o'erstreamed, Closed in with pine shade, where the Maenad girls Sat with hands busied with their blithesome toils. The faded thyrsus some with ivy sprays
Twined, till its tendril tresses waved again.
Others, like colts from carven wain yokes loosed,
Reechoed each to each the Bacchic chant.
But hapless Pentheus, seeing ill the throng
Of women, spake thus : " Stranger, where we stand,
Are these mock-maenad maids beyond my ken.
Some knoll or pine high-crested let me climb,
And I shall see the Maenads' lewdness well. "
A marvel then I saw the stranger do.
A soaring pine branch by the top he caught,
And dragged down — down — still down to the dark earth. Arched as a bow it grew, or curving wheel
That on the lathe sweeps out its circle's round :
So bowed the stranger's hands that mountain branch,
And bent to earth — a deed past mortal might !
Then Pentheus on the pine boughs seated he,
And let the branch rise, sliding through his hands
Gently, with heedful care to unseat him not.
High up into the heights of air it soared,
Bearing my master throned upon its crest,
More by the Maenads seen than seeing them.
For scarce high-lifted was he manifest,
When lo, the stranger might no more be seen ;
And fell from heaven a voice — the voice, most like,
Of Dionysus, — crying : " O ye maids,
I bring him who would mock at you and me, "
And at my rites. Take vengeance on him ye !
Even as he cried, up heavenward, down to earth,
He flashed a pillar splendor of awful flame.
Hushed was the welkin : that fair grassy glen
Held hushed its leaves ; no wild thing's cry was heard. But they, whose ears not clearly caught the sound,
Sprang up, and shot keen glances right and left.
Again he cried his hest : then Kadmus' daughters
Knew certainly the Bacchic God's command,
And darted : and the swiftness of their feet
Was as of doves in onward-straining race —
His mother Agave' and her sisters twain,
And all the Bacchanals. Through torrent gorge,
O'er bowlders, leapt they, with the God's breath mad. When seated on the pine they saw my lord,
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS.
First torrent stones with might and main they hurled, Scaling a rock, their counter bastion,
And javelined him with branches of the pine :
And others shot their thyrsi through the air
At Pentheus — woeful mark ! — yet naught availed.
For, at a height above their fury's pitch,
Trapped in despair's gin, horror-struck he sat.
Last, oak limbs from their trunks they thundered down, And heaved at the roots with levers — not of iron.
But when they won no end of toil and strain,
Agav8 cried, "Ho, stand we round the trunk,
Maenads, and grasp, that we may catch the beast Crouched there, that he may"not proclaim abroad
Our God's mysterious rites ! Their countless hands Set they unto the pine, tore from the soil : —
And he, high-seated, crashed down from his height : And earthward fell with frenzy of shriek on shriek Pentheus, for now he knew his doom at hand.
His mother first, priestlike, began the slaughter, And fell on him : but from his hair the coif
He tore, that she might know and slay him not, — Hapless Agave' ! — and he touched her cheek, Crying, "'Tis I — 0 mother! — thine own son Pentheus — thou bar'st me in Echion's halls !
Have mercy, 0 my mother ! — for my sin
Murder not thou thy son — thy very son ! "
But she, with foaming lips and eyes that rolled Wildly, and reckless madness-clouded soul, Possessed of Bacchus, gave no heed to him ;
But his left arm she clutched in both her hands, And set against the wretch's ribs her foot,
And tore his shoulder out — not by her strength, But the God made it easy to her hands.
And Ino labored on the other side,
Rending his flesh: AutonoS pressed on — all
The Bacchanal throng. One awful blended cry
Rose — the king's screams while life was yet in him, And triumph yells from them. One bare an arm, One a foot sandal-shod. His ribs were stripped
In mangled shreds : with blood-bedabbled hands Each to and fro was tossing Pentheus' flesh.
Wide-sundered lies his corse : part 'neath rough rocks, Part mid the tangled depths of forest shades : —
Hard were the search. His miserable head
Which in her hands his mother chanced to seize,
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. 39
Impaled upon her thyrsus point she bears,
Like mountain lion's, through Kithairon's mid Leaving her sisters in their Maenad dance ;
And, in her ghastly quarry exulting, comes Within these walls, to Bacchus crying aloud,
Her fellow-hunter, helper in the chase Triumphant — all its triumph-prize is tears! . . .
Enter Agave, carrying the head of Pentheus.
Agav6 —
Asian Bacchanals !
Chorus — Why dost thou challenge me ? — say. Agave —
Chorus —
Of Kadmus —
Lo, from the mountain side I bear A newly severed ivy spray
Unto our halls, a goodly prey.
Chorus —
I see — to our revels I welcome thee.
Agave —
I trapped him, I, with never a snare !
'Tis a lion — the whelp of a lion, plain to see.
