II The History of the Bible

I. THE HISTORY OF THE BIBLE
1. The basal fact from which our inquiry takes its start is the very indisputable and patent one that in the world there is such a book as THE BIBLE. There is a definite volume, well known and always the same in contents, about which there need be no mistake, which goes under this name, and under this name is accessible to all. This very patent fact is the first that we need to notice.

2. It is another fact, hardly less patent than the last, that this book occupies a unique position in the world of civilized man. No other book stands to-day among men for what the Bible stands for. We are not asserting here that it has a right to the position it occupies or the power it exerts: we simply assert that it is undeniable that it holds that position and exercises that power. The legislation of civilized nations is profoundly affected by its teaching; the social habits of cultured people are largely determined by its scheme of life; the governmental forms of powerful countries are built on its principles, and their functions are carried on under its sanctions. Rulers are entrusted with the exercise of their powers, witnesses are credited in the deposition of their testimony, only after oaths sworn upon or according to it. Everywhere it has percolated through the fabric of civilization, and modern society is built up upon the lines drawn by it.

Still further, where it most dominates, there is most life. It is the great Protestant nations - those who most rest upon this book - which are the most prominent nations, the most full of abounding life and enterprising energy, the most impressive on the destinies of man. It is even the pioneer of civilization; instead of following, it breaks the way for material advancement. Go where you will, if you find life, you will find also the Bible; and you will find it in the very midst of the organism. You will find it in the hall of legislation, and in the laws that are there framed; in the courts of justice, and in the justice that is there administered; in the colleges of learning, and in the learning that is there imparted; at the home-firesides, and in the moral training and homely virtues which are there inculcated. In a word, it is, as no other book has ever been to a single nation, bound up with all civilization and progress and culture.

3. It is worth our notice, still further, that this position of power and influence has been attained and held by the Bible through a most remarkable history. Confined for ages to a rough, isolated corner of the globe, in the keeping of a small and peculiar tribe of men, it almost without a moment's warning, like a great lake receiving a new accession of waters, immediately on completion, burst all boundaries and deluged the world. It came commended by no external pomp of appearance, attended with no force of arms. Alone and single-handed, in the face of stinging contempt and bloodthirsty cruelty, it opposed ancient prejudices, long-settled habits, customs and religions, every consideration of self-interest or indulgence or safety, and swept them away like so many straws. By its simple, despised presence among men it conquered. It mattered not where it went; human society in every stage of development, under every form of administration, and composed of every race of men, everywhere alike yielded itself to it.

We cannot overstate the case; it is even impossible for us to mentally realize the profundity of the change induced. Look only at the straws of external action which, veering suddenly around, advertise to us the change of wind beneath and behind. See the revolution in the sentiment which the sight of a cross kindled. Who can estimate, again, the profound revolution which was necessary in men's very habits of thought, in their inmost consciousness, before sacrificial ordinances could fall into neglect. Just think of it. From the beginning of the world sacrifices had been universal. Men knew, and had from the beginning known, no other way to express the deepest facts of their consciences. The habit had been ground in upon the race not only for a lifetime, but for a world-time. Everybody everywhere spontaneously fled to this rite as the fit expression of the sense of sin and the hope of deliverance. And yet, in little more than fifty years after the introduction of Christianity into his province, Pliny complains that it had almost put a stop to sacrifices there. A world-habit, dominant from the beginning, thus rolled back upon itself in a single generation! We cannot possibly appreciate the greatness of this conquest. Sacrifices had been almost the whole life of the people: from childhood sacrifices had met each man in every form, in every quarter, in every act, in every duty of every day's business. Not only could he not engage in any of the graver duties of the citizen without being confronted with them everywhere; he could not rise from his bed in the morning, retire to it at night, partake of his necessary sustenance, without a recognition of a god or the performance of a rite at every step. And yet Christianity came, not undermining the principle which underlay sacrifices, but emphasizing it, and still they fled away from its presence.

Beneath such external changes, conceive, if you can, the immense revolution that was wrought. Not only was the whole practice of religion altered, but also the whole theory of religion; not only the whole practice of morals, but the whole theory of morals. Vices in former repute were suddenly raised to the highest pinnacle of virtues; virtues in former repute were thrust down to the lowest hell of vices. Everything was overturned. Is it asked whether the human means employed in gaining this grand victory were not sufficient to account for it? Look at them. A dozen ignorant peasants proclaiming a crucified Jew as the founder of a new faith; bearing as the symbol of their worship an instrument which was the sign of ignominy, slavery and crime; preaching what must have seemed an absurd doctrine of humility, patient suffering and love to enemies - graces undreamed of before; demanding what must have seemed an absurd worship for one who had died like a malefactor and a slave, and making what must have seemed an absurd promise of everlasting life through one who had himself died, and that between two thieves. Did their voices fall on willing or docile ears? This was the age of those princes of scoffers, Celsus and Lucian. Did they prosecute their work in peace and quietude? They were thrown to the lions until the very beasts were satiated with their prey. Their blood seemed only to water the field of the Lord.

Thus, in the face of all discouragement and cruel persecution, the Bible found itself established with incredible rapidity in the hearts of an immense Christendom. In less than seventy years it was known over all the then known world; within little more than a single century it had won to itself "almost the greater part of the whole state." Do you say that this, despite all appearances, must have been an exceptional age and an exceptional experience? We reply that it is the experience of the ages. When corruption had brought back an age of darkness and the Bible was once more lost from real life, it required but a Luther to tear off the veil for it to re-enact the same history and sow Europe with the blood of its votaries till a harvest could be reaped of equal victory. It cannot be necessary to repeat the story of the noble conflict. You know it well, and know that it was a Bible war and a Bible victory. The same history is even now working itself out about us. Madagascar, under our eyes, has repeated it. Every corner of the globe has felt the tingling of the mighty impulse. Even here, in America, we are living amid historical wonders, our eyes unopened to the sight. Rapidly as the population of the United States has grown since 1800, the proportionate increase of the votaries of the Bible has outstripped it. Yet so quietly has it all been done that we live utterly oblivious of it until, through painfully gathered statistics, the fact is made to look us squarely in the face.

How certain a fact, then, it is that the Bible has reached its present wonderful position and influence through a most remarkable history, and a history which it is still continuing on exactly the same lines!

4. It is important to note, next, that throughout all this history, and still to-day, this great influence which the Bible has exerted has been, and is still, purely and only beneficent. All its power has been exerted in the direction of the elevation of man and loving ministry to his needs. Of course we are in no danger of forgetting that the truth of this statement has been of late challenged in some quarters. But neither can we forget three other facts: 1. That it is not challenged by the well-informed and unprejudiced even among those who deny the divine origin of the Bible. 2. That the methods by which it is attempted to make the Bible appear in any other rôle than that of a cornucopia of good for man will (as Dr. Fisher has lately very clearly shown) avail equally to prove that love is a curse and the household fireside, with all its blessings, a very nest of corruption. Of course, it is not denied, either of love or of the Bible, that it sometimes has been the cause of pain; each has often ennobled man through the pain and self-sacrifice called out by it. Nor is it denied of either that it has been made at times the excuse of crime, but both have cried out upon the wickedness which would hide behind their sacred skirts. 3. That those who put forth the challenge have been led to do it only because the teaching of the Bible has so leavened society and the usages of modern life that it is almost impossible for men to believe that the world could ever have existed without the restraining and ennobling influences which now seem naturally to dominate us, and yet which really have their root in the Bible. A true picture of the boon which this book has really been to the world can be obtained only by an examination of two classes of facts - those belonging to the condition of society before it entered into its beneficent reign on the one hand, and on the other those belonging to the condition into which society lapses whenever the Bible in any degree loses its hold upon men. The shamelessness of Roman society under the early emperors will give us the norm of the one; the horrors of the Italian renascence and of the French Revolution will give us the norm of the other. It is not necessary to stop now to pollute these pages with the recital of the depths of degradation from which the Bible rescued man, and from which its potent influence (witness the Italian renascence and the Reign of Terror) alone keeps him rescued: they may be read in any accredited history of the times, and it is certainly justifiable to assume as fact what is recognized as fact by all competent historians.

Thus, then, the Bible is seen to tread the ages like the fabled goddess under whose beneficent footfall sprang beautiful flowers wherever she went. Hospitals and asylums and refuges for the sick, the miserable and the afflicted grow like heaven-bedewed blossoms in its path. Woman, whose equality with man Plato considered a sure mark of social disorganization, has been elevated; slavery has been driven from civilized ground; letters have been given by Christian missionaries, under the influence of the Bible and in order to its publication, to whole peoples and races. Who can estimate that boon? Thus Cyril and Methodius gave alphabet and written language to the vast hordes of the Sclaves; thus Ulphilas, to the whole race of Teutons; thus even Egypt, mother of letters, first received a manageable alphabet. Thus still to-day tribes and peoples sunk in barbarism are being lifted by the Bible to the ranks of literary nations. So the work goes on, and still to-day, as ever before, the Bible stands in all the world exercising everywhere its immense power in the restraining of all evil passions, in the advancement of all that is good and tender and elevating, in pouring out benefits unspeakable to the individual and the state.

5. All this immense influence for good which the Bible is exercising over the minds and hearts of men is due to a most deep-seated and steadfast conviction in their minds that it is from God and constitutes a law given from heaven for amending the lives and ameliorating the condition of men.

If this be a fanaticism, it is a most beneficent and a most remarkable fanaticism, far from easy to account for on the hypothesis that it is a fanaticism. Did men rush to embrace a delusion which had nothing to commend it to them amid the scoffs of Celsus and the ridicule of Lucian, against their every interest and against their every inclination, and that when the majesty of Rome was unsheathed to fright them back and the jaws of the lions yawned to engulf them? Men do not usually spring so to die for a delusion which offers so little and threatens so much. Then, too, how has the fanaticism so grown? How is it that it still holds captive so many millions of those whose intellect is of the clearest and whose culture is of the highest? How is it that it still embraces the civilized world? But, however it be attempted to account for it, here is the fact. The great influence which the Bible has ever exercised has been always, and still is accounted for by those who yield to it on their sincere conviction that this book, which differs so in power from all other volumes, differs from them equally in origin, being alone of books God's book, while all others are men's.

6. This conviction is traced by them not solely to the visible power and influence of the book, nor solely, conjoined with that, to the manifest grandeur and divinity of its contents and character, but also (continuing to dwell now on external particulars) to marvelous circumstances which attended the giving of this marvelous book to the world. Those who wrote its latter portion and sent the whole abroad asserted that they acted under commission from God and authenticated their mission by a series of astounding miracles. Thus the miracle of the book is appropriately believed to have sprung from the center of a God-endowed company.

We cannot pause now to prove that these miracles really occurred. All that can be said is that the testimony they rest on is irrefragable, and that they must be admitted to have occurred or the foundations of all history are swept away at a stroke. It is enough here to note how appropriately the wonderful history which has been wrought out by the Bible is made to spring from open miracles. All is here consistent and appropriate; and if those miracles which are asserted to have happened really happened, all is explained and constitutes a harmonious whole. Otherwise, we are landed in great difficulties and inconsistencies.

If we will ponder the facts which we have so baldly stated, it seems that we must conclude that the external history of this book is such as will so harmonize with a supernatural origin for it as to take away all strangeness from the assertion of such an origin. And what is that but saying that the history of the book suggests a supernatural origin for it - even raises a presumption in favor of such an origin for it? This book is certainly unique in the power it possesses: is it not unique in its source of power? It is certainly furnished with an influence possessed by no other book. Whence came it?