God and my Neighbour Part 5

As many of the laws and incidents in the books of Moses were known to the Chaldeans, the "direct revelation of G.o.d" theory is not plausible.

On this point Dr. Gladden's opinion supports mine. He says, on page 61:

That such is the fact with respect to the structure of these ancient writings is now beyond question. And our theory of inspiration must be adjusted to this fact. Evidently neither the theory of verbal inspiration, nor the theory of plenary inspiration, can be made to fit the facts, which a careful study of the writings themselves brings before us. These writings are not inspired in the sense which we have commonly given that word.

The verbal theory of inspiration was only tenable while they were supposed to be the work of a single author. To such a composite literature no such theory will apply. "To make this claim," says Professor Ladd, "and yet accept the best ascertained results of criticism, would compel us to take such positions as the following: the original authors of each one of the writings which enter into the composite structure were infallibly inspired; every one who made any changes in any one of these fundamental writings was infallibly inspired; every compiler who put together two or more of these writings was infallibly inspired, both as to his selections and omissions, and as to any connecting or explanatory words which he might himself write; every redactor was infallibly inspired to correct and supplement, and omit that which was the product of previous infallible inspirations. Or, perhaps, it might seem more convenient to attach the claim of a plenary inspiration to the last redactor of all; but then we should probably have selected of all others the one least able to bear the weight of such a claim. Think of making the claim for a plenary inspiration of the Pentateuch in its present form on the ground of the infallibility of that one of the scribes who gave it its last touches some time subsequent to the death of Ezra."

Remember that Dr. Gladden declares, on page 5, that he shall state no conclusions as to the history of the sacred writings which will not be accepted by conservative critics.

On page 54 Dr. Gladden quotes the following from Dr. Perowne:

The first _composition_ of the Pentateuch as a whole could not have taken place till after the Israelites entered Canaan.

The whole work did not finally a.s.sume its present shape till its revision was undertaken by Ezra after the return from the Babylonish captivity.

On page 25 Dr. Gladden himself speaks as follows:

The common argument by which Christ is made a witness to the authenticity and infallible authority of the Old Testament runs as follows:

Christ quotes Moses as the author of this legislation; therefore Moses must have written the whole Pentateuch. Moses was an inspired prophet; therefore all the teaching of the Pentateuch must be infallible.

The facts are that Jesus nowhere testifies that Moses wrote the whole of the Pentateuch; and that he nowhere guarantees the infallibility either of Moses or of the book. On the contrary, he set aside as inadequate or morally defective, certain laws which in this book are ascribed to Moses.

So much for the authorship and the inspiration of the first five books of the Bible.

As to the authorship of other books of the Bible, Dr. Gladden says of Judges and Samuel that we do not know the authors nor the dates.

Of Kings he says: "The name of the author is concealed from us." The origin and correctness of the Prophecies and Psalms, he tells us, are problematical.

Of the Books of Esther and Daniel, Dr. Gladden says: "That they are founded on fact I do not doubt; but it is, perhaps, safer to regard them both rather as historical fictions than as veritable histories."

Of Daniel, Dean Farrar wrote:

The immense majority of scholars of name and acknowledged competence in England and Europe have now been led to form an irresistible conclusion that the Book of Daniel was not written, and could not have been written, in its present form, by the prophet Daniel, B.C. 534, but that it can only have been written, as we now have it, in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, about B.C. 164, and that the object of the pious and patriotic author as to inspirit his desponding countrymen by splendid specimens of that lofty moral fiction which was always common amongst the Jews after the Exile, and was known as "The Haggadah."

So clearly is this proven to most critics, that they willingly suffer the attempted refutations of their views to sink to the ground under the weight of their own inadequacy.

(_The Bible and the Child_.)

I return now to Dr. Aked, from whose book I quote the following:

Dr. Clifford has declared that there is not a man who has given a day's attention to the question who holds the complete freedom of the Bible from inaccuracy. He has added that "it is become more and more impossible to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible." Dr. Lyman Abbott says that "an infallible book is an impossible conception, and to-day no one really believes that our present Bible is such a book."

Compare those opinions with the following extract from the first article in _The Bible and the Child_:

The change of view respecting the Bible, which has marked the advancing knowledge and more earnest studies of this generation is only the culmination of the discovery that there were different doc.u.ments in the Book of Genesis--a discovery first published by the physician, Jean Astruc, in 1753. There are _three_ widely divergent ways of dealing with these results of profound study, each of which is almost equally dangerous to the faith of the rising generation.

1. Parents and teachers may go on inculcating dogmas about the Bible and methods of dealing with it which have long become impossible to those who have really tried to follow the manifold discoveries of modern inquiry with perfectly open and unbiased minds. There are a certain number of persons who, when their minds have become stereotyped in foregone conclusions, are simply _incapable_ of grasping new truths. They become obstructives, and not infrequently bigoted obstructives. As convinced as the Pope of their own personal infallibility, their att.i.tude towards those who see that the old views are no longer tenable is an att.i.tude of anger and alarm. This is the usual temper of the _odium theologic.u.m_. It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew and the rack of mediaeval Inquisitors, and would, in the last resource, hand over all opponents to the scaffold or the stake.

Those whose intellects have thus been petrified by custom and advancing years are, of all others, the most hopeless to deal with. They have made themselves incapable of fair and rational examination of the truths which they impugn. They think that they can, by mere a.s.sertion, overthrow results arrived at by the lifelong inquiries of the ablest students, while they have not given a day's serious or impartial study to them. They fancy that even the ignorant, if only they be what is called "orthodox,"

are justified in strong denunciation of men quite as truthful, and often incomparably more able, than themselves. Off-hand dogmatists of this stamp, who usually abound among professional religionists, think that they can refute any number of scholars, however profound and however pious, if only they shout "Infidel"

with sufficient loudness.

Those are not the words of an "Infidel." They are the words of the late Dean Farrar.

To quote again from Dr. Gladden:

Evidently neither the theory of verbal inspiration, nor the theory of plenary inspiration, can be made to fit the facts which a careful study of the writings themselves brings before us. _These writings are not inspired in the sense which we have commonly given to that word._ The verbal theory of inspiration was only tenable while they were supposed to be the work of a single author. _To such a composite literature no such theory will apply._

The Bible is not inspired. The fact is that _no_ "sacred" book is inspired. _All_ "sacred" books are the work of human minds. All ideas of G.o.d are human ideas. All religions are made by man.

When the old-fashioned Christian said the Bible was an inspired book, he meant that G.o.d put the words and the facts directly into the mind of the prophet. That meant that G.o.d told Moses about the creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, and the Ten Commandments.

Many modern Christians, amongst whom I place the Rev. Ambrose Pope, of Bakewell, believe that G.o.d gave Moses (and all the other prophets) a special genius and a special desire to convey religious information to other men.

And Mr. Pope suggests that man was so ignorant, so childlike, or so weak in those days that it was necessary to disguise plain facts in misleading symbols.

But the man, Moses or another, who wrote the Book of Genesis was a man of literary genius. He was no child, no weakling. If G.o.d had said to him: "I made the world out of the fiery nebula, and I made the sea to bring forth the staple of life, and I caused all living things to develop from that seed or staple of life, and I drew man out from the brutes; and the time was six hundred millions of years"--if G.o.d had said that to Moses, do you think Moses would not have understood?

Now, let me show you what the Christian asks us to believe. He asks us to believe that the G.o.d who was the first cause of creation, and knew everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with a fabulous and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth, and that since that day the same G.o.d has gradually changed or added to the inspiration, until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Darwin to contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He asks us to believe that G.o.d muddled men's minds with a mysterious series of revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them to stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and antagonistic religions fight each other to achieve the survival of the fittest. Is that a reasonable theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable man can accept? Is it consonant with common sense?

Contrast that with our theory. We say that early man, having no knowledge of science, and more imagination than reason, would be alarmed and puzzled by the phenomena of Nature. He would be afraid of the dark, he would be afraid of the thunder, he would wonder at the moon, at the stars, at fire, at the ocean. He would fear what he did not understand, and he would bow down and pay homage to what he feared.

Then, by degrees, he would personify the stars, and the sun, and the thunder, and the fire. He would make G.o.ds of these things. He would make G.o.ds of the dead. He would make G.o.ds of heroes. He would do what all savage races do, what all children do: he would make legends, or fables, or fairy tales out of his hopes, his fears, and his guesses.

Does not that sound reasonable? Does not history teach us that it is true? Do we not know that religion was so born and nursed?

There is no such thing known to men as an original religion. All religions are made up of the fables and the imaginations of tribes long since extinct. Religion is an evolution, not a revelation. It has been invented, altered, and built up, and pulled down, and reconstructed time after time. It is a conglomeration and an adaptation, as language is.

And the Christian religion is no more an original religion than English is an original tongue. We have Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, French, Saxon, Norman words in our language; and we have Aryan, Semitic, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and all manner of ancient foreign fables, myths, and rites in our Christian religion.

We say that Genesis was a poetic presentation of a fabulous story pieced together from many traditions of many tribes, and recording with great literary power the ideas of a people whose scientific knowledge was very incomplete.

Now, I ask you which of these theories is the most reasonable; which is the most scientific; which agrees most closely with the facts of philology and history of which we are in possession?

Why twist the self-evident fact that the Bible story of creation was the work of unscientific men of strong imagination into a far-fetched and unsatisfactory puzzle of symbol and allegory? It would be just as easy and just as reasonable to take the _Morte d'Arthur_ and try to prove that it contained a veiled revelation of G.o.d's relations to man.

And let me ask one or two questions as to this matter of the revelation of the Holy Bible. Is G.o.d all-powerful or is he not? If he is all-powerful, why did He make man so imperfect? Could He not have created him at once a wise and good creature? Even when man was ignorant and savage, could not an all-powerful G.o.d have devised some means of revealing Himself so as to be understood? If G.o.d really wished to reveal Himself to man, why did He reveal Himself only to one or two obscure tribes, and leave the rest of mankind in darkness?

Those poor savages were full of credulity, full of terror, full of wonder, full of the desire to worship. They worshipped the sun and the moon; they worshipped ghosts and demons; they worshipped tyrants, and pretenders, and heroes, dead and alive. Do you believe that if G.o.d had come down on earth, with a cohort of shining angels, and had said, "Behold, I am the only G.o.d," these savages would not have left all baser G.o.ds and worshipped Him? Why, these men, and all the thousands of generations of their children, have been looking for G.o.d since first they learned to look at sea and sky. They are looking for Him now. They have fought countless b.l.o.o.d.y wars and have committed countless horrible atrocities in their zeal for Him. And you ask us to believe that His grand revelation of Himself is bound up in a volume of fables and errors collected thousands of years ago by superst.i.tious priests and prophets of Palestine, and Egypt, and a.s.syria.

We cannot believe such a statement. No man can believe it who tests it by his reason in the same way in which he would test any modern problem.

If the leaders of religion brought the same vigour and subtlety of mind to bear upon religion which they bring to bear upon any criticism of religion, if they weighed the Bible as they have weighed astronomy and evolution, the Christian religion would not last a year.

If my reader has not studied this matter, let him read the books I have recommended, and then sit down and consider the Bible revelation and story with the same fearless honesty and clear common sense with which he would consider the Bibles of the Mohammedan, or Buddhist, or Hindoo, and then ask himself the question: "Is the Bible a holy and inspired book, and the word of G.o.d to man, or is it an incongruous and contradictory collection of tribal traditions and ancient fables, written by men of genius and imagination?"

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE

We now reach the second stage in our examination, which is the claim that no religion known to man can be truly said to be original. All religions, the Christian religion included, are adaptations or variants of older religions. Religions are not _revealed_: they are _evolved_.

If a religion were revealed by G.o.d, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been a religion which fulfils those conditions.