The Religious Situation | Page 2

imagination, which by its working in sleep, sometimes with no assignable materials for the fancy, seems almost to show creative power?
Has Deity directly revealed itself to man? It has if the Bible is inspired. Otherwise, apparently, it has not. About the Koran or the Zendavesta it is hardly necessary to speak. "The Bible" we call the Old Testament and the New bound up together, as though they contained the two halves of the same dispensation and the moral ideal of both were the same. The historical importance of the Old Testament can hardly be overrated; nor can the literary grandeur of parts of it, or the advance made in social character and in law. When in connection with the question of American slavery attention was specially directed to the social law of Moses, no careful reader could fail to be greatly struck by its advanced humanity and civilization. Nevertheless, the morality of the Old Testament is tribal, while that of the New Testament is universal. The tribal character of the Old Testament morality is seen in the destruction of the first-born in Egypt in order to force Pharaoh to let the Chosen People go; in the invasion of Canaan and the slaughter of the Canaanites; in the murder of Sisera; in the approval of the treason of Rahab; in David's putting to torture the inhabitants of a captured city. The attempt to reconcile all this with universal morality by styling it the course of "Evolution" can hardly avail, since the spirit of tribal separatism dominates in the latest books of the Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah, where Israelites are not only forbidden for the future to marry with Gentiles, but bidden to put away Gentile wives. It is true there are glimpses of a universal dominion of the God of Israel, and of the happiness to be enjoyed by all nations under it. Still, Jehovah is Israel's God.
Were the Old Testament a Divine revelation it would certainly be free from error concerning the works of Deity, which plainly it is not. The narrative in Genesis of creation, compared with other primitive cosmogonies, is rational as well as sublime. But if Professor Buckland could persuade his hearers he could not persuade himself.
Largely good the influence of the Old Testament has no doubt been; largely also it prepared the way for the New. That its influence has been wholly good cannot be said. It has furnished fanaticism with aliment and excuse. It has found mottoes for the black flag of religious war.
Is it possible to believe, in face of doubtful authenticity, contradictions as to fact, and traces of local superstition, that the New Testament any more than the Old was dictated by Deity? Inspired by the creative power, in common with the other works of creative beneficence, as a part of the general plan, the New Testament may have been. Its morality is not tribal, but universal. "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," this beside the well of Samaria by the Founder himself was proclaimed. If there is any privilege it is in favour not of race, but of class, the class being the poor, whose poverty seems counted to them as virtue, perhaps rather to the disparagement of active goodness.
Had the New Testament been divinely inspired, would not its authority have been clearly attested? Would not the authorship of its books have been made known? Would the slightest error or self-contradiction have been allowed to appear in it? What is the fact? The authenticity of a large portion of the Epistles of St. Paul seems admitted by critics; of other books of the New Testament the authorship is regarded as doubtful. The three Synoptic Gospels have a large element common to them all, and are evidently grafts upon a single document which is lost, and which the critics generally seem inclined to place not earlier than the latter part of the first century. The Synoptics all tell us that when Jesus expired the veil of the Temple was rent. One adds that there was preternatural darkness; a third that the earth quaked, that the rocks were rent, that the graves opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, came out of the graves after the resurrection of Jesus, went into the holy city, and appeared to many. Such apparitions plainly must have produced an immense sensation; such a sensation, it may be assumed, as would have brought scepticism to its knees. This surely must be legendary, and the legend must have had time to grow.
Though grafts on the same original stock, the Gospels are often at variance with each other; as in the case of the genealogy of Jesus, upon which the harmonists labor in vain; in that