The Religious Situation | Page 2

wide space to traverse, even in what may be assumed to be the material
sphere. What can it make of the marvellous stores of memory or of the
apparently boundless play of the 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