The Uses of This Inquiry.

And now, in conclusion, I return to the question I glanced at in the beginning:—Why tell the people these things?—why unsettle the faith of those who seem to find the Bible an all-sufficient guide? The reply is an obvious one,—I made it years ago;—If we seem to snatch from any the staff on which they have been leaning with full content, this is our apology;—The staff on which you lean will presently be broken before all eyes and it will be well to be prepared for it, that faith in God may not go with trust in the infallibility of a book. In its stead, we offer you not the words of a book that page 20 are exposed to the assaults of time and the discoveries of every age, but the eternal truth and love of the Infinite God, assured to man, not by texts that may be doubtful, and sentences that may be obscure, but by the testimony of the living soul: which even when fed with creeds of men, still cries out for the living God. I say that is a message worth bringing to men,—a true' Gospel, putting to shame the bad news which is being dinned into their ears that this is a kind of God-forsaken world,—that God inspires men no longer, and that we can only live on the echoes of what He said to men thousands of years ago ! Rise up to the height of this great vital faith in God; consider what the effect would be if men in all the churches were to cease preaching that inspiration has ceased and is dead; and if they began to preach this truth,—that ours is the living God to-day; consider, I say, what the effect would be if only for one day this nation were to live in full possession of this faith and under the influence of it. The memory of that day, and the results of it, would be fragrant when all who took part in its sublime fidelity had long since passed away.

Another reason for doing this work is that when we recognise in the Bible a natural instead of a supernatural origin, we, for the first time, find a use for every portion of it. As I just now indicated, the Bible will become more instead of less interesting to us as we see in it a record of human struggles, thoughts, and experiences. Where we are now driven to blame and criticise, because of the theory of infallibility, we shall be able to feel sympathy and to admire. The old characters that look deformed, and the old writers that often look hideous, when they are set forth as fully and directly inspired by the Almighty, will look heroic or admirable when we see them as seekers after God, and strivers after the light, though amid thick darkness. Yes! the Bible will become a living book, a book full of interest and instruction just in proportion as we give up the palpably impossible theory that it is the complete and final word of God.

But there is yet another reason for seeking to put the Bible in its true place as a record of human thoughts: this is, that while it is regarded as a complete and final revelation of infallible truth it will inevitably be the cause of strife and division. The theory is that the Bible has been given as a perfect revelation of Divine truth, to end our doubts and to authoritatively declare what is true: the fact is that the Bible has split Christendom itself into fragments. Every man or Church has its own point of view and its own half-unconscious preferences, which lead to exaggerated clingings to certain portions of the Bible or to one-sided interpretations of it: and it is these that are exalted into divine and infallible revelations.

But not only because of one-sided points of view is the Bible productive of strife and division: it is so also because it is in itself an inconsistent and contradictory book. In fact, there is in it so much that is fragmentary, inconsistent, or equivocal, that (and perhaps to a greater extent than any other book in the world) it furnishes page 21 material for creed and theory builders of every kind. In truth, the condition of the religious world to-day supplies a grotesque commentary upon the statement that the Bible is the word of God, given to settle our differences and lead us all to infallible truth. Sects and churches, wide as the poles asunder, go to it for proofs of dogmas and justifications of practices utterly opposed to one another; and the dwellers in this theological Babel all fancy they think as they do at the bidding of the Most High! Some time ago, when George Dawson repudiated the bloody sacrifices of the Jews, and their perpetuation in the form of the bloody sacrifice of Christ, as an atonement for sin, this was the swift reply from the other side:—"What I do you dare to question the Bible? Who, according to that book, enjoined the sacrifices of old? Who sent Moses to Egypt to deliver the descendants of Jacob from bondage? Who opened the red sea and formed a passage for their escape? Who sustained the whole nation where there was all lack of natural sustenance? Who assembled them round Mount Sinai, and gave them the laws and commandments which were to be their national constitution in the land to which they were going?" And so the hopeless, irrational, wearying fight goes on,—the one side urging that we must advance on to rational, humane, and really religious ideas, the other demanding submission for all time to the letter of a book. The process is a melancholy one. First, people give in to the superstition that the Bible is the final Word of God, then they take a particular point of view or bring to the Bible a foregone conclusion, then they see just as much as their point of view enables them to see, or as much as their foregone conclusion will allow them to see, then they busy themselves in persuading people that the result is the final, infallible, and perfect revelation of the will of God, to dispute which is to be damned! And this it is—this taking of one's own view of the Bible as the authoritative word of God—that is at the root of nine-tenths of the bigotries and extravagances and persecutions of Christendom. It is certainly at the root of the monstrous and pernicious idea that God will send to hell all those who do not believe certain dogmas that are said to be revealed.

Now if we could liberate the human mind and heart from this bondage to a contradictory book, and throw people back upon themselves—upon the reason, the conscience, and the affections,—the change would be enormous. People who now totally differ about their ideas of God and man and the future would soon approach one another, led by the same human instincts: and then it would be seen that they had all along been the victims of a theory which, though a mere assumption, had been powerful enough to deprive them of the use of their faculties, and to induce them to force themselves to believe the most unlikely and even the most distasteful and dreadful things. For see what people have forced themselves to believe. They have held by the ghastly fancy of natural depravity and the inherent sinfulness of the little child: they have insisted on the even ghastlier dogma of salvation by the offering of the page 22 blood and agony of an innocent mail to an angry and exacting God: they have clung with fearful tenacity to the doctrine of eternal damnation, acknowledging that they hold it in spite of their natural repugnance to it, but actually counting that repugnance a reason why they should receive it, as all the more "a trial of their faith," which really means that they silence God's true voice in the soul to listen to an imaginary voice in a book: they have taught and quarrelled over doctrines of predestination, of election, of final perseverance, and one knows not what, sowing the Church, broadcast, with the seeds of bitter controversies and cruel discords, all because, instead of hearing the voice of God as it spoke to them in the conscience and the heart, they insisted on compelling that voice to be still or to become, in some feeble, unnatural and forlorn way, an echo of another voice that comes sighing from the past. And the agony of this conflict has filled Christendom with those very distortions of truth and discords of error which are cited as proving that God is not speaking to men now, but which really bear witness against us for not listening to His voice.

Judge you what the effect would be if from the minds of all good men and women a clean sweep could be made of the assumption that the Bible or some particular notion thought to be extracted from it, is the word of God from which it is sin to swerve: judge what would happen if they could all be left with their truest selves—with their common sense, their common conscience, their common humanity, and shall I not add—their common reverence for God? I venture to say that the Babel of tongues would be at an end: the parted currents would flow in one broad natural channel, and the light of a simple trust in God would be shed over all. And where then would be the dark, depressing, irrational, and cruel beliefs that now only live because it is thought they are "revealed"?

Then see how theologians have fought against science, which has had to make its way, even in modern times, against the terrorism of orthodoxy and the ban of the Church. See how people, in the face of the clearest evidence, contend for the most impossible theories of creation, transgression, and redemption. See with what vehemence they insist upon the inherent sinfulness of all human beings, the existence of Satan, the reality of an eternal hell, and the need of atoning blood. Would all this be so, if it were not for the delusion that a supposed revelation from God has told us the final truth about these things? The proof of this is that when reason and conscience and humanity are appealed to for more reasonable and humane ideas, we are deliberately told that the carnal reason (and even the carnal eyes) of man must submit to the word of God. In other words.—we must silence the living witness whom we can question and improve, and compel ourselves to listen to a dead witness who can neither be cross-examined no corrected.

If, then, there were no other reason for telling the plain truth about the Bible, this would suffice for me,—that the delusion as to page 23 its perfection, inspiration, finality, and supreme authority, has led and still leads to strife, to persecution, to the stifling of thought, to the perverting of the judgment, to the silencing of the tongue, to the warping of the conscience, to the hindrance of reform. Throw men and women back, I say, upon the voice of God in themselves, upon the grand and solemn facts of life, upon reason, conscience, and the living soul: then, and only then will they know the truth; and the truth will make them free.

Our cause, then, is the cause of the emancipation of the living soul form the dead hand of the past; the liberation of the human mind from the oppressive weight of mere authority; nay I the making straight in the desert a highway for our God. We are not rebels, striving against God; we are children, seeking Him. We believe that He is the living God for living men, and that He who spoke to the fathers will speak to us. We reverently and gratefully accept the good that is in the Bible, but we go to the God of the Bible for ourselves. We live in days that are rich with the accumulations of long laborious centuries,—with the hard-earned winnings of the thinkers of other days; and it would be a shame indeed if we were not better able than they to solve many of the great problems that oppressed their souls. Knowing this, we lift up our hearts to God for the light, the truth, and the guidance that belong to us to-day.