00.2. FOREWORD
FOREWORD
“AS a man is interested in his roses, and doesn’t think of the thorns,” so he studied language. That was Professor Wilson’s answer to my query, when I expressed amazement at the range of his linguistic explorations, covering some forty-five languages and dialects. His answer helped me to understand. And as we sat by the fire in his study at Princeton, with the signs of his labors all around us, on shelves, and tables, and desk—yes, and on the floor, I came to understand still better the stories I had heard of his learning, and of his masterly methods in the defense of the Scriptures. When he was a little chap, four years old, son of a leading merchant in the little town of Indiana, Pa., he could read. He began to go to school at five, and at eight he had read, among other books, Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies.” That merchant father was a man of sound culture and good sense. He was president of the Board of Trade of his county, and president of the local school board—with ten children in his own home. When Robert was nine years old he and a brother were taken by their father on a journey to Philadelphia. One of the exciting and memorable experiences of the trip was the visit to a bookstore on Chestnut Street, where the father left the boys for a little while, so that they might select a number of books, of their own choosing. When he returned they had gathered about fifty volumes, including Prescott, Robertson, J. S. C. Abbott, and similar standard works,—examples of the “light reading” that these children enjoyed.
Robert prepared for college in the Indiana public school, and was ready for the sophomore class at Princeton when he was fourteen years old. However, he did not enter his class—the class of 1876— until he was at the advanced age of seventeen, for as he naively and rather apologetically remarked: “I had a good deal of headache between my fourteenth and twentieth years, and then typhoid. After that my headache disappeared. I really couldn’t half do my work before that.” In college young Wilson specialized in language, psychology, and mathematics. In such Bible courses as he then studied he says that he got “a very low grade of 90, which pulled down my average.” To him language was the gateway into alluring fields that drew him strongly. He prepared himself for college in French, German, and Greek, learned Hebrew by himself, and took a hundred dollar prize in Hebrew when he entered the seminary.
“But how did you ever do it?” I asked. The professor’s eyes twinkled, and he smiled at my surprise.
“Well, you see,” he replied, “I used my spare time. When I went out for a walk I would take a grammar with me, and when I sat down to rest, I would take out the book, study it a little, and learn what I could. I made up my mind that I wanted to read the great classics in the originals, so I just learned the languages in order to do that.
“I would read a grammar through, look up the examples, making notes as I went along, and I wouldn’t pass by anything until I could explain it. I never learned long lists of words, but I would read a page through, recall the words I didn’t know, and then look them up. I read anything that I thought would be interesting to me if it were in English. I got so interested in the story that I was unconscious of the labor,—as a man is interested in his roses, and doesn’t think of the thorns. So I learned Greek, Latin, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and so on.”
Now Robert Dick Wilson in all these crowded years was not clear concerning his true calling in life. Before he went to the seminary, he and a brother of his gave much time to evangelism. At Indiana they were in such work for a year and a half, and with ample evidence of God’s blessings upon their labors in great numbers of souls led to Christ. That work was particularly attractive to young Wilson, on fire as he was, and is to-day, for the furtherance of the Gospel. But his seminary studies caused him to feel that there was a great need for a type of Biblical scholarship that was not so subjective as much of the teaching he heard, but objective and thorough in dealing with facts that could be known only by exhaustive research over the whole range of the ancient languages related to the Bible. He faced the question seriously,—should he go on in the highly attractive and necessary work of preaching in which he had been so greatly blessed, or was God calling him to years of toil in comparative obscurity and seclusion, in order to let his life count for the defense of the Scriptures on the basis of linguistic and historical facts, which only arduous and patient toil could reveal? He chose under God’s guiding hand the life of the scholar, and thousands have thanked God, and other thousands will yet thank him, that this servant of his said, “Here am I; send me.”
What Robert Dick Wilson then believed, and now believes with all his heart is this: that textual and historical Biblical controversies should be taken out of the region of subjective personal opinion, into the region of objective, clearly attested fact. It was to this task that he set himself, and no labor was to be too long or too tedious or exacting to enable him to reach that goal.
He could not at that time learn Babylonian in America, so he went to Heidelberg, determined to learn every language that would enable him the better to understand the Scriptures, and to make his investigations in original documents. So to Babylonian he added Ethiopic, Phoenician, all the Aramaic dialects, and Egyptian, Coptic, Persian, and Armenian. He studied in Berlin with Schrader, who was Delitzsch’s teacher, called the father of Assyriology. He studied his Arabic and Syriac under Sachau, and Arabic under Jahn and Dieterichi; Hebrew under Dillmann and Strack, and Egyptian under Brugsch. He became conversant with some twenty-six languages in these years devoted to language acquisition. For Professor Wilson had a plan, carefully worked out during his student days in Germany, under which he proposed to spend fifteen years in language study, fifteen years in Biblical textual study in the light of the findings of his studies in philology, and then, God willing, fifteen years of writing out his findings, so that others might share them with him. And now it is our privilege in this booklet to read, in terms that we all can understand, some of the gloriously reassuring facts that he has found in his long pilgrimage through ancient days.
Just a single glimpse of how long it has been startles the superficial and the scholarly student as well, when either learns that in order to answer a single sentence of a noted destructive critic, Professor Wilson read all the extant ancient literature of the period under discussion in numerous languages, and collated no less than one thousand citations from that literature in order to get at the basic facts, which when found showed that the critic was wrong. It was largely a case of superior scholarship—in accordance with a good definition of the scholarly temperament—“that rare combination of profound insight, sustained attention, microscopic accuracy, iron tenacity, and disinterested pursuit of truth, which characterizes the great scientific discoverer or the great historian.”
Professor Wilson’s productive work has been presented hitherto almost entirely to his students, some two thousand of whom have been in his seminary classes through the years; in scholarly journals of restricted circulation; and in a few books, one of the most remarkable of which is his “Studies in the Book of Daniel.”
“Professor,” I asked, “what do you try to do for your students?”
Instantly he replied, with quiet earnestness, “I try to give them such an intelligent faith in the Old Testament Scriptures that they will never doubt them as long as they live. I try to give them evidence. I try to show them that there is a reasonable ground for belief in the history of the Old Testament. [He has not specialized on the New Testament.]
“I’ve seen the day,” he went on, “when I’ve just trembled at undertaking a new investigation, but I’ve gotten over that. I have come now to the conviction that no man knows enough to assail the truthfulness of the Old Testament. Whenever there is sufficient documentary evidence to make an investigation, the statements of the Bible, in the original texts, have stood the test.” That is a significant statement from one who does not have to trust to hearsay in matters of criticism, and who has worked for so many years in devout self-denying study of the sources and the text of the Old Testament. “When a man says to me, ‘I don’t believe the Old Testament,’” exclaimed Dr. Wilson, “he makes no impression upon me. When he points out something there that he doesn’t believe, he makes no impression upon me. But if he comes to me and says, ‘I’ve got the evidence here to show that the Old Testament is wrong at this or that point’—then that’s where my work begins! I’m ready for him!” And the professor laughed in his hearty way, in evident enjoyment of the prospect of such an encounter.
I think perhaps one reason why I have been so stirred by many personal talks with this stalwart scholar is the habit he has of putting proof before you as he goes, and not standing on his dignity as though no one had a right to ask questions of him about his findings. But when a scholar challenges him, then the Professor is a roused lion,—no, an aroused attorney for the defense, massing his facts so overwhelmingly, proving them, driving them home, and disclosing the weakness of his opponent’s case so convincingly, that I should think the attorney for the plaintiff in the attack on the Old Testament would wish for the sake of his reputation that he had not ventured on ground where his own ignorance would be so manifest to the court. For it is made very evident by a study of any of Professor Wilson’s keen critiques of the destructive critics’ work that much of the material so often called by the critics “the assured results of modern scholarship” is nothing more than the quicksand footsteps of a really inexcusable, downright ignorance. “Criticism,” says Dr. Wilson, “is not a matter of brains, but a matter of knowledge.” But let Professor Wilson lay before you his findings. He is concerned only with evidence, and it will gladden your heart to know even a little of what he has found, as he unfolds some of his experiences in the following studies.
Philip E. Howard, Publisher of The Sunday School Times.