03.08. CHAPTER VIII. THE MORAL SUBLIMITY OF GOD'S WORD
CHAPTER VIII. THE MORAL SUBLIMITY OF GODS WORD.
"Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." Psalms 119:105. Do the moral teachings of the Bible accord with its claims? This is the most searching question of all. Even prophecy and miracle would fail to satisfy us that the Bible is of God without correspondence between the moral truths there revealed and those faculties of our being to which such truths are addressed. The scientist boldly infers that light was meant for the eye, and the eye for the light, because light is pleasant to the healthy eye, and painful only to the diseased. On scientific principles, we as boldly say that the Bible was meant as a light to the moral nature of men; and here is the broad basis of our induction. The men most free from moral corruption, men like Plato, of pure mind and clear moral judgment when brought in contact with the moral teachings of this book, most delight in them; and only so far as men grow corrupt morally, and the eye of the soul becomes diseased by vice and crime, do they turn from the pure Word of God.
It is commonly a mark of moral profligacy that men antagonize the Bible; and generally the degree of moral degradation is shown by the violence of such opposition. There is a man who has for years been conspicuous as the enemy and traducer of the Christian faith; yet his life was said to be exceptionally faultless in its morality, and his character singularly without blemish. This seemed strange, for his opposition to the religion of the Bible is peculiarly reckless and malicious. But further investigation disclosed the fact that his conversation, when unrestrained by the conventionalities of society, is impure and contaminating. I heard a gentleman of the highest probity say that, when by a severe snow-storm he was shut up with that man in a hotel, hemmed in by snow-drifts, so shocking was his foulness of speech that he preferred the cold and snow without, rather than expose his helpless ears to such defilement. It is the old story of hating the light, coming not to the light, lest one’s deeds be reproved.
Let us give to this moral test its fullest weight. Some would have us receive the truth simply on the ground of its authority, whether it fits our inborn ideas of right and equity and humanity or not. There are a few who tell us that we are not to presume to judge as to right and wrong; that God’s will makes right and wrong, and that what would be vice if done by our choice alone, becomes virtue if done at His word. Are there, then, no eternal laws of right and wrong which lie, back of God’s will, in the very nature of things? Was Kant, the philosopher, wrong when he said that "the two things that filled him with awe are the star-sown deeps of space and the deeper gulf between right and wrong?" Why did God give us faculties capable of judging wrong and right if He meant that we should dare no judgment? It is one of the awful things, that as God made man capable of sitting at the telescope, and, in the invisible scales of science, weighing the stars, so He has made man’s moral nature capable of weighing even Him in its balances. As the child recognizes his father by a certain likeness a look, expression, attitude, gait, tone of voice, grasp of hand, nay, even in darkness by something not to be described so are we to recognize God because He corresponds to our inner sense of what God must be; because He fits with divine exactness into the strange void of our spiritual being as nothing else can.
We cannot conceive of any array of miracles that would force upon mankind a belief contrary to the teachings of reason or the promptings of conscience. Bishop Clark affirmed that if "it were written with letters of fire on the midnight sky: God is unjust, God is cruel, there is that within us which would say, this is an illusion of the senses or the work of some malignant power hostile to God. He cannot be unjust."
If the Bible be the Word of God, we may be assured that it will contain nothing essentially opposed to our moral sense; for that moral sense is given us to perceive truth and recognize light. This is the argument from correlation, or mutual adaptation, an argument worthy to fill volumes.
Nature is full of wants with corresponding supplies; of appetites or cravings with their gratifications and satisfactions. The wing of the bird tells of the air on which it may float; the fin of the fish, of the water through which it may glide; the ball of the joint, of the socket; the eye is a prophecy of the light, and the ear of sound. So universal is this correspondence that wherever we find a craving, an adaptation, or a lack, we look with unerring certainty for something else filling the craving, meeting the adaptation, supplying the lack. Emerson closed a protracted argument with a literary skeptic in these forcible words: "Sir, I hold that God, who keeps his word with the birds and fishes in all their migratory instinct, will keep His word with man." And Bryant, in his "Lines to a Waterfowl," with great beauty, points out the lesson taught by this wonderful correspondence and correlation, in these lines:
"He who, from zone to zone Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright!"
If man craves and needs an infinite Being, in whose strength, wisdom, power and love, human weakness, ignorance, feebleness and affection may find perfect refuge and rest, it will be the only exception to universal facts if no object exists to meet this conscious need. The Bible declares and exhibits just such an object, exactly adapted to fill and fulfill all this need.
It is our solemn duty to apply to the Word of God these moral and spiritual tests, in order, first, to ascertain whether indeed it be the Word of God, by its essential correspondence with our own moral instincts and needs; and, secondly, to appreciate more fully its real worth and beauty. Chamfort, the Parisian wit, says: "I heard, one day, a devotee speaking against people who discuss articles of faith, say naivement, Gentlemen, a true Christian never examines what he is ordered to believe. It is with that as with a bitter pill: if you chew it you will never be able to swallow it." Behind the witticism is a covert sneer; the light word is a sharp sword, meant to thrust at all genuine religious faith. But it is not so; the Bible asks no such absurd, blind faith, no such unreasoning, unthinking, mechanical acceptance! In the uncovered mounds of Nineveh, you see only fragments of that departed glory - broken slabs, shattered pillars, grandeur and magnificence and splendor lying in ruin. How do you recognize Nineveh? You have from history and art formed an idea of Nineveh as it was when the crown of empire was upon its brow, and you compare the conception with these remains. They correspond; and you have no more doubt that the ancient city is uncovered than though you saw it now in all the pride of its supremacy. Somewhat thus, does God mean that we shall test his Word. Among its first declarations is this: "God made man in his own image." It is very plain that the image is shattered and man is a ruin. Yet if we compare the Bible idea of true manhood with the ruined fragments of the original man, we shall see a correspondence. And the more closely we compare the Word of God with human nature and needs, the more plainly will appear a similarity between the utterances of that Word and the highest utterances of the soul of man. This has been observed and confessed even by professed infidels, and it is a fact which no human philosophy has yet explained, and which, on the basis of skeptical philosophy, defies satisfactory explanation.
Happily, the foes of Christianity furnish us a starting-point in their own concessions and confessions. So few are the exceptions that it is fair to call it a universal verdict that no book ever known among men compares with this. The praises of the Bible, drawn from the lips of infidels, and left on record by their pens, might be mistaken for the adoring words of saints, or even angels. Yet the Word of God does not court the favorable opinion of men. With divine indifference, it hews its way into the very heart of man. It begins by telling him that his wisdom is folly, his righteousness filthy rags; it assaults him from every side with the most humiliating exposures; and yet it challenges his admiration. Reville, the advocate of French Rationalism, says: "One day a question was raised in an assembly what book a man condemned to life imprisonment would best take with him, and from Roman Catholic, Protestant, philosophers and materialists, came alike the one reply, to which all agreed the Bible!" As H. L. Hastings quaintly intimates, this Bible is a "book which has been refuted, demolished, overthrown and exploded more times than any other book you ever heard of. Every little while somebody starts up and upsets this book; and it is like upsetting a solid cube of granite. It is just as big one way as the other; and when you have upset it, it is right side up, and when you overturn it again, it is right side up still."
I. One element which enters into the ethical perfection of the Bible is its impartiality. All human biography is more or less one-sided. Boswell’s Life of Johnson has been pronounced the model biography, yet it is, more than anything else, a long-drawn-out and highly-flavored encomium a worshipper, bowing before his idol, and obscuring his idol’s features by the clouds of incense with which he invests him. Boswell breaks on Johnson’s feet the alabaster box of ointment; and the book is filled with the odor of his spikenard. Human biography belongs largely to the heroic, and sometimes approaches the fabulous; and it is not unnatural. When men are prompted to prepare such books, it is commonly from profound admiration for the character they are to portray. They approach their work as an artist begins a portrait or a bust, with an ideal image before him and in the artistic the natural is often lost; there is a likeness, but it is a transfigured likeness a portrait untrue to life! Cromwell said to the younger Lely, who was about to paint his portrait, "Paint me as I am; if you leave out a scar, a wrinkle, a freckle or a pimple, I’ll not pay you one shilling!" But if all human biographies were paid for upon this basis, their authors would not get rich; all of them more or less discredit the truth by a suppression of vices and faults. In Bible biography mark the rigid ethical impartiality - rigid indeed, but never frigid! You do not feel that there is any effort or willingness to represent the subject of the biographical sketch either with a bias of prepossession or of prejudice, but to be exactly true to nature and fact. But no man is held up as perfect, except the one perfect man. Caleb and Joshua, Nehemiah and Daniel, are not presented on the faulty side of their characters; yet they are not put before us as faultless, crowned with a diadem almost divine. And, on the other hand, Noah, who was "perfect in his generations and walked with God," is still exhibited in his drunken sleep, and, though his sons went backward and cast a cloak over him to hide his nakedness, the impartial historian does not even cloak his sin by silence, far less, apology. We find Moses indulging in unrighteous anger and unholy pride, and there is no concealment lest we should think less of the glory of his face who talked with God as a man with his friend. David was "after God’s own heart" the great king, the saintly psalmist. How the pen of the uninspired biographer even now falters when tracing that part of his history which records two of the highest crimes! And yet how unhesitatingly the pencil of the Holy Ghost adds to the beautiful portrait the ugly and repulsive feature that belongs there, for the truth’s sake! The Gallery of Battles at Versailles immortalizes no defeats. You walk through those vast corridors, and you understand the inscription over the portal: "A toute les glories de la France." The galleries of paintings are so extensive that if these pictures were placed in a row they would cover seven miles. The subjects of the historical paintings range from the Crusades to the last Italian war, including incidents in the career of Napoleon I, by David; more recent Algerian battle scenes, by Horace Vernet, and Yvon’s Crimean and Italian scenes. But it is noticeable that not one defeat is pictured forth.
Turn now to the Word of God; let us enter God’s historical gallery. Here the ages are included from Adam to Abraham, Moses to Malachi, and from John Baptist to John the Apostle. Peter was to the New Testament church what Abraham or Moses was to the Old, and yet he, whose noble confession was the rock on which our Lord built His church, was also pronounced a Satan, an offense unto Christ, because he savored not of the things that were of God, but those that be of men. If the Bible would have spared any one, surely it would be the disciple whom Jesus loved, and whose head lay in his own bosom; and yet there is not even a golden gauze to veil his impatience and intolerance, his jealousy, ambition, vindictiveness! These men are not ideal men, but real men of like passions as ourselves, even the foremost of apostles, like Paul, or of prophets, like Elijah! There is no Greek idealism here.
II. This Book has never been found in a single particular to teach immorality; and the most exalted positive morality and spirituality are taught here. Where can be found such exhibitions of the deformity and enormity of sin? Where such lofty laws of thought, feeling, purpose, endeavor?
Some try to rob God’s word of its moral value by subtle hints that it is not original. We are told that the law of Forgiveness is no new thing, that the Hindoo proverb long since enjoined it even toward enemies, and beautifully compared the forgiving spirit to the sandal wood that imparts it fragrance even to the axe which cuts it to the heart. We are told that the Golden Rule is as old as the Chinese sages, and that Confucius 530 B. C. wrote it in a negative form; "Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you." But suppose all this to be true and overlook the fact that the negative form of this precept is at best but a silver, not a golden rule does it prove anything against Christianity that some of its grand precepts have been anticipated by Plato or Pythagoras, by Hindoo or Chinese sages? The moral system of the Bible is to be tested as a system,. You may find tropical plants in a hot house but to find them in their native soil you must go to the tropics! There they are parts of the vegetable system, not exotic, but indigenous they belong to the flora of the country. And the question is not whether certain of the ten commandments can be found in pagan codes, or some precepts of the sermon on the mount, in the sacred book of Buddha; but where do we find the higher laws of life and love, amid surroundings entirely consistent and correspondent? Here is the native soil, in which celestial plants naturally grow and thrive and bloom! It is this divine system of morality which makes the Bible stand apart and alone, alike without superior or rival. Daniel Webster said, "there is always room at the top." Thus far, the Bible stands confessedly at the top: still there is room for any better system of morality; and even if the Bible is like the top-stone of the pyramid that leaves no place for any above it, the common verdict of mankind will heave it from its place if a better can be found. The progress of human reason in the paths of ethical discovery is merely the progress of a man in a treadmill, doomed forever to retrace his own steps, and we feel no fear that any human system will ever be able to improve in one particular upon this sublime ethical teaching!
There is a tradition of the descendants of Seth living on the summit of so lofty a mountain as to be able to hear and join in the song of the heavenly host. The Bible is that mountain: its peak pierces beyond the clouds into the sublimest elevations and atmospheres. Where the Word of God ends, Heaven begins. The conceptions of things human and divine, found here, surpass in grandeur and magnificence all the dreams of the ages and of the sages.
III. Where did the mere mind of man learn such moral conceptions of God? In a previous chapter the Bible account of Creation was contrasted with the absurdities of the best pagan cosmogonies. Take the Greek conception of God, at the summit of ancient culture, and compare it with the idea of the divine nature here unfolded! Jupiter, father of gods and men, the Omnipotent, the Thunderer, was the Son of Saturn, who had dethroned his father, and devoured his own children at birth. His wife, however, succeeded in saving Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto and they became gods respectively of earth, sea and hell. Jupiter held court at Olympus, and the court of the most licentious of French sovereigns was not more infamous. Lust, rage, jealousy, hate, intrigue, combined with power, wisdom, majesty and love in impossible mixtures. As Geiger well says, "Gods were a turbulent aristocracy one mightier than the rest but not almighty." Juno, Jupiter’s wife, put him to sleep during a battle of the Greeks before Troy. So angry was he with her for raising a storm to impede Hercules that he hung her from the vaults of heaven by a chain, tying anvils to her feet, and when her son Vulcan interposed he flung him down head first: he landed on Semnos but broke his leg in the fall and has limped ever since. Jupiter had a severe head ache, and Vulcan was summoned to relieve his distress, and at a blow from his hammer, out sprang Minerva, full-armed. These are a few specimens of Greek mythology. Think for one moment of the Bible conception of God all powerful, but good; all-knowing, yet merciful; all-present, yet not the God of Pantheism, inseparable from his works; but a personal God. Think of His infinite holiness, of purer eyes than to behold evil, yet graciously planning for the salvation of sinners; exalted to the highest heaven and yet condescending to the weakest and the humblest. Where did the writers of the Bible get such conceptions of the one God, while the foremost nations were worshipping dumb idols! while Egypt bowed to the crocodile, and Athens gave 60,000 women to the licentious rites of Venus, and Rome was adoring the bloody God of War, and the riotous God of Wine! while even the Parsee got no higher than to turn his face eastward and adore the sun!
IV. The Bible is alone in the full, clear exhibition of the majesty and dignity of man; putting an infinite distance between the lowest of men and highest of animals. Look at the inversions of truth in history! See Egypt in her palmy days worshipping, as divine, the calf and the crocodile; man bowing before the animal; then read Genesis, and see how grand a difference and distance are there put between the loftiest level of animal life and the lowest level of human being.* The highest order of animal is only creeping thing, but man is made in the image, after the likeness of God, out of the dust of the earth, but with an inbreathed soul and spirit the direct inspiration of God’s breath.
Mark when man is to be created the crown of all creation there is a council among the sublime persons of the Godhead: "Let us make man." He was to be in God’s own image intellectually independent, with powers of reason and reflection and intelligent communication. Hobbes finely says that man differs from all other animals, "rationale et orationale," by the gift of reason and speech. Man alone was made in God’s likeness in intellectual capacity. Let modern science exalt the animal creation as it will, and try to evolve man from the monkey: but here is a great gap which no evolution can bridge. The capacity for development in the animal reaches a limit beyond which it cannot be carried. Man’s capacity for growth no science has ever yet bounded or measured. The monkey is after six thousand years essentially the same. Improvement by the most painstaking process is only like the swinging of a pendulum within a very narrow limit it never goes beyond the extremity of the arc. Is man what he was even a thousand years ago?
Look at the new-born infant no animal is at birth so helpless as he; not even an instinct of self-preservation except that which enables the infant to attach itself to the mother’s breast. No knowledge of the use of eyes or ears, hands or feet. The new-born pup is ahead of the new born babe in intelligence, sagacity and power of self-preservation. But how soon the child will be training the dog, asserting his superiority!
There was a boy at Dr. Richards private asylum in New York, who seemed utterly animal, irrational and without the self-helpful instincts of a normal animal. He would lie on the floor, his tongue lolling from his mouth, absolutely without apparent thought and almost without sensation. He was called the "oyster-boy!" For months they tried to awaken a single sign of conscious life, or impress upon him one idea. One day Mrs. Richards dropped her thimble on the floor, and it fell with a metallic ring that started or startled the boy’s idiotic mind into feeble action and he turned slowly, as Bottom would say, "to see a noise which he heard," and then back his intellect retreated into the idiotic darkness, as a snail withdraws into its shell! But like the faint streak of grey in the east, that simple sign meant the awakening of consciousness! It was the first tint that tells of the dawn of day. And, on the morrow, again the thimble was dropped, and again the oyster-boy moved, and looked, this time a little more quickly and intently and so, little by little, the darkness gave place to the dawning light, till the tongue no longer hung from the mouth, but began to learn the mystery of speech.
By-and-by a shoemaker was brought and made a shoe before his eyes, fitting it to his foot, and then Dr. Richards, laying his hand on the shoe and then on the workman would say, "Shoemaker makes shoe." And so a tailor and a coat. Dr. Richards then desired to arouse at once the mental and moral faculties by introducing to this awakening intelligence some conception of God. But how should he select an object great and grand enough to convey such a conception! It was a summer morning and the glorious sun was just pouring his flood of light into the bay window. Dr. Richards took the boy to the casement, reverently pointed to the sun and said with holy awe: "God made the sun!" and the boy, catching the tone and the thought together, repeated "God made the sun!" And Dr. Richards left him gazing. He returned two hours later, and that oyster-boy still stood reverently gazing and saying, as though his whole soul were overwhelmed, "God made the sun!" Bishop Potter afterwards heard that boy, Sylvanus Wheeler, repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and with a voice choking with emotion he said, "For thirty years I have repeated that prayer, but never like that!" Is man indeed only an educated monkey? When the noblest specimen of all the animal creation is found capable of even such development as that, it will be time enough to doubt that man is more than the animal. No, between that oyster-boy helpless on the floor and the highest style of animal life, there is the fathomless gap of the infinite! How does the gap widen when we remember to what illimitable extent the education and development of that mind and heart may yet be carried! Try and follow that intellect and heart, so slow to wake into a true life as year after year, and, beyond this narrow sphere, age after age, and cycle upon cycle revolve the oyster-boy has left all the scholarship and learning of the centuries behind, as the soaring lark leaves the twig of the shrub to greet the sun high up where clouds rest, or as the sun in noonday leaves the dim glory of the dawn. He has gone far beyond Aristotle and Plato, and Bacon; the learning of philosophers he despises as the full- grown man puts away the prattle of childish ignorance. He has attained unto the knowledge of the cherub and the affection of the seraph. If man has his descent from the oyster, how comes this ascent above the oyster! The image of God in man is the moral likeness also the power of judgment, discriminating between right and wrong. Man has a conscience, and if we measure fully the grandeur of its authority and the majesty of its decisions, we shall be constrained to say with Dorner, that "conscience has the man." And so has the man the image of God’s immortality. He is fashioned not like the beasts that perish, after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life. What wonder that God is said to have breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of lives, so that man became a living soul mark, became, not had a living soul. It is the soul that is the man, and therefore God made man to have dominion over fish and fowl and cattle the whole creation.
It is because of the exalted moral and spiritual character of the Bible that it has successfully resisted the assaults of four thousand years! It is too strong in itself and in its hold on the hearts of men, to be overthrown; as well attempt with popguns and putty to demolish Gibraltar or to root up by hand one of the cedars of Lebanon. The Bible is too high to be successfully assaulted; as well try to throw water against the firmament or to dislodge the stars with arrows; or, as Dr. Breckinridge said, "as well attempt to plant your shoulder against the burning wheel of the mid day sun, and roll it back into night!"
Psalms 2:1-12 represents God as seated on his exalted throne, and derisively laughing at the impotence of human rage against Him and His rule. So may we say of the Word of God it laughs at the malice of its foes, at the impotence of its most gigantic adversaries, for, like the throne of God, it rests on eternal foundations?
Some reader perhaps smiles at such enthusiasm, and thinks within himself that it is very strange if the Bible is such a wonderful Book, that the skeptical objector does not find it out. A man may look into the Bible with an eye open only to objectionable features. The unconverted man loves objections, as the condemned man at court is glad to detect a flaw in the argument which is directed against him, though the flaw may not at all affect his guilt or the real conclusiveness of the testimony. A mind disposed to skepticism opens the Word, if at all, not to find moral beauty, but to hunt for something on which to hang a new objection - and hence, most infidels never read the Bible, but take their objections at second hand. Let two examples be given.
"And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem."* This has been violently assailed as a proof of the cruelty of David the man after God’s own heart, who nevertheless took the people of Rabbah and sawed them in twain, or drew over them iron harrows, or clove them with axes, or roasted them in brick-kilns. But what if it refers only to the work at which he set them?
*2 Samuel 12:31. Angus Bible Hand Book. An infidel paper in Boston devoted a column of ridicule to the "quail story," estimating the bushels of quails piled up over the country, and showing that each of the 6,000,000 Israelites would have 2,888,643 bushels of the quails per month, or 69,629 bushels for a meal. But the Bible says no such thing as that they were piled two cubits high over a territory forty miles broad; it simply means that the wind that brought them from the sea, swept them within reach, or about three feet above the ground, not out of reach as they would have been over head. If you should say you saw a flock of birds as high as a church spire, even an infidel would ridicule any one for supposing they were packed so high.
V. There is one fact, worth more than all objections, and overbalancing them all. The Bible somehow works moral revolutions in character. Find any other book that has wrought such wonders. Men have studied natural philosophy, astronomy, botany, geology, read novels and histories and poems, works on law and medicine and philosophy; who has found these books restraining lust, curbing sensual appetites, inspiring noble aims, exposing sinful propensities, moving one to be a truer son, better husband, kinder father? But, somehow, from the day men begin systematically to read the Bible, they begin to be sensible of a new power at work in mind and heart, working most of all for righteousness. I would put higher value on one chapter of God’s Book than on all other books put together, to restrain from evil, and constrain to good; and for more than twenty-five years I have been watching this book as it has touched other men and women in the quick of their being, with the thrill of a divine life. I have seen men of no secular culture grow grand under the educating influence of this book their minds expanding under the influence of its elevating, ennobling, inspiring ideas of God and man, of duty and destiny; I have seen them grow to beauty of character and conduct, sweetness of temper and disposition, transformed, transfigured.
These results demand a cause efficient and sufficient to produce such effects; and that adequate cause can be found only in the fact that God is in the Bible by the breath of His inspiring, transforming Spirit.
"This little volume," said the venerable Schliermacher, holding up a Greek New Testament before two English students, "contains more valuable information for mankind than all the other writings of antiquity put together." This book is really the foundation of all the literature that is worth preserving. Not less than two hundred thousand volumes have been written to expound and illustrate the Book of books. It is thus the central sun of a constellation of glories; and more and more as the ages pass, do the noblest of human thoughts, both borrow their lustre from its glory, and wheel into reverent orbits about this as a centre?
Let the infidel assault it. Let men blaspheme and ridicule. It is God’s lever and it is moving the world. Science turns its microscopic eye upon it, but it cannot be convicted of essential error. The moral philosopher examines its ethical code; but the inspiration of all virtue is there. The hungry soul that craves food for a starving heart, finds here the full feast of fat things satisfying every craving. Who will turn from this divine book, to gratify his evil heart by a fatal plunge into the darkness of unbelief!