It was also very lucky for these poor, overworked, and oppressed slaves—the class which in all other ages and countries suffers most from hard times—that they should have escaped unhurt by these calamities; for if they had suffered by them as well as the Egyptians, they could not have persuaded them that God favored Israel.
Here one can not but wonder that these learned Egyptians, whose colleges of priests were planted on the banks of the Nile, and who had made the climate, soil, and productions of their native land their constant study, should have been so ignorant of these natural causes of the plagues—so easily discovered nowadays by anybody who makes a summer trip to Egypt—as to be terrified into emancipating their slaves by a stormy season. Just imagine to yourself a couple of abolitionist lecturers proceeding to Lexington and commanding the slaveholders of Kentucky to liberate their slaves immediately, on pain of the Ohio being muddy during high water, and the swamps of the river-bottom being full of frogs and musquitoes! But this interpretation does not reach the climax of absurdity till our Rationalist Punch, by way of signalizing his deliverance from Egyptian bondage, makes Pharaoh and his army forget that the tide ebbs and flows in the Red Sea, raises the tide over a shoal faster than cavalry could gallop from it, gathers an annual crop of twenty millions of bushels of manna from the thorn-bushes of Sinai, and feeds three millions of men, women, and children for forty years upon purgative medicine!!!
"We must then give up the problem as insoluble; for if reason be insufficient to give authority to the Bible, and criticism fails to discover its truth, how are we to know that it possesses either?"
Just as you would discover the truth of any other history, or the authority of any other law. You do not say, "The tale of the successive swellings of the Catawba, the Yadkin, and the Dan—three times in a fortnight, inFebruary, 1781, immediately after the American army had retreated across these rivers, preventing Cornwallis and the British forces from crossing till the little handful of weary and famished patriots had escaped—savors of the marvelous and leans so much toward the superstition of a special providence, that it must be rejected as not historical." You inquire if there be sufficient testimony to the fact. You do not say, "The Revised Statutes present internal evidence of being a collection of political tracts by various authors, written at different times, differing also in style, and of various degrees of merit, many of them contrary to my inmost personal convictions; therefore I can not acknowledge them as true and valid." You simply ask if this be a true copy of the laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor? Our inquiry about the truth of the history, and the authority of the laws of the Bible, must be of the same kind—an inquiry after testimony. Is this Book genuine or a forgery? Is it a true history or a lying romance? Have we any testimony on the subject?
But it is alleged that the Book contains in itself evidence of having been written in an unscientific age, and in an unhistorical manner; and, particularly, that its statements of the creation of the world, and of mankind, only six thousand years ago, are refuted by the discoveries of geology; which show us, that the world is many millions of years old, and that man has been on this world at least one hundred thousand years. In support of this last assertion, geologists refer to the remains of the lake dwellings in Switzerland; to skeletons of men found in caves, with bones of animals now extinct; to flint tools and weapons found in gravel beds, said to be of remote antiquity; to bones found deep in the Mississippi bottom; and to the monuments of Egypt.
In replying to this objection, we have first to say that we have elsewhere, in this volume, shown that the Biblenowhere alleges that God created the earth only six thousand years ago, but in many places emphatically affirms the contrary.
In the second place, as to the antiquity of man, the Bible nowhere says, that Adam was the first human being whom God created; nor that he and his posterity were the only intelligent beings occupying this world before our tenancy of it; nor that we are even now the exclusive occupants. On the contrary, it makes very distinct allusions to other races, capable of assuming serpentine, swinish, and human bodies, and of meddling disastrously in earthly affairs in former times; though, as it does not profess to teach us truths which do not concern us, it gives us no narration of the creation or history of pre-Adamite animals or men. But there is no more ground of objection against the Bible for neglecting to give us a history of pre-Adamite men, if there were such men, than for neglecting to describe the pre-Adamite animals, or the coal measures, or the nebulæ, or the climate, soil, population, and politics of Jupiter. The Bible has one great object—to teach men how to be holy and happy; and it can not be shown that the chronicles of the pre-Adamites, if they kept chronicles of their alleged savage state, would help us in the acquisition of holiness.
No discoveries, then, which geologists may make of pre-Adamite races of men, can at all affect the credit of Moses' account of the creation of Adam, and of the history of his family. They may fill museums, if they please, with their flint arrow-heads and axes, they may pile up pyramids of stone mortars, they may perhaps some day discover an old-world bronze railroad, and bronze-clad or copper-bottomed steamboats, they may produce pre-Adamic electric, aeronautic engines, and magnetic sewing machines, or bone needles, we care not which; and we will admire them, and confess that they are very curious, and perhaps very old; but unlessthey can show that Adam was descended from these old-world folks, we have no biblical quarrel with them. Like Moses, we will let them rest in peace.
But we would remark, thirdly, that no such discoveries have yet been made. No human bone, implement, or monument, has yet been discovered which can be proved to be more ancient than Adam, or nearly so ancient. There is not a single indisputable fact to show, that any of the tools, bones, or monuments; alleged in this discussion, is of any specific date whatever, save that the Danish bogs came down to the date of the Danish invasion of Ireland in the eleventh century; the burnt corn of the Swiss lake dwellings was probably that which Julius Cæsar describes the Helvetians as burning preparatory to their invasion of Gaul; and the monuments of Egypt, for which Bunsen claimed twenty thousand years, are now acknowledged by the best Egyptologists to reach not quite to 3000 B. C. As to the bone found at the base of the bluff at Memphis, it was not foundin situ, and probably was washed out of some Indian grave at the top, and buried in thedebris. The Abbeville skull[126]had a fresh tooth in it, for which thirty-five thousand years was claimed, until examination by a competent committee exposed the deception. Where there is a good paying demand for pre-Adamite skulls, there will always be a good supply. Dr. Dowler calculates the age of a skeleton of an Indian, found at the depth of sixteen feet in digging the gas works at New Orleans, at fifty thousand years; while the U. S. Coast Surveying Department show that the whole Delta is not more than four thousand four hundred years old.
These gross errors, which affront our common sense, wherever we are able to test geological calculations, fill uswith mistrust of their allegations of evidence, which, from the nature of the case, we can not test.
Of this class is the discovery of human bones in caves containing the bones of cave bears, rhinocerii, mammoths, and other extinct animals. The argument is that man and these animals lived at the same time. Very well, what time was that? There is no evidence to show that it was a hundred thousand years ago. The Siberian hunters fed their dogs on the flesh of a mammoth they found frozen in mud bluffs at the mouth of the Lena, and its hair and wool are now in the museum of St. Petersburg. Dr. Warren'smastodon giganteushad some bushels of pine and maple twigs, in excellent preservation, in its stomach, when exhumed in Orange County, New York; and you may see for yourself the vegetable fiber found in its teeth in his museum in Boston.[127]Does any one believe that the vegetable fiber and maple twigs have kept their shape one hundred thousand years? The mammoth found in the ditch of the Tezcucoco road must have fallen in after the Incas had dug that ditch. The Indians have a tradition that their fathers hunted a huge deer with a hand on his face, which slept leaning against the trees. And there is good geological reason for believing that the final extinction of the mammoth, the European rhinoceros, and their contemporaries, was caused by the change of climate in Northern Europe, Asia, and America, caused by the elevation of these northern lands, which has been going on since the tenth century, and which, about three centuries ago, closed the Polar Sea, rendering Greenland uninhabitable. The juxtaposition, then, of the bones of man and extinct animals is no proof of the remote antiquity of either. And no proof has been made from the nature or depth of the overlying deposits.
The shape, size, and general character of the skullsalleged to be of such remote antiquity give no countenance to the theory of man's brutal origin; which is the great thing to be gained by giving him a remote antiquity. The Enghis skull is in no way inferior to many good modern Indian skulls; and the man of Mentone stood six feet one in his stocking soles (if he wore stockings), having a good John Bull head between his shoulders, with a facial angle equal to that of Generals Grant or Von Moltke; and in fact being a fine old Gallic gentleman, all of the good old times.
Geologists, however, lay stress on the cumulative character of the evidence they produce; owning that no single fact is conclusive, but claiming that credence should be given to the accumulation of facts. But no accumulation of ciphers will amount to anything. All the alleged facts are found to be fatally defective either in authenticity or definiteness. No multitude of doubts can assure us of the certainty of a fact or assertion. The evidence for the pre-Adamite antiquity of man is only a gathering of facts doubtful, and wholly indeterminate, without any element of proof of remote antiquity.[128]
But there is a source of evidence of the most undeniable character, to which we may appeal for a decision of the subject. The law of population is as certain as any other law of nature; and it tends to the regular increase of mankind. Population tends to double itself every twenty-five years, as we see in the United States. In less favored countries the rate is not so rapid. In Europe it doubles every fifty years; and nowhere in less than two centuries. And the result is, that if the human race had existed onthis earth under existing laws of nature, as the evolutionists allege, for one hundred thousand years, not only must they have multiplied until their bones would have covered the earth, and filled the sea, but, as Sir John Herschel shows, they would have formed a vertical column, having for its base the whole surface of the earth, and for its height three thousand six hundred and seventy-four times the sun's distance from the earth![129]
The existing population of the globe corresponds pretty well to the natural increase of three pairs in forty centuries, which is something near to the Bible chronology. The laws of population, then, inexorably refuse the indefinite, or even the remote antiquity of mankind, and vindicate Moses as a writer of truthful history.
The alleged anachronisms of the Pentateuch have been adduced as testimony that it could not have been written till long after the time of Moses. These alleged anachronisms are generally the insertion of a modern name of a city instead of the ancient name, or an explanatory addition which would not have been necessary in the days of Moses. Now if all these cases could be proved, they would at most only show that the scribes who copied the manuscripts in later ages had inserted these explanatory changes or additions, under proper authority. Everybody's common sense will tell him, that Moses did not narrate his own death in the last chapter of Deuteronomy; but it is none the less true though Joshua, or some other prophet, added that postscript.
But Hengstenberg has[130]examined these alleged anachronisms in detail, and shown that the objectors allow themselves to interpolate into the text a meaning of their own in order to show the inaccuracy of the Bible. For instance, Genesisxii. 6, "The Canaanite was then in the land," they maintain could only be written after the Canaanites had been driven out. They interpolatestill, which is not in the text. But they entirely mistake the meaning of the passage, which refers to an earlier statement of the same fact, chapter x. 15, to show that Abraham, the heir of the promise, came as a stranger and a pilgrim to a land preoccupied by a powerful people, who are again mentioned, chapter xiii. 7, for the purpose of showing how Lot and Abraham came to be so crowded as to separate.
Another of the prominent instances is the name of the ancient city of Hebron, which, in the book of Joshua, is said to have been anciently called Kirjath-arba. But Numbers xiii. 22, which states that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt, and was the residence of Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the sons of Anak, shows that the writer was well acquainted with the history of the place, and Genesis xxxv. 27 shows that Hebron was the first name, and that it had two other names added to it, both after the time of Abraham, since Mamre was his contemporary, and the Anakim lived centuries later. This may stand for a specimen of the alleged anachronisms of the Pentateuch.
But now comes Bishop Colenso with his slate and pencil to demonstrate to us that, no matter who wrote it, or by what external authority it is commended, the Pentateuch is so full of arithmetical errors, and of impossible narratives, in its accounts of common affairs, as well as in its miraculous stories, that not only is it not the Word of God, but that it is not even a truthful history, and stands self-convicted of being a collection of fables. Of course, if that can be proved, there is an end of the matter, though it would still seem strange that it should have been left for the bishop to discover Moses' ignorance of arithmetic, and of camp-life among the Arabs. Nevertheless the very novelty of a bishop assaulting the Bible in such a style hassecured for him a large number of readers, many of them ignorant enough to believe his assertions, though too indolent to test his calculations, or even to read the passages he criticises. This renders some notice of his criticisms necessary according to our plan of considering objections according to their popularity, rather than according to their merit. For, on examining the bishop's objections to the Bible, they are all found to arise from want of science, want of sense, or ignorance of Scripture—an inability to read the Scriptures in their original Hebrew, or even to cite them correctly in English. In some criticisms he contrives to compile these three kind of blunders into a single chapter, making a mosaic of very amusing reading indeed.
Of course we can only give specimens of his peculiar style of attack on the Bible; for to expose all his blunders would require some volumes as large as his own. But we shall select illustrative instances of the bishop's blunders from each of the departments indicated above.
As a specimen of the bishop's blunders in science, let us take the first which he offers—his attempt to convict Moses of a contradiction to geology in his account of the deluge.
Bishop Colenso declares that the Bible teaches that the deluge was universal, and that this is contradicted, among other things, by certain geological discoveries, in Auvergne, of volcanic cones of light cinders, which would have been swept away by any such flood.
Aye, if they had only been there at that time! But Eli de Beaumont, a learned geologist, not convicted of so many blunders as the bishop, alleges that the whole of the system of Teanarus, including the elevation of Stromboli, and Ætna, has been formed since the catastrophe of the principal Alps; and that the volcanoes of Auvergne and the Vivarrus are of post-Adamic origin.[131]So the bishop's geologydoes not contradict what he thinks the Bible says after all. On the contrary, so far from geology contradicting a universal deluge, the best geologists speak of every part of the earth having been repeatedly under the sea, and they collect its fossils on the tops of the mountains.
But the bishop ought to know that hundreds of years ago, before geology was born, some of the most learned bishops and theologians of his own Church, as well as some of the chief scholars of the dissenters, following the most learned of the Hebrew rabbis, did not believe that the Bible taught that the deluge was universal. For instance, Bishop Stillingfleet, in his great work,Origines Sacra, says: "I can not see any urgent necessity from the Scriptures to assert that the flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The flood was universal as to mankind, but from thence follows no necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole earth was peopled before the flood; which I despair of ever seeing proved." Matthew Poole says: "Where was the need of overwhelming those regions of the earth in which there were no human beings? It would be highly unreasonable to suppose that mankind had so increased before the deluge as to have penetrated to all the corners of the earth. It is indeed not probable that they had extended themselves beyond the limits of Syria and Mesopotamia. Absurd it would be to affirm that the effects of the punishment, inflicted upon men alone, applied to those places in which there were no men. If, then, we should entertain the belief that not so much as the hundredth part of the globe was overspread with water, still the deluge would be universal; because the extirpation took effect upon all the part of the globe then inhabited."
Nor does the language of the Bible necessarily conveythe idea that the whole surface of the globe was covered with water. Dathe, professor of Hebrew (in hisOpuscala ad Crisin, edited by Rosenmuller, 1795), says: "Interpreters do not agree whether the deluge inundated the whole earth or only the regions then inhabited. I adopt the latter opinion. The phrasealldoes not prove the inundation to have been universal. It appears that in many placeskolis to be understood as limited to the thing or place spoken of. Hence all the animals introduced into the ark were only those of the region inundated."
But the most literal rendering of the language of Moses does not necessitate our belief that when he says that the waters covered the whole earth,arets, he meant the whole globe. The common Bible meaning of this word is land, country, or region, as the perpetually recurring phrases, the land,arets, of Havilah, the land of Nod, the land of Ethiopia, the land of Goshen, the land of Egypt, the land of Canaan, which occurs three hundred and ninety times, may convince every reader beyond the possibility of mistake. How now, from this word being used by Moses, could this learned bishop conclude that he necessarily meant to describe the globe? Moses says, "The waters prevailed upon and covered the whole country." The bishop translates, "covered the whole globe;" evidently in order to make Moses commit a blunder.
But reference is made to the expression, "All the high hills under the whole heavens were covered;" which the bishop will have it meant all the mountains under the moon.
But the popular use of the word "heavens," in Moses' day, had as little reference to universal space, as the word earth, or land, had to the whole globe. It meant simply the visible heavens over any place; and its extent was defined by the extent of the earth those visible heavens covered. Thus Moses himself defines it, Deuteronomy iv. 32: "Ask from the one side of heaven unto the other."Deuteronomy xxviii. 8: "Thy heaven over thee shall be as brass." Deuteronomy ii. 25: "This day I will begin to put the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven." And so commonly throughout the Bible, "the clouds of heaven," "the fowls of heaven," refer to the optical heavens. Such is the meaning in Genesis. Noah describes the deluge as it appeared to him, as covering all the hills within the horizon of observation, and Moses copies Noah's log-book.
The geologist adds his testimony to the existing evidences of the recent submergence of a large region of Persia and Turkey around the Caspian Sea, and its subsequent elevation. But it is no part of our business to show in what way God produced the deluge. Geology shows us, however, that the submergence of parts of the earth beneath the sea, and their subsequent elevation, is the most common of all geological phenomena; almost all existing continents and islands having been submerged.
The bishop is as far behind the age in his astronomy as in his geology. He blindly follows the Infidels of the last century in their attack on Joshua's miracle, arresting the sun and moon, as inconsistent with their science; which taught the immobility of the sun and moon, it seems, and was entirely ignorant of the modern discovery of the grand motions of the fixed stars, including our sun, and of the dependence of all the planets, including our earth and moon, upon that grand motion for the motive power of their revolutions.[132]
One wonders from what college the bishop came out ignorant of facts known to the boys of American common schools.
A great many of the bishop's blunders are occasioned by want of sense. The process is very simple. The sacredhistory is very brief. Only the headings of things are recorded. Much must be supplied by the common sense of the reader. The manners of the East are very different from ours. Three thousand years have greatly changed the face of the country. Ignore all this, and interpret the Pentateuch as though it consisted of the letters of Our Own Correspondent, and you will find difficulties on every page. Such is the style of Colenso's criticism. Assume that Moses gives a full and complete chronicle of all events which have happened since the creation, and then dispute the recorded facts because it can easily be shown he omitted many.
But the bishop has not the honor of discovering this method, or of founding this school of criticism. We have heard village critics of the loom and the forge discuss such questions as are handled by Colenso, and the Essays and Reviews, and often with much more acuteness and penetration. With whateclathas our village critic unhorsed the itinerant preacher with the inquiry, What became of the forks belonging to the nine and twenty knives which Ezra brought back from Babylon? but was, alas! himself routed in the moment of triumph by the inquiry as to the sex of the odd clean beasts of Noah's sevens. How often has our village blacksmith critic requested a sermon upon the genealogy of Melchizedek, which the minister agreed to furnish when our blacksmith could tell him the foundry which manufactured Tubal Cain's hammer and anvil. Lot's wife, the witch of Endor, Jonah's whale, the sundial of Ahaz, and the population of Nineveh, were all duly discussed, together with the bodies in which the angels dined with Abraham. Did the loaves and fishes miraculously multiply in numbers, or increase in size? Where did the angel get the flour to bake the cake for Elijah? Did our Lord catch the fish by net, or by miracle, which he used in the Lord's Dinner on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Butthequestion—which we marvel beyond measure that the bishop overlooks—alwayswas, Where did Cain get his wife? This is the fundamental question for such critics. The difficulty, it will be perceived, lies across the very threshold of the history. How did he stumble over it without record of his misadventure? It recurs, however, on every page. If the bishop will only answer that question, and introduce us politely to Cain's wife, I will engage that she will answer most of these other difficult questions. Had Seth a wife? How could Noah and his three sons build a ship larger than the Great Eastern? We can imagine the roars of laughter with which the bigger school-boys will greet the serious exhibition of their old tests of dullness, in a printed book, and by a learned bishop, as objections to the inspiration of the Bible. But the bishop does actually devote Chapter V. to the impossibility of Moses addressing all Israel; Chapter VI. to the extent of the camp compared with the priest's duties; Chapter XX. to the grave difficulty of the three priestly families consuming the offerings of some millions of people; which surely to a bishop of the Church of England should not be an unparalleled feat. Such chapters enable us to appreciate the mental caliber of our critic, and excuse us from argument with a man incapable of interpreting popular phrases. He would prove the associated press dispatches all a myth, because it is impossible for the House of Commons to appear at the bar of the House of Lords—six hundred men to stand on four square yards of floor; for McClellan to address the Army of the Potomac, which extended along a line of thirty miles; for Grant and Sherman—two men—to capture Vicksburg and thirty thousand prisoners! Manifestly impossible.
The most specious of all the sophistry spread over the volume is that contained in the Seventeenth Chapter, regarding the increase of Jacob's family, of seventy persons, to a nation of two or three millions, in Egypt, during the two hundred and fifteen years to which he confines the bondage.But it is only another case of Cain's wife. The Pentateuch gives us the list of Jacob's children and their wives, but makes no formal mention in that place of their servants and retainers. These, in Abraham's times, amounted to three hundred fencible men, or a population of fifteen hundred; who would have increased in Jacob's time to several thousands, capable of defending the border land of Goshen against the marauding Bedouin. And this population could easily increase to the three millions of the Exodus, at the same ratio in which the population of the United States is now increasing; so that it is a mere superfluity of naughtiness for the bishop to deny what the sacred historian so emphatically asserts: "That the people were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and the land was filled with them." But the bishop utterly ignores the people of theclan, and taking his slate and pencil ciphers out the impossibility of Jacob'sfamilyamounting to so many. And yet it is not impossible that in the four hundred and thirty years which the sacred historian so precisely asserts as the period of their sojourn in Egypt, Exodus xii. 40, the family alone might have multiplied as fast as the family of the famous Jonathan Edwards, which, in a hundred years after his death, numbered two thousand souls.
Peter Cartwright, the venerable Methodist minister, celebrated his eighty-seventh birthday on the first of September, 1871, at Pleasant Plains, Sangamon County, Illinois, surrounded by one hundred and twenty children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now, if this family of two persons could so increase in eighty-seven years, why could not Jacob's family, of seventy persons, increase in equal ratio? In that case, even in the two hundred and fifteen years to which the bishop limits the sojourn in Egypt, the Israelites would have amounted to over eight millions. If it be objected that this was a case of special blessing, we answer that the Israelites are expressly asserted to have beenspecially and wonderfully multiplied. There is, therefore, no improbability in Moses' numbers.
The bishop ascribes to Moses another of his own blunders; this time, however, in reading his Bible in plain English, which correctly translates the Hebrew—Exodus xiii. 2. The Lord commands Moses and Israel to "Sanctify to him every male that openeth the womb, both of man and beast," from the time of the death of the first-born of the Egyptians. The impropriety ofex post factolegislation, the reason assigned for this law, and the grammatical meaning of the language in the present tense, all combine to show that the law is prospective; and the number of the first-born, twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-five, afterward given in Numbers, shows plainly that this is the meaning, being about the proper increase of thirteen months. But the bishop strangely blunders into the notion that this is the number of all the first-born of Israel; only about one in forty-five or fifty, and therefore argues against the historical veracity of the Pentateuch. A good many of the bishop's blunders arise in this way from misreading his Bible.
He makes another blunder of this kind, and as usual charges it on Moses, in his misreading of Leviticus xxiii. 40, as if directing Israel to make booths of palm branches and willows at the feast of tabernacles, instead of bearing the palms of victory in triumph into the temple of God. The son of the chief rabbi of London ridicules the bishop's Hebrew scholarship here, saying that any Jewish child could have set him right; but had he read even his English translation carefully he need not have blundered here.
In connection with the subject of the numbers of the people we notice his tacit assumption—that Moses records everything necessary for a statistical table—in his criticisms on the numbers of the Danites and Levites, Chapters XVIII. and XVI.; and on Judah's family, Chapter II. Hetakes it for granted that because the Exodus took place in the lifetime of the fourth generation of some of the sons of Jacob, therefore there were none but four generations born in the two hundred and fifteen years to which he confines the bondage, and none but those whose names are recorded. This is a blunder of the same sort as if he should mistake the list of the British peerage for a census of all the families of Great Britain, and calculate the average duration of human life by the ages of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Palmerston. But here we have a wonderful instance of the providence which often makes objectors refute themselves. The chapter on Judah's family (II.) shows that in forty-two years Judah had grandchildren ten or twelve years old; as many Syrians, Persians, and Hindoos have at this day. But if six generations could thus be born in Syria, or India, in a century, why not in Egypt? And 1 Chronicles vii. 20, 21 enumerates ten generations of the sons of Ephraim; giving ample opportunity for the biblical increase.
Another set of the bishop's blunders is occasioned by his utter ignorance of camp-life, especially among the Arabs. In Chapter VIII. he assumes that all the people had tents, and the bishop orders them made of leather. But he concludes they could not possibly get them, nor if they had them could they carry them. By and by he provides them with two millions of cattle, however; and it is likely each of them had a skin, and was able to carry it for a while, while the Hebrews dwelt in the booths of the encampments they still commemorate in the feast of tabernacles. But the word "tents" is the common phrase for any kind of shelter in Scripture, including even houses in the expression, "To your tents, O Israel," used in the days of David.
In Chapter IX. he discusses the probability of their obtaining arms in Egypt. A week with one of the Union armies would show him how speedily freedmen can providethemselves with arms and learn tactics; and a short residence in Ireland would teach him the utter impossibility of preventing a discontented people from arming themselves even with firearms; much more when every grove furnished artillery. He protests that all Egypt could not furnish lambs enough for the passover; because in Natal an acre will only graze one sheep, forgetting that Moses was not raising sheep in Natal, but in the best of the land of Goshen, which, if as fertile as the county of Dorset in England, would easily keep five millions of sheep.
In Chapter X. he insists on the impossibility of giving warning of the passover, and subsequent march, in one day, to a population as large as London, scattered over two or three counties. Has he forgotten the straws carried over all Ireland in one night, and the Chupatties of the Indian Mutiny? The negro insurrection of Charleston was known by the negroes of Louisiana two days before their masters received the intelligence by mail. Critics know little of the power of the love of freedom. But there is no reason for the bishop's supposition that all the preparations for leaving were made in one day, save his own mistake of the Hebrew of Exodus xii. 12, as referring to the night of the day on which God spake to Moses, instead of the night of the day of which he was speaking, as the slightest reflection on the context shows.
In Chapter XI. the bishop assumes the functions of Major-General, and masses his army—rank, and file, wagon train, hospital, commissariat, contrabands, droves of cattle, and camp followers—into a mass of fifty front and twenty-two miles long. Very naturally he gets into a tremendous jam, out of which we have no intention of extricating him; merely remarking that bishops do not make good generals, and that Arab Sheikhs do not march in that way. They scatter themselves and their cattle over the whole country for forty or fifty miles, and have no confusion; and attend moreoverto Moses' sanitary camp regulations, in their several encampments.
In Chapter XII. he exerts himself to starve the cattle for want of pasture and water; garbling Moses' account of the wilderness for that purpose, Deuteronomy viii. 15, "Beware that thou forget not Jehovah, thy God, who led thee through the great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions,where there was no water." Here he stops, as if this was all that referred to the subject. But when we turn to the passage, we find that he omits the most material part of the speech. For Moses goes on to say, in the hearing of all Israel, who could certainly have contradicted him had the fact not been well known to them, "Who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint." Moses' account is quite self-consistent, and the bishop's garbling of it is dishonest. There were districts of Arabia so dry and sterile that but for this miraculous supply both men and beasts had perished; but the greater part of the country was simply uninhabited pasture land, sufficiently productive even now to support several Arab tribes; and much better wooded and watered then. The monuments of Egypt abundantly testify the number and power of its shepherd kings, who pastured their flocks upon it in their successive invasions of Egypt.
The bishop says, Chapter XIII., that the climax of inconsistencies between facts and figures is reached when we come to the notice by the Lord to Israel, contained in Exodus xxiii. 29, "I will not drive them, the Canaanites, out from before thee in one year, lest the land become desolate, and the beasts of the field multiply against thee." The argument is that a population of two millions was assigned to a territory of only eleven thousand square miles; and consequently would be more dense than the population of the agricultural region of England, where there is no danger of wild beasts multiplying.
But the objection is again based on a blunder, and a garbling of the text of Scripture. Had the bishop done himself and his readers the justice to complete the passage which he has half cited, by inserting the next two verses, he could have read verse thirty-one: "And I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river,"i. e., the Euphrates, as other passages show, Genesis xv. 18. That is to say, a territory five hundred miles long by one hundred miles broad, or fifty thousand square miles, was to be occupied by two millions of people. That is about the present population, and all travelers testify that three-fourths of it lies desolate. Prof. Porter saw seventy deserted towns and villages in Bashan alone. But for the rifle and gunpowder the wild beasts would now overpower the inhabitants.
By a wonderful providence, contemporaneously with these attacks, the Lord has raised up an army of scholars, travelers, and archæologists, whose explorations illustrate the Bible in a remarkable manner, throwing new light upon its history, poetry, and prophecy. It is refreshing to turn from the cavils of ignorant criticism to the clear light of discovered facts and imperishable monuments.
The Bible history has recently received a wonderful amount of illustration and confirmation from the researches of scholars and discoverers amid the ruins of Egypt, Persia, and Assyria; completely exploding the theory that this history was a comparatively recent composition, written long after the events which it records, and betraying its want of genuineness by the anachronisms and errors of description of historical and natural events with which it abounds. Wherever it differed from the statements of any Greek, or other heathen historian, it was forthwith alleged that Moses was wrong, and the profane author was right; and for a long time nobody could bring any evidence on the other side, because there were no contemporary records;the oldest heathen historian being a thousand years later than Moses. But by some strange inspiration, the Lord set a multitude of explorers to work upon the monuments of Egypt, deciphering the hieroglyphics which had so long puzzled the world, digging into the mounds which had for centuries covered the ruined palaces and cities of Persia and Assyria, and bringing to Europe ship-loads of recovered statues, marbles, cylinders, mummies, obelisks, papyrii, covered with all manner of pictures and inscriptions, civil, religious, and political, contemporary with the Bible history, and setting the best scholars of Europe to decipher and translate them. They are only, as yet, in the middle of their labors, but already so much has been discovered as to warrant the assertion that before they have finished they will furnish full corroboration of all the great outlines of Old Testament history.
Egypt was the first to come forward in furnishing her quota of commentary to the corroboration of the Books of Moses. Hengstenberg'sEgypt and the Books of Moses, Wilkinson'sAncient Egyptians, and Osburn'sMonumental History of Egypt, furnish almost a commentary upon Moses' account of Egyptian affairs, confirming every biblical allusion to Egypt as historically correct, and revealing to us even the natural causes of the seven years high Nile and plenteous harvests; in the overflow of the great central lake in Nubia wearing away the embankment; and of the seven years subsequent low Nile and famine, by the drought consequent on this immense drainage. The very titles of Joseph as, "Director of the Full and Empty Irrigating Canals," "Steward of the Granaries," etc. etc., are still to be read on his tomb at Sakkarah,[133]and much more of the same sort.
F. Newman ridicules the Bible narrative of Shishak'sexpedition against Rehoboam as a mere fictitious embellishment of an otherwise tame narrative;[134]but Egyptologists, like Stuart, Poole, and Brugsch, have examined the inscription of Shishak, at Karnak, and allege that it fully corroborates the Scripture history.[135]
Some of the most obscure portions of the Bible, which have long been stumbling-blocks to commentators and historians, are now thus illuminated by the light of modern discoveries of monuments and inscriptions found in the ruins of the ancient cities of Persia and Assyria, upon which they in turn cast such light as to enable the discoveries of Layard and Rawlinson to assume an intelligible coherency. The tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis, written a thousand years before Herodotus or Manetho, and which Rationalistic commentators were so long "unable to verify by their own consciousness," and which were therefore consigned to the realm of mythology, are now acknowledged by the first scholars and discoverers to stand at the head of the page of reliable history, and to form the basis of all scientific ethnography.
The diversity of languages among mankind seems not to have attracted the attention of the Greek philosophers. When modern inquirers began to investigate the matter, they were well-nigh confounded by the multitude of dialects and languages. The labor of three generations of scholars has been expended upon philology, the most ancient monument of mankind. And the result is that all the various languages of earth have at length been classified under three tongues—the Shemitic, the Aryan, and the Turanian. But this most recent discovery of comparative philology was narrated by Moses thirty centuries ago, with the historical account of the origin of the division of theprimeval family into three separate colonies, colonizing the earth after their families and after their tongues.—Genesis x. 32. The discovery of this coincidence fills Bunsen with astonishment. "Comparative philology," he says, "would have been compelled to set forth as a postulate the supposition of some such division of languages in Asia, especially on the ground of the relation of the Egyptian language to the Shemitic, even if the Bible had not assured us of the truth of this great historical event. It is truly wonderful; it is a matter of astonishment; it is more than a mere astounding fact that something so purely historical, and yet divinely fixed—something so conformable to reason, and yet not to be conceived of as a mere natural development—is here related to us out of the oldest primeval period, and which now for the first time, through the new science of philology, has become capable of being historically and philosophically explained."
The brief, yet definite, assertions of the Hamitic origin of the old empire of Babylon, and of an Asiatic Cush or Ethiopia, which have been so repeatedly charged against the Bible as blunders, even by some profound scholars, have been vindicated by the recent discoveries in the mounds of Chaldea Proper of multitudes of inscriptions in a language which Sir H. Rawlinson affirms "is decidedly Cushite or Ethiopian," and the modern languages to which it makes the nearest approaches are those of Southern Arabia and Abyssinia. The old traditions have then been confirmed by comparative philology, and both are side lights to Scripture. * * * "The primitive race which bore sway in Chaldea Proper is demonstrated to have belonged to this Ethnic type."[136]
"The conquest of Palestine is recorded on the annals of Sennacherib, and the cylinder of Tiglath-Pileser describeshis invasion of Palestine. The names of Jehu, of Amaziah, of Hezekiah, of Omri, Ahaz, and Uzziah have been made out.The very clay which sealed the treaty between the kings of Judah and Assyria, with the impresses of their joint seals upon it, is preserved in the Nineveh gallery.The library of Assurbanipal, in twenty thousand fragments, contains among other scientific treatises, such as astronomical notices, grammatical essays, tables of verbs, genealogies, etc., an historico-geographical account of Babylonia and the surrounding countries. As far as these fragments have been translated, the district and tribal names given in the Bible correspond very closely with them."[137]
But this is not the only illustration and confirmation which these old Assyrian monuments offer to the Sacred Writings. From the first invasion of the Assyrians, under Tiglath-Pileser, to the restoration of Israel from Babylon, and the rebuilding of the temple, under Darius, the Bible history is full of references to the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian monarchies, and their affairs with Israel and Judah. And the inscribed tablets, cylinders, and temple tablets, and statues, are full of references which directly or indirectly elucidate and corroborate the Bible history, attesting to skeptics the truthfulness of its wonderful narrative; the very stones of Nineveh, and the ruined palaces of Babylon and Assyria, crying out in vindication of the veracity of the Bible. Already so much has been discovered as to fill several volumes, to which we must refer the reader for details.[138]
One of the alleged historical errors greatly insisted on by Rationalistic commentators was the statement by Daniel, that Belshazzar was King of Babylon when it was taken by theMedo-Persians, and that he was slain at the storming of the city. Herodotus and Berosus had stated that Nabonnidus was king, and that he was not in the city then, but was afterward taken prisoner and treated generously by Cyrus. These accounts seemed contradictory; and as Herodotus and Berosus were generally esteemed respectable historians, the Rationalists ridicule Daniel as an erroneous writer of history. But one of Sir H. Rawlinson's discoveries has vindicated the prophet, and also explained how the historians were truthful too. W. Taylor, one of Rawlinson's assistants, discovered an inscribed cylinder in Ur of the Chaldees containing an account of the reign of this very Nabonnidus, which Sir Henry describes in a letter to theAthenæum, (1854, page 341): "The most important facts, however, which they disclose are that the eldest son of Nabonnidus was named Bel-shar-ezar, and that he was admitted by his father to a share in the government." This name is undoubtedly the Belshazzar of Daniel, and thus furnishes a key to the explanation of that great historical problem which has hitherto defied solution. We can now understand how Belshazzar, asjoint-kingwith his father, may have been Governor of Babylon when the city was attacked by the combined forces of the Medes and Persians, and may have perished in the assault which followed; while Nabonnidus, leading a force to the relief of the place, was defeated, and was obliged to take refuge in Borsippa, capitulating after a short resistance, and being subsequently assigned, according to Berosus, to an honorable retirement in Carmania. A minute coincidence also is thus brought to light, showing the accuracy of the inspired historian in one of the details of his narrative. Belshazzar elevates him to the position of Grand Vizier, or Prime Minister, which, under ordinary circumstances, would be thesecondplace of dignity in the empire. But Daniel represents the king as raising him to thethirdplace, which we now see to bestrictly correct, since Belshazzar himself was the second in rank. Thus the weapons discharged against the Bible ever recoil upon the heads of its assailants.
Not only among the monuments of the great historic nations do we now discover corroborations of Scripture, the records and monuments of even obscure nations are most strangely turning up and being discovered, after lying unnoticed for centuries, as if God had reserved their testimony for the time when it would be needed and valued. The Bible does not refer to the history of the surrounding nations, save in connection with their relations to Israel; but it is surprising to see how many of these references are corroborated by recent discoveries. The Bible, for instance, describes[139]Omri as establishing a kingdom with his capital at Samaria, and he and his son, Ahab, making war on Mesha, King of Moab, conquering him and making him pay an annual tribute of one hundred thousand lambs and one hundred thousand rams, with the wool. But it came to pass that when Ahab was dead that the King of Moab rebelled against the King of Israel.
Now amid the perpetual wars of the petty kingdoms of Asia, and after the utter extirpation of the Moabitish nation, the chances were millions to one against our recovering any historical monuments whatever of that people; and almost infinite against recovering any which should coincide with the half dozen allusions to them in the Bible. But Mr. Klein discovered in the ruins of Dibon, one of the ancient cities of Moab, and Capt. Warren recovered, the fragments of the now famous Moabite Stone, on which, in the old Samaritan characters, we read: "I, Mesha, son of Jobin, King of Moab. My father reigned over Moab thirty years, and I reigned after my father. I erected this altar unto Chemosh, who granted me victory over mine enemies, thepeople of Omri, King of Israel, who, together with his son, Ahab, oppressed Moab a long time—even forty years,"[140]etc.
But space forbids even the enumeration of the corroborations of Bible history from the days of Abraham to the time of the first census of the Roman Empire, when Cyrenius was Governor of Syria the second time. In every instance where its monuments have spoken of biblical affairs they have confirmed the accuracy of the Bible history. The history of Great Britain, or of the United States, is not more authentic than, and not so accurate as, the long line of history recorded in the Bible. No important error has been proven in any of its historical statements of the world's history for forty centuries. This accuracy contrasted with the acknowledged errors of the best historians, is proof to every candid mind of divine direction and help to the sacred writers.
Sweeping away, then, these cobwebs, we open the volume and form our opinion of its genuineness and authenticity from its own internal evidences—its nature and contents—and from the way in which it was used by the Hebrew nation.
It is important at the outset to know how long these documents have undoubtedly existed. No one denies that they were in existence eighteen hundred years ago. Indeed, the first literary attack on them which has been recorded was made about that time; and Josephus' defense of the Scriptures against Apion still exists. The very same writings which the Protestant churches now acknowledge as canonical, and none other, were then acknowledged to be of divine authority by the Jews. It is true they bound their Bibles differently from ours, but the contents were the very same. They made up their parchments of the thirty-nine books in twenty-two rolls or volumes, one for every letter of their alphabet; putting Judges and Ruth,the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, the two books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Jeremiah's Prophecy and Lamentations, and the twelve minor prophets, in one volume respectively. They also distinguished the five books of Moses as,The Law; the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon as,The Psalms; and all the remainder as,The Prophets.[141]Moreover, it is well known that two hundred and eighty-two years before the Christian era, these writings were translated into Greek and widely circulated in all parts of the world. They were, in fact, not only popular, but received as of divine authority by the Jews at that time, read in their synagogues in public worship, and regarded with sacred reverence. How did they come to receive them in this manner?
These writings were not only acknowledged by the Jews; their bitterest enemies—the Samaritans—owned the divine authority of the five books of Moses, and preserve an ancient copy of them, differing in no essential particular from the Hebrew version, to this day. The Samaritans always bore to the Hebrews such a relation as Mohammedans do to Christians, and the Hebrews returned the grudge with interest: "For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." These heathen Babylonians, four centuries or more before the Christian era, were somehow induced to receive the Pentateuch as of divine authority, and to frame some sort of religion upon it. Their enmity to the Jews is conclusive proof that, since that time, neither Jews nor Samaritans have altered the text; else the manuscripts would show the discrepancy.
These books are not such as any person would forge to gain popularity, or to make money by. There is nothing in them to bribe the good opinion of influential people, orcatch the favor of the multitude. On the contrary, their stern severity, and unsparing denunciation of popular vice and profitable sin must have secured their rejection by the Jewish people, had they not been constrained by undeniable evidence to acknowledge their divine authority. They set out with the assertion of the divine authority of the law of Moses, and everywhere sharply reprove princes, priests, and people for breaking it. The prophets, so far from seeking popularity, are foolhardy enough to denounce the bonnets, hoops, and flounces of the ladies, and to cry, Woe! against the regular business of the most respectable note-shavers,[142]to croak against the march of intellect, and shake public confidence in the prosperity of their great country,[143]to ally themselves with fanatic abolitionists, and introduce agitating political questions into the pulpit; crying,Woe to him that useth his neighbor's service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.[144]To crown all, they organized abolition clubs to procure immediate emancipation, and published incendiary proclamations in the cities of the slaveholders,[145]and, strange to say, they were allowed to escape with their lives; and their writings were held sacred by the children of those very men and women they so unsparingly denounced; a conclusive proof that the calamities they predicted had compelled them to acknowledge these prophets as the heralds of God. The proof must have been conclusive, indeed, which compelled the Jews to acknowledge the writings of the prophets as sacred.
Another very striking feature of these writings is, their mutual connection with each other. They were written atvarious intervals, during a period of a thousand years' duration, by shepherds and kings, by prophets and priests, by governors of States and gatherers of sycamore fruit; in deserts and in palaces, in camps and in cities, in Egypt and Syria, in Arabia and Babylon; under the iron heel of despotic oppression, and amid the liberty of the most democratic republic the world ever saw; yet, circumstances, and lapse of time, they ever hold to one great theme, always assert the same great principles, and perpetually claim connection with the writers who have preceded them. There is nothing like this in the histories of other nations. Two centuries will work such changes of opinion, that you can not find nowadays any historian who approves the sentiments of Pepys or Clarendon, whatever use he may make of their facts. But the historians of the Bible not only refer to their predecessors' writings, but refer to them as of acknowledged divine authority. Thus the very latest of these books gives the weight of its testimony to the first—"And they set the priests in their divisions, and the Levites in their courses for the service of God, which is at Jerusalem, as it is written in the book of Moses."[146]And Daniel spake of the books of Moses as well known when he says, "Therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of God."[147]The shortest book in the Old Testament—the prophecy of Obadiah, consisting only of twenty sentences—contains twenty-five allusions to the preceding histories and laws. The last of the prophets shuts up the volume with a command to "Remember the law of Moses." In fact, just as the epistles prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the gospels; so do the prophets prove the existence and acknowledged authority ofthe law of Moses. They were acknowledged not merely by one generation of the Jewish people, but by the nation during the whole period of its national existence; and they are of such a character, that they must then, and now, be taken as one whole—all accepted, or all rejected together.
The reader of the Old Testament will speedily find that these writings are not merely a connected history of the nation, of great general interest, like Bancroft's or Macaulay's, but of no such special interest to any individual as to force him, by a sense of self-interest, or the danger of loss of liberty or property, to correct their errors. On the contrary, every farmer in Palestine was deeply concerned in the truth and accuracy of the Bible; for it contained not only the general boundaries of the country, and of the particular tribes, like the survey of the Maine boundary, or of Mason and Dixon's line, but it delineated particular estates, also, and was, in fact, the report of the Surveyor-General, deposited in the county court for reference, in case of any litigation about sale or inheritance of property.[148]The genealogies of the tribes and families were also preserved in these writings; and on the authenticity and correctness of these records, the inheritance of every farm in the land depended; for as no lease ran more than fifty years, every farm returned to the heirs of the original settler at the year of jubilee.[149]Thus every Jewish farmer had a direct interest in these sacred records; and it would be just as hard to forge records for the county courts of Ohio, and pass them off upon the citizens as genuine, and plead them in the courts as valid, as to impose at first, or falsify afterward, the records of the commonwealth of Israel.
This will appear more clearly when we consider that they contained also the laws of the land—the Constitutionof the United States of Israel, with the statutes at large—according to which every house, and farm, and garden in the whole country was possessed, every court of justice was guided,[150]every election was held, from the election of a petty constable, to that of Governor of the State,[151]and the militia enrolled, mustered, officered, and called out to the field of battle.[152]These laws prescribed the way in which every house must be built, regulated the weaver in weaving his cloth, and the tailor in making it, and the cooking of every breakfast, dinner and supper eaten by an Israelite over the world, from that day to this.[153]Now, let any one who thinks it would be an easy matter to forge such a series of documents, and get people to receive and obey them, try his hand in making a volume of Acts of Assembly, and passing it off upon the people of Ohio for genuine. Let him bring an action into one of the courts, and persuade the judges to give a decision in his favor, upon the strength of his forged or falsified statutes, and then he may hope to convince us that the laws of Moses are simply a collection of religious tracts, which came to be held sacred through lapse of time, nobody knows how or why.
Nor were these laws, and the usages thus established, common, and such as the people would be ready easily to adopt. On the contrary, Moses repeatedly asserts, and all ancient history shows, that they were quite peculiar to the Hebrew people then; and they are to this day confined to the republics which, like our own, have drawn their ideas from the Bible. It is enough to name the common law and trial by jury; the armed nation; the right of free public assembly, free speech, free passport, and free trade; the election of civil, judicial, and military officers by universalsuffrage; the division of the land in fee-simple among the whole people; the rights of women to hold real estate in their own right, to speak in public assemblies, and to prophetic functions; and the support of religion by the voluntary offerings of the people.
Our own republic resembles Israel as a daughter her mother. The land of liberty was the Bible country. The first republic which the world ever saw was designed by Almighty God, and revealed to the world in the Bible, and by the example of the United States of Israel. From that pattern our forefathers copied all the grand features of our glorious republic—the equitable distribution of the land, in fee-simple, among the people; securing them, by the jubilee, against the introduction of feudal tenure, and landlordism; the abolition of a standing army, and the defense of the country by the militia; the election of all officers, civil and military, from the town constable, and the justice of the peace, up to the president of the republic, the Lord Jehovah himself, by universal suffrage—and the Federal Union of the twelve tribes into one nation, with township, county, and state governments, with a common law, common schools, and the equality of all citizens before the law; the right of naturalization; sanitary and social institutions, such as modern philanthropists are only beginning to dream of, for the elevation of the people; and all this avowedly held in trust for all mankind, as a fountain of blessings for all the families of the earth. No such ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, ever existed among the wisest heathen nations—the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans. On the face of the whole earth there never was, and there is not to-day, a free republic outside of the light and liberty of the Bible. The so-called republics of Athens and Rome were hideous aristocracies, and tyrannies. From the Bible the men of the Continental Congress learned the grand truth, which they emblazoned on the forefront oftheir immortal Declaration of Independence, "That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" thus planting the rights of man upon the only immovable basis—the throne of the eternal God.
But there were other features of the Mosaic legislation so far in advance of the ideas of our modern Materialism as not to have been even yet suggested in our social congresses, nor even dreamt of by our most advanced Christian philanthropists, in their endeavors after the elevation of the masses. Moses' idea was the prevention of pauperism, and of the conflict between labor and capital, and of the gambling speculating fever, and the formation of an independent, intelligent, joyous, religious, healthy, and thrifty people, well-bred, well-fed, well-lodged, able to fight their foes on the battle-field, to reap their ridge on the harvest-field, to enjoy the blessings of healthy families, and to rejoice before the Lord. A volume would be needed to develop the social bearings of the laws of the Hebrews. We can only suggest for consideration the laws regarding inalienability of the homestead, and the bankrupt law; the laws of marriage and inheritance; the laws of servitude and wages; the sanitary laws regarding building, clothing, bathing, eating, and contagion; the protection of the rights of animals; the dispersion of the educated class; and the three great national festivals, during which the whole people were released from the labors of the field, and of the kitchen, and enjoyed during the eight summer days of each picnic such an excitement of social enjoyment, religious fervor, and political patriotism, as modern Christendom anticipates in the millennium, but which neither Church nor State has, as yet, systematically attempted to nurture.
That the Hebrews did not obey the law, and so did not enjoy the happiness obedience would have secured, is only what God foresaw, and foretold repeatedly, with solemnwarning of the disastrous degradation to which disobedience to God's laws must ever reduce man. Nevertheless, even their very imperfect conformity to these institutions gave them such superiority of blood and breeding to their ungodly neighbors, that they have survived the most powerful nations, and, in spite of dispersion, exile, disfranchisement, and persecution, they exist as a distinct people, superior intellectually, commercially, and morally to all the heathen nations at this day. How much higher had been their position had they fully obeyed the law.
Our argument is, that this law of liberty, equality, fraternity, and religion, was worthy of our Father in heaven, and a seed of blessing to all the families of the earth.
To a Jew living before the coming of Christ, the unanimous testimony of his nation, confirmed by all the commemorative observances of the sacrifices, the passover, the Sabbath, and the jubilee, by the reading of the law and the prophets, and the singing of the historical psalms in the temple and the synagogues, by the execution of the laws of Moses in the courts, and by the very existence of his nation as a distinct people, separate from all the other nations—could leave no doubt that laws so peculiar and beneficent must have been enacted by a wisdom superior to that of man, and their observance imposed by divine authority; nor that the miracles by which these laws were authenticated, and the national existence of the people of Israel was secured, were genuine, and divine. The chain of historical and internal evidence is too strong to be broken, while the Jewish nation exists.
But yet this historical and internal evidence of the authority of the Old Testament is but the smallest part of that which we possess, who have the testimony of Christ on this subject. For this testimony removes the question from the mists of antiquity, and even from the debatable ground of historic certainty, and resolves the whole process ofsearching for, and comparing and examining a host of second-hand witnesses, into the easy and certain one of hearing the Author himself say, whether he acknowledges this Book to be his or not. Christians receive the Old Testament as the Word of God, because Jesus says so.
Now, reader, it is of the utmost importance that you should stop just here, and give a plain, confident answer to these questions: Dost thou believe upon the Son of God? Is Jesus the Messiah of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write? Are you perfectly satisfied of the truth of the New Testament, and willing to venture your eternal salvation upon the words of Christ contained in it?
For, if not, of what use is it for you to trouble yourself about the Old Testament? You might as well waste your time in examining the genuineness of the bills of a broken bank; they may be genuine or they may be forgeries; but who cares? They will never be paid. If the first promises of the bank of heaven, to send the Messiah eighteen hundred years ago, have been fulfilled, its other paper may be also valuable; if not, it must be equally worthless. If the New Testament be not of divine authority, you may place the prophets on the same shelf with the Poems of Ossian; and then follows the serious consequence, that there is not a grain of hope left for you or for any man on earth. If Jesus be indeed an Almighty Savior, and if he has indeed risen from the dead, then, through the power of his mighty love, your filthy soul may be washed from its sins, and your mortal body may be raised from the rottenness of the grave. But if Christ be not risen, you are yet in your sins. You have no notion that any of the gods of the heathen, or the precepts of the Koran, can purify your heart. You know well that Infidelity never sanctified any of your comrades. Conscience tells you that you are not any better now than you were a year ago, but worse. You are yet in your sins; and in them you must live and die! Aye, while yourimmortal soul lives, while the laws of human nature continue, you must carry those brands of infamy on your character, and daily progress from bad to worse; sinking deeper and deeper in the contempt of all intelligent beings; and, were there no other avenger, in the remorse and despair of your own mind, you must experience the horrors of perdition. Jesus, able to save to the uttermost, all that come unto God by him, is your only hope. There is none other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved. If his gospel be true, you may be saved; if it is false, you must be damned.
If you have the shadow of a doubt of the truth of the New Testament, go over the subject again; re-read the former chapters of this book; pray to God for light and truth; above all, read the Book again and again; and if, in your case, as in that of one of the most famous teachers of German Neology—De Wette—the careful study of the New Testament impels you to rush through all the mists of doubt to the higher standpoint of a lofty faith, and the sunshine of real religion; and if with him you can now say, "Only this one thing I know, that in no other name is there salvation than in the name of Jesus Christ the crucified, and that for humanity there is nothing higher than the incarnation of Deity set before us in him, and the kingdom of God established by him,"[154]you may then go on with your inquiry into the divine authority of the Old Testament. With the Master himself before you, the Author, the Inspirer, by whom, and for whom, the prophets spake, and to whom all the Scriptures point, you will not think of wasting time in examining second-hand evidence; but go direct to Jesus himself. His testimony will not be merely so much additional testimony—another candle added to the chandelier by whose light you have perused the evidences of theScriptures; it will shine out on your soul as the light of the Sun of Righteousness with healing on his wings. Every word from his lips will awaken in your heart the voice from heaven, "This is my beloved Son. Hear him." What saith Christ, then, respecting the Old Testament?