THE BIBLE FOR THE YOUNG.*
The Bible for Young People—translated from the Dutch into plain, intelligible English by Mr. Wicksteed—is an attempt to meet a Practical difficulty of much interest to those who retain the old faith that the Bible has a message from God to men, though they have learnt that it is a national literature, which has been formed Under like conditions, and must be studied by like methods, with those of all other literatures. In religion, no less than in morals, * The Bible for Young People. By Dr. H. Oort and Dr. I. Hooykaas, with the assistance of Dr. A. Kuenen. Vol. I. Prepared by Dr. H. Oort. Translated from the Dutch by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A. London: Williams and Norgato. 1873.
The School aad Childreo's Bible. Prepared under the superintendence of the Rev. William Rogers, M.A., Prebendary of St. Paul's, the. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1873. the greatest reverence is due to the young ; and now that we can no longer honestly tell our children, as our fathers or mothers could tell us, that the Old or even the New Testament narratives relate events in all things exactly as they occurred, the question arises how we can best impart to them our new critical knowledge in the matter, in the form really best suited to their intellectual as well as spiritual capacities. The Jewish literature, naturalised for us in the purest and noblest forms of our own language, has for every English-speaking child all the charms and all the use E which the Greek and Roman literatures offer only to a few. And ;I those of us who in our own childhood more than half believed the ' stories of Homer, awl Livy, and Plutarch, and still remember the splendour of a light which has since faded into common day, may anxiously ask ourselves how far—and in what way—we must help our children to look beyond those "clouds of glory" which bang over the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the con- fidence that the blue sky of truth is, after all, the best. For the imaginative powers are not less necessary than the logical and critical for the thorough apprehension of truth. This is so with the physical sciences ; and not less with history, philosophy, and theology.
The plan of the volume before us is first to give an intro- ductory sketch of the history of Israel from the Exodus under Moses to the time of Christ, and then to follow into critical detail the whole of the pre-Mosaic narratives which make up the book of Genesis. These are retold, for the most part, in simple as well as vigorous language, bringing out the several features which might be overlooked, till so noticed, in the old familiar farus, in a manner which shows that in most cases the writer appreciates both their beauty and their spiritual worth, while he points out with the quiet force of real learning the difficulties or impossibilities in the way of accepting these stories as actual history. We have some gravO exceptions to take both as to the method and the results of the book, but we are therefore the more anxious to do justice to its learning and piety. There is at times, indeed, a somewhat too clerical tone in it, which will not add to its at- tractiveness to "young people," while we fear it will not disarm that unfair theological hostility with which it is certain to be attacked. It thus speaks of "the character of the Bible" :—
" From various points of view it deserves to be highly prized. It is of inestimable value, for instance, for our knowledge of antiquity, since it contains almost our only authorities for the history of Israel and the origin of Christianity. Some parts of it, too, have seldom been equalled as works of art, and may therefore servo to ennoble our taste and elevate our sense of beauty. But, above all, the Bible is the book of religion. Observe, we do not say,—the book of our religion, but of religion. Not that we would treat the other sacred books as of no value. Far from it. Hindoos and Persians, Egyptians and Greeks, have thought of God and the invisible as earnestly as the Israelites; and what the men of greatest piety and genius among those peoples have believed, what the founders of religion or the philosophers among them have declared, so far as it has been preserved to us in writing, not only in their sacred books, but elsewhere too, furnish no small amount that might safely be placed by the side of many portions of the Old Testament at least. Nor can we assert that every part of the Bible gives us a pure reflection of God's being and God's will. Time after time we shall be compelled to allow that the writers of the books of the Bible wore men,—constantly going astray, as such, in their search for the way to God. But we call the Bible the book of religion because the place of honour in the life of mankind, and of each man in particular, belongs to the person of Jesus, and because it is upon Jesus that the whole Bible turns. . . . . . We hope we shall never lose sight of the fact that the Bible is the book of religion while we are speaking of its stories, and that 80 we may gradually find a direct or indirect answer to the questions, Who and what is God for us?' and What are we to do, and what to leave undone ? ' for it is our heartfelt desire and the highest object of our efforts to quicken the conscience of our readers, and to make their religious feelings deeper and purer. Nor do we leave this object out of view in contributing to their knowledge, more especially of the history of the Israelite and the Christian religion, for we believe that this history clears our insight into the way of Goa with man, and gives us the key to many perplexing facts in the region of religion."
The devout spirit of this passage is greater than its intellectual force ; and this is a characteristic feature of the whole book. Another extract will make this plainer, and show what are the chief defects of the author's method. After a graphic reproduc- tion of the Hebrew "legend of the Flood," he goes on :—
" But whatever the source may have been from which our writers drew the old story, they clothed it according to their own ideas, and we therefore learn from it what they thought of God, andof his relation to mankind. From this point of view the story inspires us with no great respect. On the contrary, it leading ideas are perverted and superstitious. Nay, the writer who uses the name Yahveh, to whom we owe the stories about paradise and the Cainites, actually repels us. For how does he make his God think and act with regard to mankind ? He is deeply grieved because there is nothing but evil in man. Noah alone is an exception to the rule. So all created things to which life has been given are destroye4 ex- cept the men and beasts secured within the Ark. But after the flood, when Yahveh smelt Noah's sacrifice, half pleased by the offering, half vexed to think of the futility of what he had just done, he said, 'I will never destroy the earth again for the guilt of men, for they are bad from their very birth ; so what is the use of my destroying them ?' Of whom is this Israelite writer speaking ? As for his repre- senting his Yahveh in the form of a man, we know that he did that before, and all through the writings of the Israelites we Come upon this anthropomorphism (representations of the Supreme Being under human forms) again and again. Even this we do not always find edifying, but mindful of the fact that man can never form a true conception of Deity, or find adequate expressions in which to speak of it, we need not be distressed when anyone speaks of God's hand or foot, God's heart or eye, God's anger or love. We ourselves sometimes use expressions of this kind without the smallest hesitation; and therefore, even when we read that God smelt a sacrifice, or that he repented of having made mankind, the necessity of using forms of speech concerning God which are borrowed from the life of man may be admitted an excuse ; although we know that 'God is not a man that he should repent.' But in this story the whole conduct of Yahveh is unworthy. We should be offended in such behaviour in a man. To destroy his work because it had not turned out particu- larly well, and then to say drily that he really need not have done so, for, after all, the result will never be any better,—such conduct would not speak very well for the character of a man, and yet it is ascribed by this writer to his God ! Surely a writer who can make such repro- bentations can have no very exalted conception of his God."
If our author's intellectual force were equal to his learning and religious feeling, be might surely here have had "the courage of his opinions" about anthropomorphism, and have applied them to the whole of this attempt of Hebrew mythology to explain certain moral and physical phenomena of the universe. He knows and explains clearly what anthropomorphism is, but yet is too fearful of falling back into superstitious orthodoxy, to apply his own exsplanation consistently and completely. Why is it per- missible for the myth-writer to say that Yahveh repents that he made man, but not to say that he will bear with, and not utterly destroy, this imperfect work, with the hope that it may, after all, improve? Ottfried Muller does not treat Greek mythology thus hardly. But with the rarest exceptions, we may say of our new Biblical criticism, "Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it." Just as a modern form of philosophy has been defined as Calvinism with the Christianity left out, so the Biblical writers are required to come up to the standard of verbal inspiration, though their inspiration is no longer admitted. This ancient legend is first shown to exhibit the same primitive habits of mind as all other legends of like antiquity, and then its author is masle a moral offender for not thinking and writing in the forms of nineteenth-century. theology. The writing " Yahveh " for Jehovah, and spelling "God" with a small "g," here and through- out the volume, are other instances of the like want of intellectual grasp in the endeavour to combine Christian morality with his- torical criticism of the Old Testament. Without questioning the learning of these great Dutch scholars, we venture to doubt whether "Yahveh" in the mouth of an Englishman will express the Hebrew sound of "the ineffable Name" much more exactly than "Jehovah"; and even if this doubt were removed, we should see no more neces- sity for such purism than for adopting a new pronunciation of Zeus or Jupiter, in order to represent the original better. But this is not all. It is an historical fact—and Dr. Oort has recognised it clearly in the first extract we have given above—that our actual Christian worship of God is the worship of the God of the Jews in a sense in which it is not the worship of Zeus or Jupiter. We could not sub- stitute Zeus or Jupiter for the " God of Bethel" in the well-known hymn in which He is appealed to in our churches as the God of our fathers and ourselves. Mr. Arnold, though his theology does not forbid him to define God as a "tendency," insists on marking this unbroken chain of history by retaining the "Loin)" of our Authorised Version rather than returning to Jehovah ; and at least the latter name may be kept,, without excluding any of that critical ioquiry which Dr. Oort would make into the gradual enlargement and elevation of the Hebrew idea of the Godhead.
The intention of the other volume before us—the School and Children's "to present the Bible in a form which shall be shorter, and at the same time better adapted for the use of children or young persons." It leaves out those parts which are uninteresting to children or unfitting for them to read, and though a few passages have been kept which would certainly be better omitted, the book will be found a very useful one for its purpose.
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