BOOKS.
MR. MYERS ON CHRISTIANITY AND THE BIBLE.*
WE have now before us the second part of Mr. Myers's Catholic Thoughts, and as we ventured to anticipate in our former article, we find that the author's teaching on the relation of the Bible to Christianity and Hebrew monotheism is even more suggestive and more valuable than his conclusions, profound as these are, on the relation of the Church to the individual Christian. And perhaps it may be as well to state at the outset that if ,Mr. Myers's conceptions of the nature and function of the Christian Church were • Cutholie Thoughts on Me Bible and Theology. By the late Frederic Myers, M.A, Perpetual Curate of St. John's, Keswick• London: Isbister and Co. 1874.
luminously expository of the principles enunciated in Coleridge's
Church and State, the elaborate, reverent, but fearless and com- prehensive discussions concerning the nature and authority of Scripture contained in the present volume, may be regarded as an amplification of the fruitful hints on " inspiration " thrown out by Coleridge in the Confessions (9'. an Inquiring Spirit.
But our readers would entirely mistake our object, if they sup- posed that by this special reference to Coleridge we implied the least derogation from the great claims which Mr. Myers has established for himself in the present volume, on the thoughtful consideration of all Biblical students, or on the gratitude of all those who, loving the Bible much, yet believe that in the person and teaching of Christ there are mysteries of light which transcend indefinitely the limits of the loftiest ascriptions, regarding either or both, which are to be found in the words of Apostles or Evan- gelists. Indeed, we are so far from being guilty of any such paltry depreciation, that it is rather a matter of difficulty with the present writer to express adequately his recognition of the worth and genuine originality of the teaching of Mr. Myers on the great question of the constitution and function of the Bible, of the New Testament in particular, without seeming to employ the language of mere undiscriminating eulogy. For it is his deliberate opinion that we do not yet possess in our insular literature any work which can be regarded as either occupying the same ground, or as worthy to be the substitute for that now lying before us. Cole- ridge, in his brief oracular statements, "uttered the seeds of things." In the pages of Mr. Myers we have a ripe and abundant harvest. It is almost superfluous to observe that whilst Mr.
Myers bestows the freest handling on the literature of the various documents of which the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures consist, his reverence for the Bible as a whole is of a character so loyal and profound as should still the apprehensions of the most con- servative of holders of literal inspiration. The Bible does not lose, but gain immensely in moral and spiritual power, when studied from the point of view which is occupied by Mr. Myers. The following are his own words :—
" These writings, as a whole, are generically different from all others in character and authority ; of incomparably greater dignity, of immea- surably higher worth, even emphatically sacred; a special divine gift to man, wholly inestimable, and one which it is impossible to regard with too much either of reverence or of gratitude. Indeed, clearly on its first aspect, there lies an impress of Divinity on the Bible not visible else- where. The Spirit of God so moves upon the face of its pages, that, compared with all other Scriptures, the Bible is Holy, they profane. This book is a record not merely of the most valuable of man's specu- lations and discoveries concerning truth, but emphatically of God's revelations and instructions concerning it ; not merely an exposition of such laws and precepts as the reasonings and intuitions and sentiments of men have agreed to pronounce the wisest and the worthiest, but of such direct and special communications of the Divine Spirit to the spirits of individual men, as disclose Purposes of God, and Sanctions of Duty, and Promises of Help, which no man by searching could find out, but which it is the everlasting life of man to take hoed to, and his spiritual death to disregard."
If .apart from the special—we might indeed rather say the unique—contents of the Bible, we look for a moment at its outward history, and endeavour to contemplate the influence for good which it has exerted in the world, and the grand web.of interests and events which have been, and are, connected with it ; if we think of the number of individual souls which this Book has quickened, and nourished, and blessed, or of the magnitude and variety of the institutions to which it has given rise ; if we reflect on the way in which it has stirred, and purified, and elevated the thoughts and feelings, and even the very words, of men ; and if we note how its influences have been augmented just in proportion as the ages have become more spiritual and cultivated, we have, according to Mr. Myers, considerations which immediately, and of themselves, must compel every de- vout soul to render to the Bible the profoundest homage. But whilst the Bible is all this, and more than all this, Mr. Myers is specially careful to tell us that the Book itself is not the Revela- tion, but rather its reflection and record, herein drawing a dis- tinction which we have long held to be of the utmost importance, and one which, when recognised, transplants the Bible from the domain of magical formula,, liberates it as from a spell, relieves it of a thousand responsibilities with which it should never have been burdened, clears away difficulties which have no higher origin than our own pedantic theories, while it enables us to dis- criminate between the words of men of like passions with our- selves, and the still, small voice which the heart and conscience must regard as Divine. As an illustration of the way in which the distinction here contended for operates, not in the evasion of difficulties, but in the elimination of them, we might refer to the alleged antagonism between the conclusions of science and the statements of the Old Testament. Read simply and honestly,
the so-called Mosaic account of the Creation contained in the first chapter of Genesis is, we do not say a childish cosmogony, but it, at all events, belongs to the " Juventus Mundi," and it is both logically absurd and scientifically ludicrous to endeavour to find in it anticipations of, or agreement with, the sure and certain con- clusions of the modern geology and astronomy. But in the first place, whatever later Jews may have affirmed, this attempt to account for the existing order of material phenomena, and of man himself, as other and greater than any of these, does not claim for itself divine authority ; and even if it did, the claim would no more interfere with the moral sanctions which attach to the authentic legislation of Moses, than the prosaic interpretation by the Church of Rome, as against Galileo, of a poetical passage in the book of Joshua, invalidates her testimony on the great sub- ject of our Lord's resurrection. The Exodus from Egypt is a fact falling within the province of legitimate history ; the Ten Com- mandments date from the desert, though be it noted, by the way, it is quite impossible for us to say whether the moral reason for the keeping of the Sabbath-day, which is found in the book of Deuteronomy, or the physical one, which is read at our Communion- tables every Sunday, is the one which actually derives from Moses. Nevertheless, this section of early Hebrew literature—and it is not of the least consequence to us, in this respect, whether it ought properly to be classed amongst the Elohistic or Jehovistic documents—enshrines a truth which we do not find enunciated elsewhere amongst the primitive peoples, and that is the truth of the existence of one creating mind distinct from, and antecedent to, all the objects of sense-perception. Now, Mr. Myers would say that only some special unveiling or inward illumination can account for the fact that this truth stands out so high and clear in the Hebrew records.
But while this central truth shines 'forth, like the sun in the firmament, throughout the whole circle of Old-Testament litera- ture, there is one great qualifying fact which presses itself on the consideration of every thoughtful student of the Bible. And this is what Mr. Myers happily terms the Progressiveness of Revela- tion, in its relation both to ethics and theology. A priori, we should have anticipated a gradual advancement of the Hebrew consciousness in its recognition of spiritual verities, if only the assumption be granted that the Abrahamic race itself, at any rate, in its representative members, was subjected to a special divine discipline, or by a special concurrence of inward faculty and outward event was lifted on to the lines of spiritual discovery. And it seems to us that this assumption is by far the most reason- able light, is, indeed, the only intelligent or intelligible light which we can place behind the phenomena of the Jewish story. Take this hypothesis away, and then the differentia of the Hebrew people, so far, at least, as history has as yet unveiled the past to us, becomes utterly enigmatic. Outside the pale of Israel, we have " seekers after God," watchers in the night, and some of these, after deep pon- dering on the manifold arrangements, principles, and events of the sensible and preter-sensible spheres, attained to' grand con- clusions. One of them, as St. Paul reminds us, was touched with a quite prophetic consciousness of the profound lessons of Christ when he wrote, " We, too, are his offspring." Still, the noblest, and by the expression we mean the reverently wisest, of these ethnic inquirers after the highest good never speak " with authority." Certainly the greatest of them all, Socrates, never indulges in such a tone. A trembling hope, girt round with many noble aspirations, no doubt, but also with many fears, which in the long-run quite quenched the hope, and left the nations without a living God in the world, is the highest spiritual characteristic which we can discover in the Pagan philosophy. But when we meet with Abraham, with Moses, with Samuel, and the prophets, we meet, indeed, with men of like passions with ourselves—for even the meek Moses slays the Egyptian— but they confront us, not with a speculation, but with a message. They are not seekers, but seers, who have themselves been found by a living word in the depths of their souls, and they speak, not to our intellectual apperception merely, but to our heart and conscience, with a directness and urgency and self-evidencing power which have certainly mastered Mr. Matthew Arnold, and which constrain men of humbler pretensions to acknowledge that the Jew was in possession of a secret which was largely hidden from other men. That secret of a living, eternal spirit, not seen in the clouds, or heard in the winds, but holding invisible communion with the inmost life of man, was the Jewish discovery to the world. The discovery is theirs, and to use the felicitous phraseology of Sir Joshua Reynolds, we can only discern, while the Jew first discovered. The Jew was the spiritual Columbus. But the primitive Hebrew no more apprehended the
full significance of the great spiritual region that was unveiled to him than did the Genoese sailor comprehend the conformation of our planet, much less 'the earth's place as one of the heavenly bodies, when he first alight&I on one of the West India Islands. In both cases alike, however, the clue was found for further revelations. Equally in both the later developments were reached, not by miraculous intervention, but in the normal course of providential guidance. From the conflict in the mind of Abraham as to the duty of human sacrifice down to the period when a prophet could with clear and unclouded decision utter the great sentiment, " He bath showed thee, 0 man ! what is good, and what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God," the progress is not more conspicuous, than is the fact that the more profound spiritual recognition of the requirements of man's Creator was the result of an inward education, which seems to have been special to the prophets themselves. For, marvellous as is the story of Israel, perhaps the most astonishing element in the whole of it is that the great bulk of the Hebrew community— excepting the sudden flush of enthusiasm for the God of Abraham which broke over the bondsmen in Egypt—remained utterly idolatrous down to the times of the Babylonish captivity.
But possibly the kind of progress of which we are here speaking would be best illustrated by the Book of Job. Assuming, as we are constrained to assume, that, in Biblical language, God spoke to Abraham, and showed His ways unto Moses, we, nevertheless, find that the deeper Hebrew mind was not all of a sudden initiated either into the perception of the divine character or the methods of the divine government ; and when we open the great Hebrew poem just alluded to, we discover how much debatable ground remained open for the freest speculation, although the champions of orthodoxy claimed then, as the champions of orthodoxy claim still, to have possession of the secret which fathoms the fathomless. But it seems to have been the special object of the unknown poetic Titan to whom we owe the Jab-drama to demolish this bold pretension, and to show that the cut-and-dry popular notions could not half cover the phenomena of nature or the facts of human experience ; that to maintain that they did was to "lie for God," was to be irreligious for the sake of religion, and that the path of wisdom lying deeper far than that of the miner for gold, though this was " hidden from the eye of the vulture," was to be found, and found alone in the depths of the spiritual consciousness, in which, as in a sanctuary, one would not indeed discover a solution of the mysteries of Providence, but would, amid fear and trembling, come into communion with an imperative Word, which speaks on this wise, " The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding."
But we must bring this article to a close, and beg our readers to turn to the eloquent, the soberly eloquent, pages of Mr. Myers, in which they will learn how thirty years ago a great thinker and eminently devout man calmly and reverently, but in full assurance of hope, fronted the problems which are exercising the souls of the best friends of Christianity now. They will read the story of the progressive development of Hebrew thought under the guidance of a teacher who, with subtle 'tact, separates the accidents of legendary ascription and exaggeration, or the narrow- ness and fanaticism of fervid song-writers, or the passionate de- nunciations of prophets half-driven to despair, from the essential verities of which Israel was incontrovertibly the depositary, and who, in consequence, has showed us, with a clearness and fullness peculiar to himself, how divine these verities are, while his great, but simple method of exposition, applied equally to the contents of the Old Testament and to those of the New, conducts inevitably to the conclusion which is at once earnestlyProtestant, but at the same time supremely Catholic, that for the individual soul, or the Church at large, there is, and can be, no ultimate authority but the mind of Christ himself. That surely must be a good book, as it is certainly a great one, which, enabling us to travel with discriminating but reverent consideration over the whole field of Biblical inquiry, leaves us as the disciples were left on the Mount of Transfiguration, with no man but Jesus only. For quieting the apprehensions of .the fearful in presence of modern criticism, for winning back thoughtful working-men to Christ and Christianity, for indicating to Christian teachers now what is their special trial and calling, for comforting lonely inquirers with faith in God's immediate inspirations, or if cultivated Sadducees among us are to be rendered suspicious of the omniscience of their nescience, we know of no bopk so likely to achieve these various ends as this masterly volume, which closes the series of our lamented Bishop Ewing's Present-Day Papers.
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