ENGLISH IDOLATRY.
MR DISRAELI says the English people are by constitutional temperament religious, but really the more we study them, the more we doubt it. What is the true test of a religious 'temperament? We should say, the habitual tendency to look beneath the- surface of life to the ultimate realities kyond, —to the relations, that is, in which the naked soul, so to -speak, stands to the power by which its destiny is determined and its constitution imposed,—the disposition to penetrate mere -forms, and superficial veils, etiquettes, and habits, to pierce to the -controlling and fusing power above or behind nature, or at -least to crave for the power to do so, however impotent some men find themaelves for the attempt. We can recognize what we call the 'religious temperament in some who may well be called fanatical -disbelievers. Shelley undoubtedly in the earlier part of his life was a fierce, a fanatical atheist,—but if ever a man had the -temperament that,—whatever twist it may take, owing to causes partly moral and partly social,—must be called the tempera- ment of sensitiveness to the invisible, the temperament which -quivers beneath every spiritual influence, bad or good, as a leaf -quivers in the wind, the temperament that cannot endure to put up with mere surface plausibilities, and insists on penetrating, -whether it has the power or not, to the spiritual reality at the -bottom of human habits, it was Shelley. Now, what we mean when we say that the English people does not seem to us religious, is that, even in its religion, it has a temperament the very opposite -of this, a temperament that never sounds or desires to sound anything
• to the bottom, a temperament which delights in a compromise, which is always looking out for what we may call a buffer between the real ;spiritual reality and itself, a temperament as great a contrast to the spirit of the Hebrew teachers who gave us our faith, as is the function of a sheath to the function of • a sword. Turn from the _Hebrew poet crying out, " As the heart panteth after the water- brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 0 God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God : when shall I come and appear before God ?"—to our so-called believers in the plenary inspiration -of the Bible shrieking about the danger of any attempt to rectify its errors and make the Word of the living God more intelligible to ordinary Englishmen, and one sees at once that what these ,people care for, is not God himself, but the conception and the language about God to which they are used, and which will make them most comfortable,—and for which they evidently do not believe that God himself can provide them with any effectual substitute.
Just consider for a moment the sort of response made to the Bishops' proposal to revise the established English Version of the Bible wherever it is really inaccurate or unintelligible ;—and for once that it conveys what is not in the Bible, there are, at least, a hundred places (chiefly in the Old Testament) in which it utterly Jails to convey what is there ;—and remember that the outcry has -come chiefly from those who are most earnest in asserting that the -original is really the dictation of the Holy Ghost, and that the words were chosen as well as the thoughts by the Holy Ghost. Well, first, there is Lord Shaftesbury, who represents the extreme _Evangelical Churchmen,—the man who thought "Ecce Homo " the Afloat soul-destroying book ever " vomited out of the jaws of hell," ,because it treated as a problem for historic inquiry to solve, what Lord Shaftesbury held to be finally and for ever decided by the -assertion of the Bible. Well, what does Lord Shaftesbury say to this tardy but hardly, one would suppose, assailable proposal for removing false impressions as to what, according to Lord Shaftes- bury's opinion, God has said, and making clear and intelligible whole chapters in the Old Testament of these divine utter- ances, of the contents of which English people are now almost as wholly unable to form any impression whatever as they would be if they were written in the original Hebrew ? On Lord Shaftesbury's view, there should be as much disrespect in tolerating mis- takes and hopeless obscurities, as there would be in wilfully garbling or withholding large parts of an oral message given by God. On his view, the true representation of the original drift and
meaning is the true rendering of the divine voice itself,—now for ever silent, except so far as it helps interpreters to interpret that ancient voice. Well, if that be so, what will he not give to recover for the people one word of such a voice now lost to them ? What will he not give to prevent one false interpolation, unscru- pulously palmed off on Him, from ever again claiming that sacred authority? The answer is, that the noble Earl will give nothing for either purpose,—may be willing to give a good deal to prevent the successful fulfilment of either purpose. And on what grounds does he put this extraordinary reluctance to set Englishmen right as to what God has or has not said? First, he says, it won't alter the net result as to faith and doctrine. Englishmen who take their faith and doctrine from the Bible will find very much the same there,—on the Bishop of St. David's own admission,—after the revision as before. That is apparently Lord Shaftesbury's impres- sion as well as the Bishop of St. David's, though the Earl is probably not quite so good a judge. So long, then, as there is no substantial falsification of the net result of what God has said, Lord Shaftesbury is quite indifferent as to formal misrepresenta- tions of Him,—such as putting into ignorant persons' heads false arguments, like the text of the three holy witnesses, which no one pretends to think ought to be in the Bible at all. He is quite will- ing, moreover, to take it on trust, and very easily on trust, that no superior care and correctness of translation will alter men's doctrinal inferences. He does not wish the people to have the chance of judging of that for themselves. The opinion of the Bishops and of himself shall be final for them. But of course Lord Shaftesbury has a more positive reason against revision than this. It is not that he really wishes people to have an imperfect and misleading transcript of the Word of God, but only that he considers it a comparatively minor evil as compared with the evil of their not all having the same :—
" The English Bible, as altered by the Bishops, will cease to be the Bible, not only of the Nonconformists, but of the Scotch and Irish Pres- byterian Churches ; it would cease to be the Bible of our brethren in the United States of America, and of every Protestant speaking the English language over the entire surface of the globe. We should, moreover, lie under the burden, the importance of which will, of course, be variously estimated, of having the fifty million copies of the Scrip- tures already issued by the Society synodically condemned' (such is the phrase) by the two Houses of Convocation."
What this precisely implies we do not feel quite sure. For one thing, apparently that the fifty million Biblical conversion-engines already issued would have lost something of their efficiency, if people in general were to fancy that they could not absolutely trust them. In order, then, to prevent these fifty million copies being dis- credited even when the translation is really accurate, Lord Shaftes- bury is anxious to keep the eyes of the people shut to the trifling fact that there are several bad mistakes of meaning which might easily be corrected, and a vast number more which at present rob our authorized version of all meaning, though there is a very good meaning in the original, if scholars were only allowed to ex- plain it. What particularly sacred interest is there in Dissenters and Churchmen agreeing to use (for ordinary purposes) an Eng- lish translation with the same title-page ? Nobody ever proposed to alter the language or style except to make the unintelligible in- telligible, or to correct a blunder, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred those who quoted from the revised and the unrevised version would still quote the very same words. We suspect that what Lord Shaftesbury is really afraid of, is the com- mercial loss involved in the partial superannuation of so many Bibles with which some folks might begin to be dissatisfied. It would be very inconvenient perhaps to have amendments moved in the Bible Society proposing that in future they should order the newly revised version, the cost of which per bible might be some- thing increased. These are the substantial considerations, we imagine, which induce the Earl of Shaftesbury to apologize for error, and for an amount of obscurity which makes one-tenth part of the Bible at least a mere riddle to ordinary people. A great capital has been sunk in Bibles, — the capitalists must be consulted before reverence to the Divine Speaker can be attended to. His meaning is nothing like as important as the convenience of the society got up to publish His meaning. What though most of the minor prophets and much of the greater prophets be in the present translation mere enigma ? The production of fifty mil- lion copies of such enigma creates a vested interest which makes it a grave question whether you can supersede them, in spite of any claims of divine light. Our Evangelicals worship an idol called Authorized Version, which claims, indeed, to represent God ; but which has so many independent interests of its own, that even where it is proved to misrepresent or obscure Him, it is stoutly supported against any proposal to perfect it further.
Precisely the same spirit is shown by a Mr. Wean], who writes complainingly to the Standard that the proposed emendations in the authorized version "would tend to divest it of what we may fairly term its Christology,"—i. e., the Messianic prophecies of Christ. "Unbelief," says Mr. M'Caul, "is to gain everything, whilst the excusable anxieties of old-fashioned folk, who can give very strong reason for the hope that is in them, are treated as being apparently unworthy of consideration." Well, if Mr. M'Caul can get good linguistic testimony, as he says, in favour of the authorized version and against the suggested emendations, surely he has nothing to fear. He may depend upon it that not a change will be made without a very strong con- sensus of the best philological authorities. But does he not really mean to imply distrust of the philologists on the part of the Christologists ? Is it not his real drift that he would rather keep a Messianic interpretation against the evidence of impartial Hebra- late, than not keep it at all,—in other words, that he would rather keep his Christology intact even if founded on error, than not keep it at all,—that he would rather deceive himself,—if that should be the upshot of the best philological inquiry,—as he has been accus- tomed to deceive himself about the Messianic prophecies, than give up a 'favourite text' at the bidding of mere scholars ? We suspect that is what his wail really means. Rather a human word which we have always been accustomed to suppose was the divine word, than any unsettling of our old prepossessions 'I "We will always maintain," this school seems to say, "that it is utterly impious and blasphemous to suppose that the Bible is anything but the literal Word of God ; but, nevertheless, we must add, that the shock to our feelings involved in setting us right as to what that Word really is, when we have all along had an 'authorized version' on our side, is so tremendous, that we must be excused for declining to discuss philological questions on philological grounds. It is evidence enough for us that we have hitherto always thought the Authorized Version right. We prefer to retain our conception of the Word of God, to getting at the true Word by any such disturbing, afflicting, and unsettling process !"
Now, may we not adduce this sort of diffused feeling in proof of the assertion that the English people is not truly religious—that it does not like to be in contact directly with even what it deems the absolutely divine, but much prefers erroneous intermediate conceptions to which it has grown accustomed ? A great writer has defined idolatry as meaning the preference of a consciously imperfect image of God, which has adapted and contracted itself to our weaknesses, to that eager desire to have our imperfections exposed and burned up in the heat of the divine perfection, which alone is true worship. In this sense of the word, idolatry, —i.e., the interposition of a consciously imperfect mediate conception between our hearts and our truest vision of God, are we not all of us more or less idolaters,—and that, too, from our habitual love of compromise and half-though ts,—and even more so than most other peoples ? Assuredly the bibliolaters who first make a book into God, and then do not even care to have the book in its most perfect form, but talk of the interests involved in Dissenters and Church people being misled by the same errors, and the loss that would be occasioned by a depreciation in the value of fifty million Bibles, seem to us melancholy illustrations of the idolatrous in- stincts of our practical English race.
Previous page
