MISS JULIA WEDGWOOD'S MESSAGE OF ISRAEL.* MATTHEW ARNOLD'S well-known criticism
on one of the earliest of English Biblical critics was that his work did not tend to edification. Professor Jowett, in a remarkable letter published in the Spectator of June 23rd, said much the same thing from the negative side, when he owned that criticism, however necessary, did not "supply any principle of action." And now we have Miss Wedgwood telling us that the test by which Biblical criticism must stand or fall is its power to render the moral purport of the Old Testament intelligible. To show that it stands rather than falls, that it makes clear rather than obscures the message of the Bible, is the object of this volume.
Miss Wedgwood, it will be seen, is not content to stand, so to speak, on the defensive. " You cannot do without the critic," she says in effect to the modern reader of the Bible. " The keen pathos, the vivid dramatic interest, the profound spiritual teaching of the Old Testament, are all hidden from one who tries to read the whole of it with the same kind of attention." Whether any one ever really did this may, per- haps, be doubted. Even Dean Burgon could hardly have put the ceremonial precepts of Leviticus on the same level of interest with Ruth or the Evangelical utterances of Isaiah.
• The Message of Israel in the Light of Modern Criticism. By Julia Wedgwood. London : labiator and Co. 1894.
But the attitude of mind described in these words is easily to be recognised. It was almost universal in the past ; it is probably taken up by the vast majority of readers in the present. And we quite believe that it did not and does not hinder such readers from deriving from the book a full spiritual sustenance. Miss Wedgwood concedes so much as regards a class which, however, from her description of it, must be very limited in numbers. "It [the Bible] was intel- ligible to those whose vision of the Eternal was so keen that the discrepancies of human divergencies might flit across it like those thin clouds which are themselves turned to radiance as they flit across the face of the moon." This is finely said but it does not cover the case for multitudes of simple, unin- structed readers who are not one whit the worse for still believing that Moses wrote the Five Books, and that the Psalms are veritably the " Psalms of David."
On the other hand, we readily concede that this position is daily becoming more untenable. Criticism is in the air ; it affects, often in the strangest fashion, those who have no ac- quaintance with its processes, or even, it may be said, with its definite conclusions. A Sunday-school child will ask questions or make objections, which would never have occurred to its father or its mother. Those who have to teach, or at least acquiesce in, traditional statements, explanations, and recon- ciliations, are conscious of a burden of which they would gladly be relieved. It is not from lack of honesty or courage that they do not move ; they are profoundly reluctant to disturb the faith of others, but they can hardly help feeling that their own faith is growing weaker. To many so placed Miss Wedg- wood's book will be helpful in no small degree. Chapter IV., for instance, entitled " The Jehovist and the Fall of Man," supplies a very broad treatment, which is at once devout and philosophical, of some very difficult subjects. The story of Creation is postponed, as belonging to a later document, the work of the "Priestly Writer." But it will be convenient to make a brief reference here to Miss Wedgwood's view of it. " Nowhere," she says, " has the doctrine of evolu- tion a more definite forerunner than in that first chapter of Genesis, which has been represented to the popular imagina- tion as its main antagonist." Believers who are not bound in the fetters of literalism have been content to look upon the chapter as a Psalm of Creation and to be satisfied with the certainty that it is incomparably the most dignified of all cosmogonies. To be told that it is also the most scientific is more than they could have expected. Bat many who have not been troubled by hostile criticisms on the first chapter of Genesis have not been so easy in regard to the third,—the story of the Fall of Man. Regard it as a narrative, or even as a myth, and it defies the most ingenious efforts of the apolo- gist. But it assumes a different aspect when its spiritual significance is thus drawn out :—
" The endeavour to be as God, knowing good and evil, destroys the true manhood; the expected revelation of the divine nature turns out to be a mere discovery of the poverty of human nature. Through a fragmentary form of symbolic narrative, in which we cannot give to every detail its moral equivalent, we may follow the course of the Hebrew revelation in that deep sense of the antithesis of the divine and human which prepares the way for an equally deep sense of the union of the divine and human. The one truth is the complement of the other, but as set forth in the parable of finite understanding, they sometimes take the aspect of contradiction. A true humanity is the reflection of the divine, yet a true humanity does not seek to be as the divine—we cannot comprehend these truths in any single intellectual grasp, we can but apprehend them in successive movements of attention, sway- ing in each direction to the very verge of intellectual error The story of the Fall of Man is rather a parable than a legend It bears the aspect less of an account of events taking place in the infancy of humanity than of a crisis in the development of an individual spirit ; it is a hidden chapter in every biography, not an ascertainable event in the dawn of history."
And when it is so admirably illustrated by the closest of all parallels :-
" We should better understand the triumphant temptation which opens the history of the Old Testament if we read it in connection with the baffled temptation which opens the history of the New Testament ; it is interpreted most clearly by the narra- tive of its repetition and defeat. The appeal of the Tempter to the ideal man is identical with his appeal to the first man; 'if thou be the son of God' is another version of the promise, " ye shall be as gods.' Command these stones that they be made bread' echoes the whisper, what, hath God said ye shall not eat of any fruit of the garden ? ' The stones of the Jordan repre- sent a limit that was accepted, as the fruit of Eden represents a limit that was spurned. The first temptation is given us in the form of a parable, the second has all the appearance of a simple
autobiography; since it refers to events which could be known to none but Him who had experienced what He narrated, yet in some sense it is a parable still Temptation, for the great souls of humanity, is always a mystery. We may say of the voice of the Tempter as of that which it leads us to mistrust, that it comes not in the storm or the earthquake, but in the still small voice. Who knows when a great man is tempted ? Who knows when he is not? The treasures of earth glitter before him, and he passes them as the closet that holds a child's toys ; a path opens towards some arduous or dangerous goal, and his whole strength is taxed in resistance. That the serpent is more subtle than all the beasts of the field' remains a perennial truth, the Tempter glides upon us undiscerned, his step is noiseless, his form eludes the eye; only this we know, that he follows on the track of aspiration, as shadow follows light."
n this and the following chapter, bearing the title of " The Sifted Race," the early records of Hebrew history down to the migration into Egypt receive a treatment which is full of felicitous suggestion. We think that Miss Wedgwood makes some statements too broadly and positively, as to the anthropopathy of the Jehovist writer, and the defects in the character of Abraham, for instance; but the value of the whole it would be difficult to exaggerate. Who will not read hereafter the story of Jacob with a new sense of spirituality, after it has been illuminated for him by the meaning which its latest interpreter draws out of it P After pointing out the bargaining spirit of the patriarch's first covenant with God,—the vow at Bethel,— "If God will be with me and keep me in the way that I shall
go then shall the Lord be my God," our author goes on :—
" A purifying discipline separates the revelation thus received and the next. When he sees once more the face of God, he is not occupied with the thought of food and raiment. He seeks a blessing from his mysterious antagonist, not as he has sought it from his father, by lying devices, but by persistent endeavour, by arduous struggle, by entreaties and tears. So we may complete the narrative of the Jehovist by that of a prophet who wrote about 740 B.C., and seems to have read the history ; and whose expansion lights up the legend with a wonderful force and depth of meaning. Hosea is the prophet of sorrow, of compassion, of repentance. His own history, or some series of events which he represented as an autobiographic parable (for surely a chapter of true experience is given us in the story of the faithless wife and the compassionate husband), had taught him a peculiar sympathy with the life of repentance, and when we turn from the Jehovist's narrative of supernatural struggle to Hosea's picture of prayer, we feel almost as though we were turning from a parable to its interpretation. 'He had power over the angel, and prevailed ; " but how? ' he wept and made supplication unto him.' It is another form of the narrative, will not let thee go except thou bless me.' Surely the blessing is reiterated when on the following day ' Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept." Receive my present, for- asmuch as I have seen thy face as one seeth the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me,' might seem to hold the clue to the parable. Have we not all felt that there, where the estranged brother has taken us to his heart, we have seen the face of God ? Through man's forgiveness he who has ever consciously received it is sensible of the embrace of the Divine."
These chapters are perhaps the most fruitful portions of Miss Wedgwood's work. It is here that she is most constructive, but to be this is her aim everywhere. If she treats the narrative not unfrequently with a freedom which will startle and even shock many readers, she cer- tainly brings out its meaning with a fullness and com- pleteness which are most gainful. Some of the conclu- sions which she has taken from the critics seem to us extreme. Surely all the Psalms—to take one instance- " are not utterly unsuitable to any circumstance in David's life," or, at the most, such that "the absence of positive indications allows us to,fit them into his history." And when we are told that "while we imagine that David wrote the Psalter, we have to forget everything else he did," because it is impossible that "the great heroes of national struggle or dominion expended half their energies on literary composi- tion," the answer is obvious. "Half their energies " is surely a very rhetorical expression. What was there in the circum- stances of David to hinder him from writing the seventeen or eighteen Psalms which the more moderate critics attribute to him P Charlemagne, in whose Empire Palestine would have been a petty province, found time for some literary work, and Alfred, whose circumstances more nearly resemble those of the Hebrew King, was a prolific author. We do not care, however, to criticise details in Miss Wedgwood's work. As a whole, it is a very noble combination of the critical and the
devout.
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