APPENDIX

TO WHAT EXTENT THE RESULTS OF HISTORICAL AND SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM, ESPECIALLY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, SHOULD BE RECOGNISED IN SERMONS AND TEACHING.1

I WILL waste no time in dwelling on the difference between preaching and teaching, and between one congregation and class and another. I assume that we must teach "as people are able to bear it." Nor will I do more than briefly point out the inevitableness, the importance, and the difficulty of the subject proposed; difficult, chiefly, because it is so hard to see whither we shall be led if we follow what seems to be truth and reason.

I will pass on

at once to what seem to me the main principles which must guide each man in his own use of these results of criticism, with only one word of personal preface. It is to explain that I have no right to speak as those who will follow me, as an authority in Biblical research. I have been asked to speak as one whose teaching, whether in pulpit or class-room, has immediately to be tested by contact with the critical spirit of our universities, and who has tried so to teach that there shall be at no time a painful shock to the faith of his young hearers.

Some may think that the question may be expressed in simpler language. How far ought the clergy to tell the truth about the Bible?

Let us first lay down our principles in answering the question in this shape.

1 1 A Paper read at the Manchester Church Congress, October 1888.

Firstly, We must tell the truth. Nothing could justify the clergy in maintaining a view of the Bible which they believe or suspect to be false. It would demoralise the clergy. It would lower their whole standard of truth. Their voices will not ring true when they preach what they do believe, if they also preach what they do not believe. The pulpit must not deceive the pew, even for what it thinks is the good of the pew. The suspicion of dishonesty destroys its influence with the pew, but, what is far more important, the fact of dishonesty corrupts and degrades the pulpit itself. We must tell the truth, and nothing but the

truth.

But, secondly, We must tell the whole truth; and here, it seems to me, lies the difficulty of the position, which the critics of us clergy are slow to appreciate. The question is as to the results of criticism. But there is an ambiguity lying in this word "results." I do not mean that there are no results of criticism so certain that no one of credit will dispute them. It is tolerably agreed that the Bible is not a scientific text-book. But I heard one eminent preacher not long ago maintain in public that all the main results of science are anticipated, in a sort of cryptogram, in the Bible; and he himself, among several striking illustrations, found what he described as "Harvey's immortal discovery of the circulation of the blood" in St. Paul's Epistles.

Nor do I mean that Old Testament critics do not agree among themselves even in important points. This is true and inevitable in the present condition of knowledge. But it must nevertheless be admitted by candid men, if they are students at all, that there are some positive results of the highest importance; and it may be well to state some of them here explicitly. For example, it must be regarded as a result of criticism that the historical books of the Old Testament are highly composite in their nature; that, while they contain fragments of ancient documents, they have been edited and re-edited at later dates; and that some important sections are thus popularly referred to periods to which they do not belong. Portions, moreover, of the narrative, quite irrespectively of all questions about the miraculous element, have come to be regarded as legendary

and unhistorical; and the text is found to be by no means perfect. It is a positive result of literary criticism and of modern science to make it clear that no science is taught or implied, and that the scientific standpoint of the writers was simply that of the period in which they wrote. It is a still more important result that the morality inculcated, indeed revelation itself, must be regarded as progressive and historical; stages of gradual enlightenment succeeding one another.

We sometimes forget that the Old Testament includes all that survives of Hebrew literature of all kinds, and there is nothing which a priori exempts this literature from the application of the ordinary principles and methods of literary, textual, and historical criticism. The methods which detected the composite origin of the Iliad are applicable to the Pentateuch; those which dissolved Livy's history of the kings of Rome are applicable to the early history of the Jews; and the principles of textual criticism, which are giving us better texts of Sophocles and of the New Testament, have revealed the defects of the Hebrew text, and may one day, so the Old Testament revisers lead us to hope, actually reconstruct it. These are solid results, whatever their importance may be. When I speak of the ambiguity lying in the word results, I by no means intend to urge the lazy commonplace that "critics are not agreed among themselves, and that when they are so it will be time enough to listen to them."

The ambiguity lies here. These results are to a considerable extent not adapted for use in preaching and teaching until we have absorbed them, and fitted them in along with other facts in our general scheme of the nature of revelation and of the Bible. As they stand, the results of criticism are more or less in the position of scientific theorems, the applications and connections of which have not yet been discovered; unfit for religious teaching, and having no reference to it, but to be kept in mind, and not contradicted, even by implication. We do not preach physical science, but some knowledge of physical science would be occasionally useful to prevent absurdities, and in the same way a knowledge of the results of criticism

imposes a limit on our expressions which must not be transgressed.

But again, this negative use of the results of criticism is not all. The results of criticism are gradually forming a mass of orderly knowledge, a science in fact, lying ready to be used when we preachers can see how it all bears on the other undeniable qualities of the Bible, and use it for edification and religion. But the process of so absorbing and digesting these results into a really higher criticism of the Bible is a slow one, and has scarcely begun. The criticism of a great poet or philosopher would be a poor thing if it went no further than such points as I have referred to. What is his insight into the eternal problems of the soul? How does he assist us in understanding human life and destiny and in knowing God? Is he a true seer? And if we ask this of our higher critics of Sophocles, or Plato, or Wordsworth, we shall not think that the results of the so-called higher criticism of the Old Testament, however useful as materials, are final and complete results.

The

To put it otherwise, there is a division of labour. critics, like other men of science, have arrived, and are arriving, at certain results; these are immediately useful in preventing serious misuse of the Bible in the pulpit, such as sometimes shocks the pew; and may be useful in enriching and expanding our whole conception of the Bible, when we have sufficiently mastered them and traced them to their results. The results as they stand are intermediate, not final, in Biblical criticism.

These seem to be the principles on which to answer the immediate and practical question. Tell nothing but the truth about the Bible, and take pains to inform yourself about the truths of criticism, but do not hastily impart such intermediate results as I have spoken of either to people totally unprepared for them, or to any one until you have well assimilated them, until they fill the Bible with new life and power and meaning, until in fact the limitation "how far" becomes quite unnecessary, because you are then able to tell the whole truth.

Now if the question proposed were really identical with