ment, in particular, keeps the secret than we could outdo in our trim Gothic tabernacles the wonders of Amiens and Chartres. He is the true Vandal who attempts to restore the antique. Living as we do in a period when ideas are debased and language is setting towards decay, our efforts at a new creation of the English Bible would probably be marred by the same faults that disfigure religious writing in general.

At the best we should betray by our imitation of ancient models how poor a thing is deliberate pedantry.

The conclusion seems unassailable. England has its Bible in the only form that is likely to be accepted when onethird of the human race will have learned its language and taken over its civilization. We cannot offer them anything better in the shape of literature, no, nor by many degrees so good. But even if we had that more excellent style, how undo the past? How get rid of the associations, memories, attachments, in virtue of which, as Emerson remarks, every sentence in the sacred volume is like an old Cremona that has been played upon until human passion seasons it through and through? Happily, these associations, intimate and affecting enough to pierce the hearts of a whole people as though it were one man, do not spring from any dogma reprobated by our creed. Neither Calvin nor Cranmer has taken the English Bible captive, or made of its sentences a tenure which heresy may claim. Certain mistranslations, due to Tyndale's fierce hatred of the Catholic priesthood, have long since been corrected as we would have them to be. Whatever is left unsound a very slight handling would remove. On the subject of various readings more is to be said by and by. At present my contention is only that the Bible holds a place in the world-wide literature of England from which it cannot be ousted, and that in the problem

of conversion so momentous a fact demands more notice than it has hitherto received.

Some help in considering it we may gain by viewing the Scripture in its literary aspect, and thus bringing out the state of the case on which authority will be called to decide. Theologians naturally are not apt to regard the sacred text in this light, while admitting its justice. They know well that Revelation has not been given in the form of axioms and definitions, nor by way of science; that tradition is a living memory, rooted in the hearts of Catholics, handed on by personal teaching; and that its record in Hebrew and Greek is no treatise after the method of Aristotle. Inspiration has produced a series of books on which is everywhere set the seal of their authors, their age, and their local origin. They are composed in the language of Israel, a peculiar people, and they reflect the colors of a civilization which has passed away. They do not proceed on general or abstract principles. They are a history, or a drama, or a biography of heroic figures, and show a greater likeness to the pages of Herodotus than to the diagrams of Euclid. They abound in human touches, in characteristic sayings, in allusions to rites, customs, beliefs, usages often primitive and continually foreign to our habits of thought. All this rich array, spreading beyond the margin of formal treatises, we have to reckon in our account when we would measure what the Bible means to those well-versed in it.

There are still devout souls to whom the notion of bringing Holy Scripture under the microscope of critical analysis borders on the profane. They look only at its message and its Divine Originator; to the human element they pay little or no regard; and the adept who pries into sources, composition, peculiarities of speech, historical cir

cumstances, they are tempted to define as one who would "peep and botanize upon his mother's grave." They feel that what we term culture, applied to Revelation, is artificial if not superfluous, and comes in at the door as faith flies out at the window. Analysis, they dread, may end by denying inspiration. Now, it is quite true that scholarship has often, elsewhere than in dealing with Psalms and Prophets, proved fatal to poetry. The grammarian-let us call by his old name this latter-day apparition-cannot, unless he rises above the crowd of details, see the wood for the trees. We have sometimes to rescue from his blind grasp our early English drama, sometimes the Attic tragedians. But here, too, the wounds made by the spear of Achilles that spear alone will heal. Since Richard Simon opened the door to critical enquiries (his Old Testament leading the way in 1687), and Lowth attempted an estimate of Hebrew rhythm, while Herder sought the and resemblances in contrasts all works of genius, sacred and secular, Eastern and Western, the Bible has moved into a fresh horizon.

Formerly

the story of Israel. Thus, by mere juxtaposition, the human element of Scripture has gained in depth and breadth, in affinities and antecedents, beyond all that men could have dreamt a hundred years ago. And this exactly it is which literature takes for its province. Religion looks up to the First Cause and is content. History, criticism, philology, psychology, and our other inquisitive sciences, are never done searching out the second causes, in and through which the First manifests Himself.

We possess now such instruments for this purely analytical account of Scripture as the Fathers would have envied; but they had advantages of their own. Can we not enjoy the new without losing the old? Our Vulgate will be held more precious in the measure that its Hieronymian text is made more certain; what shall we call the process by which to recover it? Surely criticism, the Higher and the Highest, demanding a fine sense for every shade of meaning, a mastery over sources, a knowledge as minute as extensive of medieval history. Are we permitted to be experts in this fashion while restoring a translation, but forbidden to touch the original? Who would say so? The greater questions will take us beyond St. Jerome to the matters now in debate among learned men. A revised Hebrew text, such as Baer's further studies in the Septuagint, and even the distant gleams cast on the Old Testament by Talmudic illustrations, cannot but lead up to more precise acquaintance with that which, after all, is the head and front of written religion-I mean, the books themselves. Any comment, to be of value, should enhance the significance of its subject. And here, again, we observe that while religion interprets the present by the past, being essentially a tradition from antiquity, the critical historian verses that method, and places himself

re

as near the origin as possible, in order to travel down stage by stage to actual fact.

Thus, theologians view the finished results in creed and dogma; but critics unravel the process of development, so far as the evidence will allow. To speak technically, it is the form of Revelation which dogma contemplates; in history we are concerned with its matter and circumstances. These distinctions imply no more contradiction here than elsewhere, unless it be one to master the story of England that we may the better understand living Englishmen. But it will not do to confound the methods. Moreover, according as we employ them the relative importance of the different parts will change. To the critic, of necessity, the Old Testament comes first, the Gospels and Epistles are derived from it; but the teacher of doctrine takes these for a rule, or as the final cause, the scope and real intention of the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets. I may study man in his nature and thence forbode his destiny-that would yield me the human dogma, so to name it. Or I may follow him up from his first appearance on this planet, tracing out his relation to other species, and thereby attain a true, though fragmentary, knowledge of what he has been, even if unable to guess what he will be. The logic that deduces from his rational constitution man's various qualities will surely not make void his ascertained or ascertainable past. He is what he has grown to be. And religion has grown with him. Shall we not interest ourselves in the strangely chequered course of that evolution which has brought us hither?

Origins and authors, language and history, charm us as they never did our Christian forefathers. We desire to see the pages of Holy Writ as they appeared in the eyes of contemporaries, to grasp their immediate intention

and work out how it stands towards the final, to march up with Israel from the Euphrates or the Nile and share in the training, thanks to which it has taught mankind the law of Righteousness. For an end in its nature historical, using means offered us by archæology, the science of language, primitive customs, and the like, the Old Testament is a necessary foundation. Revealed doctrine has taken the shape of an Eastern and Semitic literature. To Westerns generally this at once implies the duty of translation with all its difficulties of letter and spirit.

Translation is not only from language to language; it is also from ideas to ideas. When the Alexandrian Jews undertook to render into Greek some portions of the sacred volume, they softened many sayings which to aboriginal Hebrews gave no offence, but which would have shocked more modern ears. In such "anthropomorphisms" a double difficulty rose to light. As symbols of the Divine they were imperfect, and in a foreign tongue misleading; but they were also highly concrete, while the tendency of later Greek was towards the scientific or the abstract. If we consider the Bible as a whole, we shall perceive in it scarcely an admixture of Hellenic thought and nowhere any trace of reasoning by rule. For science, as the "dividing and distinguishing intellect" employed on general ideas, the Semite shows no capacity whatever. He cannot enter into our logic and has never assimilated the Organon of Aristotle. How shall we get inside this other soul, which cares nothing about our grammar, confuses our many particles, and measures the world on a scale of its own? Speculation, disinterested, impersonal, "pure" as we say, is only not disdained by the Arab (and the Jew is an Arab in this wider sense) because he does not so much as know what it means. The

Sadducee hated Greek culture as tempting Israel to idolatry; that it could pass by every form of worship into a region of thought simply absorbed in thinking, not even Plato (nay, Plato least of all) could have driven into that brain, stored with images and similitudes, alive to emotion, keen upon action, but innocent of metaphysics.

In this, and po other mould the Bible is cast. It utters the language of childhood, juventus mundi, but not of a child who will grow into a European man. Our dramatic poetry, our reasoned narrative, of which Sophocles and Thucydides are respectively models, find no likeness among Oriental writings. Hebrew story proceeds by simple addition, the particle "and" serving to connect its incidents even when highly contrasted. How strange this loosely built structure appears in Greek anyone may learn by reading the Gospel of St. Mark, which follows the native idiom; and to Latin it is equally repugnant. The Hebrew poets, again. are essentially of a lyric type, carried on not by a theme of which they unfold the several parts, but by feeling drawn out in the presence of an object loved or hated. They command, entreat, compassionate, curse or bless, in short flights of song, the effect heightened by repetition, the manner violent and picturesque. As they never appeal to abstract reason, or the nature of things apart from its Maker, so they move onward by association of moods, which themselves evoke the corresponding images. Hence the abrupt transitions, disjointed, as we think, and perplexing to us, who look for cause and effect where the Semite will not stop to bind them explicitly together. He sways himself according to a rhythm of passion, allows nothing to the opposite side, and as children live in the present so does the prophet, his one tense being the "Now" of ex

cited interest. That species of return upon the words, which Lowth called "parallelism," belongs to extempore eloquence; it enables the orator to fling the object under varied lights, to watch it in movement, and to sustain his quivering voice, dominated by a feeling that shakes him out of himself. In the beginning, as many scholars hold, such lyrical outbursts had more than a touch of ecstasy; they are still observed in the Bedawin of the Desert wrangling over disputed claims. But everywhere the key-note is subjective, the horizon close, the source of feeling an interest not a pure idea.

Again, as the audience is the tribe, and literature, when it comes on the scene, takes this form of rhetoric, authorship, too, is collective long before it assumes the privileges of the lonely genius. It is the work of the community.

We read about the "schools

of the prophets," who anticipated not merely the common life but in some sense the scriptorium of Christian monasticism. Their leader may be imagined as controlling like a choirmaster those vivid explosions of enthusiasm during which his disciples uttered their sentiments. We do not attempt now to improvise in company except for sport; but the Easterns, and perhaps the half-Arab Sicilians, find in the crowd an inspiration which suddenly reacts upon all within hearing. and between them a story or poem is made out. Job argues with his friends in a moving dialogue, whereas Hamlet soliloquizes. Meditation in the Psalms is vocal and popular. The Talmud shows what is meant by a master and a school of law, where lectures are not treatises but aphorisms pointed by examples. And in like manner the Dervishes, who have preserved a much earlier form of religion than the Koran, seek for illumination in excitement, not in consecutive reaSee Dr. Peter's "Nippur," i, 238, ed. 1897.