There are two remarkable characteristics of present-day apologies for Christianity: one is extravagant laudation of Jesus as man and teacher, the other is extravagant laudation of the Bible as ethics and literature. Both these characteristics are really signs of the decadence of positive faith. Anyone who sincerely believed in the deity of Jesus would shrink from praising his human virtues. To such a person it would savor strongly of impertinence. Nor would anyone who really believed the Bible to be the Word of God make it the subject of meaner panegyrics. It seems ridiculous to argue that God wrote with unusual power and sublimity, and is actually the very first of known authors. But this is what Dr. Farrar does, essentially, in the last six chapters of his volume. No wonder, therefore, that all the vices of his style are displayed in the accomplishment of this extraordinary task. He has to make several quotations from great or distinguished writers, but he catches no literary infection from them. One of these quotations is from brave old George Fox. "I saw," the great Quaker wrote, "that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of Light and Love flowed over the ocean of Darkness; and in that I saw the infinite love of God." This is magnificent writing. It has vision, force, and simplicity. In its way it could hardly be beaten. And how poor in comparison is the turgid pulpit rhetoric of Dr. Farrar! We are told by this wordy defender of the faith that the Christian Scriptures are "the Supreme Bible of Humanity"—as though, if it be the Word of God, it could be anything less. Our attention is called to its "unique transcendence"—which is a penny-a-lining pleonasm. We are informed that it has "triumphed with ease over the assaults of its enemies"—which is a remarkably modest assertion, especially in view of the fact that the "enemies" of the Bible were, for fifteen hundred years, generally subdued by persecution, imprisonment, torture, assassination, and the burning of their writings. We are further informed that the Bible commands the reverence, guides the thoughts, educates the souls, and kindles the moral aspirations of men "through all the world"—which is an extremely sober statement in view of the fact that all the nominal Christians, not to be too precise about the real ones, do not amount to more than a fourth of the world's inhabitants. So wonderful a book is the Bible that "the Lord Jesus Christ himself did not disdain to quote from the Old Testament"—which was his own word, in the sense that it was (professedly) written under divine inspiration. This is absurd enough, but it is nothing to the rapturous eulogy of the Bible which follows it. "All the best and brightest English verse [not some, mark, but all!], from the poems of Chaucer to the plays of Shakespeare in their noblest parts, are echoes of its lessons; and from Cowper to Wordsworth," Dr. Farrar says, "from Coleridge to Tennyson, the greatest of our poets have drawn from its pages their loftiest wisdom." Really, one is tempted to ask whether such stuff as this is possible in any other country than England, or perhaps America; and whether, even in England or America, it is possible outside churches, chapels, and Sunday-schools. Sixty pages later—Dr. Farrar could not sober down in that long interval—he declares that "It was the Bible which created the prose literature of England." Now if this were true it would not serve Dr. Farrar's ostensible purpose. It would not prove that the Bible is a divine revelation. It would only prove the historical—that is to say, the largely accidental—importance of the Authorised Version of the Bible in the development of English literature. But this declaration of Dr. Farrar's is not true. The Authorised Version did not initiate, it rather closed, a period of our literary history. The English of the translators in their Preface is vastly different from the English of their translation. Indeed, they were rather collators than translators. They took the older versions as the basis of their work, they altered as little as possible, and the alterations they did make were strictly in harmony with the time-honored style of those older versions, a style which was even then very archaic. Dr. Marsh, himself a devout Christian, contends that "the dialect of this translation was not, at the time of the revision, or, indeed, at any other period, the actual current book-language nor the colloquial speech of the English people." He maintains that it was "a consecrated diction" which had been "gradually built up" from the time of Wycliffe.* Its language was not the language of Chaucer's prose, nor even of Wycliffe's own prose, any more than it was the language of Bacon's or Shakespeare's, or even that of divines like Hooker. The Authorised Version is indeed a monument of English, but of special English. It has always stood aside from the main development of English prose. Of course it has exercised a considerable influence, but that influence has been chiefly indirect. From the young naive prose of Malory to the mature and calculated prose of Swift—not to come farther—there is a clear stream of development, to which the language and style of the English Bible have contributed infinitely less than is generally assumed. With the single exception of Bunyan's masterpiece, which stands apart and alone, it is difficult to name a first-class prose competition that was greatly indebted to our Authorised Version. Even the divines disregarded it as a literary model, and perhaps most conspicuously so in the seventeenth century, immediately after its publication.
     * George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language
     (Murray), pp. 441, 445.
Dr. Farrar is entirely wrong in declaring that the Bible created the prose literature of England. Even if he only means that English prose was vastly profited by the religious literature which followed upon the heels of the Reformation, it is easy to reply that this literature was mainly controversial and never remarkable for the higher graces and dexterities. For those virtues, prior to the time of Taylor and South, we must turn to secular and even to "profane" compositions; a fact which is well known to every real student of English literature.
The next device of Dr. Farrar's advocacy would be astounding if one did not know the muddle-headed public for whom he writes. He devotes a monstrous number of pages to the citing of a "cloud of witnesses to the glory and supremacy of the Holy Scriptures," beginning with the great John Henry Newman and winding up with the notorious Hall Caine. Sandwiched between these dissimilar "witnesses" are Heine, Goethe, Rousseau, Wesley, Emerson, Carlyle, Huxley, Arnold, Ruskin, and a host of others. Most of them were Christians, and afford a partisan testimony which is not very valuable. In any case, there is no real argument in a list of names. When a man is being tried on a definite charge, it is idle to recite a catalogue of his distinguished friends. Witnesses to character are only heard in mitigation of sentence after the jury has returned a verdict of Guilty. Perhaps this fact had its influence on Dr. Farrar's mind; at any rate, he calls his "cloud of witnesses" when he has ended all he had to say in the form of argument.
These witnesses, moreover, are jumbled together without the slightest discrimination. Let us take a few illustrations to show the futility of Dr. Farrar's method.
John Wesley cried "Give me the book of God! Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be a man of one book." Yes, and John Wesley believed in witchcraft, and honestly declared that to throw over witchcraft was to throw over the Bible. He had, also, his own way of proving "the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures." He wrote a "Clear and Concise Demonstration," from which we take the following extract:—
"I beg leave to propose a short, clear, and strong argument to prove the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.
"The Bible must be the invention either of good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God.
"(1) It could not be the invention of good men or angels; for they neither would nor could make a book, and tell lies all the time they were writing it, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord,' when it was their own invention.
"(2) It could not be the invention of bad men or devils; for they would not make a book which commands all duty, forbids all sin, and condemns their souls to hell to all eternity.
"(3) Therefore, I draw this conclusion, that the Bible must be given by divine inspiration."*
     * John Wesley's Works (1865), vol. xi., pp. 464-465.
Could anything be more childish than this ridiculous play upon the word "invention," and this absurd supposition that "good men" and "bad men" are two sharp divisions of the human species? We know that all men are mixtures, and that honest men may be mistaken, and tell falsehoods without lying. We are therefore able to measure the value of John Wesley's "demonstration" that the Bible is inspired.
John Ruskin thanks his mother for daily reading the Bible with him in his childhood, and daily making him learn a part of it by heart. This is seized upon by Dr. Farrar, who places it in his list of testimonies. But it might have been wise—it would certainly have been honest—to tell the reader how Ruskin views the Bible. This great writer has formulated four theories of the Bible, the third of which he has declared to be "for the last half-century the theory of the soundest scholars and thinkers in Europe." And what is this theory? Here it is in Ruskin's own words:—
"That the mass of religious Scripture contains merely the best efforts which we hitherto know to have been made by any of the races of men towards the discovery of some relations with the spiritual world; that they are only trustworthy as expressions of the enthusiastic visions or beliefs of earnest men oppressed by the world's darkness, and have no more authoritative claim on our faith than the religious speculations and histories of the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Indians; but are, in common with all these, to be reverently studied, as containing a portion, divinely appointed, of the best wisdom which the human intellect, earnestly seeking for help from God, has hitherto been able to gather between birth and death."*
     * Time and Tide, pp. 48, 49. It should be noted that the
     Letters in this pregnant little volume were written by
     Ruskin as far back as 1867.
Surely this is a very different view of the Bible from the one which is presented by Dr. Farrar. Setting aside a little religious phraseology, a Freethinker might endorse Ruskin's theory of the Bible. Everything is substantially granted to the Freethinker when it is admitted that the Bible has "no authoritative claim on our faith." Whatever truth and beauty it contains may then be thankfully accepted.
Professor Huxley's famous eulogy of the Bible, as a book to be read in Board Schools, is made the most of by Dr. Farrar. He must have winced, however, at Huxley's reference to what a sensible teacher would "eliminate" as "not desirable for children to occupy themselves with." He was not sensitive enough to wince at the statement that "even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child"—which is virtually a testimonial in his favor for grown-up men and women. Dr. Farrar crows lustily over what he calls "Professor Huxley's testimony to the unique glory of the Scriptures." It is perhaps well for him that Huxley is incapable of resenting this misrepresentation. Still, it must be admitted that on this occasion, as on one or two others, Huxley did gratuitously play into the hands of the enemy. He might have known the kind of use they would make of his "graceful concessions."
Dr. Farrar had not the honesty to tell his readers that Huxley had the most sovereign contempt for his theory of the Bible. The great Agnostic held, for instance, that "belief in a demonic world" is inculcated throughout the New Testament, and that this belief is "totally devoid of foundation." He declared that Inspiration, in the school of the Higher Criticism, is "deprived of its old intelligible sense," and is "watered down into a mystification." He laughed at the miracles of the Gospels, and made great fun of the story of the bedevilled Gadarean swine. He held that religion and morality have really no necessary connection, and sneered at the "supernaturalists"—gentlemen like Dr. Farrar—who took to patronising morality when they saw its importance, and "have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of supernaturalism."*
To accept a testimonial from such a writer is abject on the part of a clergyman defending the inspiration of the Bible; and to parade it is ............