The translation which is used, for the most part, in this book is the King James Version as paragraphed in Everyman's Library, where it is printed in five convenient volumes.

II

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE NEW SPIRIT

HE fact that some of the Old Testament books

TH

were admitted with hesitation, after doubt and debate, establishes the principle of inequality. This is an inevitable characteristic of all collections: every considerable number of things is made up of better and worse. They may all be good, but there will be varying degrees of goodness.

Thus we perceive that the New Testament is a better teacher of religion than the Old; Samuel and Kings are more reliable histories than Chronicles; the sermons of Amos and Hosea are on such great themes as the fear and love of God, the sermons of Haggai and Malachi are about such lesser matters as the erection of a church building and the generous support of the services.

The Bible is not level, like a desert; it is full of hills and valleys. It is not like an enclosed garden, with trim beds of growing things, carefully weeded, and intersected by neatly graveled walks; it is like a wide expanse of country; with farms, but also with forests in which there is thick undergrowth and trunks of fallen trees; with land partly fertile, but partly infertile; with good roads between populated town and

town, but also with abandoned roads still marked with old deep ruts but now leading nowhere. The Bible is not an account of a series of monotonous centuries, like the annals of a stagnant people; it is a record of progress, out of ignorance into better knowledge, from lower to higher ideals. It is as interesting as a river, on its varied way from the mountains to the sea. The notion of a Golden Age in the past is neither Hebrew nor Christian. It is a pagan conception of a decadent 'world. In the Old Testament and in the New, the Golden Age is in the future. Men are looking forward with expectation to the coming of the Messiah, and then to his coming again. The redemption of mankind is yet to be. The kingdom of God is to be continually prayed for, and prepared for.

If then we are to know the Bible in any true sense, we must begin with the fact that it is a record of progress. We are thus provided with answers to many hard questions.

I

Some of these questions relate to a conflict between religion and science.

A few years ago a popular antagonist of conventional religion went about lecturing on the Mistakes of Moses. He took his material from the errors which he found in the first five books of the Bible. He might have made a similar lecture on the Mistakes of Plato, or of Julius Cæsar, or of Thomas Aquinas, or of anybody else who lived more than five hundred years ago. The dullest child in the grammar school knows more

about the world than they did. But the significance of the lecture was in a theory which was then held by many people to the effect that the inclusion of the books of Moses in the Bible was a guarantee of the infallibility of Moses. Science, comparing what the world says about itself with what Moses said about it, declared that Moses was in error. Religion was supposed to claim that everything which Moses said was right. There were, indeed, apparent errors, but they were laboriously explained away.

This was not only a laborious but a painful process. In their zeal to maintain the inerrancy of Moses, some Christian scholars seemed to be like those lawyers who are intent not on the revelation of the truth but on the winning of their case. They gained the whole Pentateuch at the peril of the loss of their own soul.

Meanwhile the Bible itself was so indifferent to the whole matter of the accuracy of the Old Testament account of the making of the world that it offered its readers a free choice between two quite different accounts. According to the first account "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"; then came stars and continents and planets and animals and man. In the second account, in the place of the deep there is a desert, "for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth,' only "there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground"; then came trees, and a garden in Eden, and a man "to dress it and to keep it," and after the creation of man "the Lord God

formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air."

The fallacy at the heart of the situation was the failure to recognize the fact that the Old Testament is a record of progress. The accounts which it contains of the making of the world are true in the sense of being true records of what the Hebrews thought about these matters, several thousand years ago. But mankind would be dull indeed if after all these centuries of residence upon this planet we know no more about it than was known a thousand years before Christ in the Mediterranean provinces of Asia.

II

This controversy between religion and science was followed by a much more serious contention between religion and morality.

The situation was this. On the one hand was religion, requiring complete acceptance of the Bible; on the other hand was the Old Testament, praising, or at least allowing, conduct which the New Testament condemned. The Old Testament said, Hate your enemies, spoil their goods, kill them and their wives and children.

Thus in the Fifty-eighth Psalm we are instructed how to regard the wicked.

Before your pots can feel the thorns,

He shall take them away as with a whirlwind,

Both green, and burning.

The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: