Chapter IV: Part 4

The soul possesses itself and carries with it into life native faculties and an inborn light: these manifest and develop themselves more and more as they come into relation with the exterior world; but they had still an existence prior to those relations, and they exercise an important influence upon what results. The external world does not create nor essentially change the intellectual and moral being that has just come into life, but it opens to it a stage where that being acts in accordance at once with its proper nature, and the conditions and influences in the midst of which the action takes place. The hypothesis of a statue endowed with sensibility is a contradiction; in seeking to explain man's first growth, it loses sight of the entire intellectual and moral being.

When, as I said before, man first entered the world, he did not enter it, he could not enter it, as a new-born babe, with the mere breath of life; he was created full grown, with instincts and faculties complete in their power and capable of immediate action. {135} We must either deny the creation and be driven to monstrous hypotheses, or admit that the human being who now develops himself slowly and laboriously, was at his first appearance mature in body and in mind.

The creation implies then the Revelation, a revelation which lighted man at his entrance into the world, and qualified him from that very moment to use his faculties and his instincts. Do we, can we, picture to ourselves the first man, the first human couple, with a complete physical development, and yet without the essential conditions of intellectual activity, physically strong and morally a nonentity, the body of twenty years and the soul in the first hour of infancy? Such a fact is self-contradictory, and impossible of conception.

What was the positive extent of this primal revelation, the necessary attendant upon creation, which occurred in the first relation of God with man? No man can say. I open the book of Genesis and there I read:

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"And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. {137} And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. ... Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." [Footnote 26]

[Footnote 26: Genesis ii. 15-24.]

According, then, to the Bible, the primitive revelation essentially bore upon the three points,--marriage, language, and the duty of man's obedience to God his Creator: Adam received at the hand of God the moral law of his liberty, the companion of his life, and the faculty by which he was enabled to name the creatures that were around him: in other words, the three sources of religion, of family, and of science were immediately unclosed to him. It is not necessary here to enter upon any of the questions which have been raised, as to the human origin of language, the primitive language, or the formation of families, with their influence upon the great organisation of society: the limits of the primitive revelation cannot be determined scientifically; the fact of the revelation itself is certain. {138} This is the light which lighted the first man from his first entrance upon life, and without which it is impossible to conceive that he could have survived.

The primitive revelation did not abandon mankind on its development and dispersion; it accompanied it everywhere, as a general and permanent revelation. The light which had lighted the first man spread amongst all nations and throughout all ages, assuming the character of ideas, universal and uncontested; of instincts, spontaneous and indestructible. No nation has been without this light, none left to its own unassisted efforts to grope its way through the darkness of life. Let not the human understanding pride itself too much upon its works; the glory does not belong to it alone: what it has accomplished it has accomplished by aid of the primitive principles received from God; in all his works and all his progress man has had for point of departure and support that primitive revelation. {139} All the grand doctrines, all the mighty institutions, which have governed the world, whatever intermixture of monstrous and fatal errors they may have contained, have preserved a trace of the fundamental verities which were the dowry of humanity at its birth. God has forsaken no portion of the human race; and not less amidst the errors into which it has fallen, than in the noble developments which constitute its glory, we recognise signs of the primitive teaching derived from its Divine Author.

After the revelation made to the first man, and in the midst of the general revelation diffused over all mankind, a great event occurs in history: a special revelation takes place, and has for its seat the bosom of an inconsiderable nation, that had been shut in during sixteen centuries in a little corner of the world; and it was thence that, nineteen centuries ago, that revelation proceeded to enlighten and to subdue, according to the predictions of its Author, all the human race.

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A man of an imagination as fertile as his knowledge is profound, who, with an admirable candour has in his works associated hypothesis and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the University of Göttingen, has recently thus characterised this event:--"The history of the old Jewish people is fundamentally the history of the true religion, proceeding from step to step to its complete development, rising through all kinds of struggles, until it achieves a supreme victory, and finally manifesting itself in all its majesty and power, in order to spread irresistibly, by its proper virtue, so as to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations." [Footnote 27]

[Footnote 27: H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis
Christus. 2nd ed., vol. i. p. 9. Göttingen, 1851. ]

How is the great event thus characterised by M. Ewald proved? By what marks can we distinguish the Divine origin of this special revelation that became the Christian religion? What does it affirm itself in support of its claim to the moral conquest of mankind?

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At the very outset, in proving her dogmas and precepts to have come from God, the Christian revelation asserts that the documents in which it is written are themselves of divine origin. The divine inspiration of the sacred volume is the first basis of the Christian Faith, the external title of Christianity to authority over souls. What is the full import of this title? What the signification of the inspiration of the sacred volumes?

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Sixth Meditation.

The Inspiration Of The Scriptures.

I have read the sacred volumes over and over again, I have perused them in very different dispositions of mind, at one time studying them as great historical documents, at another admiring them as sublime works of poetry. I have experienced an extraordinary impression, quite different from either curiosity or admiration. I have felt myself the listener of a language other than that of the chronicler or the poet; and under the influence of a breath issuing from other sources than human. Not that man does not occupy a great place in the sacred volumes; he displays himself there, on the contrary, with all his passions, his vices, his weaknesses, his ignorance, his errors; the Hebrew people shows itself rude, barbarous, changeable, superstitious, accessible to all the imperfections, to all the failings, of other nations. {143} But the Hebrew is not the sole actor in his history; he has an Ally, a Protector, a Master, who intervenes incessantly to command, inspire, direct, strike, or save. God is there, always present, acting--

"Et ce n'est pas un Dieu comme vos dieux frivoles,
Insensibles et sourds, impuissants, mutilés,
De bois, de marbre, ou d'or, comme vous le voulez." [Footnote 28]

"Not such a god as are _your_ friv'lous gods,
Insensible and deaf, weak, mutilated,
Of wood, or stone, or gold, as _you_ will have them."

[Footnote 28: Corneille, Polyeucte, acte iv. sc. 3.]

It is the God One and Supreme, All Powerful, the Creator, the Eternal. And even in their forgetfulness and their disobedience, the Hebrews believe still in God: He is still the object at once of their fear, of their hope, and of a faith that persists in the midst of the infidelity of their lives. The Bible is no poem in which man recounts and sings the adventures of his God combined with his own; it is a real drama, a continued dialogue between God and man personified in the Hebrews; it is, on the one side, God's will and God's action, and, on the other, man's liberty and man's faith, now in pious association, now at fatal variance.

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The more I have perused the Scriptures, the more surprised I feel that earnest readers should not have been impressed as I have been, and that several should have failed to see the characteristic of divine inspiration, so foreign to every other book, so remarkable in this one. That men who absolutely deny all supernatural action of God in the world, should not be more disposed to admit it in the sources of the Bible than elsewhere, is perfectly comprehensible; but the attack upon the divine inspiration of the sacred books has another motive, and one more likely to prove contagious. It is not without deep regret that I proceed in this place to contradict ancient traditions, at once respected and respectable, and perhaps to offend sober and sincere convictions. But my own conviction is stronger than my regret, and it is still more so because accompanied by another conviction, which is, that the system that it is my intention to contest, has occasioned, continues to occasion, and may still occasion, an immense ill to Christianity.

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Whoever reads without prejudice in the Hebrew and Greek the original texts of the Scriptures, whether of the Old or New Testament, meets there often in the midst of their sublime beauties, I do not say merely faults of style, but of grammar, in violation of those logical and natural rules of language common to all tongues. Are we to infer that these faults have the same origin as the doctrines with which they are intermixed, and that they are both divinely inspired? [Footnote 29]

[Footnote 29: I indicate, in a note placed at the end of this
volume, some instances of these grammatical faults met with
in the Scriptures, and to which it is impossible to assign
the character of divine inspiration.]

And yet this is what is pretended by fervent and learned men, who maintain that all, absolutely all, in the Scriptures is divinely inspired--the words as well as the ideas, all the words used upon all subjects, the material of language as well as the doctrine which lies at its base.

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In this assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in grammar, and if not in grammar, neither was it, any more God's purpose to give instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology. It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven. It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone, that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed.

Amongst the principal arguments alleged to prove that everything in the sacred volumes is divinely inspired, particular use has been made of the Second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, where in effect we find the passage:--

"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is
profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness:

"That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto
all good works." [Footnote 30]

[Footnote 30: 2 Timothy iii. 16, 17.]

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Is it possible to determine in words of greater precision the religious and moral object of the inspiration?

Appeal is made to a consideration of a different description. If, it is said, we at the same time admit, on the one side, the inspiration of the sacred books, and on the other, that this inspiration is not universal and absolute, who shall make the selection between these two parts?--who mark the limit of the inspiration?--who say which texts, which passages are inspired, and which are not? So to divide the Holy Scriptures is to strip them of their supernatural character, to destroy their authenticity, by surrendering them to all the incertitudes, all the disputes of men: a complete and uninterrupted inspiration alone is capable of commanding faith.

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Never-dying pretension of man's weakness! Created intelligent and free, he proposes to use largely his intelligence and his freedom; at the same time, conscious how feeble his means are, how inadequate to his aspirations, he invokes a guide, a support; and from the very moment that his hope fixes upon it, he will have it immutable, infallible. He searches a fixed point to which to attach himself with absolute and permanent assurance. In creating man, God did not leave him without fixed points; the Divine revelation, and the inspiration of the Scriptures, had precisely for object and effect to supply these, but not on all subjects alike and without distinction. I refer here again to what I lately said respecting the separation of the finite and the infinite, of the world created, and of its Creator. At the same time that the limits of the finite world are those of human science, it is to human study and human science that God has surrendered the finite world; it is not there that God has set up his divine torch; He has dictated to Moses the laws which regulate the duties of man towards God, and of man towards man; but He has left to Newton the discovery of the laws which preside over the universe. {149} The Scriptures speak upon all subjects; circumstances connected with the finite world are there incessantly mixed with perspectives of infinity; but it is only to the latter, to that future of which they permit us to snatch a view, and to the laws which they impose upon men, that the divine inspiration addresses itself; God only pours his light in quarters which man's eye and man's labour cannot reach; for all that remains, the sacred books speak the language used and understood by the generations to whom they are addressed. God does not, even when He inspires them, transport into future domains of science the interpreters He uses, or the nations to whom He sends them; He takes them both as He finds them, with their traditions, their notions, their degree of knowledge or ignorance as respects the finite world, of its phenomena and its laws. {150} It is not the condition, the scientific progress of the human understanding; it is the condition and moral progress of the human soul which are the object of the Divine action, and God requires not for the exercise of his power on the human soul, science either as a precursor or a companion; He addresses himself to instincts and desires the most intimate and most sublime as well as the most universal in man's nature, to instincts and desires of which science is neither the object nor the measure, and which require to be satisfied from other sources. Whatever true or false science we find in the Scriptures upon the subject of the finite world, proceeds from the writers themselves or their contemporaries; they have spoken as they believed, or as those believed who surrounded them when they spoke: on the other hand, the light thrown over the infinite, the law laid down, and the perspective opened by that same light, these are what proceed from God, and which He has inspired in the Scriptures. Their object is essentially and exclusively moral and practical; they express the ideas, employ the images, and speak the language best calculated to produce a powerful effect upon the soul, to regenerate and to save it. I open the Gospel according to St. Luke, and I there read the admirable parable:--

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"There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and
fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:

"And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid
at his gate, full of sores,

"And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the
rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

"And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by
the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and
was buried;

"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth
Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

"And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and
send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water,
and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

"But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime
receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things;
but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

"And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf
fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot;
neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

"Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou
wouldest send him to my father's house:

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"For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest
they also come into this place of torment.

"Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let
them hear them.

"And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them
from the dead, they will repent.

"And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."
[Footnote 31]

[Footnote 31: Luke xvi. 19-31.]

Was it the intention of Jesus, and of the Evangelist who has repeated his words, to describe, as they really are, the condition of men after their earthly existence, their positive local position after God's judgment, and their relations either with each other or with the world which they have quitted? Certainly not; the material circumstances intermixed with this dialogue are only images borrowed from actual common life. But what images so strike, so penetrate the soul? What more solemn warning addressed to men in this life, to rouse them to a sense of their duties towards God and their fellow creatures, in the name of the mysterious future that awaits them?

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Nothing is further from my thought than to see in the sacred books mere poetical images and symbols; those books are really, with respect to the religious problems that beset man's thoughts, the Light and the voice of God; still, that Light only lights, that voice only reveals revelations of God with man, duties which God enjoins men in the course of their present life, and prospects which He opens to them beyond the imperfect and limited world where this life passes. As for this life itself, it is the object of human study and science, not of the inspiration of the sacred Scriptures. In disregarding this limit, in pretending to attribute to the language of the Scriptures, used with reference to the phenomena of the finite world, the character of divine inspiration, men have fallen with respect both to thought and act into deplorable errors. Hence proceeded the trial of Galileo, and numerous other controversies, numerous other condemnations still more absurd, still more to be regretted, in which Christianity was immediately placed in opposition to human science, and constrained to inflict or receive remarkable disavowals. {154} The same is the case at the present day with respect to numerous objections made in the name of the natural sciences to Christianity, and which from the learned circles where they have their birth, spread over a world at once curious and frivolous, where they cause the Christian faith itself to be regarded as ignorant credulity. Nothing of this kind could ever occur, no necessity of such conflict could await the Christian religion, if on the one side the limits of human science, and on the other those of divine inspiration, were recognised as they really are, and respected according to their rightful claims.

I might cite in aid of the opinion I support numerous and great authorities. I will refer to but three, appealed to by Galileo himself in 1615 in his letters to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine" [Footnote 32]--(who could appeal to authorities more august?)--"Many things," says St. Jerome, "are recounted in the Scriptures according to the judgment of the times when they happened, and not according to the truth." [Footnote 33]

[Footnote 32: Opere Complete di Galileo-Galilei, t. ii. chap.
ii. pp. 26-64. Florence, 1843.]

[Footnote 33: OEuvres de St. Jérôme, Comment, in Jeremiam, ed.
Vallars. t. ix. p. 1040.]

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"The purpose of the Holy Scriptures," says the Cardinal
Baronius, "is to teach us how to go to heaven, and not how the
heavens go." "This," says Kepler, "is the counsel I give to the
man so ill informed as not to understand the science of
astronomy, or so weak as to regard adhesion to Copernicus as
proof of want of piety:--Let him at once leave the study of
astronomy and the examination of the opinions of philosophers;
instead of devoting himself to those arduous researches, let
him remain at home, till his fields, and occupy himself with
his proper business; and thence, raising towards the admirable
vault of heaven his eyes, which constitute for him his sole
mode of vision, let him pour forth his heart in thanksgivings
and praises to God his Creator. He may rest assured that he is
thus rendering to God a worship as perfect as that of the
astronomer himself, to whom God has accorded the gift of seeing
clearer with the eyes of his intelligence; but who, above all
the worlds and all the heavens that he attains, knows and wills
to find his God." [Footnote 34]

[Footnote 34: Kepler, Nova Astronomia, Introductio, p. 9.
Prague, 1609.]

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I discard, then, as absolutely foreign to the grand question that occupies me, all the difficulties suggested to the Scriptures in the name of those sciences whose province is finite nature. I seek and consider in these books only what is their sole object,--the relations of God with man, and the solution of those problems which these relations cause to weigh upon the human soul. The deeper we go in the study of the sacred volumes, restored to their real object, the more the divine inspiration becomes manifest and striking. God and man are there ever both present, both actors in the same history. Of this history it is my present object to illustrate the grand features.

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Seventh Meditation.

God According To The Bible.

It is far from my intention to evade the questions which concern the authenticity of the Bible, and of the respective books which compose it. I shall enter upon them in the second series of these _Meditations_, when I touch upon the history of the Christian religion. Those questions, however, have no bearing upon the subject which occupies me at the present moment; the Bible, whatever its antiquity, whatever the comparative antiquity of its different parts, has been ever that witness of God in which the Hebrews believed, and under the law of which they lived, the great monument of the religion in the bosom of which the Christian religion took its birth. It is this God of whom in the Bible, and in the Bible alone, it is my purpose to seek the peculiar and true character.

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The nations of Semitic origin have been honoured for their primitive and persistent faith in the unity of God. Under different forms, and amidst events very dissimilar, nearly all nations have been polytheistic; the Semitic nations alone have believed firmly in the one God. This great moral fact has been attributed to different and to complex causes; but the fact itself is generally acknowledged and admitted.

In two respects in this assertion there is exaggeration. On one side, among the nations of Semitic origin, several were polytheistic; the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrews, and the Arab Ishmaelites, alone remained really monotheistic; on the other side, the idea of the unity of God was not entirely strange even to the polytheistic nations. The greater part, like the Hindoos and the Greeks, admitted one sole and primordial Power anterior and superior to their gods;--idea, vague and searched from afar, derived from the instinct of man or the reflection of the philosopher, and which amongst those nations became neither the basis of any religion that deserves the name, nor any efficacious obstacle to idolatry. {159} The God of the Bible is no such sterile abstraction; He is the one God at the present time as in the origin of all things, the personal God, living, acting, and presiding efficiently over the destinies of the world that He has created.

He has besides another characteristic, one far more striking, which belongs to Him more exclusively than that of Unity. The gods of the polytheistic nations have histories filled with events, vicissitudes, transformations, adventures. The mythology of the Egyptians, of the Hindoos, of the Greeks, of the Scandinavians, and numerous others, is but the poetical or symbolical recital of the varied and agitated lives of their gods. We detect in these recitals sometimes the personification of the fancies of nations described in accordance with their actual phenomena, some times the reminiscences of human personages who have struck the imagination of the people. {160} But whatever their origin, whatever their name, each of those gods has his individual history more or less overladen with incidents and acts, now heroic, now licentious, now elegantly fantastic, now grossly eccentric. All the polytheistic religions are collections of biographies, divine or legendary, allegorical or completely fabulous, in which the careers and the passions, the actions and the dreams of men, reproduce themselves under the forms and names of deities.

The God of the Bible has no biography, neither has He any personal adventures. Nothing occurs to Him and nothing changes in Him; He is always and invariably the same, a Being real and personal, absolutely distinct from the finite world and from humanity, identical and immutable in the bosom of the universal diversity and movement. "I Am That I Am," is the sole definition that He vouchsafes of himself, and the constant expression of what He is in all the course of the history of the Hebrews, to which He is present and over which He presides without ever receiving from it any reflex of influence. {161} Such is the God of the Bible, in evident and permanent contrast with all the gods of polytheism, still more distinct and more solitary by his nature than by his Unity.

This is, indeed, so peculiarly the proper and essential character of the God of the Bible, that this character has passed into the very language of the Hebrews, and has become there the very name of God. Several words are employed in the Bible as appellations of God. One of these _El, Eloah,_ in the plural _Elohïm_, expresses force, _creative power_, and is applied to the manifold gods of Paganism as well as to the one God of the Hebrews. _El Shaddaï_ is translated by _the all-powerful_. _Adonai_ signifies _Lord_. The word _Yahwe_ or _Yehwe_, which becomes in Hebrew pronunciation _Jehovah_, means simply _He is_, and means self-existence, the Being Absolute and Eternal. {162} This name occurs in no other of the Semitic languages, and it is at the epoch of Moses that it appears for the first time amongst the Hebrews: "And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Eternal" (_Yahwe, Jehovah_). "And I appeared unto Abraham, Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of the All-powerful (_El Shaddaï_), but by my name Eternal was I not known to them." [Footnote 35 ] _Yahwe, Jehovah_, is at once the true God and the national God of Israel. [Footnote 36]

[Footnote 35: Exodus vi. 2, 3.]

[Footnote 36: I have consulted respecting the precise sense
and the different shades of meaning of the terms expressing
God in Hebrew, my learned _confrère_ at the Academy of
Inscriptions, M. Munk, who has replied to all my inquiries
with as much clearness as courtesy.]

The history of the Hebrews is neither less significant nor less expressive than their language; it is the history of the relations of the God, One and Immutable with the people chosen by Him to be the special representative of the religious principle, and the regenerating source of religious life in the human race. {163} This people undergoes the destiny and trials common to all nations; it demands, and becomes subject to, a variety of different governments; it falls into the errors and faults usual to nations; it frequently succumbs to the temptations of idolatry; like the others, it has its days of virtue and of vice, of prosperity and of reverses, of glory and of abasement. Amidst all the vicissitudes and errors of the people of the Bible, the God of the Bible remains invariably the same, without any tincture of anthropomorphism, without any alteration in the idea which the Hebrews conceive of his nature, either during their fidelity or disobedience to his Commandments. It is always the God who has said, "I Am That I Am," of whom his people demand no other explanation of himself, and who, ever present and sovereign, pursues the designs of his providence with men, who either use or abuse the liberty of action which that God had accorded to them at their creation. I wish to retrace, according to the Bible, the principal phases and the principal actors in this history. {164} The more I study, the more I feel that I am watching, as M. Ewald has expressed it, "the career of the true religion, advancing step by step to its complete development," that is to say, that I am there observing the action of God upon the first steps and upon the religious progress of the human race.

I. God And Abraham.

The history of the Hebrews, temporal and spiritual, opens with Abraham. At his first appearance in the Bible, Abraham is a nomad chief, who has quitted Chaldæa and the town of Haran, where his father, Terah, descended from Shem, is still living. He is wandering with his family, his servants, and his flocks, at first on the frontiers and afterwards in the interior of the land of Canaan, halting wherever he finds water and pasturage, and conducting his tents and his tribe at one time through the mountainous districts, at another along the plains below. Why has he left Chaldæa? {165} According to the Bible itself, his father was an idolater: "Your fathers," said Joshua to the people of Israel, "dwelt on the other side of the flood" (the Euphrates) "in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods." [Footnote 37] The book of Judith contains a similar assertion; [Footnote 38] and the Jewish and Arabian traditions confirm, at the same time that they amplify, the statement: the father of Abraham, they say, was an idolatrous fanatic, and his son Abraham, having set himself against the practice of idolatry, was upon his charge thrown into a burning furnace, from which a miracle alone preserved him. The historian Josephus speaks of the insurrections which took place amongst the Chaldæans on the occasion of their religious dissensions.

[Footnote 37: Joshua xxiv. 2.]

[Footnote 38: Judith v. 6-9. ]

[USCCB: Judith v. 6-9.
"These people are descendants of the Chaldeans. They formerly
dwelt in Mesopotamia, for they did not wish to follow the
gods of their forefathers who were born in the land of the
Chaldeans. Since they abandoned the way of their ancestors,
and acknowledged with divine worship the God of heaven, their
forefathers expelled them from the presence of their gods. So
they fled to Mesopotamia and dwelt there a long time. Their
God bade them leave their abode and proceed to the land of
Canaan. Here they settled, and grew very rich in gold,
silver, and a great abundance of livestock."]

The Bible makes no allusion to these traditions; from the very beginning God intervenes in the history of the father of the Hebrews. {166} "The Eternal had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: I will make thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; ... and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. ... So Abram departed, ... and Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the sons that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came." [Footnote 39]

[Footnote 39: Genesis xii. 1-5.]

How had God spoken to Abraham? By a voice from without or by an internal inspiration? The writer of the Biblical narrative occupies himself in no respect with the question. God is for him, present and an actor in the history just as much as Abraham is; the intervention of God has in his eyes nothing but what is perfectly simple and natural. The same faith animates Abraham; he issues forth from Chaldæa and wanders through Palestine, according to the word and under the direction of the Eternal.

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He wanders through the midst of populations already established upon the land of Canaan, and with these he lives in peace, but still, not uniting with them; bringing them succour when attacked by foreign chieftains; fighting in their behalf as a faithful ally, sometimes, perhaps, in the character of a valiant _condottiere_ [mercenary], but remaining isolated in his capacity of nomad Patriarch, with his family and his tribe; repelling even the gifts and favours which might perhaps lower his character or affect his independence. Everywhere that he halts, or that any incident of importance occurs to him, at Sichem, Bethel, Beersheba, Hebron, he raises an altar to his God. In his wandering uncertain life a famine impels him on one occasion even as far as Egypt:--the first perhaps of those shepherd chiefs who issued from Asia, and who were so soon to invade that rich country. Abraham passes in Egypt several years, well treated by the reigning Pharaoh; on excellent terms with the Egyptian priests, imparting to them and receiving from them such knowledge of astronomy or of natural philosophy as they mutually possessed; but maintaining ever carefully the isolation of his family, of his tribe, and of his religion. Of his own accord, or at the instance of the Pharaoh, he quits Egypt, carrying with him not only his flocks and his camels, but his Egyptian slaves, and amongst others Hagar. {168} He returns to the country of Canaan, again wanders through several of its districts, takes part in different events--internal troubles or foreign wars, and finally settles with his family and dependents at Hebron, near the oaks of Mamre, amongst the tribe of the children of Heth; but still always in his capacity as a foreigner, and always careful as such to preserve his character and his independence. When his wife Sarah died, the book of Genesis tells us that,

"Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto the sons
of Heth, saying,

"I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession
of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my
sight.

"And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him,

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"Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the
choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall
withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy
dead.

"And Abraham stood up, and bowed himself to the people of the
land, even to the children of Heth.

"And he communed with them, saying, If it be your mind that I
should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me, and entreat for
me to Ephron the son of Zohar,

"That he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath,
which is in the end of his field; for as much money as it is
worth he shall give it me for a possession of a buryingplace
amongst you.

"And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth: and Ephron the
Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of
Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying,

"Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave
that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of
my people give I it thee: bury thy dead.

"And Abraham bowed down himself before the people of the land.

"And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the people of the
land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray thee, hear me: I
will give thee money for the field; take it of me, and I will
bury my dead there.

"And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him,

"My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred
shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury
therefore thy dead.

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"And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to
Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the
sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money
with the merchant.

"And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was
before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and
all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the
borders round about, were made sure

"Unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children
of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his city.

"And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of
the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the
land of Canaan.

"And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure
unto Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by the sons of
Heth." [Footnote 40]

[Footnote 40: Genesis xxiii. 3-20.]

Little importance does Abraham attach to his precarious condition
as a wanderer and a stranger; he has faith in God. God commands,
and Abraham obeys. God promises, and Abraham trusts. One day,
however, with a feeling of anxious humility, Abraham makes the
following prayer to God:--
"Lord Eternal, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless,
and there is Eliezer of Damascus shall be my heir?
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And behold the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, This
shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come forth out of
thine own bowels shall be thine heir. I am God, the mighty,
all-powerful; walk before my face, be thou perfect. I will
establish my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after
thee, in their generation, for an everlasting possession, and I
will be their God. But thou shalt keep my covenant therefore,
thou and thy seed after thee, in their generations. And Abraham
believed in the Lord; and the Eternal counted it to him for
righteousness." [Footnote 41]

[Footnote 41: Genesis xv. 1-6. and xvii. 1-9.]

In these days, in the bosom of Christian civilization, obedience to God and confidence in God are the first precepts, the first virtues of Christianity. They were also the virtues of Abraham, and the precepts inculcated by Abraham's history in the Bible. {172} And the God of Abraham, the God of the Bible, is the same who is the object of adoration to the Christian of the present day; the same conception as that of those philosophers of the present day who believe in God, and believe in Him as in God Absolute and Perfect, Self-dependent, Eternal, without the possibility or attempt to define Him otherwise. Thousands of years have changed nothing as to the biblical notion of God in the human soul, nor as to the essential laws regulating the relation of man with God.

Historical tradition fully confirms the moral fact here mentioned. Abraham has not been the object of any mystical conception, or any mythological metamorphosis; nowhere has he been transformed into demigod or son of God; he has ever remained the model of religious faith and submission, the type of the pious man in intimate relation with God. Throughout all antiquity, and in all the East, as much for the primitive Christians as for the Jews and Arabs, as much for the Mussulmans as for the Jews and Christians, God is the God of Abraham; Abraham is the friend of God, the father and the prince of believers; these are the very names that the Gospel gives him; [Footnote 42] and the Koran, too, celebrates him in these words:--

[Footnote 42: St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans iv.; Galatians
iii.; Epistle of St. James ii. 23.]

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"And when the night overshadowed him, he saw a star, and he
said, This is my Lord; but when it set, he said, I like not
gods which set. And when he saw the moon rising, he said, This
is my Lord; but when he saw it set, he said, Verily, if my Lord
direct me not, I shall become one of the people who go astray.
And when he saw the sun rising, he said, This is my Lord, this
is the greatest; but when it set, he said, my people, verily I
am clear of that which ye associate with God. I direct my face
unto him who hath created the heavens and the earth." [Footnote
43]

[Footnote 43: Koran vi.]

The Eternal, the God One and Immutable, is the God of Abraham; Abraham is the servant and adorer of the true God.

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II. God And Moses.

The true idea of God, and the faith in his effectual and continued providence, are the two great religious principles which the name of Abraham suggests. This is the beginning of the history of the Hebrews, and the origin of that ancient Covenant which, in passing from the Pentateuch to the Gospel, has become the new Covenant, the Christian Religion.

About five centuries later, we find the Hebrews settled in Egypt, in the land of Goshen, between the lower Nile, the Red Sea, and the Desert, in a condition very different from that in which they had first been when attracted to the court of Pharaoh by the prosperity of Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham. The new Pharaoh oppresses them cruelly; they are a prey to the miseries of slavery, the contagion of idolatry, to all the evils, all the perils, physical and moral, which can afflict a nation numerically weak, fallen under the yoke of one powerful and civilized. {175} The Hebrews nevertheless persist in their religious faith, cling to their national reminiscences; they do not suffer their nationality to be lost in and confounded with that of their masters; they endure without offering any active resistance; they will not deliver themselves, but they have never ceased to believe in their God, and they await their Deliverer.

Moses has been saved from the waters of the Nile by Pharaoh's own daughter. He has been brought up at Heliopolis, in the midst of the pomp of the court, and instructed in the sciences of the Egyptian priests. He has served the sovereign of Egypt; he has commanded his troops and made war for him against the Æthiopians. He has received an Egyptian name, Osarsiph, or Tisithen. Everything seems to concur to make him an Egyptian. But he remains a faithful Israelite: true to the faith and to the fortunes of his brethren. Their oppression rouses his indignation; he avenges one of them by killing his oppressor. {176} The victims of oppression, alarmed, disavow Moses, instead of supporting him. Moses flees from Egypt and takes refuge in the Desert, amongst a tribe of wandering Arabs, the Midianites, sprung, like himself, from Abraham. Their chief, the sheick of the tribe, Jethro, called also Hobab, receives him as a son, and gives him his daughter Zipporah in marriage. The proud Israelite, who has declined to remain an Egyptian, becomes an Arab, and leads, several years, the nomadic life of the hospitable tribe. It is now in the peninsula of Sinai that Moses wanders with the servants and flocks of his father-in-law. In the centre of that peninsula, of yore a province in the empire of the Pharaohs, but which had fallen into the possession of the pastoral Arabs, rises Sinai, a mount with which from time immemorial, among the neighbouring tribes, have been connected as many sacred traditions as have ever been assigned to Mount Ararat in Armenia, or the Himalayas in India. In this venerable spot, before a burning bush, Moses, with a heart full of faith, hears God calling him and commanding him to lead his people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. {177} Moses is humble, distrustful of himself, just as Abraham before him had been. "Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? ... When I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: Exodus iii. 11, 13, 14.]

Moses receives his mission from Jehovah, and feels no other disquietude than arises from the desire to accomplish it.

In presence of such facts, with this association of God and man in the same work, the opponents of the Supernatural still clamour: "Why," ask they, "this confusion of divine action and of human action? Has God need of man's concurrence? {178} Can He not, if He will, accomplish all his designs by himself, and through the fulness of his omnipotence?" In my turn, I would ask them if they know why God created man, and if God has put them into the secret of his intentions towards the instrument whom He employs for his designs? There precisely lies the privilege of humanity: man is God's associate, subject to Him, yet a free agent independent of Him; he intervenes by his proper action in plans of which only an infinitely small part is revealed to his intelligence and reserved for his execution. Western Asia and its history are full of the name of Moses: Jews, Christians, and Mahometans style him the First Prophet, the Great Lawgiver, the Great Theologian; everywhere, in the scene of the events themselves, the places retain a memory of him: the traveller meets there the Well of Moses, the Ravine of Moses, the Mountain of Moses, the Valley of Moses. {179} In other countries and other ages, this name has been given as the most glorious that the saints could receive: St. Peter has been styled the Moses of the Christian Church; St. Benedict, the Moses of the Monastic Orders; Ulphilas, the Moses of the Goths. What did Moses do to obtain a renown so great and so enduring? He gained no battles; he conquered no territory; he founded no cities; he governed no state; he was not even a man in whom eloquence replaced other sources of influence and power: "And Moses said unto the Lord, my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45: Exodus iv. 10.]

There is not in this whole history a single grand human action, a single grand event, proceeding from human agency; all, all is the work of God; and Moses is nothing on any occasion but the interpreter and instrument of God: to this mission he has consecrated soul and life; it is only by virtue of this title that he is powerful, and that he shares, as far as his capacity as a man permits, a work infinitely grander and more enduring than that accomplished by all the heroes and all the masters that the world ever acknowledged.

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I know no more striking spectacle than that of the unshakeable faith and inexhaustible energy of Moses in the pursuit of a work not his own, in which he executes what he has not conceived, in which he obeys rather than commands. Obstacles and disappointments meet him at each turn; he has to struggle with weaknesses, infidelity, caprices, jealousies, and seditions, and these not merely in his own nation, but in his own family. He has himself his moments of sadness, of disquietude: "And Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me.... [Footnote 46] I beseech thee, shew me thy glory."

[Footnote 46: Exodus xvii. 4; xxxiii. 18-20.]

And God answers him, "I will make all my goodness pass before thee. ... Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live." And Moses trusts in God, and continues to triumph whilst he obeys Him.

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The work of deliverance is consummated; Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt, has surmounted the first perils and the first sufferings of the Desert. They advance through the group of mountains in the peninsula of Sinai Passing from valley to valley, they arrive "at the entrance of a large basin surrounded by lofty peaks. Of these the one which commands the most extensive view is covered with enormous blocks, as if the mountain had been overthrown by an earthquake. A deep cleft divides the peak into two.

"No one who has approached the Râs Sufsâfeh through that noble plain, or who has looked down upon the plain from that majestic height, will willingly part with the belief that these are the two essential features of the view of the Israelitish camp. That such a plain should exist at all in front of such a cliff is so remarkable a coincidence with the sacred narrative, as to furnish a strong internal argument, not merely of its identity with the scene, but of the scene itself having been described by an eyewitness. {182} The awful and lengthened approach, as to some natural sanctuary, would have been the fittest preparation for the coming scene. The low line of alluvial mounds at the foot of the cliff exactly answers to the 'bounds' which were to keep the people off from 'touching the Mount.' [Footnote 47]

[Footnote 47: Exodus xix. 12.]