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over and over again, I have perused them in very different dispositions of mind, at one time studying them as great historical documents, at another admiring them as sublime works of poetry.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. 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."

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.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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. 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. 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:—

"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: "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]

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?

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. 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]

"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]

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.