taste the true reason will labor to exclude. take it otherwise. But we This series of writers, through the many centuries of their continuous testimony, spoke not, wrote not, as if they possessed a liberty of discursive choice-now scattering the decorations of fiction over realities; and now striving to impart to fiction, in as high a degree as possible, the verisimilitude of truth. They spoke and wrote with a consciousness of their obligation to absolute Truth, and with a stern fixedness of purpose as toward an authority above them: among no other writers do we find a parallel instance of determinate purpose. But whether distinctly conscious of their mission, or not so; or only imperfectly conscious of it, yet they spoke as they were moved by Him who is the ἀψευδής Θεός – the "truthful God." Solemnly regardful were these "holy men of God" of the sovereignty of Truth Truth dogmatic or theological-Truth ethical, and Truth historical. Utterly averse, therefore, were they -abhorrent, let us say not merely as toward falsification, but as toward fabrication, or any approach toward that sort of commingling of the real with the unreal which might engender falseness; or might give rise to a dangerous confounding of the two. The Hebrew Scriptures, as compared with any other national literature, are pre-eminently they are characteristically they, and they alone, are throughout truthful in tone, style, and structure. Need we ask, then, why they contain neither the Drama nor an Epic? Not from the want of fitting subjects—not from poverty of materials; but as ministers of Heaven to whom a task had been assigned, did these men of genius - and they were such fail to display their skill in the creation of romances; it was not because they could not do it, that they have not attempted to immortalize themselves, and the heroes of their national history, in producing an Oriental Iliad, or Odyssey, or Æneid. To have done this would have been to introduce among their people an element of confusion and of ambiguity, which would have interfered with the purpose of the separation of this race from all other races. And yet this is not all that should be said; and the second reason would be by itself sufficient in solving the problem; and, not less than the first, is it conclusively demonstrative of the Divine origination of these writings. Because they are Inspired — θεόπνευστα - and teach the things of God, and enjoin the worship of God, therefore do the writers abstain from themes which give licence to the worship of man: they take no account of heroes; and yet it was not so that an ambitious poet, who might be thirsting for the applause of his countrymen, could find no subject in the national history, adapted to his purpose. Why not, in this manner, undertake to immortalize Moses, Samuel, David, Solomon? Why not? It was because the Hebrew Scriptures, dictated from above, are constantly and sternly truthful; - and they are so whether the great men of the Hebrew polity were as faultless as national fondness would have painted them; or were indeed as faulty as men at the best ever are. It has been the ambition- and a noble ambition, of the most highly gifted minds, in every cultured people, to give expression to a perfect ideal of humanity — to picture a godlike virtue, wisdom, valor, self-control, and temperance, according to the national conception of what these qualities should be. Among the thousand themes of poetry, this one- the imaging of a godlike magnanimity and virtue has held the highest place. - The Hebrew literature gives the several elements of virtue and piety in precept; but nowhere is it presented in the concrete. In place of the dazzling Ideal the romance of humanity -we find only the real human nature of history — vouched for as such by the presence of those conditions of human frailty which the Idealist would have taken care to exclude. A circumstance full of meaning it is, that, in these writings, all that we learn of the acts, and of the personal qualities, of the prominent persons of the national history, is found in the narrative and prosaic books, or portions of books :none of it appears in the poetic books, or in those passages the style of which is figurative and impassioned; and which, as to its form, is metrical. What then is the import of these facts, which have no parallels in the national poetry of other countries? It is this, that whenever the individual man comes forward in these writings whenever it is he who draws upon himself the eyes of his fellows, whether chief or prophet, he must do so - such as he is:- if his virtue, his wisdom, his valor, are to attract notice, so do his sins, his weaknesses, his falls, in the moments of severest trial; all these things make their appearance also, and proclaim the veraciousness of the record. can make it Greatly do we often miscalculate the relative credibility or incredibility of passages in ancient writings. No logic or no sound logic appear incredible that God should raise the dead; or that He should make the waters of the sea to stand up as a heap; or that, in any other mode, the ALMIGHTY should show ALL MIGHT. But utterly incredible would be the pretension that any congeries of events, such as are usually packed together by a poet with a definite artistic intention, has ever actually had existence in the current of the world's affairs. Utterly beyond the limits of reasonable belief would be the supposition that a man even one of ourselves has ever acted and spoken, from year to year, throughout his course, with unfailing consistency, or in that style of dramatic coherence which the contriver of a Romance, or of an Epic, figures for his hero. No such embodiment of the Ideal has ever, we may be sure, broken in upon the vulgar realities of human existence; there have been good men, and brave men, and wise men, often; but there have been no living sculptures after the fashion of Phidias, no heroes after the manner of Homer or Virgil. Then there comes before us another balancing of the incredible and the credible: as thus. The Hebrew long series Poets it is not one or two of them, but all of them in have abstained from those idealizings of humanity at large upon which the poets of other nations have chosen to expend their powers. How is it that they should have been thus abstinent should thus have held off from ground which tempts every aspiring mind? We shall find no admissible answer to this question, except this, that this series of writers followed, not the impulses of their individual genius, but each of them wrote as he was inspired from above. Nothing in any degree approaching to a worshipping of man—nothing of that sort which elsewhere has been so common nothing which could have given a warrant to the unwise extravagances of the saint-and-martyr worship of the Church in the third century, anywhere makes its appearance within the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament. On the contrary · On the contrary-as well by solemn injunction, as by their uniform example the Inspired writers, historians, prophets, poets, repeat the warning as to the rendering of worship to man, or to any creature"See thou do it not; worship God." |
