NOTE ON INSPIRATION

To-day many ask: Must we confine Inspiration to the Bible? Is Canticles inspired, and Paradise Lost not, Ecclesiastes divine, and the Vita Nuova human? Is not such a verdict the outcome of an arbitrary canon, a leaden rule, on a par with the artificial distinction which calls, e.g. preaching sacred and healing secular?

Timely and well-grounded is this protest against the "provincial departmentalism" of theology, its tendency to divide what God has united, placing this in the category of the Divine, and that outside the Divine pale. For undoubtedly this artificial distinction has a prejudicial and narrowing influence upon the conception we form of God and His universe, and our idea of the sphere and method of the working of God.

If "every good gift and every perfect gift is from above" (Jas. i. 17); if" there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit" (1 Cor. xii. 4); if St. Paul includes "healing" (= medicine), "wisdom" (= philosophy), "knowledge" (= letters), "miracles" (= (say) great scientific discoveries), "prophecy" (= inspiring eloquence), under Inspiration, then can we deny Inspiration to geniuses in poetry, music, philosophy, art, science, literature? Isaiah says of the ploughman: "His God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him" (Is. xxviii. 26); and if the craft of Bezaleel (Ex. xxxi. 3 sq.) and the sagacity of Solomon (1 Kgs. iv. 29), as well as the spiritual insight of Isaiah and St. Paul, were direct from God, as the Bible tells us, then our arts and trades, our discoveries and inventions, our wisdom and knowledge are "gifts" of God's Spirit, "inspired." Surely there is one and only One source of Truth, Goodness, Knowledge, if the Universe is one organic whole and God the source, goal and meaning of it all. Place this or that outside God's sphere, and God's universe becomes a house divided against itself. A God who is an absentee from any part or interest of His world, or despises anything that He has made, is now an impossibility for rational theology. Therefore, we are told, we cannot deny God's Inspiration to-day to Shakespeare, Lister, Huxley, Handel, or a great many more, and only give it to Bible-writers.1

Every religion makes the same claim for its "Scriptures," e.g. Indians say theirs fell straight down from heaven, or were "breathed out" by Brahma; Persians said their Avesta was directly communicated to Zarathustra by Ahuramazda's word of mouth, like the Law at Sinai; Islam holds the Koran to be the earthly copy of an original heavenly text, revealed to Mohammed

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With all this we fully agree. Inspiration (in its application to creations of genius) no one can define. We feel it, we know it when we see it, but it eludes definition, even as its exact frontier defies delimitation. The common sense of mankind declines to limit its application to Bible-writers, as the universal use of the word "inspiration" for all works of creative genius clearly shows. Goethe is right, these fruitful and inspiring genius-creations are "gifts from above, pure children of God," and their creators "the agents of the Supreme Ruler of the world, vessels found worthy to receive a divine inspiration"; and he adds, "I find many leaves written by such God-favoured men, both ancient and modern, quite as beautiful and useful and indispensable to mankind as many Bible-books."

Yet the common sense of mankind, the acclamation of souls in every creed, face to face with the Holy Books that form their daily food and stay, be it O.T., N.T., Veda, Avesta, or Koran— seem to be instinctively right in recognising degrees and kinds of Inspiration, though all inspiration is one in essence and in aim: "There are diversities of gifts, though the same Spirit." All said and done, not food, not health, not knowledge, not art, not happiness, not power, but Character, is the human goal. And by driving home to man's heart their pure moral teaching on God, Life, Duty, bidding us "lose life to find it," Bible-writers have done more for Character than all other influences put together, humanly speaking. Therefore the common sense of mankind sees, and rightly sees, in the Bible a "double portion" of God's Spirit and calls it the inspired Book par excellence.

At bottom, these views all under inspiration, men of unconsciousness that their Gregory and Justin Martyr

during his ecstasies by the Angel of Revelation. spring from the deep-rooted popular idea that, God were in such a state of passive ecstatic personality counted for nothing; they were, as St. call them, merely the "lyre,' flute," or 66 pen " of the Holy Spirit, who dictated to them the exact words to say or write down. This idea is with us still and dies hard.

CHAPTER II

THE POETRY OF THE BIBLE NOT OUR PROSE

Intellectual difficulties of the Bible.-Intellectually, we are out of touch with our Bible because (1) its poetry is not our prose; (2) its history and science are often not true to fact; (3) its first two chapters clearly contradict each other, and this tendency runs through the whole Bible; (4) many of its books look like literary forgeries.

This states the case bluntly and overstrongly ; but these intellectual difficulties are there and repel many modern minds. The three following chapters discuss these points in the above order.

(1) Bible poetry and imagery.-The Bible is a Hebrew creation. We think and speak mainly with our heads; with these old Hebrews, heart and imagination think and speak as well as brain. So there is much more colour, feeling, music, imagery in their speech than ours. In a word, poetry is their speech, bald prose ours. Hence it is not too much to say that a number of what are called Bible difficulties would never have existed had Western minds realised the tendency to highly poetical and allegorical forms so natural to Hebrew writers.

"In prophets and psalmists," writes Professor Robertson Smith, "we have the most glowing utterances of emotional minds." We forget how differently head and heart speak. As Theodore Watts tells us1:"In grief or pain at its tensest, when man is all feeling,

1 Art. "Poetry" in Encycl. Brit., 9th ed. (abridged).

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one 'wild sea of emotion,' no words avail, only moans. When man's heart is still aglow with feeling, but imagination and thought dwell there too, his 'sea of emotion curdles into warm thoughts,' and poetry, steeped in colour and music, but embodying ideas, is his speech. If man is all head, the 'sea of emotion' goes; his ideas cool, clear themselves of feeling altogether, and prose of fact is his speech."

1

Prose of fact, with words as mere colourless counters of as definite value as OH, (= water) in chemistry, is the ideal of a scientific age where intellect is all in all. In Bible days, when heart and imagination were as alive as brain, poetry was man's natural speech, and it is the mother-tongue of us all. Poetry is man's natural speech so long as he has ears to hear the song of the birds, the whisper of the leaves, the voice of wind or sea, the song or wail of the human heart's joy or sorrow, and eyes to see "the lilies of the field, how Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these." Poetry does what bald prose never can do: (a) no sooner does it speak than the whole scene rises vividly before the hearer's imagination in all its warm colour and clear outline; (b) as the self-utterance of the whole man-heart, imagination, brain-it appeals to the hearer's senses, feelings, imagination, thought, and moves him to be and to do. In a word, prose of fact produces a literature of knowledge that teaches, poetry a literature of power that moves. And De Quincey's words are true: The meanest of authors that moves stands above all who merely teach, for to-day's literature of knowledge is soon superseded by the better knowledge of to-morrow, while the literature of power that moves is "triumphant for ever so long as the language exists in which it speaks."

1 Cf. Tennyson: "Little flower-but if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is"; and Wordsworth: "To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." Cf. Linnæus on seeing the unfolding of a flower: "I saw God in His Glory passing near me, and bowed my head in worship."

A concrete illustration may give point to these general remarks. About 1100 B.C. took place the battle of Megiddo. Prose of fact describes it thus:The Israelites are sore oppressed by the Canaanites leagued together under Sisera. The plain of Esdraelon is their headquarters whence they make raids north and south. Israel is strangely helpless and disorganised. It was as if neither shield nor spear could be found among their 40,000 men. At last Israel finds its Joan of Arc in Deborah. In Jehovah's name, she summons the tribes to fight for God and the right. Ephraim, Benjamin, Zebulun, Issachar, Naphtali, respond loyally; Reuben, Gad, Dan, Asher, stay at home. She sets Barak at the head of Israel's army. He marches against the kings of Canaan under Sisera's command by the brook Kishon. Sisera's huge army and his 900 chariots of iron strike terror into Israel's smaller force of infantry. Fortunately, a terrific storm breaks into torrents of rain. The horses and chariots of Sisera sink deep in the mud and throw the rest of his host into disorder. So the foe falls an easy prey to the impetuous onrush of the agile and now eager highland Hebrew footmen. Sisera takes to flight, hides in the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite, a neutral. She professes friendship, acts the kind hostess, and kills him in his sleep.

This is how Hebrew poetry pictures it: Scene I.: Jehovah, the Lord of Storm, comes, from Sinai His home, to His Israel's rescue: "Lord, when Thou wentest forth out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, the heavens dropped (or rocked'), yea, the clouds dropped water. The mountains quaked at the presence of the Lord, even that Sinai, at the presence of the Lord, the God of Israel." Scene II.: The desolation of Israel under its foreign oppressor: "In the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, travellers walked through byways; the inhabitants of the villages ceased. Until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel; then was war in the gates, was there a shield or