By James Stalker
"More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb." Psa 19:10
The primary reason for keeping up the habit of reading the Bible is a solemn and practical one: it is that we find in it the words of eternal life-we are told what we must do to be saved and are directed to the path leading to everlasting blessedness. It would be worthwhile to read the Bible on account of the information supplied in it on these subjects, even if it were the driest and most tedious book in existence. In point of fact, however, it is not dry and tedious, but of priceless value as literature. This is a reason for reading it over and above the primary reason; it is something, which the Bible-reader gets into the bargain.
In this respect the Bible differs from the sacred books of other religions. There are other re ligions, which have Bibles as well as ours; and these sacred books of the East have in recent times been translated into English. When this enter prise commenced, it excited suspicion in certain quarters, lest some of these sacred books might prove formidable rivals to the Bible. As, however, the publication proceeded, this fear was dissipated, and that chiefly for this reason, that, while they are in some respects exceedingly interesting and well worth translating, these books are, as literary productions, altogether unreadable. If anyone wishes to test this for himself, let him try the Koran, the Bible of Mohammedans-the one of these books which an intelligent person might most naturally desire to know something about- and he must be an unusually tough reader if he makes any progress; for it is intolerably tedious.
Perhaps some of these productions may have literary merit when read in their native language; but, if so, it evaporates in the course of translation. This, however, is not the case with the Bible. Not only does its literary excellence survive this trying process; but, into whatever language it is trans lated, it forthwith becomes the foremost book in that language. It is so at all events in the English language. Not only are its annual sales immensely greater than those of any other English book, but it is acknowledged by the best judges to be the book in the language best worth reading for its literary qualities. Writers who are masters of style, like Ruskin and Stevenson, have acknow ledged that it was from the Bible that they learned how to write the English tongue; and even an author like George Eliot, who had lost her faith in the supernatural origin and authority of the Bible, kept up to her dying day the practice of reading the Bible daily, in the same way as a great pianist keeps up the habit of daily practice on his instrument.
How do we know that the Bible is good as literature? This raises the question how we know that any literature is good, or that any book is written in a good style. There is a stage at which people read without discrimination, devouring good, bad and indifferent without knowing the difference. But at a certain stage of cultivation people begin to notice differences, separating the good from the bad and the first rate from the middling. This is called literary criticism; and among ourselves this art has now reached such perfection that those who practice it have read not only all that is best in English literature but the choicest works of all the European literatures and from this wide survey they have derived marks and rules by which to test the qualities of books. Now these tests can be applied to the Bible, to see if it possesses the marks of literary excellence.
One of these marks is Readableness.
There are some books which no human being can read. You try, but they baffle you. You read ten or twenty or thirty pages, but then you close the volume, hoping never to open it again. On the contrary, sometimes, as you read, a smile begins to play about your lips; you feel inclined to turn to the person sitting in the room with you and say, "Listen to this"; and you lay the book on the shelf with a caressing touch intending soon to take it down again.
There is no book that can stand being read over as often as the Bible. I remember one winter for a certain purpose, reading through the four Gospels every week; and I was astonished to find that, so far from wearying, I resumed my task, week after week, with increasing zest; and the last time I did it with keener interest than the first. Of the disposition to ask others to read what you have read, what could be more striking evidence than the existence of Bible Societies? At the annual meeting of one of these, in which I had the privilege of taking part, in New York, it was stated, that four times a copy of the Bible had been offered by the Society to every household in the United States that did not possess one already.
Another mark of a fine style is Sublimity or Beauty.
By literary critics sublimity and beauty are accounted the highest qualities of style. Even an inexperienced person cannot fail to recognize that a passage like this is sublime: "Thine, 0 Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty; for all things that are in the heaven and the earth are Thine; and Thou art exalted as Head over all," or that a passage like the following is of exquisite beauty, "Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vine; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the field shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls; yet will I rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." Or, can anyone miss the sublimity of this: "For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness and darkness and tempest, and the voice of words, but ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and Church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel," or the beauty of this: "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? These are they, which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple: and He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne, shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living foun tains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Such passages abound in the Bible. Yet they are not too frequent. This is where beginners go wrong: they try to make their writing or speaking all sublime. But there must be light and shade; and the language ought to rise and swell only when the thought compels it.
Another mark of a fine style is Figurativeness.
Between the inner world of thoughts and the outer world of things there is such a natural con nection that the objects of external nature are mirrors in which the objects of the interior world are reflected; and the mind of man is so con stituted that it never enjoys the sight of a truth so much as when it is seen in one of these natural mirrors. For example, how much more effective than to say that strife spreads with fatal ease is it to say, as a verse in Proverbs does, "The be ginning of strife is like as when one letteth out water"; which summons up before the mind's eye a picture of an embankment, through which the water is oozing to an almost imperceptible degree, but in which, if the hole is not stopped, there will soon be a breach, through which the devouring element will pour over the fields, sweep ing away the crop of the husbandmen and imperiling the lives of the inhabitants. Such language abounds in the Bible. It culminates in the Parables of our Lord, who had, above all others, the power of seeing natural law in the spiritual world and spiritual law in the natural world.
Another quality of good literature is that it has in it the Salt of Wisdom.
What I mean by this you will understand if you happen to have read Bacon's Essays. That is a small book; but it is weighted with wisdom. Every other line, you come upon a saying in which there seems to be concentrated the experience of a lifetime and which you instinctively feel to be true and valuable. And all literature of the highest class must have this salt of wisdom. That the Bible has it in an eminent degree might be proved by the fact, that it furnishes so many texts for sermons; because a text ought to be a saying of this kind, in which the result of long experience is summed up in a few memorable words. There is hardly a page of the Bible which does not contain words of this kind; on many a page they occur in such embarrassing numbers, that the preacher hardly knows which to choose first; and it is a pity that, with so many and so choice examples to choose from, ministers do not select a far greater variety of texts than we are accustomed to; be cause this would give their hearers an impression of the wealth of the Bible.
A last feature of the Bible worth referring to is its Variety.
Macaulay remarks of sacred books in general that they tend to monotony. This is perfectly true of the sacred books of other religions; because these consist mainly of prayers and ritual directions; but it is not true of the Bible, one of the most prominent marks of which is variety, In the Old Testament you have three great masses of literature-histories, poems, prophecies. Of the histories the most attractive parts are perhaps Genesis, with the matchless biographies of the patriarchs, and the Books of Samuel, with the adventures of David. The poetical books range from the sublimity of Job to the beauty of the Psalms, and from the homely wisdom of Proverbs to the passion and fancy of the Song of Solomon. The Psalter alone is a work of almost infinite variety, containing not only prayers and praises in the ordinary sense, but descriptions of scenery, patriotic songs, and the profoundest musings on the mysteries of human existence. John Knox used to read it through once a month; and to appreciate the Psalms is a mark not only of spiritual attainment but literary culture. The prophetic writings, which are not what their name would suggest-predictions of the future, hovering in a region of mystery- but powerful oratorical appeals to the actual life of man, used to be largely a sealed book on ac count of the defectiveness of the translation; but in the Revised Version this is much improved; and it is one of the features of the Church life of our day that young ministers are turning to them for texts and finding in them messages suitable to the social aspirations of the time-messages of municipal purity and national righteousness.
In the New Testament the elements are simpler-the masses being only two-the biographies contained in the Gospels and the Acts, on the one hand, and the Epistles of St. Paul and the subordinate writers who imitate him, on the other. But in the former of these we have not only the incomparable stories of the life of Jesus but His words as well, including passages like the Sermon on the Mount and the Fifteenth of St. Luke. In the Epistles of St Paul there are, as St. Peter confesses, things hard to be understood; yet they have an extraordinary power of quickening and rousing a mind of any depth. Perhaps we should separate, as a third mass, the Johannine Writings, so peculiar are they. They are the productions of a mystic, and, though to some minds they may be unattractive, they are to others the exquisite flower of all revelation, abounding, as they do, in thoughts that travel through eternity.
At the beginning I hinted that there are various reasons by which the habit of reading the Bible may be fostered. A young man, when he leaves home, may carry away, in his trunk, a copy of the Word of God, placed there by his mother, with an injunction to peruse it every day; and for her sake he may read it, till the habit has become formed and permanent. An excellent habit, how ever acquired. But how different from his motives are those of his mother herself I Why does she read the Word of God? Why, she could not live without it. Her spirit lives on its promises; and, by its aid, she discerns the land that is very far off, where her treasure and her heart are. One who has begun to be a Sabbath School teacher may experience a great revival of interest in the Bible; for it is out of it that the material must come to satisfy the curiosity of the young minds that fill the class on Sunday. A young householder may acquire a new reverence for the Bible, because its potent voice, heard at family worship, seems to create an atmosphere of tenderness and dignity, which it is good for his dear ones to breathe.
It is possible to read the Bible from one motive at one time and from another at another; and more motives than one may combine to support the practice. The motive I have urged in this discourse is not, I admit, the most potent. But I have ex patiated on it, because it may help beginners; and, if they begin with it, they may have a stronger by-and-bye. I do not, however, mean to say that this literary attractiveness of the Bible is only for the young: on the contrary, once tasted, it accom panies us through life as a relish added to the daily bread of the soul; and certainly it is one of the things which enable us to say of the contents of the Book:
They more than gold, yea much fine gold,
To be desired are,
Than honey, honey from the comb
That droppeth, sweeter far.
Though literary appreciation alone could hardly sustain such a sentiment. In order to be able to repeat our text from the heart, one must know the Bible as a medium of communication with One "whom, having not seen, we love, in whom, though now we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."
