The New Testament in Literature and History. III

IMPROVEMENT ERA Vol. XV OCTOBER, 1912 No. 12 The New Testament in Literature and History BY JOHN HENRY EVANS, OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS UNIVERSITY III However great the literature of the New Testament may be, that is chiefly a matter of form, of dress. It is also, and mainly, by reason of the ideas it contains that this invaluable book is to be held in such reverence. The New Testament, in the first place, contains the wisest things that have ever been said. Ewald declared that "in this little book is contained the best wisdom of the world." "Take the five classics of Confucius," says Canon Farrar, "the Vedas, the Tripitaka, the whole collection of the Sacred Books of the East, the Dialogues of Plato, the Ethics of Aristotle, the moral treatises of Cicero, Enchiridion of Epictetus, the letters of Seneca to Lucilius, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the Koran of Mohammed — all that represents the very crown and flower of Pagan morality; then turn to the Christian literature, and cull every noble thought you can find in the Fathers, in the schoolmen, in the Mystics, in the Imitatio Christi, in the Puritan divines, in Tauler and John Bunyan, in Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Sanderson, or Butler in the Whole Duty of Man, and the writings of the early evangelisticals : and while in all Pagan and some Christian books you may find imperfect and even pernicious elements, you will not find, either before or after Christ, one single or fruitful rule or principle of morals (to say nothing of the

1054 IMPROVEMENT ERA deepest truths of religion) for which we could not quote deeper reasons and a more powerful enforcement from the brief pages of the New Testament alone." And, putting the same idea in different words, Whittier says : "We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From graven stone and written scroll, From all old flower-fields of the soul; And, weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read." As examples of some of these wise sayings, take the following: "Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy." "Ye can do nothing against, but for, the truth." "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." "No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, [love] I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear." "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" All these sayings go down for their origin into the very deeps of our common nature. The New Testament, secondly, contains an account of the only ideal character known to history — Jesus Christ, our Lord. When we speak of an ideal we mean something that embodies all that we are striving to attain for ourselves. Jesus is such an ideal. If you look at the lives of the best men and women that the race has produced, not only will you find something here and there in their character that is more or less unworthy, but you will find that those of them who knew of Christ looked to him as their pattern, while in the lives of those who knew him not, their character and conduct and sayings are admir-

NEW TESTAMENT IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY 1055 able only to the extent that they conformed with what he was and did and said. Here is what some men of varying beliefs have said of Christ as an ideal. Strauss declared that "Christ is the one character without the idea of whom in the mind personal piety is impossible." "The Man of sorrows," said James Martineau, "is an exemplar, the Son of God our spiritual ideal." John Stuart Mill believed that there was no better life for a man to live here below than such a one as Christ would approve. "Our highest Orpheus," says Carlyle, "walked in Judea, eighteen hundred years ago. His sphere-melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men ; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousandfold accompaniments, and rich symphonies, through all our hearts ; and modulates, and divinely leads them." Thus Christ has become the accepted ideal of human life — "the conscience of humanity." It would take up too much space to describe even briefly the qualities of Christ's character. But a few of the main traits may be mentioned. Christ was sincere. Examine yourself and your associates and see how common insincerity is in the world. We say things to our friends which we do not in our hearts mean. We act insincerely, assuming to be what we are not. But Christ was always and invariably sincere. It was easy and natural for him to be so. Christ was reasonable. Reasonableness is not so common as we sometimes think. We are always doing what we know is not reasonable. We dress unreasonably. Jesus never did. "Swear not at all," "life is more than food," "the body is more than raiment," are some of his precepts. His test of truth is the most reasonable ever advanced: "If you wish to know whether a thing is true, then live it." Jesus had perfect poise. "Most men are so poorly balanced you can push them with very little pressure into an unmanly speech, into an un-Christian disposition. Jesus was so firmly poised that under the pressure of the most venomous vituperation that has ever been hurled against a man, he stood erect, unmoved, immovable. " Christ had patience. He calmly waited for what was to be.

1056 IMPROVEMENT ERA He was never excited, in a hurry. He endured uncomplainingly. Knowing early as he must have known, that he was the Christ, he yet shows no impatience during thirty years to begin his mission. He patiently waited for the time of the Lord. Christ exhibited great courage. He never showed fear of anything. Not only did he have courage in the face of physical danger, but he possessed courage in moral situations — which is always higher. It took courage to announce himself before those among whom he had grown to manhood. He spoke out to those who sat in the high places when it was necessary. He exposed wickedness and hypocrisy wherever he found them. "And yet his courage never overleaps itself and becomes audacity or recklessness." Jesus was reverent. He was perpetually reverent, with that reverence that "moves in high altitudes." He it was that taught us "Hallowed by thy name." One of his earliest exhortations was "Honor all men." His reverence for the temple and for houses of worship was unfailing. Unlike us, his associates could not, had they so desired, have tempted him into irreverence. These and a great many other qualities were exhibited in Christ in a perfection never reached in any other person on the earth, and these it is that ever since his day we have been endeavoring to imitate. The best men and women are those who most nearly approach these qualities in him. The New Testament, in the third place, contains ideas that have altogether changed the course of history and made life different for each one of us from what it would be had not the New Testament been written. "For seven hundred years," says Lessing, the New Testament Scriptures "have exercised human reason more than all other books, and enlightened it more." To speak briefly again, these are some of the main truths of this great volume which have influenced the minds of men : First, The fatherhood of God. Christ was the first to speak of God as "our Father." On the face of it, it does not matter what relation we bear to God, or whether we bear any. In reality, however, it makes the greatest difference. To the Pagans, for the most part, God was a power external to themselves which showed itself beneficently in the rain and the sunshine, but malignantly in the thunder and the flood — there was no relationship

NEW TESTAMENT TN LITERATURE AND HISTORY 1057 between them and him. In a sense he was, in Carlyle's phrase, "an absentee God sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of the universe, and seeing: it go," without any other concern as to how it was going. That is not the God of the P.iblo. The name "Father." used for the first time in the New Testament, implies a relationship of interest, of concern, of love, of watchcare, of direction, of helpfulness — in a word, of every good affection of an earthlv parent, onlv in a perfect degree. This relation, too, has changed our conduct. God is nearer us than he would otherwise be. and we are anxious to please him. That is what the fatherhood of God signifies. Nor is that all. Tn the word "our" is involved a second great idea — the brotherhood of man. "All ye are brethren." is the emphatic doctrine of the New Testament. This is essentially the same as the doctrine of equality and fraternity in politics and Cfovernment. Tt has taken centuries for men to grasp the meaning of this great truth, and we are yet a long way from its practical application. The New Testament takes no recognition, except in way of condemnation, of class distinctions based on wealth, color, blood, or any other artificial, arbitrary classification. The only class distinction it recognizes is that between those who do right and those who do wrong. Otherwise all men are the same in the sight of God. The effect of this idea in civilized history has been enormous. Before Christ, and for a long time afterwards, racial distinctions, and, within nations, class distinctions, were very pronounced. Even the Jew of Christ's day regarded the Gentile as a dog to be spit upon and spurned. But during comparatively recent years we have learned that at bottom all men are much the same. "The race mind of the Chinese," says Professor Ross, in The Changing Chinese, "is not appreciably different from our own, and their so-called race traits are what we would probably show if we had been subjected to their circumstances and historical development." And so we are learning more and more that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth." And as a result of this doctrine, in time, hate between races and classes will be done away with, and war, as an outgrowth of hate. Universal peace must reign and every man seek, not his own, but his brother's welfare.

1058 IMPROVEMENT ERA \ third idea which is developed in the New Testament and which has had large influence on the minds of men is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the future existence. Briefly explained, it is this: That there is a soul in man which existed before it tabernacled in the flesh, and will continue to exist after its mortal state; that mortality is merely a stage in the development of this spirit, its contact with grosser material being necessary to its eternal progress; and finally, that this earth, which was prepared for man, will be his home after the resurrection of the body, where he will continue to exercise all the wholesome soulfunctions as he did in mortality, becoming more and more Godlike as he develops. This, of course, is not the precise form in which this idea has always influenced men. Nor do I mean to infer that immortality is first taught in the New Testament, for it has been understood, in one form or another, by every nation of men ; but it is there developed and clarified as it is nowhere else in ancient writings. Bishop Carpenter, of the English Episcopal Church, names three ethical ideas as including the basis of Christ's teaching as found in the New Testament, and as having greatly influenced the stream of civilization. They are (1) the doctrine of goodness, (2) moral sympathy and responsiveness, and (3) love as the ruling thought which gives coherence to the other two principles and to all that grows out of them. It is impossible to over-estimate the influence of these three ideas. To them is traceable the constantly growing effort to work righteousness individually and collectively. "There can be, so long as we are honest men," said a presidential candidate recently, "no quarter with any man who deals privately or publicly in a practice that is unrighteous ; and a man who lays himself, his life, down for that purpose, ought to die more happy than he lived." Such a standard is that set down by Christ nearly nineteen hundred years ago. The torch still burns. To these ideas are traceable every effort to ameliorate the condition of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the unfortunate among our fellows. That we have hospitals, asylums for the insane, schools for the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, is due to the operation in the human mind of these three ideas. It is the influence of these ideas that overthrew slavery in English territory and in the United States. It is the

MEW testament in literature AND HISTORY 1050 spirit of these ideas that is at work in the slums of our larger cities everywhere in the civilized world endeavoring to make the lot of those poor people a little less hard to bear. It is this same spirit that has enacted laws protecting women and children who work in shops and factories. And, in a word, so long as we go on feeling helpfully for the weak, the unfortunate, the helpless, the down-trodden, it will be due, directly or indirectly, to the principles of righteousness, of humanity, of sympathy, and of love taught so clearly and beautifully in the New Testament. To sum up: I have attempted in these pages to give two reasons why we should familiarize ourselves with the New Testament. Those two reasons are ( 1 ) that it is part of the greatest Book in the world, judged purely from a literary point of view ; and (2) that it contains ideas that have influenced the world of thought and conduct more than any others. I have tried to show, under the first, that the masters of our English speech have been unstinting in their praise of the literary form and style of this volume, and that one cannot really appreciate our mother tongue, in its greatest works, without a knowledge of the Bible ; and, under the second heading, that the New Testament contains the wisest sayings known to men, that it contains an account of the only ideal character of which we have any record, and that its teachings concerning the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the life everlasting, the principles of goodness, sympathy and love, as the standard of life, have made life, individual and social, vvholly different from what it would be had not the New Testament been written. What remains is for us to make up our minds not to let a day pass without giving a little of our time every day to the greatest Book in the world. O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer: for a day in tincourts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace an 1 glory: no good thing will be withheld from them that walk uprightly.— Psahns 84.