p. 130 | The Book of Books by R. Payne Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 11, 1870

The Book of Books.

By R. Payne Smith

“WHATSOEVER things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Rom. 15:4.

We, most of us, are so used to the proposition affirmed by St. Paul, that probably it does not strike us with the force which so remarkable a phenomenon would exert upon us, if we were brought face to face with it for the first time. For the assertion is this, that in a considerable number of short treatises, several of them, themselves compiled from more ancient documents, written by the men of one nation, but at distant intervals, under very different states of outward circumstances and inward development, there is a unity of purpose, common in a greater or less degree to them all; and that this purpose was not anything national, not anything contemporaneous with the writers, nor even fully understood by them, but was something future, and for the weal or woe of all mankind. . . . Add to their works the writings of a few more Jews: some fishermen, a tax-gatherer, a physician of Antioch, and a citizen of Tarsus, and you have a book with few external charms, which does not allure its readers by its beauty, of one part of which the language is so alien to our studies that even of the clergy few know the letters of its alphabet, while of the other part the Greek is so unpolished that your fastidious student, who prefers his style to his soul, shuns its perusal; yet this book is in every house, is read daily by countless multitudes, is said by these multitudes to give them strength for the struggle of life, and comfort under its sorrows. It is translated into all languages, and poured forth from the press by millions, is the subject of daily debate and controversy, divides nations into hostile parties according as they take one view or another of its meaning, so that even the gender of a pronoun becomes in it a matter of earnest debate. A bad translation of this book exercises a depressing influence upon a nation's advance in civilization; a good translation is one of the great levers in a nation's rise. By translating this book, Luther molded the German language into shape and consistency, and made it a fit vehicle for expressing the thoughts of those great writers whose names are now everywhere as household words. Our own translation, so elevated and noble, however deficient it may be in exactness, is the mainstay of our language, the means whereby its purity is maintained at home and abroad, and the bond which unites our colonists to their mother-land. Nor is this all. In proportion as men study this book and act upon it, they become more just, more temperate, more self-denying, more willing to labor for the good of others; while its neglect leads to luxury, to self-indulgence, to the loosening of the reins of our passions, to national weakness and private infamy. Destroy this book, with its “enthusiasm for humanity,” and no one can even suggest any other influence capable of counterbalancing the materialism of life, and of checking the tendency of increased wealth, and larger command over the powers of nature, to pleasure and an effeminate luxury. Destroy this book, and the poverty which grows more deep and dark and desperate as the wealth of the nation in the aggregate increases, will have nothing to give it consolation; nothing to alleviate it with lessons of patience; nothing to ennoble it and strengthen it by faith in a future world, where the cruel inequalities of our present social state will exist no more. Destroy this book, and the bond between rich and poor is gone. There is nothing henceforward to speak to both alike of a God who is no respecter of persons; whom rich and poor must both obey, and who will surely succor the poor who trust in him. The suffering Christ, the Man of Sorrows, the cross meekly borne, leading onward to the immortal crown,—there will be naught of this to comfort the afflicted. The glorified Christ, coming with all power as judge of quick and dead, and in that judgment putting the poor into his own place,—there will be naught of this to bid the rich man seek out the poor, and minister to him. To eat and drink and die, that will be man's all.

Among the mass of mankind,—and we must remember that the object of religion is to find a motive power that will influence, not one or two extraordinary minds, but the great mass of ordinary people;—among the mass of mankind, a man is, in the main, just, sober, industrious, temperate, chaste, in exact proportion as he studies and values his Bible. So general, in short, is its influence, that the very student of physical science takes more interest in his facts and theories in proportion as they seem to bear upon some statement of Holy Scripture, or upon some gloss currently put upon its words: and many a so-called scientific treatise is in reality a theological argument.

Spoken, then, primarily of the Old Testament, St. Paul's Scriptures, “they were written for our learning;” and the whole atmosphere of English thought still, in the middle of this nineteenth century, is saturated with their teaching. The very bitterness with which they are attacked, is an unconscious testimony to their importance. If they were powerless, without influence; if men could even shake themselves personally free from their influence, they would then be regarded with philosophic indifference—with that calmness with which thinking men profess to study the problems of human life. Now it would be contrary to the whole tenor of the Bible to expect such a state of calm; to expect a time in which there would not be strong opposition to Christianity; in which it would not have an up-hill fight, and men be compelled to win their way to its peace and blessedness by a severe struggle. It would be contrary, too, to the whole tenor of the Bible to expect that even in the church the fierce contest of passion will cease; that it will not be rent by opposing parties, and weakened in doing its Master's work far more by schisms within than by any and all opposition from without. But that sword of which our Lord spake is still wielded as trenchantly as ever. With unabated earnestness we still contend against one another and against the world. Our religious opinions or irreligious, our faith or our skepticism, hold the foremost, the dearest place in our minds. None but the tame and feeble and irresolute are indifferent in the strife. Christianity is not dead nor dying. It is not yet a stagnant pool of moribund and worn-out theories; the spirit of life still broods over its waters, and quickens it with energy, with activity, with power. Strange that it should be so! Strange, humanly speaking! Strange, unless there be in the Bible something more than human, some direct speaking and utterance of God! How could the words of a Galilean peasant, and the few fishermen with whom he consorted, thus for eighteen centuries be a law to the civilized world, if they were merely human? And why should scientific men, in this advanced and advancing age, care to look so constantly behind them, and busy themselves with the inquiry whether every statement in a Jewish cosmogony

written many thousand years ago, agrees exactly and literally with their theories, if that cosmogony was a mere speculation? We do not quarrel over the egg in which Brahm created himself, and then floated majestically over the waters during a period of countless ages, till finally, growing tired of his narrow quarters, he parted it asunder, and formed the sky and the earth from its divided portions. We have no counter theories with which to explain, defend, or attack that egg. Nothing in the world depends upon it. In India itself no one cares for it. But a great deal does depend upon the first chapter of Genesis; and it is a note of the value of Holy Scripture that, written as that record was for an entirely different purpose, it should yet excite so great and sustained an interest in a matter completely subsidiary to its main object.—DR. R. PAYNE SMITH, in Prophecy a Preparation for Christ.