THE FREE AGENCY OF THE PENMAN.
By Dr. Armitage
It is too often taken for granted that the endless varieties of expression which mark the sacred penman cannot be of divine selection without interfering with their free agency and natural idiosyncrasies. Let us look at this position. Their language is free, familiar, artless, precise in description, full in detail, yet never profuse. It is fresh, often dramatic, epigrammatic and accurately rhetorical, not to say captivating. Their words so blend the familiar with the strange—the deep with the simple—the real with the concise—and they rush with such rapid transition from theme to theme, as to excite wonder. And withal, in every case, their language is in exact harmony with its sentiment, and sets it forth so fully to inspire constant gratitude. And yet each man throws his own peculiarities of expression into his writing, so that no two of them are alike in the flow of words. For example, Peter, the apostle to the Jews, never uses the word "cross," but always "tree;" and Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, never uses the word "tree," but always "cross." But is this an accident, therefore, or is it an invasion of their freedom? Is it not rather an evidence of divine selection, to meet an important end in combating human prejudice, these apostles being Jews? And all these points are equally true of the various writers of the whole sixty books, scattered as they were through a period of 1500 years, and numbering amongst them, as they did, priests and kings—herdsmen and soldiers—tax-gatherers and fishermen—statesmen and tent-makers. They were men of opposite tempers and casts of talent—lettered and unlearned—bondmen and free. They were wanderers on the sands of Arabia—captives in the palaces of Babylon—or students in various schools. Yet no really tangible, verbal discords are introduced among them, by prejudices of education, jealousies of position, or lapse of time. They sweep the whole range of literature—history and prophecy, poetry and music, devotion and allegory, parable and controversy. Nay, they tinge the whole of their writings with the transactions of the days in which they lived, and the habits of the people amongst whom they moved, and yet there is not a jarring note among them. Moses writes in the style of legislation, and David sings the "Lord’s songs." Isaiah is all sanguine sublimity—Jeremiah is all pensive dirge—James is full of blunt reasoning—Mark keeps perpetual step to martial music, and Amos leads you all over the farm—John is rapturous, and Paul is a threefold-cord of spirituality, logic and consecration. In a word, whether eloquence moves, or sanctity hallows, or grandeur awes, or holiness commands—truth gives concord to all that they say, and forges the golden links, sentence by sentence, into one golden chain of utterance. But are we to conclude, therefore, that because they spoke naturally, their writings are in part human? Would their inspiration be better proved by evidence that they spoke unnaturally to themselves? As if the God who had endowed each of them with a natural manner could not make that manner his channel for conveying thought. May I use a parable? A vine-dresser has made and filled many casks of wine all drawn from the same vines, the same press and the same lees. But when he comes to broach them, one by one, and finds the aroma of one that of pine, and another that of cedar, and a third that of oak, according to the order of wood which has contained the rich liquid, is he to call in question whether it is the blood of the same grape and the flow of the same wine-press? That would be folly. But not greater than it is to call in question that the whole terminology of the Bible is of God, because each flagon of truth that we open bears the flavor of this man’s style or that. We talk of the Cana wine-miracle as great; but if the forty sacred writers were not under the special injunction of God in the use of their words, then the language of their joint compositions forms the greatest literary miracle that the human mind has yet conceived of. It requires a vastly wider stretch of my faith to believe that they were not, than that they were, for in the one case I can account for both their profuse variety of style and perfect oneness of sense, while in the other I can account for neither.—Dr. Armitage.