IT is often said by Catholics and infidels that Protestants are book worshipers. It is absurd, they say, to suppose that the definite thoughts originally embodied in written words could be handed down through the centuries in such a manner as to accurately convey to the modern reader the identical ideas of the original writings. Aside from providential interposition, and the great care taken by the Hebrews to preserve their sacred writings, it seems to me that the following quotation from Ridpath’s History does much to clear up the mystery:
“The languages which were spoken by these people [the Hebrews] were the strongest auxiliary to the preservation of their religious institutions. Every Semitic language was seemingly the natural and unchangeable vehicle of those religious beliefs, which, in their institutional development, became in the first age, Judaic; in the second, Christian, and in the third, Islamite. The language was of a kind to hold fast a belief, and to prevent its inflection into other forms, or its deterioration into idolatries and myths. It was almost impossible for a dogma once recorded in the Semitic tongue, and accepted by the people who spoke it, to change its form.” Vol. 5, p. 274.
Consider also what he says concerning the absence of myths from the Hebrew writings:
“Take the Hebrews for example. . . . To them the fretted vault on high seemed as the work of an infinite Hand. Under its shadow and curtain they became worshipers of an unseen Power. Their thought took no form of fancy. Their emotions were serious, and found vent only in forming concepts of almightiness, and in vague (!) ejaculations of praise. In the migratory period of a race it were irrational to expect artistic achievement. It is in that precise period, however, that the fanciful dreams of mythology—winged forerunners of art —prevail and flourish. At that age, also, the rudiments of the heroic epics take birth and substance. Neither the one nor the other, neither the fanciful inflections and hallucinations of mythology nor the early epic of heroes, battlemen, and protagonists, appeared among the Hebraic races.” Vol. 5, p. 276.
These statements accord well with what Professor Osgood says on the subject: “He [Paul] testifies to the truth, and he just as plainly testifies against all myths. He repeatedly uses the very word ‘myth,’ which, unfortunately, in our version, is translated ‘fable.’ He lays special injunction upon his beloved sons in the faith and ministry to reject all myths.”
As for the Greeks, their poems were founded mainly upon unhistorical legends and fables, and when we go back beyond a certain date, we find nothing but myths. Even when they pretend to write sober history, “the great critic Niebuhr,” says Professor Draper, “admits that the Greek accounts, when examined, present little that was possible;” and Draper himself says of their history of the Persian wars that the accounts “have been more than sufficiently illustrated by the brilliant imagination of the lively Greeks.”
Of the Romans the same writer affirms that, “In its entire form, the Roman power consists of two theocracies, with a military domination intercalated. The first of these theocracies corresponds to the fabulous period of the kings; the military domination, to the time of the republic and earlier Cæsars; the second theocracy, to that of the Christian emperors and the popes. The first theocracy is so enveloped in legends and fictions that it is impossible to give a satisfactory account of it.”—“Intellectual Development of Europe,” Chap. VIII., pars. 10, 11.
In regard to the literature of India, another writer, Caroline Atwood Mason, has given us some valuable hints. She says:
“In the period during which the Hebrew people, led by Moses out of Egyptian bondage, were wandering on their devious course northward, or were entering their Promised Land by the fords of the Jordan, another great exodus was taking place, nearly 2,000 miles to the east. Led by their seers, chanting the earliest hymns of the Vedas, this mighty conquering horde poured southeastward through the rugged passes of the Caucasus and the Himalayas and entered their holy land, the Land of the Five Rivers, which they named India. These tribes were not a nation of newly-emancipated serfs, like the Hebrews, neither were they, like them, of Semitic origin. They belonged to the splendid Aryan stock; were a highly intellectual people, with a Sanscrit (polished) language.”—“Lux Christi,” pp. 4, 5. “The religion of the Indo-Aryans . . . rapidly degenerated.”—Id., p. 7. “For the facts of India’s authentic history we must, however, turn to foreign writers.”—Id., p. 39.
Here, then, is a people starting with the highest culture then known, and degenerating so rapidly as to be unable to preserve any authentic records of its own history! What a contrast to the Hebrews, who started in ignorance and degradation, and whose historical records are now the basis of all reliable ancient history!