Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors. James Freeman Clarke

      We now pass on to ask, What is the inspiration of the New Testament, or of its writers?

      The writers of the New Testament had no different inspiration from that of all other Christians. We nowhere hear of any one receiving an inspiration to enable him to write a Gospel or an Epistle. They distinctly repel the idea of any such special or distinct inspiration. “By one spirit we have all been baptized into one body, and have been all made to drink into one spirit.” Gifts are different, but the spirit is one and the same in all. But even among these diversities of gifts, nothing is said of any gift for writing [pg 107] Gospels or Epistles. Probably, therefore, the inspiration by which these were written was precisely the same as that by which they preached to the Gentiles or taught in the Church. It was an inward sight of Christ, an inward sight of his truth and love, which enabled them to speak and write with authority—the authority of those who saw what they said, and knew it to be true. “We speak what we know, and testify what we have seen.” Hence it is that we find in their writings so much substance, so much comprehensiveness, so much insight. They are in constant communion with an invisible world of truth. They describe what is before their eyes.

      A book given by inspiration is not a book made perfect by miracle, but a book, the writer of which was in a state open to influences from a higher sphere. All books which the human race has accepted as inspired—Vedas, Koran, Zendavesta—are sacred scriptures; all that lasts is inspired. Perpetuity, not infallibility, is the sign of inspiration.

      “The word unto the prophet spoken

      Was writ on tables yet unbroken;

      The word by seers or sibyls told

      In groves of oak or fanes of gold

      Still floats upon the morning wind,

      Still whispers to the willing mind.

      One accent of the Holy Ghost

      The heedless world has never lost.”

      The famous proof-text on this subject is that in the Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.” To what Scripture did Paul refer? Some say to the Jewish Scripture. Some say to the Jewish and Christian writings. But the Christian writings were not then all written, and were not collected into what we call the New Testament. The apostle does not limit himself to these. He says, “All Scripture is inspired”—not merely Jewish or Christian [pg 108] Scripture, but all sacred writing. All the writings of every age which are looked upon as Scripture, which men from age to age reverence and honor as such, were not of man's invention, not of man's device, but came from some irrepressible influence acting on the soul from within. The poet before quoted says truly—

      “Out from the heart of nature rolled

      The burdens of the Bible old.

      The litanies of nations came,

      Like the volcano's tongue of flame,

      Up from the burning cone below,

      The canticles of love and woe.

      The hand that rounded Peter's dome,

      And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,

      Wrought in a sad sincerity.

      Himself from God he could not free;

      He builded better than he knew;

      The conscious stone to beauty grew.”

      There is a truth in this—a profound truth. The Bible is not an exceptional book in this, that it has no parallels in nature to its method of production. It is true that Phidias was inspired to make his statue and to build the Parthenon.

      “Such and so grew those holy piles,

      While love and terror laid the tiles.

      Earth proudly wears the Parthenon

      As the best gem upon her zone,

      And morning opes in haste her lids

      To gaze upon the Pyramids;

      O'er England's abbeys bends the sky

      As on its friends with kindred eye;

      For out of thought's interior sphere

      These wonders rose to upper air.”

      When Mr. Emerson and Theodore Parker compare in this way the Bible with the Vedas or the Parthenon, we often feel that it degrades the Bible, and takes away its special sanctity. But this is not necessarily the case. There may be a wide gulf between the inspiration of the Bible and that of the Vedas, or of Homer or Plato; and yet they may all belong to the same class of works. There [pg 109] is a wide gulf between man and the highest of the inferior animals; and yet we put man into the class Mammalia, along with oxen, whales, and cats, and into the same Order with apes and bats. We do not think that man is degraded by being thus classified. He occupies a distinct species in this order and class. So the New Testament and Old Testament constitute two distinct species, of which they are the sole representatives of one genus of inspired books; but that genus belongs to the same order as the Vedas, Edda, Zendavesta, and Koran, and that order belongs to the same class as the poems of Homer and Dante, the architecture of the Parthenon and the Strasburg Minster, the discovery of America by Columbus, and of the law of gravitation by Newton.

      The class of works which we call inspired comprehends, as we have before said, all which come to man by a certain influx into his soul—not by looking out of himself, but by looking into himself. Sometimes we go and search and find thoughts; sometimes thoughts come and find us. “They flash upon our inner eye;” they haunt us, and pursue us, and take possession of us. So Columbus was haunted by the idea of a continent in the west; so Newton was haunted by his discovery long before he made it; so the “Paradise Lost” pursued Milton long before it was written. Every really great work must have in it more or less of this element which we call inspiration.

      But while the great works of genius belong to the class of inspired works, we make a distinct order out of the great religious works which have been the sacred Scriptures of races of men. They evidently came from a higher inspiration than the works of science and the works of art. They have ruled men's souls for thousands of years. These, then, we place in an Order by themselves, and it is no discredit to the Bible to be ranked with the works of Confucius, which have [pg 110] kept the Chinese orderly, peaceful, industrious, and happy for almost twenty-six centuries.

      But still, among these sacred books the Bible may be said to constitute a distinct genus, because it differs from all the rest in two ways—in teaching the holiness of God and the unity of God. The writer has been a careful reader of all these sacred books for twenty years; he has read them with respect; in no captious spirit; wishing to find in them all the truth he could. He has found in them much truth—much in accordance with Christianity. But he sees a wide difference between them all and the Bible. They are all profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for instruction; but they are not Holy Scriptures in the sense in which we ascribe that word to the Bible. The Old Testament, though having in it many harsh and hard features, belonging to the Jewish mind, has strains which rise into a higher region than anything in the Vedas or the Zendavesta. The Proverbs of Solomon are about on a level with the books of Confucius. But nowhere in all these Ethnic Scriptures are strains like some of the Psalms—like passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The laws of Menu are low compared with the Pentateuch.

      But if the Old and New Testament make a genus by themselves, they divide again into two species. There is a specific difference between the New Testament and the Old. The New Testament inspiration is of a far deeper, higher, and broader character than the other. In fact, we ought, perhaps, to make a special order by itself from the New Testament writings. They are so full of life, light, and love—they are so strong yet so tender—so pure yet so free! They have no cant of piety, no formalism, but breathe throughout a heavenly atmosphere. Their inspiration is of the highest kind