Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

14).

66

[ocr errors]

one illustration of the fulness of Bible words, namely, the Hebrew word for atonement, rendered camphire in the Song of Solomon (i. We are told by preachers sometimes that atonement means at-one-ment, but, from the use of the word, we see it means to cover, as in Genesis vi. 17, where both the verb and noun are rendered "pitch." As the ark was covered within and without with pitch, so the believer in Christ is covered by His atoning sacrifice, as the Irish boy said, "God does not see me nor my sins, for I am covered by Christ's atonement." Reconciliation, or at-one-ment, is the outcome of the atonement, but the atonement of Christ is a work done for us, and that work is complete, perfect, eternal, satisfying, and independent of us.

Lieut.-Colonel G. MACKINLAY said :-The subject of the testimony of archæology to the Bible is of great importance, and Miss Hodgkin's paper is well up to date with its appeal to solid and indisputable facts, only made available during recent years.

I hope this paper will stir us all up to regard this subject more carefully and fully. Following the example of one of our senior VicePresidents, Canon Girdlestone, I would recommend two books, one fairly modern and the other quite recent. Both are by very distinguished and very learned men, and both are written in an interesting manner and easily understood by the general reader. Both are cheap; they are: "Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies," by Prof. Sayce, 1904, published by the R.T.S., and "The Law of Moses," by Prof. Edouard Naville, of Geneva, translated into English with a preface by Dean Wace, 1922. Published by Thynne.

Miss Hodgkin gives many useful concrete examples of mistakes made by modernists during recent years which have been corrected by the results of archæological research, such as the objection that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, as it was thought that writing was not known when he lived, and that in his uncivilised times a code of laws could not have been brought out. We now know that inscribed clay documents were employed by the Babylonians long before the days of the Exodus. And the discovery of the laws of Khammu-rabi, at a date anterior to Moses, contradicts the other assertion of the modernists. She gives many other instances of the same nature, including several in the New Testament: it is striking that the investigation of the discarded contents of Egyptian rubbish-heaps have contradicted the conclusions of modern professors. Their disproved assertions are not now repeated; but unfortunately we do not hear acknowledgments of their mistakes.

Miss Hodgkin has a very decided gift of expressing her truths in an interesting and finished manner, and I strongly support the suggestion of Mr. Oke that this paper should be printed for general readers and circulated as widely as possible.

I will now propose, by acclamation, a hearty vote of thanks to Miss Hodgkin for her valuable paper.

(Carried unanimously with applause.)

646th ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.

HELD IN THE CONFERENCE HALL, CENTRAL BUILDINGS, WESTMINSTER, S.W.,

ON MONDAY, JULY 3rd, 1922, AT 4.30 P.M.

THE VERY REV. HENRY WACE, D.D., Dean of Canterbury-President of the Institute-in the Chair.

The Minutes of the previous meeting were read, confirmed, and signed, and the Hon. Secretary announced that the following had been elected since the last meeting :-As Members, G. Babington Michell, Esq., O.B.E., G. H. Judd, Esq., F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S.; as Life Associate, Albert Hiorth, Esq., C.E.; and as Associates, Miss Barbara P. Harper and Robert Duncan, Esq., M.B.E.

The Chairman then called on The Rt. Rev. Bishop J. E. C. Welldon, D.D., Dean of Durham, to deliver the annual address, on Modernism.'

ANNUAL ADDRESS.

MODERNISM.

[ocr errors]

BY THE RT. REV. BISHOP J. E. C. WE DON, D.D.,
DEAN OF DURHAM.

It is the fashion of the present day to disparage, if not to despise, the Victorian era. Yet the Victorian era was one of the What names can the 20th

great periods in British history. century show or hope to show in comparison with such names as Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and George Eliot, Darwin, Hooker, Lyell, Adams, Kelvin and Lister, Newman, Keble, Pusey, Liddon, and Spurgeon, Leighton, Millais and Landseer, Davy and Stephenson. It has often been a surprise to me that the three reigns of women, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria, should have been signalised by the most conspicuous achievements in war and in peace, in literature and in science. Queen Victoria's reign is not unworthy to stand beside, although in time so long after, Queen Elizabeth's.

But the feature which above all others distinguishes the Victorian age is man's ever-increasing command over Nature. It will be enough to enumerate some few of the scientific discoveries which then enriched human nature and life, such as the locomotive steam engine, cheap literature, photography, electricity, and

as its results the electric telegraph and telephone, the safety lamp. the spectroscope, anesthetic and antiseptic medicines, the motor car, the aeroplane, and, last of all, the cinema. I can think of no fact more remarkable than that the means of locomotion should have remained virtually unchanged from the age of the Pharaohs to the age of Queen Victoria, and that then within one generation the civilised world should have passed, as the late Lady Dorothy Nevill was fond of saying it had passed in her own experience, from stage-coaches to aeroplanes.

The consequence has been that the Victorian era, and indeed the whole 19th century, has come to be generally regarded as the age of scientific discovery. It is science which has given the age a peculiar name and fame; it is science which has stamped upon the age a special character.

I have sometimes thought that the spirit of science in the 19th century invaded territories which are not properly its own. Thus, science affected literature. Literature is not a science but an art. It is in its nature selective, not exhaustive. Like painting or sculpture it chooses its subjects with a discriminating taste. An accurate portraiture of a dunghill is not artistic; it is the very denial or the contradiction of art. But science admits no reserves, no delicacies. Whatever is or appears to be the truth, science must find it out and speak it out. Its one object is knowledge; it scorns the veil which art throws over knowledge. Even in biography it aims at recording a man's whole life from his birth to his death; not an act of his, not a speech, I had almost said not a letter is omitted. What a contrast is presented by the ancient masterpieces of biography, e.g., by the Agricola of Tacitus; may I not reverently add, by the Gospels themselves! The author of the fourth Gospel concludes his narrative by telling of the many other things which Jesus did, "the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose, he says, that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written," but he does not tell them, and although he does not tell them, his Gospel has enthralled the interest of the world.

66

Again, science has invaded the province of morals. It is well to consider that creeds are the parents of deeds. Fifty years ago it was commonly assumed that, whatever might be the processes of human thought, morality, like civilisation, was immutably assured. But what is morality? It is impossible to judge the moral effects of one intellectual or spiritual order by the lives of men who have been educated under another. Society is not uniform all the world over; there is a Mohammedan society, a Hindu society, a Buddhist society as well as a Christian society But Christian society cannot exist apart from the Gospel and the Person of Jesus Christ. Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Christ Jesus. The land-marks of Christen

dom He ordained, He established and He alone maintains and upholds. It is not difficult to-day to observe how, in such degree as the nations of Europe reject or neglect His authority, they drift, as in instances like the sanctity of marriage and the purity of the home-life, into a moral system which is different from His and may be opposite to His, and which, if it remains, must stand upon some other basis or principle than His.

The survival of the fittest as an article of the Darwinian faith is the antithesis to the Christian benediction of the poor, the humble, the suffering, the afflicted. It is not a moral doctrine at all. The late Professor Huxley saw and in his Romanes lecture owned that it did not, and could not, justify Christian morality. For it means the triumph of the strong, it means the suppression of the weak; it means the worship of the super-man or the super-nation that worship which has made Germany the curse of the world. Nietzsche in his wildest hours sinned only by applying the Darwinian theory to international life. To-day the civilised nations of the world exhibit a reaction towards Christian morals. The Conference at Washington, and, indeed, the League of Nations, is a rebuke to the theory of the mailed fist. It seems as though by a striking paradox the triumph of Christ's moral law in international life is beginning just when it seems to be failing in social and even in personal life. But be it so or not so, there can be no doubt as to the absolute difference between the law of science and the law of the Gospel; and the law of morality, as Christians have always understood it, depends not upon science, but upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The spirit of science then, or of natural science, as it is sometimes called, was in the 19th century triumphant. Its incursion into the domain of letters and morals was an unmistakable evidence of its triumph. In its new-born pride it set no limit to its authority. The new heaven and the new earth of which men had dreamed, or at least the new earth, would, it was assumed, be created by the inventions of scientific research. Science, looking upon the world as it had been and as it was, conceived the audacious idea of revolutionising all the many activities of human thought.

It was in this spirit that science attacked the problems of ancient history. Literary criticism began to breathe a scientific air. For science does not merely observe and collate facts; it often asserts a hypothesis, which is itself a bold effort of imagination; then it examines whether the facts do or do not agree with the hypothesis, and, if they do agree, it accepts the hypothesis as true. That was the way in which Descartes dealt with his theory of vortices; Copernicus with his of the revolution of the heavenly bodies; Newton with his of gravitation. There is no

doubt that science in its loftiest flights, no less than art, demands the exercise of the imaginative faculty. The literary criticism. of which I am speaking found its proper home in Germany; for the Germans, as Madame de Stael long ago saw, are more keenly addicted to theories, and more strongly affected by them, than any other European nation. Wolf set to work upon the dissolution and reconstruction of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He broke up each of these poems into a number of disjointed ballads; then he recombined them in the name of Homer; but his Homer was no more than a mere name. The extraordinary effect of Wolf's treatise was due to its coincidence with the new spirit or temper of literary science. Then Niebuhr followed suit by attempting to re-write all the early chapters of Roman history. He believed himself capable of discriminating between truth and falsehood in that history. He traced it backwards to a number of ballads corresponding with the Wolfian ballads or rhapsodies, such ballads as Macaulay tried to reproduce in his well-known Lays of Ancient Rome. How far Niebuhr attained success or failed in attaining it is still an open question; but it is probable that the reaction against his conclusions has been stronger than against his methods of arriving at them. Still the history of ancient Rome according to Niebuhr is not the traditional history, but something widely different, and that something determined by literary criticism acting upon the principles of natural science.

Time passed, and it brought the inevitable consequence. The spirit of re-writing poetry or history passed from Homer and Livy to the Bible, and especially to the Old Testament. In its first representatives, men like Eichhorn and Ewald, it assumed a form of reasonable moderation; but the transition from them to Wellhausen and Weizäcker marks its progress towards extravagance; for as it acquired fresh courage, it aimed at re-writing, I might almost say at inverting, the history of the Jews. There was really no limit to its audacity. It was not content with splitting books like the Pentateuch or Hexateuch into fragments after the manner of Wolf's ballads; but at the hands of such a critic as the late Dr. Cheyne it aspired to fix the dates not only of particular books, but of particular chapters and even verses in the same book. Dr. Cheyne's method of treating the Psalter and the prophetical books falls little short of insanity. Germany was the centre of the new critical school, which somehow arrogated to itself the title of the higher criticism; and in Germany itself the centre of the school was Tübingen. Nobody denies the industry or the acumen of Ferdinand Christian Baur. But nobody to-day, I think, accepts his theory of the Pauline epistles. Yet the professors of Holland and Switzerland could not or would not lag behind the professors of Germany. Leyden and Zürich became the rivals of Tübingen. The zenith or the nadir of literary

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »