“Some instruction, no
doubt, is to be gathered from the literature of every people; the
products of the human mind, in all its phases, and in circumstances
the most unpromising, have generally something to tell us. But, on
the other hand, there is a great deal in the wisest uninspired
literatures that cannot properly be described as permanently or
universally instructive; much in that of ancient Greece; much in that
of our own country. And therefore, when an Apostle says of a great
collection of books of various characters, and on various subjects
—embodying the legislation, history, poetry, morals, of a small
Eastern people —that whatsoever was contained in them had been set
down for the instruction of men of another and a wider faith, living
in a later age, and, by implication, for the instruction of all human
beings, —this is certainly, when we think of it, an astonishing
assertion. Clearly, if the Apostle is to be believed, these books
cannot be like any other similar collection of national laws,
records, poems, proverbs; there must be in them some quality or
qualities which warrant this lofty estimate.
“Then we may observe
that, as books rise in the scale of excellence, whatever their
authorship or outward form, they tend towards exhibiting a permanence
and universality of interest; they rise above the local and personal
accidents of their production, and discover qualities which address
themselves to the mind and heart of the human race.
This is, as we all know,
the case to a great extent with Shakespeare. The ascendancy of his
genius is entirely independent of the circumstances of his life, of
which we know scarcely anything, and of the dramatic form into which
he threw his ideas. He has been read, re-read, commented on,
discussed, by nine generations of Englishmen; his phrases have passed
into the language, so that we constantly quote him without knowing
it; his authority as an analyst and exponent of human nature has
steadily grown with the advancing years. Nay, despite the eminently
English form of his writings, German critics have claimed him as, by
reason of the wealth of his thought, a virtual fellow-countryman; and
even the peoples of the Latin races, who would have greater
difficulty in understanding him, have not been slow to offer him the
homage of their sympathy and admiration.
“And yet, by what an
interval is Shakespeare parted from the books of the Hebrew
Scriptures His grand dramatic creations, we feel, after all are only
the workmanship of a shrewd human observer, with the limitations of a
human point of view, and with that restricted moral authority which
is all that the highest human genius can claim. But here is a Book
which provides for human nature as a whole and which makes this
provision with an insight and comprehensiveness that does not belong
to the capacity of the most gifted men. Could any merely human
authors have stood the test which the Old Testament has stood? Think
what it has been to the Jewish people throughout the tragic
vicissitudes of their wonderful history. Think what it has been to
Christendom. For nineteen centuries it has formed the larger part of
the religious handbook of the Christian Church; it has shaped
Christian hopes; it has largely governed Christian legislation; it
has supplied the language for Christian prayer and praise. The
noblest and saintliest souls in Christendom have one after another
fed their souls on it, or even on fragments of it; taking a verse,
and shutting the spiritual ear to everything else, and in virtue of
the concentrated intensity with which they have thus sought, for
days, and weeks, and months, and years, to penetrate the inmost
secrets of this or that fragment of its consecrated language, rising
to heroic heights of effort and endurance. Throughout the Christian
centuries the Old Testament has been worked like a mine, which is as
far from being exhausted today as in the Apostolic age. Well might
the old Hebrew poet cry, 'I am as glad of Thy Word as one that
findeth great spoils.' 'The Law of the Lord is an undefiled Law,
converting the soul the testimony of the Lord is sure, and giveth
wisdom unto the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, and
rejoice the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, and giveth
light unto the eyes. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than
much fine gold: sweeter also than honey, and the honeycomb.'
“Even those parts of
the Old Testament which seem least promising at first sight have some
instruction to give us, if we will only look out for it. Those
genealogies which occur in historical books sometimes remind us of
the awful responsibility which attaches to the trans mission, with
the gift of physical life, of a type of character, which we have
ourselves formed or modified, to another, perhaps a distant
generation or sometimes they suggest the care with which all that
bore on the human ancestry of our Lord was preserved in the records
of the people of revelation. Those accounts, too, of fierce war and
indiscriminate slaughter, such as the extermination of the
Canaanites, pourtray the vigour and thoroughness with which we should
endeavour to extirpate sins that may long have settled in our hearts.
Those minute ritual directions of the Law, which might at first sight
read like the rubrics of a system that had for ever passed away,
should, as they might, bring before us first one and then another
aspect of that to which they pointed the redeeming work of our Lord
Jesus Christ.”
H.P. Liddon, The Worth of
the Old Testament, A sermon preached Second Sunday of Advent (December 8, 1889)
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