THE
HISTORY OF ZIONISM
Hellas, Rome and Israel—The Englishman’s Bible—Its influence upon English Literature—Rev. Paul Knell, Matthew Arnold, Sir H. Havelock, Gordon, Livingstone, Ruskin, Carlyle, Taine, Sir L. T. Dibdin, Huxley, and J. R. Green—The Puritans—The Pilgrim Fathers—James I.—Cromwell.
No great idea, once proclaimed, has ever yet perished from the earth. An idea may assume new forms, may change its mere outward semblance—for all great ideas are plastic in their attributes and immutable in their essentials—but, once it has been enunciated, human life absorbs it within itself for ever.
The Greek spirit of freedom, and the order, discipline and law of Rome survive in Anglo-Saxon institutions, not by mere enforcement of victorious arms, but because men have recognized them as the happiest approximation to the independence of each and the subordination of all that has ever yet been conceived.
To Greece was entrusted the cultivation of reason and taste. Her gift to mankind has been science and art. To the Greeks we owe the science of logic, which has dominated the minds of all modern thinkers. Much of the spirit of modern politics, too, comes from Greece. On the other hand, the sentiments and the organizing force behind all States and Governments, which are absolutely indispensable to their vigour, are to a great extent Roman. Justinian’s¹ laws have penetrated into all modern legislation. Thus Greece may be said to have disciplined human reason and taste, and Rome human organization and power.
But England has been influenced by Israel even more than by Hellas and Latium; by the power and the light of the Hebrew genius—by the Bible.
The mission of the Hebrew race was to lay the foundation of morality and religion on earth. Their works and their Book are great facts in the history of man; the influence of their mind upon the rest of mankind has been immense and peculiar. The Hebrews may be said to have disciplined the human conscience; and to the pages of their sacred books humanity has turned again and again for new inspiration.
No people has been so devotedly attached to the Bible as the English, and the effect may be traced in all the great movements of English history. The Bible has dominated the whole domestic and political life of the English people for some centuries, and has provided the basis of the English conception of personal and political liberty.
The education of a large number of Englishmen has consisted mainly in the reading of the Scriptures. There is indeed no book, or collection of books, so rich in teaching or capable of appealing so forcibly to the unlearned and the learned alike. That the growth and gradual diffusion of religious and moral thinking is due to the supreme influence of the Bible is a fact which can be recognized throughout the whole of English history. As a single instance, we may take two writers who lived at different periods, and dealt with this subject from dissimilar points of view—the Rev. Paul Knell (1615–1664) and Matthew Arnold (1822–1888). Knell compared England with Israel. The name “Israel” was used by writers of his age with so much laxity, that it is impossible to define the sense which it was generally intended to convey. It often meant the Religion of Israel; at other times it was used as if it was a synonym of the word “Church.” But Knell used the word in its plain meaning: for him “Israel” meant simply the People of Israel in the Land of Israel (Appendix ii). If we compare the general tone and attitude of Christian preachers in those times in other countries with the attitude taken up by the English clergy, we must acknowledge that the latter have a much greater appreciation of the value and dignity of the Jewish people and of its great influence on the character of the English nation.
In spite of all modern developments, and notwithstanding the fact that modern science has undermined some of the old beliefs, the fundamental attitude of Englishmen to the Bible remains unchanged. There is no need to quote many writers; it is sufficient to refer to Matthew Arnold, who insists that Righteousness is the burden of Old Testament teaching, and that this idea has greatly influenced the formation of the English character (Appendix iii).
The indebtedness of English literature to the Bible is immeasurable. The Bible has inspired the highest and most ennobling books in the English language. No other book has been so universally read or so carefully studied. The Bible has been an active force in English literature for over twelve hundred years, and during that whole period it has been moulding the diction of representative English thinkers and literary men. The Bible is “the book upon which they have been brought up,” says Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Nor has its influence on men of action been less marked. Englishmen picture Sir Henry Havelock (1795–1857) sustaining himself upon the promises of the Bible through the darkest hours of the Mutiny; Charles George (Chinese) Gordon (1833 –1885) writing with his Bible in front of him at Khartoum; and David Livingstone (1813–1873) in the loneliness of Central Africa reading it four times through from beginning to end, drawing from it patience, fortitude and perseverance. One of the mightiest moral forces of the last century in England, John Ruskin (1819–1900), acknowledges his great indebtedness to the Bible. “In religion,” he says, “which with me pervaded all the hours of life, I had been moved by the Jewish ideal, and as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me they seemed finally to agree in the old article of Jewish faith that things done delightfully and rightfully were always done by the help and spirit of God.”
“I have before me one of those great old folios in black letter in which the pages, worn by horny fingers, have been patched together,” writes Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828–1893), in his Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (Paris, 1863–4).¹... “Hence have sprung much of the English language and half of the English manners. To this day the country is Biblical; it was these big books which had transformed Shakespeare’s England. To understand this great change, try to picture these yeomen, these shopkeepers, who in the evening placed this Bible on their table and bareheaded, with veneration, heard or read one of its chapters. Think that they had no other books, that theirs was a virgin mind, that every impression would make a furrow, that they opened this book not for amusement but to discover in it their doom of life and death.”
“The Bible stands for so much in England: it is the foundation of our laws,” said Sir Lewis Tonna Dibdin, “for when you get back behind judicial decisions and Acts of Parliament you come at the bottom to the moral laws, of which the Ten Commandments were the first written summary.”
“The Bible,” says Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), in his Essays on Controverted Questions, “has been the ‘Magna Charta’ of the poor and the oppressed.”
There is no Christian people even among the Protestant nations which could be compared with the English in knowledge of the Old Testament and in devotion to its teachings. This was the avowed object and the undeniable result of the English Reformation.
“Elizabeth (1533–1603) might silence or tune the pulpits,” says John Richard Green (1837–1883), “but it was impossible for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice and mercy and truth who spoke from the Book.... The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class.”
This Biblical influence was felt long before the translation of the Bible into English. When King James I. (1566–1625) in 1604 sanctioned a new translation of the Bible, he let loose moral and spiritual forces which transformed English life and thought. But before this the Renaissance, or revival of learning, had led to the study of the Scriptures and so had helped to make men Puritans.
The Pilgrim Fathers crossed the ocean with little more than this sacred volume in their hands and its spirit in their hearts. The men who founded new Commonwealths built up their constitutions upon the teachings of the Bible; and tradition has long asserted that every soldier in Cromwell’s army was provided with a pocket edition, which consisted of appropriate quotations from the Scriptures, mostly from the Bible of the Jews.¹
A close parallel can be drawn between the Puritans, of whom Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was the principal type, and the enthusiasts who shared with Judas Maccabæus (ob. 3628 a.m.) the dangers and glories of his illustrious career. Both were stern warriors forced into battle by the stress of great principles, and by the strongest sense of obligation to a sacred cause. Both fought for liberty against tyranny, against religious persecution and unrighteousness. The spirit which inspired them all was the secret of the world’s greatest achievements. The parallel can be traced even further. Cromwell’s life was shaped by the influence of the Bible. For a figure to compare with Cromwell we must turn neither to ancient history nor to early English history, but to the pages of Jewish national history in the Bible. Cromwell’s examples were Joshua (2406–2516 a.m.), Gideon (fl. 2676 a.m.) and Samuel (ob. 2882 a.m.). Hebrew warriors and prophets were his ideals. And that is not to be wondered at, for Cromwell studied the Bible every day with attention and reverence and with a desire to be guided by it. He was an intellectual and spiritual child of the Old Testament, and he “imagined himself to be a second Phineas, raised up by Providence to be the scourge of idolatry and superstition.”¹