It belongs very closely to our subject to determine in what sense the Hebrew Scriptures are to be interpreted, because, if the popular interpretation is to be maintained at every point, Egyptology, and a great deal more of what eventually must, and now ought to be, used in the construction of religious thought, will continue for a time to be deemed in popular opinion, and to be represented by its guides, as hostile to religion. I would, then, submit that, if universal history is to be aided at all by the Hebrew Scriptures, or if they are to be applied to any historical purpose whatever, they must be interpreted according to the received canons of historical criticism.

Those who deny this accept, in so doing—if they are logical and consistent—one or other of two alternative consequences: either that all contemporary and antecedent history is contained in the interpretation they put upon the sacred records—that is, in what at present happens to be the popular interpretation—so that nothing that is not contained in, or deducible from, or in harmony with, that interpretation is to be received as history; or else that history has nothing at all to do with the documents, or the documents with history.

There are, however, other people, not less learned nor less desirous of attaining to the truth, who are completely incapable of accepting either of these two alternatives. They value the Holy Scriptures too highly to treat them in this way. They believe that, though their primary object was not historical, they contain much history of many kinds, and of great value. History of events, of the human mind, of conscience, of religion—much of the history, in one word, of man, or of humanity; but, furthermore, they believe—and in this lies the gist of the controversy—that what they contain on any one, and on all of these subjects, is to be ascertained only by critical investigation. The single historical question with them is, when the documents have been rightly interpreted, what do they really contain?

They believe that the purpose, the character, and the contents of the documents, alike, preclude the idea of fraud and deception. The thought of the existence of any thing of the kind in them had its birth, naturally and unavoidably, in the popular interpretation. A false and ignorant interpretation was met by a false and ignorant attack. It could not have been otherwise; for both belong to the same age. No one, then, can be deceived by these documents, excepting those who interpret them ignorantly and wrongly. It is a question of interpretation. A false interpretation has surrounded them with difficulties, and in a great measure destroyed with multitudes their utility and their credit. The true interpretation will remove these difficulties; and where mischief has been done, restore their credit and utility.

But there appears to some a preliminary question: that of the right of interpretation. About this there, however, can be no real question at all, even among those who support what we call the popular interpretation. How can they deny to others the right they claim for themselves, of adopting the interpretation that appears to them most in accordance with truth and fact? The third, the twelfth, the sixteenth, and all other centuries, had a right to interpret the document in the way which at the time seemed true. The nineteenth century has the same right. The men of other times interpreted it according to the combination of knowledge, and of ignorance, that was in them. We must do the same.

Let us see, then, what is the difference between the popular, and the historical methods of interpretation. Proximately we shall find it very great; ultimately not much. But the point before us will not be fully understood until it be seen in a distinct concrete instance. The popular method goes on the assumption that the modes of thought, and the modes of expression of early ages, and of other races of men, must be accepted by us in the sense in which we must take anything addressed to ourselves by a contemporary author. This, the historical method tells us, is an impossibility. It has been rendered impossible by subsequent advances in knowledge, in the generalization of ideas, and in language through a larger use of general and abstract terms. The historical method says that archaic modes of thought, and modes of expression, must be translated into our modes of thought, and our modes of expression.

I will now give an instance that will include both. In those early times men had not been trained, as we have been, by ages of culture, to think abstractedly. They could only think, if we may so express it, concretely. It was necessary that a palpable image of what was meant should be before their minds. This was what made idolatry so attractive to the people Moses led up out of Egypt. It was so to all the young world, and is so still to all who are in the infancy of thought. And it was so in a pre-eminent degree with those Moses had to deal with, for they had been mentally degraded below even the level of the times, by the hard slavery in which they had been kept for some generations. Even among our own labouring class this inability to think abstractedly is very conspicuous. Their want of intellectual training, their ignorance, their life of toil, their poverty of language, particularly of abstract and general forms of expression, are the cause of it. They can never tell you what they themselves said, or what anybody else said, except in a dramatic form. With them it is always ‘I said,’ and ‘he said;’ in each case the very words being given. They cannot indicate the purport of what was said by the general, or abstract, form of expression that a man consented, or hesitated, or refused compliance, or remonstrated, &c. General forms of thought and expression are beyond them. Nor will they, for they cannot, tell you simply that a thing was done: instead of this they must tell you every step of the process. That which is very remarkable, in this nineteenth century, in one class, amongst ourselves, was a law, a necessity, of thought among those with whom Moses had to deal.

As a foundation, then, for the theocratic system he was about to establish, he had to announce the idea, not perhaps altogether new to some of those who had come out of Egypt, but one to which the thought of Greece and Rome was never conducted, that God was the Creator. Suppose, then, that he had contented himself, as we might, at this day, with stating it in that abstract form. We may be absolutely certain that the statement would have fallen dead on the ears of the people, to whom he had to address himself. They could not have taken in the idea. No effect whatever could thus have been produced upon them. He was therefore obliged, not as a matter of choice, but of necessity, to present the idea to them in the concrete. That is, to give them a series of pictures of creation. This, he had to say, was the picture of things before creation begun. This was what was done first. This was what was done next. And so on throughout the whole. And this was what was said at each act of creation. When the idea was presented to them in this concrete, dramatic form, they could understand it, and take it in. It was the only mode of thought, and the only mode of expression, that were possible then. When translated into modern modes of thought, and modern modes of expression, they simply mean God is the Creator. Nothing more. Those who would press them further, do so because they are not acquainted with the difference between archaic, rude, uncultured modes of thought and expression, and those of minds that have received culture, and been benefited by the slowly maturing fruits of ages of culture.

This method of historical criticism offers similar explanations of much besides these first chapters of Genesis. It tells us that good, and true, and God-fearing men, and who were moved by a holy spirit, which they described as coming to them ab extra (in which their metaphysics, if erroneous, were honestly so) could hardly in those times have thought, or expressed themselves otherwise than as they did; and that if, through some realization of the Egyptian idea of the transmigration of souls, they had returned to earth, and were now amongst us, with precisely the same yearnings for justice, truth, and goodness they had been moved by in those primitive days, they would not express themselves now as they did then, but as we do. Their metaphysics would have become the same as ours. But in either case there would be no difference in their meaning.

It is evident, by the way, that the historical method of interpretation differs also, in the effect it has on the feelings and practice, from the popular interpretation of the present day, and of former times. It is evident, for instance, that it could not lead a man to denounce the mythology and religion of Egypt, the aims of which were distinctly moral, as the invention of devils. The old popular methods of interpretation, also, naturally sanctioned the persecution of those who differ from us in religion, as they did at the time of the Crusades; and of those who differ from us only in interpretation, as in the case of the treatment of the Vaudois; and in the still more shocking case of the creation and maintenance of the Inquisition, one of the most dreadful episodes in human history. The historical method, however, suggests nothing of the kind. It can regard such extravagancies only as contradictions of the meaning and purpose of religion.

But to go back to the contrast between the popular and the historical methods of interpretation as applied to the particular instance I selected, that of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. Some little time back I met with the following illustration of the errors into which we must fall, if we feel ourselves obliged to take them precisely in the sense that would belong to their words, had they been addressed by a living writer to ourselves. There happened to be an equestrian circus exhibiting in the neighbouring town. The gardener who was in my service at the time had rather an inquisitive mind; and the word equestrian, which occurred in the posters that announced the performance, puzzled him; and as he did not like to give his money without knowing what it was for, he asked me what the word meant. I told him it meant an exhibition in which horses bore a part, and that the word was derived from equus, the Latin name for a horse.

‘No,’ he exclaimed, ‘that can’t be right.’

‘Yes,’ I rejoined, ‘it is so.’

‘No;’ he continued, ‘it is impossible; because we are told that when the animals were created they were all brought to Adam, and that whatsoever he called each, that was the name thereof. So horse must be the name of the animal all over the world for ever. Being an animal, it can have only one name: the name Adam gave it.’

Argument was useless. For him to have been persuaded of anything that contradicted his literal interpretation would have been to abandon belief in the authenticity of the book.

Here then we have the popular method actually at work. We see the whole process. And the way in which it demonstrated to my gardener that equus could not possibly be Latin for horse, is much the same as the way in which some other conclusions have been arrived at, with which everybody is familiar, but with which very few people are satisfied.

The attempt to get over the difficulties of the literal method, in the instance that was just now before us, by abandoning it at one point only, that of the meaning of the word ‘day,’ has three disadvantages. First that of abandoning a principle while loudly and energetically professing to maintain it. Secondly that of addressing itself to one particular, and not to the whole of the subject. And, thirdly, that of being, in itself, surpassingly preposterous. For who ever did doubt, or could doubt, that in the place referred to, the word ‘day’ means, and was intended to mean, the space of our twenty-four hours? Is not this the meaning attributed to the word in the reference made to the first chapter of Genesis in the Decalogue? And are we not told, in the body of the narrative itself, with the most emphatic iteration, that the period of time intended by the word is what is comprised in the evening and morning?

On the other hand the historical method of interpretation explains satisfactorily, both why the work is divided into days, and why the constituent parts of each day are spoken of. This was done, because to do so was in conformity with archaic modes of thought and expression.

In this there is nothing forced or strained. Above all it is perfectly true. It also explains everything.

The attempt to place all we know of the stratification of our earth, of the series of changes that have been effected in the relations of the sea and land, and in extinct Floras and Faunas, on the further side of ‘the beginning’ of the first verse of this first chapter of Genesis, is equally portentous. Here again, all the difficulties of the narrative are left wholly unexplained, and the student is referred to an arbitrary, and contextually impossible, assumption, and told that it contains a sufficient answer to every objection. This interpretation makes the explicit statements of the subsequent account direct contradictions to the (by the supposition) implicit meaning of the first verse. One cannot but think that those who propound an interpretation of this kind have no suspicion of the mischief they are doing. It is impossible that its worse than hollowness could, in any case, escape detection one moment beyond the time that a man, who has but a very small store of knowledge, begins to think. And then, as all experience proves, the revulsion that ensues against such teaching (and revulsions of this kind generally reach the subject itself also, on behalf of which such teaching is advanced) is out of all proportion to the gain—and what kind of gain is it?—temporarily secured from ignorant and unthinking acquiescence.

Of course, the word ‘beginning,’ just like the word ‘day,’ and all the rest of the narrative, was intended to be taken by the rude people to whom the pictures of which the narrative is composed were submitted, precisely in the sense in which it was always taken by them; that is to say in the sense in which plain words are taken by plain people. And then arises the question we have been considering, How is all this to be taken by ourselves?

As our ideas rest on a different basis, that of scientific demonstration, we can acknowledge, in respect of any particular, that we are ignorant, either of the modus operandi, or of the time required for the operation, or of both. But Moses could not do this: he could deal with these matters only in conformity with the requirements of his purpose, and with the facts of the times.