BIBLE HISTORY - Classic Works of Apologetics

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EDITORIAL PREFACE.
Scriptures, with which this history has especially and almost exclusively to do, .their sugges­
tions and representations are not out of place, and add immeasurably to the interest and
value of this volume; but at the same time they ought to be taken with caution and
reserve. Even as these words are being penned, and while the brilliant assaults of George
Adam Smith, Cheyne, and Driver, on the unity of "Isaiah," are still fresh in the public
mind, Principal Douglas, their peer in learning and ability, is challenging their conclusions
in a masterful treatise, entitled" Isaiah One and His Book One." It is consequently impossible
at this date to anticipate the final findings of genuine and well-balanced criticism.
That must be left to the future. Each author connected with this Bible History is alone
responsible for the views he advocates; but whatever these personal teachings may be, every
candid student WIll admit that they have not obscured the sublime truths, which the move­
ments of the mighty past disclose, that God is in all history, and that all the ages have
providentially been made tributary to his unique manifestation in the Divine Christ.
From the slow development of religion, which is perhaps the most notable feature of
the inspired chronicle, it is evident that we cannot hope to comprehend its meaning 111
a moment or without patient application. God does not hasten: we cannot. It is also
observable, that not only has religion been of tardy growth; it has been the product of
various and oftentimes of indirect agencies. At the beginning God did not put coal in the
mine, neither did he plant the full-grown tree, but scattered living germs on the earth,
which afterward became forests. These forests drank in the sun until they were soaked with
flame; then they sank into the darkness to be transmuted in the laboratory of nature into
substance for heat and light. Thus the final religion had to pass through successive stages.
At first it was but a seed; then it took shape in antediluvian, postdiluvian, patriarchal,
theocratical, ceremonial, and prophetical eras - more than once being submerged in the
night of exile, oppression, and apostasy-at last to blaze forth in all the splendors of the
Christian dispensation. No wonder, then, if the history of this sublime progress should
reveal the touch of many hands, and the interblending of diverse materials. It may be
compared to a mosaic in which piece to piece has been joined that a glorious picture of
heavenly things might be produced. Though the seams and divisions of this picture may
not be apparent to all- for the Bible is not fashioned like the Byzantine mosaics, where all
the articulations are palpable and rough, but like those of Rome where all the lines are
ground down until they are nearly invisible-they still exist; and when some master-work­
man shows them to us and makes clear the various fragments that enter into the composi­
tion of the whole, let it not be doubted that even this may be true, and the divine origin
of the grand old book remain uninvalidated. For one controlling, guiding, unifying mind
must have been operative through all the weary ages to produce out of such composite
elements a result so wonderfully unique, upliftjng, and unfathomable as the Bible: and that
mind in the nature of things could not have been human.
It has been customary in volumes of this character to give an account of the four
centuries between the last of the Hebrew prophets and the first of the Roman emperors,
and to embrace in the narrative a description of the overthrow of Jerusalem. This introduc­
tion of material not contained in the Scriptures is justified as necessary to an understanding
of the relation existing between the old economy and the new, and to the coherent unfolding
of the divine purpose in the calling of the Gentiles. But it has always seemed to the editor
that the reason, good and sufficient as it is, for this method, ought to lead the historian
yet farther. Instead of arresting his work at the point of catastrophe, he ought to carry it
onward to the period of victory. That the student may perceive how Christianity emerged
from obscurity to the preeminence it attained under the Cresars; that he may see how it